Literature in Canada 2.0 | 470: Our Home and Native Land

3.3 GGRW Allusions

This is the third time I’ve read the novel. The way I’ve found most effective for me is to flag possible allusions as I read them and write a quick note. This has helped me methodically comb through the references and make more connections. I’ve used post-its this time because I find that I notice things differently each read and don’t want anything too permanent but I’m kicking myself that I’ve lost some of my previous readings’ notebooks. I’m going at this similar to Jane Flick in her reading guide….read more

Assignment 3.2

Narratives assume, in Blanca Chester’s words, “a common matrix of cultural knowledge.” The Four Old Indians are perhaps the best examples of characters that belong to a matrix of cultural knowledge, which excludes many non-First Nations. What were your first questions about and impressions of these characters? How have you come to understand their place in the novel? I had read this novel a couple times in my earlier course at UBC with Dr. Paterson, so I was familiar with the importance of the number 4, the Medicine Wheel, and…read more

Assignment 3.1

Frye writes: A much more complicated cultural tension [more than two languages] arises from the impact of the sophisticated on the primitive, and vice a versa. The most dramatic example, and one I have given elsewhere, is that of Duncan Campbell Scott, working in the department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa. He writes of a starving squaw baiting a fish-hook with her own flesh, and he writes of the music of Dubussy and the poetry of Henry Vaughan. In English literature we have to go back to Anglo-Saxon times to…read more

Assignment 2.3

Posted by jbernoe in Assignment 2.3

In order to address this question you will need to refer to Sparke’s article, “A Map that Roared and an Original Atlas: Canada, Cartography, and the Narration of Nation.” You can easily find this article online. Read the section titled: “Contrapuntal Cartographies” (468 – 470). Write a blog that explains Sparke’s analysis of what Judge McEachern might have meant by this statement: “We’ll call this the map that roared.” Matthew Sparke touches on a post-colonial problem concerning Canadian identity, nationalism, and prejudice all bound up within the law by way…read more

Assignment 2.2

First stories tell us how the world was created. In The Truth about Stories, King tells us two creation stories; one about how Charm falls from the sky pregnant with twins and creates the world out of a bit of mud with the help of all the water animals, and another about God creating heaven and earth with his words, and then Adam and Eve and the Garden. King provides us with a neat analysis of how each story reflects a distinct worldview. “The Earth Diver” story reflects a world…read more

Lesson 2.2 Thoughts

So this blog post is not an assignment, but I felt compelled to respond to several points of consideration while reading the lesson. Mostly this will be for my own sense of organization, and indeed it began as such in my notebook but part way through I thought that I would also post it as it draws in topics from my Art History 377 class (Northwest Coast Art – The South). To backtrack a bit, my first note that I paused to consider concerned Dr. Paterson’s note that “the first…read more

Home again

Comfort, familiarity, family, peace. These are shared threads of thought on the subject of home. What I found interesting is that a lot of you thought home was not a fixed structure. How ironic that I should write my earlier post about the connection of a fixed structure (house) and feelings (home). Guess I’m the odd one out! Upon rereading my previous post I suppose I could have emphasized more of the feelings associated with the structures that I focused my attention on. I also noticed an absence of pets,…read more

A house is not a home, right?

Home. How to describe it…? It’s certainly the building. But not just the structure because that’s the house. Let’s think of it as a container. Yes. It is a container of people and objects and memories. But there are lots of these containers, more specifically the home is a container of what is comfortable. Home to me is a literal and figurative space. Literally, I live there, (sometimes) sleep. Figuratively, I am at rest there. It’s not a home if I cannot fall asleep, and not only sleep but feel…read more

A Story

You’ll never believe what happened. Well, you might after I tell you the story. It’s a rough one. I haven’t opened up about this to many people. Okay, here I go. Have I ever mentioned Margaret to you before? No? Okay. Well she was my neighbour and died. She was thirteen, a freshman in high school and at the time I was a couple years older, a senior, which made us unlikely friends even though we grew up together. She suffered from cystic fibrosis. She knew this ever since she…read more

Assignment 1.2

At the beginning of this lesson I pointed to the idea that technological advances in communication tools have been part of the impetus to rethink the divisive and hierarchical categorizing of literature and orality, and suggested that this is happening for a number of reasons. I’d like you to consider two aspects of digital literature: 1) social media tools that enable widespread publication, without publishers, and 2) Hypertext, which is the name for the text that lies beyond the text you are reading, until you click. How do you think…read more