Hello! If you are reading this you have found my blog, Canadian literature studies. A place of observations, discoveries, comparisons, and hopefully some interesting pieces of writing! As for myself, my name is Leana and I am a 4th year English language major at UBC. When I’m not spending every waking moment studying or reading copious amount of course work, I like to practise yoga, dance ballet, and travel the world. I also spend time volunteering at the Britannia Homework club, assisting high school aged students with their reading and writing skills.
This blog is in response to the course English 470 Canadian Studies, instructed by Dr. Erika Paterson. We will be reading and analyzing historical Canadian literature and assessing their impacts on Canadians. More specifically, we will focus on the similarities, differences, and intersections between Indigenous and European traditions of literature here in Canada. I am excited to read both types of literature, mostly because I have not read many Indigenous pieces of writing and am not accustomed to the style or popular stories. I hope to also weave in historical factors into my analysis of the readings because I believe that history is very important in understanding relationships in many literature works ( for example, the colonial relationships between Canadian First Nations and Europeans during the fur trade).
Canadian studies is a broad title that encompasses a multitude of things throughout Canada. For myself, this Canadian studies course should incorporate the historical relationships between Europeans and Indigenous peoples, a diverse range of Canadian people’s feelings and opinions over certain topics or issues throughout history, and the political/social reactions to select Canadian literary pieces.
Finally, I came across this blog by a man named Aaron all about Canadian literature and I thought I would share! Its easy to read, informative, and can even be helpful for those students pulling a all-nighter right before a Canadian literature exam! Check it out 🙂
My brother and I in front of the parliament buildings in Victoria, BC. Myself looking very patriotic in red pants and white top (not planned)
I am very excited to start this blogging journey and I welcome you all to say hi in the comment box below!
Hello Lena, good to meet you and happy to hear you are excited for this course of studies; I look forward to your contributions. One note on your blog – you need to actually hyping the url you are providing – to so so, just highlight the title or name of the link you are sending us to – and then click on the chain link icon in the tool bar – a page will open and you need to paste the url into the box – see if you can correct the above link. As well, two hyperlinks per blog please and thanks.
Thank you for the help Dr. Paterson. I have fixed the link situation and added another! 🙂
Thank you Leana for your blog post, and I am interested in many of the same things you are! Obviously, the insight into indigenous literature was a part of what caught my eye about the course, and am looking forward to understanding the “style or popular stories” you talk about. I think what is interesting in terms of indigenous ‘literature’ is the medium of its message: oral story telling rather than written scribal literature. This connects with our learning of the relationship between reading and listening in our Lesson 1.2; oral stories having a “time and place”, a moment that it occurs, and a specific space it is occupying. I took a very interesting course in the area of Media Studies in connection with Shakespeare’s work and looked at Marshall McLuhan and his work on the transformation from an oral culture to a print culture. McLuhan’s work is expansive, but his understanding of a historical shift from oral to print culture will be interesting to see how it applies to indigenous story-telling. How do you think a medium of oral story telling differs from what we now consider a highly ‘literate’ culture of the written word? I’d be interested in looking at how perhaps an oral indigenous story telling process and experience is different than that of reading it?
Hi Leana,
Good work on your blog! Like you and Jeff I was also drawn to the reading of historical and indigenous literature. I too do not have much experience reading and learning about much indigenous pieces of work, however, in my very first semester at UBC I took and Arts Studies 150 and our theme of the course was oral history. We learned about to the what aspects of an oral story differed from a written story and how storytelling in itself is a major part of culture. I think that this course will be very helpful in illustrating the importance and impact of oral history on literature, or vice versa. I also liked how you drew attention to the title of the course as being “broad”. Drawing information from many area will produce the best result in terms of understanding our country. How we know Canada us not how other people or cultures know Canada, which I think is one of the most exciting prospects of learning for this course! The only thing I wonder is if we are a broad country, does that make for a lack of identity? Something to think about.
Hi Jeff and Sarah, thank you for your replies!
You both had commented on First Nations oral history and I have since read the lecture. I wonder, since scribal literature can be preserved in its original form, do oral histories tend to change over time and does this challenge their historical value or general veracity? I think that this could be a major difference between the two forms of literature and I would love to learn more about it.
Hi Leana – thought I’d drop in and say hello too.
I’m interested in media studies and McLuhan’s work – in fact I just submitted my MA application on the subject – and especially in the digital remediation of First Nations stories and expression. I’d like to take a quick nitpick – I hope you don’t mind – oral histories, as such, are not literature in and of themselves. In the act of remediation through print (or digital media in our case) oral (& aural) expression is ‘set’ – published – and some degree of power is removed from the storyteller as they become ‘literature’. I’d further posit that script is not ‘set’ in the manner of print – I’m thinking of great papyrus scrolls – and if I recall correctly these often had multiple ‘authors’. I don’t mean to push a poststructuralist viewpoint here (or ever 😛 ) but it’s important to take oral narratives on their own terms as well as ‘historiographically’, if you’ll forgive my misuse of the term. You might be interested in the rhyming structures by which Grecian poets would recite epics – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dactylic_hexameter – in particular the section on ‘Homer’s meter’. Scholars have in fact been able to infer a missing consonant in Ionian in their analysis of rhyme scheme – so the intrinsic historical value of the piece is visible.
Sorry for the wall of text – excited to work with you!
Joey Levesque
🙂 Excellent observations Joey – thank you
Hi Leana – I am just testing here to see if your comments are being posted automatically. Thanks