EN 2220 6.

0: INTRODUCTION TO CANADIAN LITERATURE

TERM: Fall-Winter 2009-2010

WEBSITE: TBA

COURSE INSTRUCTORS:

COURSE DIRECTOR:

NAME : Allan Weiss

OFFICE: 208D SC
PHONE: 416-736-2100 x33705
EMAIL: aweiss@yorku.ca
OFFICE HOURS: Tuesday 3:30-4:30
Friday 3:30-4:30
And by appointment

TEACHING ASSISTANTS:

Denise Dennis
Melissa Dalgleish
Lee Frew
Danielle Spinosa

TIMES AND LOCATIONS:

Lecture W 2:30-4:30 CLH-G

Tut 01 F 2:30-3:30 BC 214 A. Weiss
Tut 02 W 4:30-5:30 VC 114 D. Dennis
Tut 03 R 9:30-10:30 HNE 103 M. Dalgleish
Tut 04 R 11:30-12:30 SC 212 L. Frew
Tut 05 F 11:30-12:30 VH 2009 D. Dennis
Tut 06 R 10:30-11:30 HNE 103 D. Spinosa
Tut 07 W 4:30-5:30 MC 109 D. Spinosa
Tut 08 R 2:30-3:30 HNE B11 M. Dalgleish
EN 2220 6.0: INTRODUCTION TO CANADIAN LITERATURE 2

EXPANDED COURSE DESCRIPTION:

This course surveys Canadian literature from its early days to the contemporary period,
introducing students to works in various genres: fiction, poetry, drama, and so on. The
readings feature representative texts by authors from a wide range of historical periods,
regions, and backgrounds. The course is designed to provide students with a solid foundation
for further study in the field of Canadian literature.

ORGANIZATION OF THE COURSE:

There will be a two-hour lecture and a one-hour tutorial per week. The lecture will set the
broader context for understanding that week's readings and themes, and provide some close
reading of individual texts where appropriate. The tutorial will focus more directly on the texts
assigned for each week. All students will be expected to come to class having completed the
assigned readings so that they are prepared to discuss them.

COURSE LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

1. Brief Statement of Purpose
The course will examine the development of Canadian literature chronologically from
the first half of the nineteenth century to the present day. We will look at the major themes in
Canadian writing, including the immigrant experience; regionalism; French-English relations;
class; national and ethnic identities. Lectures will provide historical and cultural contexts for
the works studied, and present critical techniques for close reading. Tutorials will allow
students to discuss their own responses to and interpretations of the readings, permitting
them to explore the texts in detail. In addition, whenever possible, the course will teach skills
in writing essays about literature through classroom discussion and assignments.
2. Specific Learning Objectives:
It is hoped that students will gain an understanding of the broad range of Canadian
writing by reading and discussing works from a variety of periods and regions, and written by
authors from diverse backgrounds and working from many cultural perspectives. It is also
hoped that students will develop their essay-writing skills through assignments and, when time
permits, study of effective writing in lectures and tutorials.
EN 2220 6.0: INTRODUCTION TO CANADIAN LITERATURE 3

COURSE TEXTS:

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (Seal)

Timothy Findley, The Wars (Penguin)
Louis Hémon, Maria Chapdelaine (Dundurn)
Tomson Highway, Dry Lips Ought to Move to Kapuskasing (Fifth House)
Margaret Laurence, The Diviners (U of Chicago P)
Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women (Penguin)
Mordecai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (Penguin)
Gabrielle Roy, The Tin Flute (NCL)
Michel Tremblay, Les Belles Soeurs (Talonbook)
Robert Lecker, ed. Open Country (Nelson)

Shorter texts can be found in the anthology

EVALUATION:

Assignment: Due Date: In Tutorial Week of: Value:

Short essay Oct. 21 10%
First term paper Nov. 25 20%
First term test Dec. 2 10%
Second term paper Mar. 24 25%
Class participation 15%
Final exam Exam Period 20%

Essays should conform to proper MLA style. Written assignments MUST be handed in
on time. No papers will be accepted after the final exam. ANY USE OF ANOTHER
PERSON’S WORK, WHETHER IT IS IN PRINT OR ELECTRONIC FORM, WITHOUT
PROPER CITATION CONSTITUTES PLAGIARISM AND WILL LEAD TO CHARGES OF A
BREACH OF ACADEMIC HONESTY. Please see the Senate Policy on Academic Honesty at:
http://www.yorku.ca/secretariat/legislation/senate/acadhone.htm
Each tutorial leader will determine how class participation is assessed in his or her
class(es). In general, assessment of class participation will take into account the student's
contributions to discussions and in-class exercises, preparation of reading assignments, and
performance on any additional reading or writing exercises assigned by the tutorial leader.
EN 2220 6.0: INTRODUCTION TO CANADIAN LITERATURE 4

Grading, Assignment Submission, Lateness Penalties, and Missed Tests

Grading: The grading scheme for the course conforms to the 9-point grading system used in
undergraduate programs at York (e.g., A+ = 9, A = 8, B+ - 7, C+ = 5, etc.). Assignments and
tests will bear a letter grade designation and a corresponding number grade (e.g. A+ = 90 to
100, A = 80 to 90, B+ = 75 to 79, etc.).
(For a full description of York grading system see the York University Undergraduate Calendar
- http://calendars.registrar.yorku.ca/pdfs/ug2004cal/calug04_5_acadinfo.pdf)
Students may take a limited number of courses for degree credit on an ungraded (pass/fail)
basis. For full information on this option see Alternative Grading Option in the Faculty of Arts
section of the Undergraduate Calendar.
Assignment Submission: Proper academic performance depends on students doing their work
not only well, but on time. Accordingly, assignments for this course must be received on the
due date specified for the assignment. Assignments are to be handed in to the instructor at the
tutorial.
Lateness Penalty: Assignments received later than the due date will be penalized one-half
letter grade per week or portion thereof that it is late. Exceptions to the lateness penalty
for valid reasons such as illness, compassionate grounds, etc., may be entertained by the
instructor but will require supporting documentation (e.g., a doctor’s letter).
Missed Tests: Students with a documented reason for missing a course test, such as illness,
compassionate grounds, etc., which is confirmed by supporting documentation (e.g., doctor’s
letter), may request accommodation from the instructor. Further extensions or accommodation
will require students to submit a formal petition to the Faculty. Be sure to consult the Faculty
of Arts guidelines on Deferred Standing Agreements, petitions, etc.

IMPORTANT COURSE INFORMATION FOR STUDENTS:

All students are expected to familiarize themselves with the following information, available on
the Senate Committee on Curriculum & Academic Standards webpage (see Reports,
Initiatives, Documents): http://www.yorku.ca/secretariat/senate_cte_main_pages/ccas.htm
- York’s Academic Honesty Policy and Procedures/Academic Integrity Website
- Ethics Review Process for research involving human participants
- Course requirement accommodation for students with disabilities, including physical,
medical, systemic, learning and psychiatric disabilities
- Student Conduct Standards
- Religious Observance Accommodation

Notes:
The last date to enrol in the course without permission is Sept. 24, 2009
The last date to enrol in the course with permission is Oct. 23, 2009
The last date to drop the course without academic penalty is Feb. 6, 2010
EN 2220 6.0: INTRODUCTION TO CANADIAN LITERATURE 5

LECTURE SCHEDULE AND READING ASSIGNMENTS:

1. Sept. 9 Introduction: Texts and Contexts

2. Sept. 16 The Immigrant Experience: The First Generation

Reading: Thomas Chandler Haliburton, “Gulling a Blue Nose”
Catherine Parr Traill, Selections
Susanna Moodie, Selections

3. Sept. 23 The Confederation Poets I

Reading: Isabella Valancy Crawford, “Malcolm’s Katie”; "The Dark Stag"; "The Canoe"

4. Sept. 30 The Confederation Poets II and the Animal Tale

Reading: Charles G. D. Roberts, “The Tantramar Revisited”; “The Sower”;
“The Iron Edge of Winter”
Bliss Carman, ”Low Tide on Grand Pré”

5. Oct. 7 The National Dream

Reading: Archibald Lampman, “The Railway Station”; “Heat”; “The City of the End of
Things”
E. Pauline Johnson, “A Cry from an Indian Wife”
Duncan Campbell Scott, “The Onondaga Madonna”; “The Forsaken”

6. Oct. 14 Reading Week: No Classes

7. Oct. 21 The Roman de la terre

Reading: Louis Hémon, Maria Chapdelaine
First essay due this week in tutorials

8. Oct. 28 Modernist Poetry

Reading: E. J. Pratt, “Newfoundland”
Earle Birney, “David”; “Bushed”; “Can. Lit.”
Dorothy Livesay, “Night and Day”
Sinclair Ross, “The Lamp at Noon”
EN 2220 6.0: INTRODUCTION TO CANADIAN LITERATURE 6

9. Nov. 4 The Montreal Poets

Reading: F. R. Scott, “Laurentian Shield”
A. M. Klein, “Heirloom”; “Portrait of the Poet as Landscape”;
“The Rocking Chair”

10. Nov. 11 French-Canadian Modernism

Reading: Gabrielle Roy, The Tin Flute

11. Nov. 18 Poetry at Mid-Century

Reading: Irving Layton, “The Swimmer”; “Whatever Else Poetry Is Freedom”
P. K. Page, “The Stenographers”; “Stories of Snow”
Al Purdy, “The Country North of Belleville”; “Wilderness Gothic”

12. Nov. 25 The Immigrant Experience: The Second Generation

Reading: Mordecai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
Second essay due this week in tutorials

13. Dec. 2 Mid-Term Test

***********************************************************************************************************

1. Jan. 6 Regionalism and the Novel

Reading: Margaret Laurence, The Diviners

2. Jan. 13 Regionalism and the Short Story

Reading: Rudy Wiebe, "Where Is the Voice Coming From?"
Alistair MacLeod, "The Boat"

3. Jan. 20 Postmodern Poetry I

Reading: Phyllis Webb, "Poetics Against the Angel of Death"
Robert Kroetsch, "Stone Hammer Poem"
EN 2220 6.0: INTRODUCTION TO CANADIAN LITERATURE 7

4. Jan. 27 Historiographic Metafiction

Reading: Timothy Findley, The Wars

5. Feb. 3 French-Canadian Drama

Reading: Michel Tremblay, Les Belles Soeurs

6. Feb. 10 Postmodern Poetry II

Reading: Michael Ondaatje, "The Cinnamon Peeler"
bpNichol, Selections
Gwendolyn MacEwen, "A Breakfast for Barbarians"

7. Feb. 15-19 Reading Week: No Classes

8. Feb. 24 The Story Cycle

Reading: Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

9. Mar. 3 The Immigrant Experience: African-Canadian Literature

Reading: Dionne Brand, “No Language Is Neutral”
Marlene NourbeSe Philip, “Discourse”
George Elliott Clarke, “Language”

10. Mar. 10 Speculative Fiction

Reading: Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

11. Mar. 17 Postcolonialism: Borders and Borderlands

Reading: Thomas King, “Borders”
Clarke Blaise, “Identity”
Rohinton Mistry, “Squatter”

12. Mar. 24 Native-Canadian Drama

Reading: Tomson Highway, Dry Lips Ought to Move to Kapuskasing
Third essay due this week in tutorials

13. Mar. 31 Contemporary Voices and Review

Reading: Karen Solie, "Love Song of the Unreliable Narrator"
David Bezmozgis, "A New Gravestone for an Old Grave" OR
Timothy Taylor, "The Resurrection Plant"
 The MLA Style

The MLA (Modern Language Association) Style offers a simple way to cite your sources. It is
the preferred style for this course, and you are asked to follow it carefully. For further details,
see the organization’s website at www.mla.org
The MLA Style involves using parenthetical references and a Works Cited page rather than
footnotes (although these can still be used for such purposes as making additional points and
calling the reader’s attention to other texts). Generally speaking, the citation should include
only the last name of the author of your source and the page number. Do not use a comma
or the abbreviation “p.” (Note: there is no such abbreviation as “pg.” in scholarly work). The
typical citation would look like this:
(Hadley 49)
(Chase and Blair 51)
However, if you have already informed your reader that the citation comes from, say, Hadley’s
text, just give the page number:
(49).
If you are citing two or more texts by the same author, provide a short title as well as the
author’s name if the context does not make it clear which text you are citing; remember to
underline or italicize book titles, and use quotation marks for articles, short stories, and
poems:
(Smith, Biological Science Fiction 52)
(Jones, “Alien Worlds” 124)
Put your citation at the end of a sentence or clause to prevent it from interrupting the flow of
your sentence, and leave a space between the last word and the opening parenthesis. If you
are citing a short quotation--up to four lines long--put your citation at the end of the quotation
and leave a space between the closing quotation mark and the opening parenthesis. Note
that any punctuation comes after, not before, the parenthetical reference:
“the greatest danger, they realize, still lies ahead” (Hadley 44).
If your quotation is more than four lines long, set it off from the text of your essay by indenting
one inch on the left side only; in such cases, the parenthetical reference follows the
punctuation. See the sample essay page for an example.
MLA Style 2

Students often have difficulty incorporating quotations into their essays. Be sure to introduce
your quotation, providing context or explanation where necessary; do not simply insert your
quotation without any introduction and expect it to speak for you. Use only the punctuation
you need before the quotation. If your sentence flows smoothly into the quotation, do not
insert any punctuation:
She feared that “her meaning would be mistaken or distorted” (Kent 12).
Otherwise, use a comma or a colon depending on your sentence’s syntax:
Kent says, “She became afraid that her meaning would be mistaken
or distorted” (12).
She is clearly worried about how they would react to her words: “She
became afraid that her meaning would be mistaken or distorted”
(Kent 12).
The basic principle to keep in mind is that you are making a sentence out of both your own
words and those of your quotation, so be sure that your sentence remains grammatically
correct.
You may omit unnecessary words and phrases, but be careful to quote everything you need to
for your quotation to make sense and be fair to the original. Use three spaced dots, known as
an ellipsis, to indicate that you have omitted text; you may put them inside square brackets,
but be consistent:
. . . or [. . .]
If you need to insert your own words into a quotation to make it clearer, use square brackets
to indicate your insertion.
When compiling your Works Cited page, put your sources in alphabetical order by author’s
last name; if a work is anonymous, insert it alphabetically according to the first important
word in the title (i.e., not The or A). Follow the models below for works by one author, two or
three authors, and more than three authors. In your Works Cited list, as in the rest of your
essay, underline or italicize book titles and put the titles of shorter works--articles, short
stories, and poems--in quotation marks.
A technical point: periodicals--monthly magazines, quarterly scholarly journals, and so on--are
paginated in two different ways. Some paginate each issue separately. Others paginate
continuously throughout the volume; in other words, if issue #1 ends on p. 149, issue #2 will
begin on p. 150. If the periodical you are citing is paginated continuously throughout the
volume, you need only cite the volume number; if the periodical paginates each issue
separately, you must cite the issue number as well as the volume number so as to direct your
reader to the correct issue and page. See the examples below.
Sample Essay Page

Anderson 4

While flying to the oceanic outpost on the shuttle, Elam considers what has brought the two
main characters to Isis:
Take Tam Hayes. A true Kuiper orphan, excommunicated by the doctrinaire Red
Thorns [a fanatical political group] for signing up with a Works project. But signing up
with the Trusts was the only way to reach Isis. . . . He had traded his history for a
dream. And Zoe Fisher, as obedient a bottle baby as any that Earth had produced. No
dreams allowed, not for that female gelding. But Isis had stitched them together
somehow. (82)
For Tam, it is Earth that constitutes the true alien environment. He could never go to Earth
because the “biotic barrier was simply too steep; it would have meant countless . . . immune-
system tweaks” (59). It has been suggested that the characters never find their true homes,
but Isis—despite its hostile biology—becomes a home for at least some of them (Jones 128).
The disaster at the oceanic outpost leaves the scientists baffled. As Li tells
Degrandpre, “`All I know for certain is that one of my laboratories is at the bottom of the ocean
and two of my men are dead. At the time of the accident, they had bacterial plaques in their
glove box. I don’t know if that contributed to the problem or not’” (68). In her analysis,
Phoebe Smith says, “Wilson portrays a clear conflict between Li’s concern for his personnel
and Degrandpre’s supposedly `broader’ political vision” (Biological Science Fiction 121).
Degrandpre’s approach will have disastrous consequences later in the novel.
Zoe’s views become clear during her first solo excursion:
Her moods had been mercurial, but right now she felt surprisingly good, felt solid,
walking in the sunlight and swinging her arms with
Sample Works Cited Page

Anderson 8

Works Cited
Ardron, Bob. The Fiction of Robert Charles Wilson. Toronto: ECW, 2004.
Chase, Judy, and Cory Blair, eds. Science Fiction and the World of Tomorrow.
Kansas City: U of Kansas P, 1998.
Hadley, Glenda. “Bios and the Alienation of Self.” Science-Fiction Studies
19 (1999): 42-51.
Jones, Bradford. “Alien Worlds.” Science Fiction and the Other. Ed. Peter
Lane and Beverly Soren. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000. 121-34.
Marx, Julian, Ted Baxter, and Hrundi Bakshi. “Satire and Tragedy in Science
Fiction Novels of the 1990s.” Canadian Review of Literary Studies 3.2
(2006): 17-32.
Smith, Phoebe. Biological Science Fiction: A Critical Study. London: Penguin,
2001.
---. To the Ends of the Earth and Beyond: Space Travel in Science Fiction.
Baltimore: Raven, 1997.
Weiss, Allan, et al. A Full Analysis of Fantastic Literature. Laputa: Lagado UP,
2002.
Wilson, Robert Charles. Bios. New York: Tor, 1999.
 The Rules

1. Live cell phones are NOT permitted in the lecture or tutorial. If your
cell phone goes off during class, you will be asked to leave and may
not return for the duration of that class.

2. If you bring a laptop to class, you will be expected to use it for class-related
purposes. If you use it for non-class-related purposes, such as surfing the
internet or playing games, you must sit at the back of the lecture hall or seminar
room. If your use of your computer becomes disruptive or distracting for other
students or the instructor, you will be asked to leave and may not return for the
duration of that class.

3. Plagiarism is a serious offense! You may not present other people’s

words or ideas—whether word-for-word, in paraphrase, or in summary—
as if they are your own. Cite all sources in both written work and oral
presentations. Failure to do so will lead to severe penalties; please
read your material on academic honesty!

4. You are responsible for knowing sessional dates, including drop dates.
If you wish to drop the course, you must do so by the drop date and do so
through the registrar’s office; you cannot simply stop coming to class. If
your name is still on the class list by the end of the course, and you have done
none or very little of the work, you will receive an F.

5. You MUST attend the tutorial in which you are registered. If you wish to
switch tutorials, you must do so officially. You may not simply attend any
tutorial you wish. Should you attend a tutorial in which you are not registered,
you will receive no credit for attendance or participation.