On L.M. Montgomery: Public Lecture at SFU

Dr. Laura Robinson, "Sex Matters: L.M. Montgomery, Friendship, and Sexuality"

Friday, 26 March 2010
7-8:30 p.m. Harbour Centre, Room 2270

GSWS thanks the Departments of English and History for their generous co-sponsorship.

Dr. Laura Robinson is an Associate Professor of English literature at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario. In addition to articles on children's literature, Canadian women writers Margaret Atwood and Ann-Marie MacDonald, and the television show The L-Word, she has published articles on L.M. Montgomery's work in 100 Years of Anne with an "e", Storm and Dissonance, Canadian Studies: An Introductory Reader, Canadian Literature, L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture, and Children's Voices in Atlantic Literature Culture. Her short fiction has appeared in Wascana Review, torquere, Frontiers, Her Circle, and EnterText.

Mid-Term Essay

The Canadian experience articulated as a journey is a literary trope encoded early by seminal writers such as Susannah Moodie, Margaret Atwood and Northrop Frye. Ethel Wilson made this authoritative by her magnum opus in fiction The Innocent Traveller. Write a two-thousand word essay, due in lecture on March 26th, in which either Mordecai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz or Lucy Maud Montgomery's Emily of New Moon is explicated in direct relation to Wilson's representation of Canadian identity and journey. You have three alternatives for your essay.

1. Concentrate on the aspect of dominant matriarchy
2. Use the Canadian formulation of religion--in either its personal or its ecclesiastical aspect--to order your argument.
3. Frame the journey in the context of the opposing integration-alienation axes.

Again, choose one of these three alternatives. The essay must demonstrate that you have a robust understanding of the two texts that you chose entirely in context of the information presented in course lecture. You do not need to incorporate any secondary sources beside course lecture but you are free to do so.

Duddy Kravitz's brother Lenny

Picture taken after Lenny dropped out of medical school: pertinent phrase--"anatomy's the killer..." O-o-h yeah.

Literary Bile

Today's Arts & Letters Daily features an excellent article from the Toronto Globe & Mail on the biliousness of writers to their own fraternity, entitled "You suck, and so does your writing." It ends with the following comment on Canadian writers:

It pains me, though, that Canadian writers have fallen invectively short. Are we too nice? Too deferential? Sure, there's no shortage of private whingings, resentments and jealousies, but wouldn't it be a treat to have, say, Alice Munro opine of Robertson Davies something along the lines of: “The man was a blowhard. All that cloudy, mystical Jungianism hung on the slenderest of twigs; and never a character you could faintly believe in.”

Ah well, I can dream, can't I?

The article's writer "... [b]ooks editor Martin Levin has been the target of some invective of his own, but of disappointingly low quality."

On History and National Identity

A very useful quotation on the importance of historical knowledge and understanding (à propos the central significance of Ethel Wilson's The Innocent Traveller) comes from Karl Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire:

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past."