Final Paper: Creative Option

For those classfellows who wish to consider a creative option for the Term Paper, it will be necessary to have me sign off on your proposed format in advance. The proposal must take the form of a set of failure standards -- applying the falsification concept from experimental science, where a theory is ranked as scientific only when it is capable of being falsified in a reproducible trial.

So, if you chose to submit a creative project for your Final assignment, in either essay or point form, list the full set of criteria by which your project can be gauged to have failed. To wit,

• if the project does not advance an academic thesis
• if the project does not identifiably incorporate material from relevent scholarship
• if the project fails to relate directly to some number of the primary course texts
• if the project fails to represent and demonstrate advanced understanding of the central ideas of the course
• &c, &c.

This criteria requirement arises from creative submissions in previous courses, where creativity was more than once mistaken (by the student author) for open license. At the same time, it has proven to give the student a helpful planning template and a good stimulus to .... productivity.

The creative project must be accompanied by a concise scholarly essay justifying the academic validity of the project.

Final Essay: Spring 2010

The Final Essay in open topic, thirty-five hundred words, due in my mailbox on April 23rd no later than 23:59, engaging any three course texts and centred explicitly around lecture themes. Note that the three texts need not be given equal importance in your argument.

Seminar Diagrammes of Wilson's "Journey:

Follow this link to the submitted diagrammes of Ethel Wilson's "Journey" chapter in Innocent Traveller. This represents very creditable productive participation from the classfellows involved, & noted accordingly.

They may additionally prove stimulative for your mid-term essays....

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.