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."

For Group Projects

From SFU Can-Lit alumnus M.S., a possible avenue for your Group project:

CBC RADIO ONE and CBC RADIO 3 are once again pleased to invte your radio and journalism students to enter our Student Journalism Awards.

We are awarding prizes for the best radio documentary and inviting pitches for a radio programming idea suitable for broadcast on Radio 3.

The Mowatt Award for best radio documentary is named after Don Mowatt who is an award winning documentary maker and long time producer with the CBC program IDEAS.

The Alexis Mazurin Award is named for our late colleague who was a bright light at CBC and whose sudden and premature death in 2006 was mourned by many. We all hope that his unique and creative talent will live on through this award.

[At this link].... you will find the entry guidelines and forms for these awards. This year we are asking for the entry applications to be made online TO THE ATTENTION OF YVONNE GALL.

Please feel free to contact me, if you have any questions. Good luck to all your students!

Yvonne Gall.  yvonne.gall@cbc.ca