Great recent podcast on the environment and literature:

http://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/cohearence/id507227667

Colonizing Nature

We adore nature. We need it and use it to understand ourselves. But the use of the land by nature artists is akin to our violent use of the land in our insatiable resource extraction and pollution dumping. Nature writing has been around for centuries and so has human plundering of the land. The two are complicit.  In postcolonial studies, one of things we’ve noticed is how often the colonizer romanticizes the colonized (the 19^th Century African, for example) and how that romanticization becomes a tool in the colonizing process. In this way, the colonized is easily understood in certain safe terms and, so, controlled. In this way art becomes complicit with economic and military agendas, akin to Marx’s ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’.

Are we doing the same when we invoke aesthetically pleasing, idealized, or stylized images of nature? This mediated representation denies the land something--its own agency or needs--for our own pleasure or needs. We colonize the land and its creatures.

. . .

Much like colonial contact with othered cultures, the contemporary contact zone with the nonhuman has its similar formation of hegemony and control. A true recognition of the land and non-human ecology as culture might be the first step in a decolonization of the non-human globe.

Destructive/Unjust Relationships to the Land and the Nonhuman

1) abuser-victim: rage and a will to dominate taken out on an unsuspecting and largely trusting other; wanton destruction of trees and animals with no rationale; a psychotic gain from the pain of others;

2) explorer-adversary: the land made malevolent, perverse, dangerous by the brave and ultimately successful adventurer or tragic hero;

3) spectator-spectacle: a trip to the zoo, an aesthetically pleasing view, watercolour painting from a car; idealized photography;

4) scientist-specimen: a object of the scientific gaze, complete with named categories, an aura of mastery, and cultural bias/blinkers; Eurocentric classification (Linnaeus); frozen in time;

5) controller-controlled: via barriers, boundaries, deterrents, herbicides/pesticides, parks, reserves, population control, the introduction of invader species, etc.; symbolic hedge cutters and curbs;

6) user-used: economic opportunism, husbandry, the harvest, agricultural transformation and maintenance; land as avenue to wealth; single-species ecosystems artificially maintained;

7) desirous-exotic: the mysterious land, wild, romantic, aestheticized, feminized, sexualized;

8) good samaritan-pitiful: sympathy, feelings of moral superiority, appeased conscience, symbolic tokens with no shifts in thinking, parental, charity;

9) narrator-stereotype: static images, misinformed myths, useful types/categories, cliché, repetitive scenes, the land as known, stock character;

10) denial-erasure: the city-dweller, the land erased from consciousness; the insulated life; the urban annihilation of natural beings;

11) ‘gone native’-salvation: the ‘wild man’, benevolent/idealized ‘Nature’, a narrative that always seems to end badly;

12) politician-obfuscated space: deliberate misinformation, disorder, willful confusion, the evasion of the known for the sake of power, the muzzling of scientists;

13) academic-other: knowledge control, authority, identity construction around the mastery of the discourses that stands in for the land, “orientalism.” 

Margaret Atwood’s Survival:

To Atwood, the central image of Canadian literature, equivalent to the image of the island in British Lit and the frontier in American Lit, is the notion of survival and its central character the victim. Atwood claims that Can Lit participates in creating this theme as the central distinguishing feature of the nation's literature. 

The central image of the victim is not static; according to Atwood four "Victim Positions" are possible (and visible in Canadian literature). These positions are:

▪       Position One: To deny the fact that you are a victim. This is a position in which members of the "victim-group" will deny their identity as victims, accusing those members of the group who are less fortunate of being responsible for their own victimhood.

▪       Position Two: To acknowledge the fact that you are a victim (but attribute it to a powerful force beyond human control, i.e. fate, history, God, biology, etc.). In this position, victims are likely to resign themselves to their fate.

▪       Position Three: To acknowledge the fact that you are a victim but to refuse to accept the assumption that the role is inevitable. This is a dynamic position in which the victim differentiates between the role of victim and the experience of victim.

▪       Position Four: To be a creative non-victim. A position for "ex-victims" when creativity of all kinds is fully possible.

Ideology is a system of concepts and views that serves to make sense of the world while obscuring the social interests that are expressed therein, and by its completeness and relative internal consistency tends to form a closed system and maintain itself in the face of contradictory or inconsistent experience.

Terry Eagleton, in his book Ideologies, lists a range of meanings:

--the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life;

--a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class;

--ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;

--false ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;

--systematically distorted communication;

--that which offers a position for a subject;

--forms of thought motivated by social interest;

--identity thinking;

--socially necessary illusion; the conjecture of discourse and power;

--the medium in which conscious social actors make sense of their world;

--action-oriented sets of beliefs;

--the confusion of linguistic and phenomenal reality;

--semiotic closure;

--the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations to a social structure;

--the process whereby social life is converted to a natural reality.

Ideology

“the function of literature is to point out that the sign is not identical with its referent.” --Roman Jacobson 

 “A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation.” --Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish 

“Ideology is the world presented positively unified.” --Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other 

“Ideology is a ‘representation’ of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” --Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”

ENGLISH 331 –  Genres in Canadian Literature

Locating Fictions/Places

10-4588 TWRFS 9:00 – 4:50

S/S 2012  Prince George

Instructor:  Rob Budde                                                                         Tel:  250-960-6693

Office:             ADM 3016                                                                           Email:  rbudde@unbc.ca

Course Description:

We will study a wide variety of fiction by Canadian authors, concentrating on 20^th c. and contemporary work. Our primary thematic focus will be on how the stories represent and construct notions of “place,” broadly conceived.  In this regard we will be exploring the complex interconnections between such critical categories as land, landscape, nature, geography, environmentalism, language, translation, culture, race, ethnicity, gender, the body, history, home, community, family, economics, work, class, social status, migration, identity, region, nation, the local, globalization, borders and hybridity. The course will be organized as a seminar, using a combination of lecture, small group work, whole class discussions, and student presentations.

Required Texts:

Lecker, Robert, ed.  Open Country: Canadian Short Stories in English.  Thomson-Nelson, 2008.

Assignments/Evaluation: (Subject to Change)

Presentation (20 mins.)…….…….…………………................................20%

Short Response Paper (5 pp)………………………………………………..20%

Research Paper (10 pp)...................................................................40%

Participation…………………...............................................................20%

Presentation: Groups of three will present a focused introduction to one of the short stories on our reading list OR do a comparative study of two of the short stories. Presentations will be evaluated based on analytical content and pedagogy or presentation style.

Short Response Paper: A short formal paper that analyzes one aspect of one of the short stories we are studying. No research required on this paper.

Research Paper: Research papers are to be typed, double-spaced, and formatted in accordance with the MLA Handbook. For this 10 pp paper you will choose any story or combination of stories from our two course texts and develop a focused, well-constructed exploration and argument on a topic or issue of your own choosing.  In addition to whatever primary texts you use, you should refer to at least 4 other secondary sources. 

Deadline Policy: A 5% per day (including weekend days) late penalty will be assessed to papers handed in after the due date without prior permission. 

Special Needs:  If there are students in this course who, because of a disability, may have a need for special academic accommodations, please come and discuss this with me, or contact Disability Services.

PLEASE NOTE **********PLAGIARISM***************:  This is a serious offense that may result in course failure and expulsion, so if you are unsure whether or not you are plagiarizing in your paper, consult the university calendar or see me before you complete the assignment.

Reading Schedule

Tuesday                                   

Introduction to Place Theory

Alissa York “The Back of the Bear’s Mouth” (Lecker 533)

Harry

Wednesday

Frederick Philip Grove “The House of Many Eyes” (Lecker 72)

Morley Callaghan “The Blue Kimono” (Lecker 106)

Sinclair Ross “The Lamp at Noon” (Lecker 112)                 

Alistair MacLeod “The Boat” (Lecker 267)

Margaret Laurence “To Set Our House in Order” (Lecker 438)

Thursday

Clark Blaise “Identity” (Lecker 307)

Margaret Atwood “Hairball” (Lecker 297)

Sharon Butala “Light” (Lecker 315)                 

Rohinton Mistry “Squatter” (Lecker 369)

Thomas King “Borders” (Lecker  329)

Friday

Leon Rooke “The Woman’s Guide to Home Companionship” (Lecker 234)

Elise Levine “You Are You Because Your Little Dog Loves You” (Lecker 415)

Bill Gaston, “The Alcoholist” (Lecker 386)

Michael Crummey, “Serendipity” (Lecker 472)                 

Ivan E Coyote “Makeover” and “The Smart Money” (Lecker 507)

Saturday

Douglas Coupland “Shopping is Not Creating” (Lecker 425)

Joseph Boyden “Shawanagan Bingo Queen” (Lecker 480)

Madeleine Thien “Simple Recipes” (Lecker 560)

Lynn Coady “In Disguise as the Sky” (Lecker 513)

Eden Robinson, “Traplines” (Lecker 487)