Canadian Studies
Term 2
TTh, 2:00 – 3:30 p.m.
This section of English 470 focuses on the intersection of Canadian Literature and Web 2.0, described by scholar Nicole Cohen as “interactive, participant-based online media.” Who is participating in online discussions of Canadian literature, and why? Avid readers are posting reviews of Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows on Chapters.Indigo.ca and Amazon.ca. Poets such as Rebecca Thomas (e.g., “Just Another Native Poet”) and Shane Koykzan (e.g., “To This Day”) are circulating their work through YouTube and Facebook. André Alexis’ Fifteen Dogs has been pinned to #CrazyforCanLit, the Scotiabank Giller Prize’s board on Pinterest, and rated 4,863 times to date on the social media site, GoodReads.com. People are tweeting about Anita Rau Badami’s The Hero’s Walk and Lawrence Hill’s The Illegal at #CanadaReads, the hashtag inspired by CBC Radio’s mass-reading event of the same name. What motivates Web 2.0 users to create, share, and re-circulate this content? What social needs are they addressing? What cultural work—or “social action” (Miller)—are they performing? Who benefits from their labour? We will approach these questions through scholarship on genre and media theory. We will also be participating in Web 2.0: one of our class assignments will be writing entries about Canadian literature for the Wikipedia community, as part of the Wiki Education Foundation initiative. Our course readings include Canadian literary works in English (still to be determined), public uptakes of these works, and scholarly articles.
