Canadian Literature
Term 2
TTh, 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Nature has always been at the core of Canadian writing. Over the past hundred years, however, creative responses to the environment have changed dramatically. In the past few decades, with the “ecological renaissance” and the “social turn,” nature poets are less apt to either passively address the land or render it sentimentally and more apt to imagine an altered state of environmental change, even degradation. Contemporary writers often look at the effects of human interaction, resource extraction, and economic exploitation on Canadian land and waters. One strand of nature writing employs a poetics of warning as writers speculate on the effects of the tar sands on global warming, the relationships between Indigenous land claims and strip mining, or the consequences of the genetic modification of crop plants on prairie ecosystems. In parallel to the creative work, much critical work has turned to discussions of human/ non-human interaction, bioregional studies, postcolonial ecocriticism, and the development of the Energy Humanities. In this course we will read critical work alongside fiction and poetry by Indigenous and Non-Indigenous writers from the past century. In the epigraph to In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje quotes John Berger’s claim that “never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.” This statement could also stand as an epigraph for this section of 222.
