Cohenadian Literature

            On Monday morning after yoga I skipped song practice to try to finish my Canadian Literature paper before the official deadline of midnight. I didn’t really think I'd make it but I gave it a shot. 

            In the late morning I took a siesta for about an hour and ten minutes and then continued. 

            I had chips, salsa and yogourt for lunch and kept working.

            I finished the internal part of the essay in the early evening and then took a half hour siesta.

            I still had to do the external research to incorporate some stuff about Nina Simone into my essay on David Chariandy’s Brother. I had downloaded three books on the topic but had only quickly scanned them and made notes but hadn’t found much that I could use. Now that I knew exactly what my thesis was I scanned the first 200 pages of What Happened Miss Simone? by Alan Light and made some notes. I definitely did not have the essay done by midnight. I still had to read the rest of the Light biography and another short bio to figure out how to finish the paper. 

            I went to bed just after midnight. 

           

            On Tuesday morning I decided not to skip song practice before working on my Canadian Literature essay. The amount of time I have spent sitting in front of the computer and working on papers lately has taken its toll on my body. These days the only daily exercise I get besides yoga is standing and moving to the music while I play guitar and sing. The result of eschewing rehearsal the day before seemed to cause my sciatica to start bothering my right hip again. Even though the essay deadline was last night we actually have until December 17 before we are penalized and so there didn’t seem to be any point to wrecking my health just to hand it in on the official due date. 

            I continued with the outside research for my essay and finished reading What Happened Miss Simone? by Alan Light. I was a couple of hundred pages into Princess Noire by Nadine Cohodas when it was time to log on for my final Canadian Literature lecture. 

            Professor Kamboureli was disappointed that she didn’t have very many students coming for the last class. At the time she said that there were twenty one of us but I think there might have been almost thirty later. 

            She reminded us to do the course assessment. The deadline is December 10 and I always do it just before the last day. 

            She said she wouldn’t be answering any more emails about the final exam. 

            She invites us to ask questions about the course with the exam in mind. 

            She advised us not to waste time reviewing our notes during the assessment but to use our own critical understanding to answer the questions. 

            She reviewed some definitions of key terms. 

            The National Imaginary refers to ideologies and value systems that represent the nation. The Canadian identity is characterized by elements of settler colonialism that the nation state to be white and rendering Indigenous people and others within the state invisible. An essay could consider the story “Squatter” in relation to the national imaginary. Canadian benevolence is parodied. Or the novel Brother in which the national imaginary is compartmentalized because of race. 

            Alexander made a comment by microphone and everyone could hear him but the professor. She treated it as if it was his problem and moved on. 

            The Sublime is an intellectual and emotional response to nature that evokes a transcendental experience of awe as seen in Icefields. The Techno Sublime is where nature is manipulated by technology to produce the same effect, as with Trask’s commercialization of the ice fields. She also gives the example of Cartwright bringing the Inuit to London and being disappointed at their lack of awe. 

            Abjection is a feeling of being cast off and rejected as in Philips’ poem, Discourse on the Logic of Language." She also says that Ruth's withdrawal in Brother is an example. 

            Aesthetics of Disgust can be seen in Rasmussen’s reaction to an Inuit feast with a dessert of maggots. 

            She asked for a definition of Contact Zone. 

            Someone spoke but she couldn’t hear this time either. She realized that the problem was from her end. She couldn't hear Kelly either. She tried logging off and reconnecting at 11:37 but it still didn’t help. She said we were going to have to use the chat. 

            I didn’t plan on participating so I moved to sit on the couch.

            Contact Zone is the space where two asymmetrical cultures meet. The act of naming places that already have names characterizes one kind of contact zone encounter.

            Code switching is shifting back and forth between cultures. 

            Postmodernism. One could compare Atwood’s poem about the pioneer and Kroetsch’s poem about the stone hammer. Writing in fragments is an aesthetic device of postmodernism. Polyvocality working together but not necessarily resolved. 

            Wilderness is an important CanLit trope. Nature having no meaning. In Atwood's poem the pioneer tries to dig rows and collapses. In Stonehammer the object moves beyond function to become a poem.

            A bildungsroman is a coming of age story in which the protagonist’s sense of self comes to be realized. Both Brother and The Marrow Thieves are examples. 

            Metafiction draws attention to the unreliability of facts and the non-objectiveness of history.

            Speculative fiction is a political commentary on the present by way of an imagined future. It borrows from Romance traditions. Offers solutions.  

            Everything in Canada is about settler culture. 

            Intertextuality is similar to allusion and uses different textual references. In the Marrow Thieves residential schools are mentioned as both inside and outside the story. Icefields is very intertextual. The character of Swift is a real historical figure and so he exists as an intertextual reference. 

            In the exam we will be given three options and asked to analyze a certain idea in relation to a sample of text. 

            Discourse can encompass different things such as her talking about what discourse means. Examples are the New Woman or the Middle Passage. 

            She thinks the exam she has prepared for us is a fair one. Consider the specifics of the exam questions. Look at thematics and formality. Literature is aesthetic, especially poetry. Look at the shape of the text, the breaks and the punctuation. Don’t waste time on citations or page numbers. Use your own voice. 

            One could write the entire exam on the poetry examples. 

            One can write on the same topic as one’s essay as long as one doesn’t repeat oneself. 

            Diaspora. A sense of loss lingers even if one is doing well. The two tropes are nostalgia and the myth of being able to go back. One could compare Canadian Experience with Squatter. One has ironic laughter and the other is actually funny. Sarosh returns to India after not fitting in and still does not fit in. Diaspora changes one’s sense of self to a hybridized identity. One gets the cultural signals wrong and one's body speaks its own language. Double consciousness like Rasmussen. George in Canadian Experience also has a double consciousness. One acts according to the expectations of the dominant society while one's own separate self also exists. 

            Alternate modernity exists outside of western enlightenment. A different pace than imperialism. The west is not embraced. Beyond western understanding. Rasmussen’s shock that an Inuit was listening to European opera. 

            The CanLit scandals will not be on the exam. 

            The second part of the exam will involve comparing two texts. Half one and half the other. Five to seven pages. 

            We have to download a writing document from Quercus and then upload it when we are done. It won’t be marked until early January. 

            Since there were no more questions she ended the class seventeen minutes early and everybody said their goodbyes and thank yous. 

            I think she’s the first English professor I haven’t thanked at the end. I didn't really like this course or her general approach to Canadian Literature because the texts were treated more as subjects of social science than as literature. 

            It’s also odd that in the three English courses I’ve had with the word “Canadian” in the front of their titles only George Elliot Clark included Leonard Cohen in his course. It seems like most English professors at U of T deliberately avoid Cohen as if he’s been over explored, even though Atwood gets studied plenty. Actually there haven’t been a lot of Jewish Canadian authors brought up at all. Anti-Semitism? 

            I went to the Introduction to British Literature homepage to answer my final lecture quiz. I had to bounce through the lecture videos to find the answers but it only took about ten minutes of a lecture that was more than an hour long. Aphra Behn was a British spy. She was also a Royalist and her character of the African prince may have been based on the English King James. Virginia Woolf said that more important than Behn’s writing was the fact that she made money from it, which gave her freedom. Her description of Surinam evokes Paradise Lost. She claimed to write without invention. The love story in Oroonoko is a chivalric romance. I got them all right. 

            I had chips and salsa for lunch. 

            After a siesta I worked until dinner time on research for my essay. 

            I had a potato, a chicken leg and gravy and decided to take a break from the paper and watch Andy Griffith. 

            This story begins with Opie playing with some older boys who decide to push Andy’s sheriff’s car in front of a fire extinguisher as a prank. The two boys ask Opie to promise not to tell. Barney sees the car and goes to write Andy a ticket. Andy makes Barney a temporary justice of the peace so he can preside over the ticket dispute. Andy gives a passionate argument in his defence that moves Barney to declare him not guilty. Opie confesses that he and his friends did it and says that he promised not to tell. Andy tells him he shouldn’t break a promise to a friend. Later Opie introduces Andy to his friend George who is from a nearby town and has run away from home. Opie won’t say where George is from because he promised not to. Andy asks himself why he always gets his britches caught on his own pitchfork. George says he’s going to Texas. Andy lets George stay at their house for a while and while Opie is making is making him peanut butter and sardine sandwiches for his trip Andy talks to George. He tells him it’ll take him about four months to walk to Texas and that he’ll need about four hundred sandwiches, plus snowshoes for the mountains. George suggests that he could go home and wait until August to run away. Andy asks him what his parents are doing right now and he says that his mother is making pork chops for dinner and his father usually plays catch with him before they eat. George starts getting homesick and asks Andy to call his parents. Opie thinks his father has betrayed a promise but Andy gives an analogy to explain. He compares the situation to jumping in to a lake to swim to save someone who is drowning even though there is a sign that says, “No swimming!” The rescuer is breaking the rules for a good reason.