Moodle

Blockseminar: June 16 - July 14, 2025. Mondays and Fridays: 4-7 pm.

The immigrant experience is a foundational phenomenon of Canadian culture and history. To a substantial degree, the country has been shaped by successive generations of immigrants, from colonial times until the present. The immigrant experience has been woven into every facet of the country’s history and understanding of itself at the level of individual destinies as well as that of the national collective. While an historical constant within Canadian life, the understanding and collective perception of immigrants and immigration and their role in shaping the country have changed over the years.

It is no surprise that the Canadian literary institution has long been occupied with the literary depiction of the immigrant experience. Some of the quintessential texts of Canadian literature – from Frances Brooke and Susanna Moodie to Frederick Philip Grove and Michael Ondaatje – have been about the effects of immigration on the immigrants themselves and the country as a whole. To a significant degree, the changing contours of the Canadian national imaginary have been shaped by changing perceptions of immigration as expressed in the nation’s literary art.

The present course will be occupied with a reading of four contemporary Anglophone novels of immigrants and immigrant experience within Canada. Our interest in studying these texts will be to identify consistencies within the transhistorical ”story” of immigration, but also to observe changes and to reflect upon the ways in which the changing narratives of immigrant experience reflect shifts within the national imaginary.

Students are required to read the assigned texts in advance of the relevant classes and to come to discussions prepared to express their own ideas and insights.

List of Required Reading (tentative list):

Peter Behrens, The O’Briens, 2012

Barbara Joan Scott, The Taste of Hunger, 2022

Dmitri Nasrallah, Hotline, 2022

Nancy Lam, The Loyal Daughter, 2022

Course Requirements:

• Course readings / discussions
• Presentation on a relevant topic of the student’s choice
• Final essay of approximately 15 - 20 pp.

Tentative Schedule (Alterations to the schedule possible – according to student availability):

Monday June 16          16:00 – 18:00                Introduction                                             

Friday June 20            16:00 – 19:00                Peter Behrens, The O’Briens                                           

Monday June 23          16:00 – 19:00                Peter Behrens, The O’Briens

Friday June 27             16:00 – 19:00                Barbara Joan Scott, The Taste of Hunger

Monday June 30           16:00 – 19:00                Barbara Joan Scott, The Taste of Hunger

Friday July 4                16:00 – 19:00                Dmitri Nasrallah, Hotline

Monday July 7              16:00 – 19:00                Dmitri Nasrallah, Hotline

Friday July 11              16:00 – 19:00                Nancy Lam, The Loyal Daughter

Monday July 14           16:00 – 19:00                Nancy Lam, The Loyal Daughter

Over the course of the past half-century, theatre has emerged as one of the most prominent artistic forms for representing the experience of Indigenous peoples in Canada. The following course will treat various playwrights and works from this tradition, beginning with The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, a play by the non-Indigenous author George Ryga in 1967. Our concern in discussing several important plays of this tradition will be in observing the development of formal innovations, but also in analysing both the evolution and the continuity of thematic issues of relevance to Indigenous life. Our readings will also be informed by awareness of the changing nature of the place of Indigenous peoples within Canada. Included amongst the topics of interest will be (re-)considerations of the historical experience of Indigenous peoples in Canada, the dramatic treatment of the social and psychological effects of Indigenous and Euro-Canadian contact, the multiple questions regarding the nature of Indigenous identity within Canada and the various forms of response – including artistic – available to Indigenous people to represent their collective experience.

Students are required to read the assigned texts in advance of the relevant classes and to come to discussions prepared to express their own ideas and insights. The approach taken in this course also assumes the importance of this theatrical tradition in both reflecting and enacting changing understandings of indigeneity in Canada.

List of Required Reading (tentative list):

George Ryga, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (1967)

Tomson Highway, The Rez Sisters (1986)

Ian Ross, farewel (1998)

Daniel David Moses, Brébeuf’s Ghost (2000)

Marie Clements, The Unnatural and Accidental Women (2000)

Drew Haydon Taylor, Dead White Writer on the Floor (2010)

Kevin Loring, Where the Blood Mixes (2009)

Course Requirements: Course readings / discussions

                                     Presentation on a relevant topic of the student’s choice

                                     Final essay of approximately 15 - 20 pp.

Tentative Schedule:

Monday July 1           17:00 – 19:00             Introduction

Friday July 5              17:00 – 20:00             George Ryga, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (1967)

Monday July 8           17:00 – 20:00             Tomson Highway, The Rez Sisters (1986)

Friday July 12            17:00 – 20:00             Ian Ross, farewel (1998)

Monday July 15         17:00 – 20:00             Daniel David Moses, Brébeuf’s Ghost (2000)

Friday July 19            17:00 – 20:00             Marie Clements, The Unnatural and Accidental Women (2000)

Monday July 22         17:00 – 20:00             Drew Haydon Taylor, Dead White Writer on the Floor (2010)

Friday July 26            17:00 – 20:00             Kevin Loring, Where the Blood Mixes (2009)

In the social and cultural history of Canada, the Ukrainian diaspora has long played a formative role. The officially multicultural character of the country, for example is to no small extent a result of, among other forces, the formative historical and contemporary presence of the Ukrainian-Canadian community. The following course will study the literary dimension of this important community via consideration of a survey of Ukrainian-Canadian literature. The course will proceed chronologically from the early twentieth-century through to recent developments. Our goal is not to develop any specific thematic or formal “thesis” regarding Ukrainian-Canadian literature, but rather to explore various topics that emerge out of the literary depiction of this community. Such topics will include: for example, the historical importance to Canada of Ukrainian immigration; the difficulties of integration into Canadian life; the experience of exile/emigration/immigration; the various personal and collective ramifications of an ethnic or “hyphenated” Canadian identity; etc.

Students are required to read the assigned texts in advance of the relevant classes and to come to discussions prepared to express their own ideas and insights.

The following is a still tentative reading list (it will be modified/updated according to availability of the works):

Vera Lysenko, Yellow Boots (1954)

Lisa Grekul, Kalyana’s Song (2003)

Maria Reva, Good Citizens Need Not Fear (2020)

Course Requirements: Course readings / discussions

                                     Presentation on a relevant topic of the student’s choice

                                     Final essay of approximately 15 - 20 pp.

Canada, a continent-spanning country occupying the northern half of North America, has an intriguing relationship with the north – as a space and as an idea. The north is central to the perception of Canada – both by Canadians and by non-Canadians – and yet the precise contours of an idea that is at once geographical and cultural remains fraught.
In the following course, we will undertake a review of central texts about the Canadian north. We will consider the fascinating ways in which the north exercises a powerful, and at times contradictory, pull on the Canadian imagination as a place of concrete historical and geo-physical reality, but also of mythic power.
Tentative List of Required Reading:
Samuel Hearne, A Journey from Prince of Wales’s Fort, in Hudson Bay, to the Northern Ocean (excerpts provided by course instructor), 1795
Robert Service ”The Cremation of Sam McGee,” 1907
Rudy Wiebe, A Discovery of Strangers, 1994
Tomson Highway, The Kiss of the Fur Queen, 1998
Keith Ross Leckie, Coppermine, 2010
Possible work of secondary literature:
Margaret Atwood, Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature, 1995

N.B. Course Requirements:               Course readings
                                                      Presentation on a relevant topic of the student’s choice
                                                      Final essay of approximately 15 - 20 pp.

Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, the course will unfold chronologically to trace several of the century’s major formal and thematic developments in American theatre. Key texts of American drama will be analysed with regard to their position and role in the formation of an historically evolving tradition. The influence on theatrical expression of broader historical events, intellectual trends and changing tastes in the socio-political and socio-cultural realms will also be considered.

Students are required to read the assigned texts in advance of the relevant classes and to come to discussions prepared to express their own ideas and insights. The approach taken in this course also assumes the primordial role played by the American theatre in ”enacting” broader social and aesthetic trends within the United States. Attention will be given to the diverse ways American drama has both shaped and reflected its surrounding society and culture.

List of Required Reading:

Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot (1908)

Eugene O’Neill, The Hairy Ape (1922)

Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

Arthur Miller, The Crucible (1953)

Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959)

Wendy Wasserstein, The Heidi Chronicles (1988)

Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1991)

Course Requirements: Course readings / Online discussions

                                     Presentation on a relevant topic of the student’s choice

                                     Final essay of approximately 15 - 20 pp.

One of the curious features of Canadian literature is the prevalence of animals. A feature previously observed in the national literary tradition, it was Margaret Atwood who in Survival, her handbook of 1972, claimed the ”‘realistic’ animal story” as ”a genre which provides a key to an important facet of the Canadian psyche.” While Atwood’s observations undoubtedly raised critical awareness of an intriguing quality of Canadian literature since the 19th century, subsequent generations of readers and critics have not always followed her lead in interpreting the animal as symbolic representation of the national character.

            In the present course, we will examine a series of Canadian novels about animals published since Atwood’s influential claims. Our goal will be to read each novel with regard to its particular thematic and formal qualities, while also considering the manner in which the depicted animals are both symbolic representations of human concerns and also real contextualised beings whose very ”animalness” makes of them a fascinating ”other.”