Seminar: Aufbaumodul Englische Literatur: Key Texts of Canadian Literature - Details

Seminar: Aufbaumodul Englische Literatur: Key Texts of Canadian Literature - Details

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General information

Course name Seminar: Aufbaumodul Englische Literatur: Key Texts of Canadian Literature
Course number ANG.03573.05
Semester SoSe 2025
Current number of participants 27
maximum number of participants 30
Home institute Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Courses type Seminar in category Offizielle Lehrveranstaltungen
First date Monday, 07.04.2025 08:00 - 10:00, Room: Seminarraum 2 [AKStr.35] (Angl.)
Participants LAG, LAS, LAFö
Pre-requisites erfolgreich bestandenes Basismodul Literaturwissenschaft
Learning organisation Texts:
Montgomery, L. M. Anne of Green Gables, Norton Edition. Eds. Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston (2007) - ACHTUNG: UNBEDINGT DIESE AUSGABE!!
Additional reading:
Kröllers, Eva-Marie. The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature. CUP, 2017.
Sugars, Cynthia (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature. OUP, 2016.
Performance record Tests, Referat, Mündliche Prüfung (je 30 min)
Lehrsprache(n) Deutsch
Studiengänge (für) Lehramt Englisch
SWS 2
ECTS points 5

Module assignments

Comment/Description

A topic in their English lessons at school. The Amazon 2016-20 serialisation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The Netflix serialisation of Anne of Green Gables (2017-19). Alice Munros Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, Trump's threats to invade the country. – Despite these and many other prompts, Canadian literature and cultures remains actually not very well known to German readers. This is in striking contrast to English speakers globally, who are very aware of Canadian writing, starting with Montgomery’s YA classic and finishing with Atwood’s global success. Our course will focus on a selection of Canadian authors and Canadian topics from the 19th century to the present, to introduce you to this vibrant literature as much as to inspire you for your future teaching of Canadian topics in your own classes. We will begin with the first breakthrough of Canadian literature sui generis on the English-speaking literary world, Susanna Moodie’s autobiographical Roughing It In The Bush (1852), which we will read in extracts, followed by three poems of the Confederation poet Charles G.D. Roberts, “The Mowing”, “In an Old Barn” and “The Flight of the Geese” (all from 1893). What seems to have established a fairly sedate and heart-warming pace of regionalism, writing the white settler experience of Canadian nature and society, was sold to global ongoing success in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s series Anne of Green Gables (first volume 1908), yet again with strong autobiographical tinges. This takes a Naturalist turn in FP Grove’s (you guessed it: autobiographical) short story “Snow” from his collection Over Prairie Trails (1922), together with a striking reminder of the performativity of authenticity. But times and literary tastes were changing: F. R. Scott’s satire “The Canadian Authors Meet” (1927/45) targets mercilessly the turn of Modernists against what they perceived as Canadian parochialism. And yet Modernism did not catch on as expected in Canadian literature, but was subverted in turn, as emerges in Alice Munro’s short stories, of which we will read “Images” (1968), an example of Southern Ontario Gothic. We will next encounter contemporary authors writing back at Canadian classics, by reading Robert Kroetsch’s “R.P. Grove: The Finding” (1975) and poems from Margaret Atwood’s “The Journals of Susanna Moodie” (1970). Our course will finish by analysing a play, presenting indigenous voices, as well as long-term demands of social and humanitarian justice that haunt Canadian culture and politics to date (Tomson Highway, The Rez Sisters, 1988).
Poems, short stories, play, and extracts will be provided in a reader for download in Stud-IP. Please be very careful to obtain only the Norton Critical Edition of Anne of Green Gables listed above!

Admission settings

The course is part of admission "Beschränkte Teilnehmendenanzahl: Aufbaumodul Englische Literatur: Key Texts of Canadian Literature".
The following rules apply for the admission:
  • The enrolment is possible from 11.03.2025, 00:00 to 14.04.2025, 23:59.
  • A defined number of seats will be assigned to these courses.
    The seats will be assigned in order of enrolment.