English 9172

Contemporary Canadian Literature in Cross-Border Contexts

Professor Manina Jones.
Summer 2019, Full year equivalent.

This course is set to run on Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 1-4 pm in UC 4415, starting May 14th, with two weeks off for Congress (Last week of May, first week of June), and going until approximately the end of July. A detailed weekly schedule/syllabus will be posted shortly.

What does it mean to read “from the nation’s edge”? In this course we will consider a selection of contemporary Canadian fiction and film in the light of recent critical and theoretical work in the interdisciplinary field of Border Studies, in order to explore the horizons and limits of our national literature. We will analyze the ways in which Canadian fiction, poetry, and drama represents movement across geo-political lines, including the US-Canada border, Indigenous territorial boundaries, ecosystems, and other trans-national spaces. In the works we examine, cultural and political, and ecological boundaries are negotiated and re-defined by immigrants, migrant workers, refugees, homeless people, cultural movements, settlers, migratory species, media and technologies.

View/download the course syllabus here: English 9172. PDF download