Discussion of essays

16 Abril 2019, 10:00 • Cecília Maria Beecher Martins

Returned students film analysis essays and discussed the corrections of these with students both as a group (general tendencies) and individually.Asked students to rewrite their essays incorporating my corrections in language.
Then discussed themes from the literary analysis essay which must be presented on 30th April 2019.Reminded students that they need to begin this essay with a formal abstract (sample abstract below) and add appropriate bibliography (follow MLA style. 
As some students are interested in doing a close reading of a section of the novel they read, we discussed close reading techniques and we discussed these based on the ideas presented in the text "'Close Reading' how to perform a literary analysis" http://individual.utoronto.ca/h_forsythe/Close%20Reading.html. A hard copy of this text can be found in the red copy shop. 
Sample abstract Title: The Canadian everyman in One Week

In One Week (2008) Michael McGowen casts his protagonist, Ben Taylor, as an everyman something that is quite unusual for a contemporary road movie. Perhaps Elspeth Cameron’s proposals in Canadian Culture: An Introduction (1997) can offer some explanation for this unusual positioning.  Cameron suggests that Canadians do not particularly like heroes, preferring the ordinary to the extraordinary; a condition she attributes to the country’s colonial past, which has given the country and its people a feeling of peripherality  because “’ Head Office’ is somewhere else” (19).

Traces of Margaret Atwood’s victims, as presented in Survival (1972), can also be seen in Ben Taylor’s progression through the movie. Developing these arguments, in this essay, I will suggest that both One Week and Ben Taylor are creations that fit in the Canadian literary tradition and can be understood more easily when examined from this perspective.