Discussion of the film "Barney's Version"

3 Dezembro 2018, 08:00 • Cecília Maria Beecher Martins

Watched the first 50 minutes of Richard Lewis's 2010 film adaptation of Mordecai Ritchler's novel Barney's Version as a typical Canadian film. 

The Canadian long poem in the context of First Nations declamatory verse and biotext

28 Novembro 2018, 08:00 • Cecília Maria Beecher Martins

Overview of Canadian literature from the beginnings up to 20th century

26 Novembro 2018, 08:00 • Cecília Maria Beecher Martins

Overview of the Canadian literature  from the beginnings up to 20th century both in terms of prose and poetry.

Diamond Grill and Biotext

21 Novembro 2018, 08:00 • Cecília Maria Beecher Martins

Student led discussion on Canadian biotext based on the analysis of Joanne Saul's text "Introduction to Biotext".

Discussion of set reading from Obasan + presentation of how to prepare and write an abstract for a research essay

19 Novembro 2018, 08:00 • Cecília Maria Beecher Martins

Discussion of set reading from Obasan

Guidelines for preparing, writing and getting feedback on your abstracts

Submission date for abstract: 5^TH December - 200 – 250 words

Your abstract will - 200 – 250 words and contain your thesis idea and theoretical framework (10%). – also your main bibliographic references ( 3-5).

The thesis idea/statement is the heart of your research paper and should be the first thing you concentrate on. It not only indicates what you are going to do, but how you are going to do this. It is the unifying agent of an essay, summarizing the main point of the paper "in a nutshell," and indicating  how the paper will develop.

When you define your thesis idea as a first step in the writing process, remember that you may need to tweak this when you have finished because your main idea has changed, but it is a good place to start your writing from even if you have to move away a little from the initial claim because of new evidence found through your research.

I will not accept essay from students who have not presented their abstract. However, if you wish to submit your abstracts earlier you can do so and I will discuss them with you

12^th Dec– I will return abstract and discuss abstracts with students from   Andrea Vercammen to João Pedro Ribeiro

17^th Dec – return and discuss abstracts to students from José Barata to Tiago Silva.

Sample title and abstract

Ben Taylor: A Canadian Hero

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. (143 words)