Sumários

Postcolonialism in Canadian literature

15 Novembro 2017, 10:00 • Cecília Maria Beecher Martins

Discusses of the chapter "Canada and Postcolonialism: Questions, Inventories, and Futures" - Diana Brydon from Is Canada Postcolonial? Unsettling Canadian Literature (2003) ed Laura Moss

Canadian Biotext

13 Novembro 2017, 10:00 • Cecília Maria Beecher Martins

Presentation of Biotext as a form of writing and anysis  in Canadian Literature,


Analysis of the chapter "Introduction to Biotext" Joanna Saul from Writing the Roaming Subject 

Discussion of Margaret Atwood's Survival and student abstracts

8 Novembro 2017, 10:00 • Cecília Maria Beecher Martins

Student led discussion of Margaret Atwood's interpretation of survival as a common denominator of Canadian literature.
Presented how I wish students to present the abstracts for their research papers (due date 20th November). 
Time line for submission and review of student abstracts and research papers:•20th November submission date for abstract (up to 250 words) – this will contain your  thesis idea and theoretical framework (10%). – I will not accept essay from students who have not presented their abstract •27th Nov – return abstract to students from   Ana Beatriz Pinto to Inês Morais
29th Nov – return abstracts to students from Isabel Martins to Susana Martins
•13th Dec Submit original research essay (2,000 - 2,500 words) 30%. 

The thesis statement is •It 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. 
Writing a thesis statement is  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. However, it is always 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.
Technical point - •Identify all of the sources you are going to use. 


Example of an abstract and title: 
Ben Taylor: a typical 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.   

Ustopias

6 Novembro 2017, 10:00 • Cecília Maria Beecher Martins

Review of Ustopias as presented by Margaret Atwood in "Dire Cartographies: The Roads to Ustopias" from In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. 

This chapter is in the course manual.

Contemporary Canadian History and Culture

30 Outubro 2017, 10:00 • Cecília Maria Beecher Martins

Achieved through student presentation and discussion of Eva-Marie Kroller's "Introduction" to The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature