Assignments
(updates syllabus info)
Revised Winter Schedule
html OR pdf
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Original Syllabus
(complete list of
required assignments)
Class Notes
Saga of an Essay
ENGLISH 113-H1: English Literature in Global Perspective
Modern and Postmodern Literary Movements: Local, Global, or Something Blurry
Conference Page
REVISED EXAM SCHEDULE
Wednesday, December 10, 2008, at 2:00pm
in BUS 1-5
Thursday, April 16, 2008, at 2:00pm
Updates to exam schedules available at the university registar's exam planner page.
Office Hours: Tuesdays 2:00-3:00pm and Thursdays 11:15am-12:15pm or by appointment
Office: Humanities Centre 4th floor, room 32
Email: mkatz@ualberta.ca
Those interested in films by our special guest, Adonay Guerrero Cortés, can find more short features at:
El blues del buen samaritano (Even without subtitles, the film's moving story comes through.)
Demo Reel 2008-Adonay Guerrero (with scenes from Son of Santo and more)
¿Dónde esconden sus secretos las mujeres? (a super-short animation)
Elegy (an animated feature Adonay created in Edmonton for Metro-TV)
La duda Mata-Doubt Kills (one of the short films we saw in class)
You can write to Adonay at: adonayfox@yahoo.com
Doug Cox writes: "I wrote the Blues Came to Canada because I realized as I traveled that there was much about true Canadian history that was never mentioned school. I started to devour books on our history and talk to people who's parents/grand parents were there. It was gratifying to see my fellow musicians, who read parts of this piece during recording, that they were largely unaware of our history as well. That made me realize I wasn't the only one ignorant of the truth. Canadians in general seem comfortable (cocky) with the idea that we are somehow better than the United States and have a cleaner history. A little digging proves this to be untrue."
To hear "The Blues Came to Canada" Also, check out the Doug Cox website at dougcox.org
Sept. 30, 2008: "As permanent secretary, Engdahl is a voting member of and spokesman for the secretive panel that selects the winners of what many consider the most prestigious award in literature. The academy often picks obscure writers and hardly ever selects best-selling authors. It regularly faces accusations of snobbery, political bias and even poor taste. Since Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe won the award in 1994, the selections have had a distinct European flavor. Nine of the subsequent laureates were Europeans, including last year's winner, Doris Lessing of Britain. Of the other four, one was from Turkey and the others from South Africa, China and Trinidad. All had strong ties to Europe."
See the entire New York Times article "Nobel literature head: US too insular to compete"
Oct. 4, 2008: "On Tuesday, Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the organization that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, gave an interview to The Associated Press and, while not dropping hints about this year’s winner, seemed to rule out, pretty much, the chances of any American writer. 'Europe is still the center of the literary world,' he said, not the United States, and he suggested that American writers were 'too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.' He added: 'The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.'"
See the entire New York Times article "Lost in Translation? A Swede’s Snub of U.S. Lit"
“Literacy is achieved when one is able to decipher, judge, and use many different kinds of text. One may be as easily enslaved to the high-minded texts of poets and philosophers as to more vulgar and demotic productions. Producers of texts correctly assume that their audiences will possess reading competence. But many text producers neither want nor expect anything more than a purely responsive act of reading—an act which will decode the transmission in precisely the way that the sender desires.”
Jerome McGann The Textual Condition (127)
