ENGL 103 B12: Case Studies in Research: Memory Banks

J. Verissimo

Our focus in this course is on the role of research in reading and interpreting literature in its broadest context. As a result, we will undertake literary analysis to achieve a better understanding of texts in relation to specific places, histories, meanings, and debates. Students should expect to learn about and put into practise the stages of the research process, which include:

· Defining/creating/identifying a research question or problem,
· finding and evaluating useful supplementary research materials, and
· learning about how to place their ideas in conversation with the knowledge they build from research.

We will work together to understand and practise the research process. Since this is not a literary analysis course, our goal is to approach the texts we will be learning as research objects that can/will lead us to better analysis.
The particular focus of this course is “Memory Banks,” which is a phrase used in Liz Gunner’s essay “Africa and Orality,” on how orality functioned in the African context: as a way their societies “organized their present and their pasts, made formal spaces for philosophical reflections, pronounced on power, questioned and in some cases contested power, and generally paid homage to “the word,” language, as how Africa made its existence, its history long before the colonial and imperial presence of the West manifested itself (67).

With an understanding that Gunner’s use of Africa here is the composition of the many nations on the continent, it is the idea of the oral form as a space for negotiating the world and encoding history to reflect the past and make it “comprehensible and accessible” that we will explore in our course. While Gunner’s focus is on African orality, we will also be extending our research to the memory banks of the Black Prairie archive in Canada. What forms of orality exist? What do these oral forms tell us about the life and region of those who create them? Do these oral forms bear similarities to what could be considered as “their original locations”? How is modernity shaping orality? Does memory matter and how is it being reconfigured in other expressive contexts today (spoken word, digital contexts etc.).