ENGL 376 B1: Late 20th Century Canadian Texts

K. Smitka

This course surveys texts that engage with cultural nationalism, social equality, and multiculturalism: topics that shaped Canadian culture in the second-half of the twentieth century. The literary texts we will study will be contextualized within the quest for a unified Canadian identity that marked the 1950s and 1960s, and the subsequent rejection of this value-as demonstrated in the shift away from a Eurocentric approach to immigration-in the 1970s and 1980s. The writers we will explore may include Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Roy Kiyooka, Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Shani Mootoo, Rohinton Mistry, and bpNichol. In recognition of the way in which studying Canadian literature is part of an ongoing processes of colonization, we will also explore Indigenous responses to Canadian culture that arise in this same period; this aspect of the course may include writing by Marilyn Dumont (Cree/Métis), Armand Garnet Ruffo (Ojibway) and Thomas King (Cherokee).