Literatures of the West Coast • University of Victoria
Graduate Program, Department of EnglishCourses 2008-09
Courses 2008-09
American Literature at the Pacific (Chris Douglas)
This course considers the ways the American West Coast became an occasion for many writers to think about migration, race, culture, nation, and the limits of politics and identity. From Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Hypothesis, through Franz Boas’s Jesup Expedition in the Pacific Northwest and Siberia and Robert Park’s work on the Pacific Survey, to the politics of Japanese American Internment and Native American Relocation: the West Coast has variously signaled the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny, the dangers of the “yellow peril,” the possibility of imperial adventures further westward (in places like Hawaii, the Philippines, or Vietnam), the Pacific Rim as the possible limit of American power, and the site at which space becomes, finally, cyberspace. It has likewise become the place where political questions have turned, finally, into questions of style and of identity.
Literary Anthropology and Anthropological Literature on the Pacific Coast (Nicholas Bradley)
The Euro-North American anthropological enterprise has produced a vast amount of writing about the indigenous peoples of the northern Pacific coast of North America, and about the Haida and Tsimshian, in particular. Major figures in academic anthropology — including Franz Boas, Marius Barbeau, Claude Levi-Strauss, and John Swanton — have written extensively about the cultures and oral traditions associated with what is now the West Coast of Canada. Contemporary Canadian writers such as Robert Bringhurst, Anne Cameron, and Susan Musgrave have drawn heavily on the indigenous traditions and texts described in the anthropological literature, as have the American poet Gary Snyder and the British poet Ted Hughes. Robin Skelton, an advocate of the distinctiveness of British Columbia’s regional literature, even suggested, in the 1970s, that indigenous traditions lie at the heart of the contemporary artistic culture of the West Coast as a whole. This course will focus on the relation of this anthropological project to Canadian literature in a postcolonial context. It will consider the literary nature and influence of anthropological texts and address the anthropological dimension of literary texts.
The course will concentrate on several overarching topics that deserve critical attention. First is the matter of genre: what is literary about anthropological writing? When and how do indigenous oral performances become part of written literature? How can literary critics account for orality and linguistic difference in their discussions of written texts? How do poets and other writers respond to and draw on anthropological writing? The second major topic is the ethics of anthropological and post-anthropological writing. What constitutes cultural appropriation or appropriation of voice? How do representation and ethics intersect? What are the connections between anthropology and colonial history? What rights and responsibilities do writers have, and how are these determined and assigned? The third major focus concerns the relation of anthropological and post-anthropological writing to Canadian literature. In what sense, if at all, are these texts “Canadian”? What relation do they have to what is conceived of as the Canadian canon? Do they undermine conventional notions of Canadian literature? This course is broadly related to fundamental questions regarding the assumptions of Canadian literature but also has a particular focus on Literatures of the West Coast, a category that complicates the nationalist model.
Forest Fetish: Reading the Nature of the West Coast (Nicole Shukin)
There are few figures which hold as much fetishistic currency as “the forest” in literary and cultural imaginaries of the West Coast. Yet produced as both trope and timber, West Coast forests are profoundly overdetermined by the often contradictory symbolic and material demands placed upon them. In this seminar, we’ll study hegemonic and counterhegemonic representations of Pacific Northwest forests as “totemic,” “untouched,” “supernatural,” “diseased,” and “dying.” We’ll draw upon Marxist, psychoanalytical, and postcolonial theories of fetishism to help us better understand the tangle of competing symbolic and economic investments in West Coast forests across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Finally, we’ll trace the efforts of writers, theorists, and visual artists such as Daphne Marlatt, Don McKay, Bruce Braun, Jin-me Yoon, and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun to inscribe histories of race, gender, labour, and struggle back into the fetishistic image of a “timeless” West Coast nature.
Core Seminar (Misao Dean and Jamie Dopp)
