Group Assignment (2006)

As we talked about on the first day of class, one of your assignments is to decide collectively on what the final book for the course will be. To do so, you will be broken into groups of 5.

On September 21, each member of the group will bring information about one recent work of Canadian fiction published in the last 3 years (i.e. 2004-2006) that he or she thinks the class should read. Each of you will distribute to the group (and to me) a typewritten summary of what you found out about the book and why you think it would be a good choice for the course. On your written summary, make sure to cite any sources you used for this information.

Once you have distributed and discussed your selections, your group will debate the merits of the particular books and then decide on one book to recommend to the class as the final book we'll read for the course.

After your group has met, your group will put up a summary on the blog which names and describes all the books you discussed and indicates your final choice. In your blog posting, explain why your group thinks its choice would be an ideal book to add to the reading list. Justify its fit not only in terms of the book itself and why you think it sounds interesting, but also in terms of how it connects or differs from the other books we will have read. How does it help to make our syllabus more balanced? Or, is that balance even important at all?

The deadline for that blog posting is Monday September 25th. From there, we will vote on which of the final six books the class should read.

As we discussed, the purpose of this assignment is for the class to come away with a sense of the type of writing happening in Canada today. You will need to be resourceful to find the book you will present to the class, but the research skills you acquire will also teach you something about contemporary literature and how to learn more about books that have not yet disappeared into either the thousands that each year disappear into the realm of the "out of print" or the very few which remain in the contemporary critical discourse and, if they are very lucky, someday find their way on to course syllabi and perhaps even "the canon."