Discussion Question: George and Rue

For this blog posting, I'm giving you a choice of two prompts. Answer one of the questions, but also make sure to read your classmates' responses to both prompts. As we did with some of the earlier assignments, also make sure to respond to at least two of your fellow students' comments.

1. What a great opportunity for us it was to have George Elliott Clarke visit our class and then give a lively reading later that afternoon. Thinking back to his visit, in what ways did having him here affect your perspective on the novel? Did his reading and talk cause you to think about the novel differently? What stuck with you the most about his visit?

2. We talked a lot about the characters of George and Rufus Hamilton, but this book is also a book that overflows with information about a particular place and time. What do you think this book has to say about Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the time period in which the novel is set?

Discussion Question: What We All Long For blog assignment

As we discussed in class, this book is full of borders, liminal spaces within and around which we continually see characters trying to negotiate their own identities, histories, and lives.

Choose a passage from the novel (quote it here so that we can read it, or give us the page number if it's extremely long) and tell us a bit about how this notion of borders comes into play in this particular moment in the text.

As with your previous blog assignments, you must also make sure to read the comments offered by your classmates. Make sure to respond in a meaningful way to at least two comments offered by others.

Speaking of Toronto...

We've talked a lot about Toronto over the last couple of days. This site gives you an interesting way of seeing the city from afar.... The City of Toronto website and good ol' Wikipedia are good sources of Toronto info as well.

A few interesting facts from the City of Toronto site:
You may already know that Toronto is home to the world's tallest building (CN Tower at 553.33 m) and that the world's longest street starts at the City's lakeshore (Yonge Street at 1,896 km), but did you know that Toronto is as far south as the French Riviera or that more people live in Toronto than in Canada's four Atlantic provinces combined?

Here you will find interesting and sometimes startling facts about Toronto, Canada's economic engine, with its 5th largest government and one of the world's most diverse and multicultural populations.

Termpaper assignment

As we discussed several times in class, your assignment for the termpaper is to create your own topic that allows you to look at a common theme or connection between two of the final books we've looked at in this course (The Englishman's Boy, George and Rue, What We All Long For, and Alligator for 180B and Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw for 180A). If there's a different Canadian book that you've read that you'd like to discuss in your essay, you may do so in place of one of the other texts we've read in class.

Make sure that the topic is narrow enough that you can answer it sufficiently and in enough detail in a 2000 word essay. Although I've chosen not to require you to do secondary research, I strongly encourage you to do so. For some essay topics, though, I realize that there might be little out there that will be relevant to your topic.

I recommend that you run your topic by me either in person or by e-mail. I'm also willing, if time permits, to review introductory paragraphs and/or outlines to help make certain that you are on the right track.

DUE: Thursday December 14th by 4:00 at the absolute latest. No extensions. Essays may be e-mailed to me or delivered to me via the English Department office (400 Old Mill)

WORD LENGTH: 2000 words