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Canadian novelists often revert to writing about the past, and often do so by combining metafictional narrative features that draw attention to the constructedness of both the narrative and the historical accounts of the past. In the late 1980s, Canadian literary theorist Linda Hutcheon coined the term “historiographic metafiction”. According to Hutcheon, in A Poetics of Postmodernism, works of historiographic metafiction are “those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages”. In this class, we will reflect about theoretical aspects and look at different Canadian novels.
Tentative List of Required Reading: George Bowering’s Burning Water (1980), Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1987). Information about the texts which are to be bought will be given in the first session; additional material will be provided in Moodle.
Requirements: Class participation, including reading assignments and discussion, and a seminar paper. |
