Prof. Lianne Moyes

Description

Gilles Marcotte has argued that every city has a space, a square, a building or a monument which stands in metonymically for the whole. In the case of Montreal, these metonyms are often contentious sites with palimpsestic histories and multiple cultural affiliations. This course affords an opportunity to discuss a range of twentieth-century literary representations of Montreal in French and in English. It encourages students to trace the genealogies of these representations, that is, the historical moment in which they arise and the discourses and practices from which they derive (including literary nationalism, anti-Semitism, le mouvement du terroir, la révolution tranquille, la modernité, feminism). The ways in which specific subjects (characters, narrators, writers) figure the city and are themselves located by those figurations will be a central preoccupation. The majority of French-language texts are available in translation; students will choose the topics of their seminars and papers the first or second week of classes.

Requirements

Participation in seminar discussion (including brief reading reports) 20%
Seminar presentation (students should submit a working copy to prof. before presentation ) 15%
First paper (expanded version of seminar due two weeks after presentation) 25%
Second paper (topic chosen by students from, or related to, course material; no extensions) 40%

Tentative Course Outline
January
5 Introduction: paintings, postcards and maps
12 Literary portraits pre-1940: W.D. Lighthall, Marie Le Franc, Stephen Leacock
19 Critical/theoretical texts
26 Gabrielle Roy Bonheur d’occasion; Roger Viau Au milieu la montagne
February
2 Selected poems of Albert Ferland, F.R. Scott, Patrick Anderson, A.M. Klein, Louis Dudek
9 Gwethalyn Graham Earth and High Heaven; Ted Allen “Lies My Father Told Me”
16 Hugh MacLennan The Watch That Ends the Night; Gérard Bessette La bagarre
23 Critical/theoretical texts
March
1 reading week
8 Hugh Hood “Looking Down From Above”; Leonard Cohen The Favourite Game
15 Selected stories of Mordecai Richler; Yves Thériault Aaron
22 Gilles Marcotte Le roman à l’imparfait (on Réjean Ducharme etc.) Gail Scott Heroine
29 Robert Majzels City of Forgetting; Raymond John Woolfrey “At the Top of the City”
April
5 Michael Delisle “Ciel avec vue”; Denys Arcand Déclin and Jésus de Montréal - Final essay due