http://www.english.uottawa.ca/pdf/ENGCourses10-11

Our objective will be to uncover the foundations of the "American sublime" as articulated by the unity of nature, national identity, and American poetics.

Method

Seminar

Grading

Paper 1 20%; Seminar 30%; Final Paper 50%

Texts

Emerson, Emerson's Prose and Poetry (Norton Critical) Melville, Moby‐Dick (Norton Critical) Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Norton Critical)

ENG7321 “Some Versions of (Canadian ) Pastoral” Thursday 10:00 ‐1:00

Professor Robert Stacey

Introduction

This course reads works of modern and contemporary Canadian poetry and fiction which rely upon or otherwise invoke pastoral tropes and conventions. In the minds of many people, pastoral writing is related to beautiful landscapes and grazing sheep. In this course, we will be emphasizing the social and 'dialogical' qualities of pastoral, and treating it as the formal embodiment of social and literary 'vulnerability.' Implicit in pastoral, Paul Alpers argues, is a necessary "acceptance of limitation.” Often dramatizing a rejection or loss of power, the pastoral is especially suited to the representation of reduced circumstances, of duress, constraint and failure. The pastoral is, as a consequence, the mode par excellence of personal and social uncertainty, an idea inscribed in the very inadequacy or fragility of pastoral writing itself. For many reasons which we will explore in this course, the pastoral has been useful to Canadian cultural producers, especially in relation to their attempts to explore social difference and questions of 'literary power.' (One trend worth noting here is the return to traditional and highly conventional pastoral forms in recent, politically‐engaged, postmodern Canadian poetry, some of which we will be reading in this course.) Since many students may not be familiar with the pastoral tradition, the contemporary Canadian work will be supplemented with a few exemplary texts from the Classical and English traditions as well as important works of pastoral criticism.