Canadian Class Systems

House keeping/grading issues: (Suggested: 5-10 minutes)

• What’s missing?  How long do you have to turn it in?

Mid-term:

• What does my mid-term grade mean?

Group Discussion:

• What did we end up saying in our short papers?

Obasan: Pages 150-300

Tonight, we will be using our 4-step approach.

Experience:

In-Class Writing: (Suggested: 10 minutes)

What was your experience of reading the second half of this novel?

• Throughout, be clear about “why” you think you had the range of reactions you had.

Group Discussion:

• Part 1: Let’s begin by going around and summarizing our writing. (Suggested: 5-7 minutes)

• Part 2: What kinds of cultural experiences do we have, or are we familiar with, that we can bring to this book. Let’s list some possibilities. What is the “frame” through which we are approaching it? (Suggested: 10 minutes for listing and discussion)
  

• Part 3: Identify one person, image, theme, or event you developed a new understanding of as you went through the novel. (Suggested: 10 minutes for reflection and discussion)
  

Break around 5:50

Analysis:

“Colonial” Time-line:

• Okay, I want to “Colonize” this book, so we can get a better understanding of just how interesting its structure is.  Let’s develop a couple of time lines.

What are the various periods that are represented in this novel?

• We will break in two groups, one group that is concerned with the events that occur right before or after Uncle’s death, and the other group will line up the events that take place before the Uncle dies.

• You will be writing these on the board. (Take a total of 20 mins: 10 to get organized, and 10 to get stuff up on the board)

Navigating the time line:

• Once we have the time-line down, we can come up with lists of the people and places that you think are the most relevant.  We will write these on the board as well. (Suggested: 5 minutes to add new information to the board)

• How does she move from one time line to the next, or back and forth within the same time line? (Suggested: 5-7 minutes for reflection and discussion)

Evaluation:

• In-class writing: (Suggested: 5-7 minutes)
  

• Okay, now that we have all this information, we need to try to do something with it.

• What is the story she is trying to tell?

• Why does she tell it this way?

• What does this way of telling the story “lend” to the story? How does it shape your experience of it?

Group Discussion:(Suggested: 5-7 minutes)

Group Work:

• Okay, now let’s evaluate it against both the critical standards we have come across in our other readings and in our major theories. Let’s break into groups of two to begin this work, and then we will report back. Groups of Two (Suggested: 5-10 minutes)

Synthesis:

• Okay, let’s consider and/or argue with some critics of the novel.

• Here are some things that are being argued about Obasan:

Radical Idea Lab

• Idea One:

Smaro Kamboureli s argues  that Obasan shows us how bodies register and resist “the established state’s ills.” She argues that the body is “a powerful medium of knowledge and agency, a site of experience that contests racist Canadian discourses of nation, gender, and sexuality.”

So – okay: What role to “bodies” play in this novel? How does the character’s physicality speak to their condition. A good place to think start this conversation, I think, is with all the descriptive language that is associated with Obasan the first time we meet her.

• Idea Two:

According to Glenn Deer

Vancouver and the rolling ocean of the west coast are the central absent spaces that are achingly longed for by the Alberta-exiled Uncle Isamu and his niece Naomi in Kogawa’s novel Obasan (1981).

• Idea Three:

According to Rufus Cool:

Confronted by a world that is hopelessly fragmented or polarized, such works set out not simply to recount the memory of some happier, more harmonious time fromthe past but to “revivify” or “resuscitate” that time, to bring it back with all “the complexity and fullness of immediate experience”

Homework:

• Read and annotate Nights Below Station Street (it’s not that long, and probably an “easier” read than Obasan in terms of its structure, but necessarily in terms of its content). No extra writing, but know the novel when you return.

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