ENG 2133 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Kateri Tekakwitha, Ironism, Canadian Literature
12 Jun 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
ENG2133 – Lecture 4- May 14, 2018
Agenda
• Intro to Cohen
• Grotesque/carnivalesque
• Postmodernism_ histographic metafiction_ non chronological _anti realist
• F. the teacher, the ironist, the fascist
• Translation/transformation
• Historical novel- Catherine Tekakwitha
• Colonialism/genocide
• History as a problem
Lecture
• ol a ie hy is Cohe uotig Ray Chales
• Most people fine Cohen to be harmless however beautiful losers is anything but- it is calculated
to disturb as many people possible
• A novel of how people exploit one another and how people do it
• Post holocaust novel- lots of reference to the holocaust
• To him there is nothing unique about the holocaust at all – knowing our history we cannot be
surprised- this is what people do
• How can we be human without doing such horrid things
• He wants to show that we are all capable of these actions when under the right circumstances
• Break us down to show other ways we can be human
• It means becoming alien to ourselves
• He is trying to attack the very idea of self hood
• To haates hae o atual ae they oe ude the ae I ad F
• I and F become merged at the end giving IF (how the world would look if you were a saint)
• This is not the Cohen of his songs
• Novel that was written quickly and while on drugs
• Book is not consistent- essentially anything that came to head made it onto the page
• Vulgar violent sexual- angry, ugly and at one point was none as what angered readers
• He aimed for a book Canadians would not want to read- he almost made it- took a long time for
this book to become famous for this reason
• Tends to give dark humour- makes things like molestation humours
• Novel about failure- hoee you a’t fail a little – you need to fail entirely – success through
failure
• Failure is more ethical than success- inversion- good is bad and so on- ugly is beautiful
• Bodies in these books are full of holes- always leaking out – broken- fragmented bodies
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
