Week 14: Final Sampling of Contemporary Writing

Question 1

What is the catchphrase often used to describe the Canadian approach to immigration?

Answer 1

Canadian mosaic/multiculturalism

Question 2

What does Neil Bissoondath criticize in Canadian multiculturalism?

Answer 2

The multicultural hyphen (Italian-Canadian, African-Canada)
Labelling people like that puts distance between them

Question 3

Why does Thomas King criticize and refuse to use the expression “postcolonial”?

Answer 3

It’s not the correct way to represent reality
Links to colonialism, not a positive view

Question 4

What is an allusion?

Answer 4

• Reference to another work, character, or artistic work (indirectly)
  “Death by Landscape”: The name of the camp “Manitou” is a reference to an Indigenous spirit

Question 5

What is pathetic fallacy?

Answer 5

Attribution of human emotion and conduct to things in nature that are not human
“Message in Bottles”: the “sun was smiling down” on the twins

Question 6

What are postmodernism and metafiction, and how can these terms be applied to both stories (Death by Landscape and Messages in Bottles) ?

Answer 6

About people who have been marginalized
Multicultural mashup of everything: metafiction (fiction about fiction)

Question 7

What is magic realism?

Answer 7

Magical elements in the normal world
MIB: Turtle giving advice (animal behave like humans)
Children are young and beautiful (almost perfect) like in fairytales

Question 8

Who are the main characters and the main idea in “Messages in Bottles”?

Answer 8

The twins
They wrote stories on the island because they thought it would rescue them
Children are naive, innocent

Question 9

Who are the main characters and the main idea in “Death by Landscape”?

Answer 9

Lucy and Lois
Explores the guilt and confusion that a woman, Lois, still feels years after her childhood friend vanished without a trace during a summer camp canoe trip