120009 SE Literature Seminar / BA-Paper / MA American/North American Lit./Studies (2018S)

The settlement of the North American prairies was facilitated in the USA by the building of the transatlantic railroad and by legislation that encouraged the settlement of pioneers through the Homestead Act of 1862. In Canada, the Dominion Lands Act of 1872 followed the American model, with both acts attracting European immigrants, who were able to acquire land for a very small fee. The greater challenges of the physical setting in Canada, which Northrop Frye contrasted with the generally less menacing American environment (cf. his juxtaposition of the resulting “frontier” and the “garrison” mentalities in the two neighboring countries) slowed this process north of the 49th parallel in Canada, but by the early 20th century many ethnic individuals and groups settled in the emerging Canadian prairie provinces too. The narratives based on these collective experiences make up a sizeable part of the "epic" of the two countries.
Among the texts to be studied in the seminar are two stories and a novel by the prominent American fiction writer Willa Cather, whose masterpiece My Ántonia is said to have captured the atmosphere of the vast landscape of the American West and to have mediated the memory of the challenges of the pioneers. They had come from various parts of the Old World or from other regions of the American continent.
The stories representing variants of the Canadian experience on the prairies illustrate the hardships faced by pioneers of different ethnic backgrounds, who had to struggle with severe weather conditions and also with drought in the 1930s. The early stories by Frederick Philip Grove, a German writer who had adopted a fake identity in Canada, and Sinclair Ross, the interconnected narratives by Margaret Laurence, and the various texts by the exiled Austrian writer and scholar Henry Kreisel, as well as the narrative explorations of the lot of indigenous individuals and groups by the Mennonite author Rudy Wiebe exemplify some aspects of the wide range of voices articulated on the prairies. The selection of texts to be studied is rounded off by a pointed narrative of Thomas King, the important advocate of Aboriginal rights, whose career suitably crosses the border between the two neighboring nations.