Thoughts on Films - and Essays

Hi Everyone. I thought I'd post some very generic questions to focus on for tomorrow's discussion of Ten Canoes and Atanarjuat. Essay topics have been put on hold as far as the blog goes; I want to discuss them in class tomorrow, with everyone giving each other feedback. This is also because, unfortunately, our March 29th class will have to be cancelled. I will explain tomorrow.

So, generic questions to be used to think about films:

1. What is the film's story? What issues does it raise? Do these issues relate to some of the larger issues concerning oral traditions that we have been discussing in class? Has your opinion regarding oral literatures shifted since seeing the film? How does translation from spoken performance to film function, in contrast to moving from spoken performance to printed word?

2. What is significant about the film's content? What is there? What is not there?

3. Think about the film's style and cinematography. Does it have a unique look? How does the style of the film contribute to the film's message?

4. How does the film align us, as an audience, in terms of indigenous perspectives on oral tradition?

Possible Essay Ideas Coming

Okay folks, I am very behind in my ideas. I promise to post my thoughts on film, and possible essay ideas, by Sunday. In the meantime, keep on thinking!

Thoughts on Louis Bird

I'll be using this post to note Louis Bird and his book "The Spirit Lives in the Mind: Omushkego Stories, Lives, and Dreams".

Other Versions

So, here goes my attempt at changing up a bit of one of Harry's stories and seeing what it looks like... This is from "To Hell and Back" :

See, he gets the gold that way without working for it, without somebody giving it to him. He gets it for nothing. That's a good way at that time, for him, so he does that. Nobody knows. He kills somebody and then he gets the money, gets the gold, and whoever he kills, he throws them in the Thompson River. "Goodbye!" He does that four times. He kills two white men, and one Indian, and one Chinaman. But this Indian, the one that he kills, he must have come from some different direction, maybe from Bella Coola, or from Lillooet, some place. Strange, because they don't miss him. He knows that. You know, he knows that they were strangers. If he kills them, they will never be missed around here. They might miss them where they came from, but not here.

Question #3

The speeches by Simon Lucas and Dan Michel have been textualized very differently. In the one instance, grammar has been edited, redundancies have been eliminated, and other features of oral language have been transformed into a more traditional written text. In the other, many of the oral features have been reatined in the written version. Which translations do you prefer, and why? What are some of the implications of each style? Argue your psoition with concrete examples from the text(s), showing HOW each written form has certain implications for meaning.

Question #2

Walter Ong has argued that, "Learning to read and write disables the oral poet." Do you agree or disagree with this claim? Why or why not? Connect your response explicitly to one or more of the storytelling examples that we have discussed in class.

Essay Questions

Hi Everyone - Sorry for the delay in getting here this week; I'm still madly playing catch-up after being out of town for two days. So, I am going to posst three different questions here in three separate posts, with each question addressing one possible topic for your first essay. The is that we can all share ideas and discuss these topics as you work on your essays.

Question #1: Wendy Wickwire, in transcribing and editing Harry Robinson's stories, "poetizes" the text. She has stated that she is following anthropologist Dennis Tedlock's model of representing oral narrative as "dramatic poetry" on the page. Tedlock argues that this mode of written representation does a better job of preserving the flavour of oral performance as it moves to written text. Other critics have argued that this arbitrary choice is an imposition on the (narrative) text and has other, negative, and ideological implications. With which position do you agree? Why or why not? How does the formal style of written representation affect meaning? Use explicit examples from Write It On Your Heart to argue your position.

Transcribing Oral Stories

Now that all of you have print copies of the stories that we listened to in class on Monday, I'd like to think about the ways in which these stories have been textualized. All of the stories that we listened to were told in English by bilingual speakers of a Native language. This reduces some of the complexity inherent in translation, because the storytellers provided their own translation and interpretation into English. However, the move from the spoken word to the written word in these stories is not nearly as seamless. All of the stories have been transcribed by different people, and in different ways. Some are presented as poetry, some as prose. In some instances we know a little bit about the storytelling context; in others not. We don't always know who has transcribed the story, nor what the context of the transcription (as distinct from the storytelling performance) is. Think about the textual version of the stories that we have listened to, and make some comments about the issues areound the transcriptions. What do you see as some of the problems and challenges in moving from oral to written? Is one style or method of textual presentation better than others in re-presenting an oral text?

Hi Everyone - Welcome to our Blog for FNST 206! I'll be inviting everyone in first, and then I'll post some things for discussion.