ENGL 478, Sept 2016 - text options

"Climate Change in a Settler-Colonial Environment": I'm confident that I'm under-qualified to teach this course, but if nobody else is going to teach a course that I could enrol in, what am I to do?

Image from Unsettling America

But of course I'm behind in my book ordering, because of course, and also because I'm more or less stuck. A single semester is never long enough to cover all the good stuff, and in consequence my usual approach is to blend some of the good stuff with some unpredictable choices. Sometimes these are works I haven't read but expect are worth my trust; sometimes they're not obvious fits, but I think there's something worth figuring out about them.

In sum, I need to choose only six or seven titles. Happy to hear other suggestions, but here's the shortlist I'm starting from, with bolding for the current lead candidates:

• Maleea Acker, Gardens Aflame (creative non-fiction)
• Ken Belford, lan(d)guage (poetry)
• Douglas Coupland, Generation A (novel)
• Derrick Stacey Denford, Ground Truthing: Re-Imagining the Indigenous Rainforests of BC's North Coast (cultural studies?)
• Alejandro Frid, A World for my Daughter: An Ecologist's Search for Optimism (eco-memoir)
• Jon Gordon, Unsustainable Oil: Facts, Counterfacts, and Fictions (literary criticism?)
• Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl (novel)
• Emma Battell Lowman and Adam J. Barker, Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st-Century Canada (politics?)
• JB MacKinnon, The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be (natural history)
• Eden Robinson, Traplines (short story collection)
• Richard Van Camp, Godless but Loyal to Heaven (short story collection)
• Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (anthropology, mostly)
• Richard Wagamese, Medicine Walk (novel)
• Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Red: A Haida Manga (graphic novel)

There's no link yet to the 2016 course calendar, so here's the 2015 base description for this variable-content course. More usefully, perhaps, here's the short description for our department handbook:

How can we read ethically and ecocritically on Canada’s West Coast, in our inescapably settler-colonial present? 

ENGL 478 will start from the position that Canadian literature, including West Coast literature, has been and continues to be shaped by the local, individual, collective ramifications of the ongoing colonial enterprise, its crises and momentum growing out of Canada’s settler-colonial past, present, and future. We’ll be reading realist fiction, science fiction, graphic novels, and eco-memoir by both Indigenous and settler authors, in the shadow of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.