The First Question of the Week

Bienvenue!

After a - I think - rather neat class on romantic nationalism and the occasional downsides thereof evolved into a discussion of group identity as caricature ("The Caper", "The Maritimer," "The Upper Canadian"), one point that might have gone unexpressed, or unstressed, was how political boundaries often do not reflect the natural geographic boundaries to environments, which therefore at least calls into question some of Herder's conclusions - if not his premises - of national character. First, the confusion - or the propensity for confusion - of the nation with the state (Milan Kundera has a great article in this week's New Yorker about this point, although he also seems to be arguing for the opposite) and how nation-state identity can tend to obfuscate personal, local, or regional identity. The state is a construct that occasionally is contiguous with nation, but not exclusively. To suggest that Canadian identity does not exist is grossly unfair, but typically - with food, with song, with habitat- certain local or regional traditions have been extrapolated as representative of the whole.

But enough about that.

The Question for next week (e-mailed to me by Monday) is: Do you consider yourself a member of an ethnic group? Why or why not?

By the way, the course syllabus is now up as a link (look to the right): any other handouts I, um, hand out will be available there as well (this does not include chapter or article photocopies: those are outside my office door).

New sexy look, new sexy year, new sexy course, same ol' sexy prof

Greetings to you all. Welcome to 113 '07.

This blog was created last year as a way of keeping in touch with etudientes (that's foreign and therefore sexy-talk for 'students') and allowing for a bit more discussion of things. It is not a substitute for attendance, but you might - might - be able to catch up on the odd missed class.

It is better than WebCT because:

• WebCT is for losers;
• This allows anyone to look at it, as opposed to a privileged few, unlike WebCT, which is for losers;
• WebCT (because it is for losers) has a tendency of crapping out (at least here at CBU);
• I can abuse my power and silence people (unlike WebCT, which is not only for losers, but is for hippie losers); and
• WebCT is totally for losers.

In retrospect, it may all be one and the same reason. Anyhoo, this will be a way of making handouts available, and is a good place to look at quasi-regularly. There is an rss feed for those too lazy to check which will tell you when I've added something new. I'll get the syllabus up to the right in a day or two, and make it all pretty.

Since I'm so very good, and the fact that you didn't do the reading was beyond your control, here is a synopsis of today's class as a PowerPoint presentation. Don't expect too many of these.

PS: Those who are new to folklore country should mosey around, set a spell, and amble through some of the posts from last year, to get a sense of things.