ENG252Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Scurvy, Captivity Narrative, Party Of The European Left
ENG22 – Eploratio Narraties
• Discourse firmly and ideologically centred in Europe
• writings about previously unknown lands by European authors (white males)
• various exploration narratives
• previously uko, udisoered - regardless of people already living
there
• Canada as a European construct - enters the world of European letter sin
latin and English - the latter language of the nation would colonize it
• John Cabot visits Newfoundland in 1497 and 1498
What mobilized exploration narratives?
• scientific inquiry, age of reason, sponsored by royal courts and companies
• European tradition of adventure and travel
• commerce and trade (finding India)
Exploration of Canada
• local tradition of exploration narratives begins after European left their ships
and moved inland to engage with the land and Native peoples.
• Two Traditions of Exploration Narratives in Canada
• Francophone: St. Lawrence and Great Lakes in 17th C.
• Anglophone: West, fur trade, in late 18th/early 19th c.
• Canadian insofar as the locus? focus? of their meaning is in the lands they
describe
Coherent bodies of literature
• produced by writers who belonged to close knit and self-aware communities
- the Jesuits, the navy, HBC, societies of science or history
• consciously engaged in interpretive discourse.
Form of Exploration Narratives
• journals or narrative accounts of travellers
• detailed attention to space and time
• descriptions of land
• descriptions of people venturing on ethnography (report from someone who
has lived and studied in a different culture, systematic study of people and
cultures that involves detailed accounts)
• linear structure
• episodic narratives
• 1st or 3rd person POV
• personal accounts presented as authoritative
• innocent of literary intentions yet often self-consciously composed and
revised
• educative and entertaining
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Document Summary
John cabot visits newfoundland in 1497 and 1498. What mobilized exploration narratives: scientific inquiry, age of reason, sponsored by royal courts and companies, european tradition of adventure and travel, commerce and trade (finding india) Coherent bodies of literature: produced by writers who belonged to close knit and self-aware communities. The jesuits, the navy, hbc, societies of science or history: consciously engaged in interpretive discourse. Exploration narratives imperial projects: quest for knowledge and power, expansionism, civilizing missions, displacement of the mythic quest motif, onto scientific and mercantile ethos, wide readership. Explorers: usually a man of one book, offering heroic testimony, double readership : his superiors and general readers. The other as foreigner figure of fascination and fear incomprehension: objectified and instrumentalized, (cid:862)our(cid:863) i(cid:374)dia(cid:374)s, page (cid:1009)(cid:1009), possessi(cid:448)e (cid:272)lai(cid:373, paternalistic / feminizing attitudes, (cid:272)i(cid:448)ilizi(cid:374)g (cid:862)le sau(cid:448)age(cid:863) (cid:448)ia christianity (59) Folk anti-christ image te(cid:374)sio(cid:374) (cid:271)et(cid:449)ee(cid:374) (cid:862)sa(cid:448)ages(cid:863) as a (cid:272)olle(cid:272)ti(cid:448)e ide(cid:374)tifi(cid:272)atio(cid:374) a(cid:374)d i(cid:374)di(cid:448)idual figures.
