(a) Munro — Canadian (rural Ontario); Dance of the Happy Shades or Lives of Girls and Women; mastery of the long short story, retrospective first person, time-shift structures. (b) Atwood — Canadian (Toronto/Ottawa); The Handmaid's Tale, Survival, poetry collections; ironic voice, dystopian fiction, ecocritical interest. (c) King — Cherokee/Greek/German; The Truth About Stories, Green Grass, Running Water, The Inconvenient Indian; oral-tradition forms, humour, Indigenous worldview.
B. Frye's phrase from The Bush Garden (1971) characterises a sensibility shaped by smallness against immensity.
B. Atwood proposes that where America narrates frontier-conquest, Canada narrates survival — sometimes barely — against threats environmental, historical, or interpersonal.
Oral tradition — knowledge, story, and law transmitted through spoken word and embodied performance across generations. Orature — a term coined by African scholar Pio Zirimu and used by writers including Thomas King to give oral tradition the dignity of "literature" without forcing it into the category of writing. Literature — written verbal art, in the narrow Western sense; in broader contemporary usage, includes orature.
B. The father raises silver foxes whose pelts he sells to the Hudson's Bay Company; the slaughter of horses to feed the foxes is the violence at the centre of the narrator's awakening.
A post-colonial reading attends to how texts represent — or are shaped by — relations of colonisation, power, displacement, and resistance. In Canada, where the country itself is a settler-colonial state on Indigenous lands, post-colonial reading helps interrogate which voices are foregrounded and which are silenced; how land, language, and identity are framed; and what relationships of power remain inscribed in seemingly neutral terms (frontier, wilderness, settlement).
The narrator has just opened the gate, deliberately allowing the horse Flora to escape — an act of refusal that the narrator herself does not yet have words for. Munro renders the act through embodied detail (sweat, weight) so that meaning is felt before it is understood. The verb "broken" both literally describes a fence and figuratively names the rupture in the daughter's self-understanding: she has crossed her father, refused her assigned gender role, but feels "broken" because the act will, paradoxically, be folded back into the family with the dismissive "She's only a girl." The crying is grief for a future already foreclosed. Marks: 1 plot identification, 2 device analysis (sensation, "broken"), 2 thematic synthesis.
Sample thesis: "Atwood's speaker pretends to record the suburb's surface (its 'sanitary trees,' tidy lawns, rational driveways) only to expose the violence beneath — the irony of a planned 'sanity' that is itself the symptom rather than the cure of cultural unease." Evidence: (1) the poem's clinical adjectives ("sanitary," "rational") whose connotations of medical sterility imply illness; (2) the implied future-tense decay (snow, glaciers, future buyers seeing the lawn-paint flake) that suggests the order is temporary. Marks: 1 thesis specificity, 2 evidence selection, 2 evidence analysis.
Munro's strategy gives the reader simultaneous access to a child's perception and an adult's reflective interpretation; the gap between the two is where ironic understanding lives. King's strategy frames the story as ongoing transmission — the listener becomes part of the storytelling chain, responsible to the story rather than receiving it as finished product. Munro produces the modern lyric subject; King refuses that very category, foregrounding relation. Marks: 2 each strategy with example, 1 comparison synthesis.
Marks: clear topic sentence (1), one embedded quotation (1), interpretation of how the violence functions (3), conclusion linking back (1). Look for: identification of the parallel between the foxes' pelts (commodified beauty) and the family's gender roles (commodified femininity); the horses' killing as the visible eruption of the daily-but-suppressed violence on which the household lives.
King's claim is that human identity, community, and worldview are constituted in and through stories — to be a person is to inhabit a network of told stories about who one is and what is possible. The political stake: if stories make us, then which stories are told (and which are silenced) shapes who can become visible. For Indigenous peoples in Canada, this is the difference between being told about (the colonial story) and telling (the sovereign story). Marks: 1 paraphrase, 2 interpretation, 1 stake, 1 communication.
Strong responses recognise that "Canadian literature" is no longer (and probably never was) a single voice. Mention may include: Indigenous writers (Thomas King, Eden Robinson, Lee Maracle, Joshua Whitehead); Black Canadian writers (Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, David Chariandy); Francophone Quebec (Marie-Claire Blais); diasporic voices (Rohinton Mistry, Madeleine Thien). Marks: 1 definition, 2 examples, 1 communication.
Look for: a clear text choice with author and date; a specific (not generic) reason; engagement with form/theme/voice/place; thoughtful argument. Marks: 1 selection, 3 argument, 1 communication.
Strong responses connect a specific media text to one of the unit's analytical concepts (place, identity, etc.) using a concrete scene or recurring element. Marks: 1 text selection, 3 analytical engagement, 1 communication.
Strong responses propose concrete inclusion (e.g., reading The Inconvenient Indian, partnering with a local Indigenous knowledge keeper, including land acknowledgements that move from words to commitments, learning two-eyed seeing as a reading strategy) AND consider risks (token inclusion, performative reading, extractive engagement, the burden placed on Indigenous students). Marks: 2 proposal specificity, 2 critical reflection, 1 communication.