/lit/ - Literature

there is no quintessential unless you want the equivalent of corncob garbage like mark twain, which would be shit like anne of green gables or some other white trash.
if you want a list of "good" canadian authors just google around for a canlit syllabi.

pro-tip: no one in canada gives a shit about the art we produce in any medium. just read Atwood or something.

also don't come to Toronto AKA Muslimcity

>>5213595
>As an American whom

Don't they have a language proficiency test for immigration in Canada?

No one in Canada that I've ever met cares about Canadian culture in that way, "great Canadian literature" and such. There is some "Canadiana" that kind of typifies (to me at least) what the country before Trudeau gave us the immigrAIDS, stuff like Pierre Burton maybe. But authors who came out of Canada are pretty shitty. I'd rather say that then try to cling to garbage like Munro. Just watch Red Green.

And if someone recommends Corner Gas to you, shoot them.

Not Canadian but Leonard Cohen's "Beautiful Losers" is considered Canada's best PoMo novel (it sucks)

His first book, Favourite Game, is much better IMO

>>5213606
>pro-tip: no one in canada gives a shit about the art we produce in any medium
pretty much this, all the cancon they try to push is just so terrible. every show cbc makes is hilariously bad. who the fuck watches republic of doyle???

>>5213606
>Muslimcity
>>5213647
>immigrAIDS
I thought only the stupid boards were racist

>>5213661
>stupid boards
you mean all of them right?

>>5213647
Yea pretty much this. I'm Canadian and I couldn't care less about Canadian authors etc. I just read whatever I find on here half the time

>>5213667
/lit/ is usually less stupid than the other boards... i guess i should've said stupider boards

this guy

>>5213687
It just knows bigger words and is therefore more long winded. That's 98% of the difference. It's all the same shit.

What ethnicity are most Canucks?

>>5213595
>As an American whom is moving

And that's where I stopped reading.

>>5213606
lel. toronto is the only city in canada worth a shit. cry more cracker

>>5213661
Come visit Canada and see if your opinion changes after living in downtown Shanghaiii mean Vancouver

>>5213727
>Not based Vancouver
Shit this is coming from a Winnipeger, I'm a professional Injun fighter by this point.

>>5213699
White

>>5213595
farley mowat

you don't use 'whom' unless you're using it with 'to' or 'with' or something like that

>>5213647
>what is the CBC?

>>5213661
>brotip: /pol/&/r9k/ aren't containment boards ...
Hello new fwend :3

>>5213595
That's pretty cool, OP. I'm also an Amerifat moving to Canada for University.

Mcgill University?

Read Ondaatje's in the skin of lion

>>5213595
You better be going to U of T

>>5213953
>tfw at UofT right now
>tfw this uncharacteristically beautiful and non-sweltering summer is going to snare so many people touring the campus into coming here

HAHAHAHA ENJOY RAIN, COLD, AND SLUSH HELL THAT CLEARS UP JUST AS YOU LEAVE, FAGS

Actually the endless blaring of construction on every single street of the campus might counteract it

>>5213940
Not OP, but still checking in as fellow American heading to McGill

>>5214262
>>5213953
University of Manitoba

>>5213595
Atwood, Ondaatje, and Mowat.

>>5214262
If undergrad, can I have your email/skype?

>>5213647
>Just watch Red Green.
>And if someone recommends Corner Gas to you, shoot them.
Basically this.

>>5213788
I actually grew up on the same street he lived on. He was like 3 houses down, never met him though. May have seen him but didn't know enough to recognize at the time.

Fun fact nobody will believe.

>>5214305
>Manitoba
>living in any provinces but BC or Ontario.
Weird...

>>5213690
This.
Also, you'll need to read french. And don't listen to the bigots, obviously.

Ondaatje
>English Patient
>Billy the Kid

John Franklin
>Narrative of a journey to the shores of the Polar Sea

Douglas Coupland
>Any book (they're amusing)

Frederick Philip Grove
>Snow

That's all I liked from the syllabus.

Atwood is extremely bad.
Munroe is extremely bad.
Lawrence is ok.

L.M Montgomery is good, though a female Mark Twain.

Cohen fucken sucks.

Canada's literature is mostly awful, with a few good ones.

I also liked John Ibbitson | Jeremy's War 1812

>>5215831
winnipeg is cool it has a lot of fun gay clubs and cheap cocaine. and it's so easy to get it back into the us because you're just coming back from canada.

>>5215881
OH SHIT!! How could I forget!??!!?

Fifth Business by Davies is fantastic!

>>5215887
>Canada
define "cheap"

>>5215902

>>5215895
on multiple occasions i paid $75 canadian dollars for an 8 ball of fishscale. but i 100% doubt that was standard as we were cute girls in short dresses

>>5215902
>>5215911
That's funny, who's the cartoonist?

as a Canadian who wants to be a writer, i feel like we might be in an interesting position where if any Canadian manages to write something that isn't boring and terrible and manages to be interesting to people who aren't from Canada, they could see big time success.

the last book I read by a Canadian author was Jian Ghomeshi's book and it was nauseatingly bad.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

>>5213652
NFB produced a bevy of masterpieces in the 60s and 70s

>>5215959
The problem isn't so much as the lack of talent.

The problem is that those in power of Canada's publishing industry are adamantly dedicated t promoting mediocrity.

Case in point, this award winning "poem" (won like 5000 bucks):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWa7KrPW8Yg

>She was pretty and gay in her youth
>She died of urinary tract infection
>Squeeze fruit juice into my mouth

Give that brave retired woman 5000$! Fuck that struggling genius writer who catch a break! hahah fuck that guy!

>>5215949
>fishscale

Protip: you're in Canada. You don't get anything better than 50/50 there.

>>5213752

Except in Toronto. White is demographically a minority here now (I think officially).

>>5215997
Get used to it, the whole country will go that way soon enough.

>>5215984
no man, maybe if you're you but i can get whatever i need wherever i am. idk i think he was just a nice guy buying for himself off the silk road and doing us a favor because i sincerely doubt he made any money off of that.

>>5215980

oh my god, that "poem" is awful.

that's true though, i applied for a few short story writing competitions and while my stuff may not have been good enough to win anyway, whenever i checked out the top 5 or so, it was all very old people writing the corniest, safest stuff.

i guess what Canada needs is some kind of a DIY movement that gets young people excited.

>>5215980

Shouldn't some talented Canadian poet go straight to New York publishing houses (or Paris for Québec), just like a talented Canadian actor goes directly to Hollywood & blissfully ignores Canadian cinema?

Terrible poem obviously, those Canadians have a lot of money to blow for sure.

I don't know about "quintessential." But there are some marvelous novels written here if somewhat unacclaimed.

Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient is very good. It quotes Herotodus at length, so he's doing something right.

Miriam Toews' a complicated kindness is very good. About a young woman whose mother is shunned by their Mennonite community, and the fallout in her life. Quite a powerful allegory about xenophobia, and to the extent it deals with a topic I see evidence of every day and I live in Canada, it qualifies as "quintessential."

A little unknown gem is Mark Frutkin's Atmospheres Appollinaire, which, if you're into literary modernism, is a fantastic exploration of the modernist zeitgeist (Alfred Jarry is a character).

For poetry, there's the exquisite Dionne Brand. Inventory is the best tome of poetry I've read in the 21st century.

As for Margaret Atwood, people seem to like her. I find her forgettable, personally. She's a good poet though.

E.J. Pratt's "Towards the Last Spike" is quintessential for CanLit, but long poetry is not everyone's cup of tea.

Whatever you do, avoid Carol Shields.

>>5215951
Kate Beaton

her website "Hark A Vagrant"

>>5216000

I doubt it. Too much racism in the smaller towns. . .

>>5216032
That's because young people don't care about those phony "competitions" to spread out their poetry... they're using Twitter instead.

Any movement that's not Twitter or Tumblr or whatever would take place in America anyway; why wallowing in an area plagued with talentless oldies?

>>5216032
>i guess what Canada needs is some kind of a DIY movement that gets young people excited.
There are a lot of small-time publications dedicated to "hip new indie shit," but that shit is flung fart too opposite the pendulum.

It's really shitty in a post-modern sort of way.

Here's an example:
http://www.taddlecreekmag.com/category/poems

All this shit sucks.

Know what this country needs? An elite fucken classical education school. One that teaches greek and latin, rhetoric, history, English literature, choir, gymnastics etc.

Boarding schools without the homosexuality and consumer/capitalist status symbols.

A school that drills and indoctrinates young boys and men to dedicate their entire lives to scholastic achievement.

A couple of years of that, and there will be a very cultivated grounds in which to grow cultural artifacts in.

If the government (or parents) gave me 60k a year, I could probably teach, house, cloth, and feed 25 pupils.

>>5216071

CanLit official is a gerontocracy.

>>5216041
>Shouldn't some talented Canadian poet go straight to New York publishing houses
Are you kidding me? Have you seen the garbage they are publishing in the New Yorker now?

All is lost on most fronts.

>>5216082
You forgot matriarchy as well.

The head of the English department is often or usually a man, but the rest of the professors are women. Usually a 3:1 ratio.

>>5216081

Before the romantic era, classical education produced the most bland, dry and boring poetry. They were all trying to reproduce the Greek and Roman classics in a very sterile and derivative way. You really feel bad when you realize this old talentless crap is all full of "good taste" and formal perfection.

Now, the descendants of these mediocre "perfect" poets are your average pomo hacks. Same global lack of talent, just shown in a different fashion.

You can't teach talent; you can only reward it when it appears.

>>5216125
>Before the romantic era, classical education produced the most bland, dry and boring poetry.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0ccLwBeje0

>>5216125
>"Edjugamagation doesn't do nuffin!"

Typical /lit/

>>5216084
I don't know, I am not American and I don't care about the irrelevancy called American literature (don't even know what the "New Yorker" is or does).

But isn't the "Poetry" magazine trying to encourage poets to do more structured and classic things? It still looked very weak to me.

>>5216150
>But isn't the "Poetry" magazine trying to encourage poets to do more structured and classic things?
Why don't you read one or a couple before naively assuming nonsense?

>>5216000

according to google vancouver's non white population is 41% and by 2030 it will rise to 59%

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I feel guilty about being racist but at the same time I don't want to be a minority. White people aren't the only racists.

In answer to OP's question isn't Two Solitudes considered pretty seminal or important? I don't know anything about it other than that tragically hip song.

>>5216160
>White people aren't the only racists.

how not?

>>5216160

over half of Vancouver's population has a primary language that isn't English already.

>>5216160
Canada is going the way it is because it is monopolized and corporatized (the banks and private corps are in an orgy with the government), and by importing aliens they are importing man power and far more obedient citizens than those of european descent (who demand their rights too loudly).

It goes in tipping points and it will happen much faster than 2030.

>>5216166
Because saying that is in and of itself racist.

>>5216136
Of course classical education produced excellent poetry too. But it was very rare. 99,9% of old poetry is pure crap. Just ignore the big names for a moment, and read the average educated poets of the 17th and 18th century. Hopeless, hopeless. Thousands of paragraphs with formulaic "tasty" stuff and phony Roman gods doing acceptable things... That's even more insufferable than your normal pomo babble.

>>5216147
What?
Go read boring 18th century verse like Jacques Delille's to understand how you can be extremely educated and still talentless.
Actually you don't have to go this far. Just read any poetry or fiction book written by academics. Why not David Lodge, for example? or Percival Everett? or Pierre Jourde? It's mediocre.
Education doesn't bring talent.

>itt: angry and ignorant people who think you magically become a divine writer because you've read the greeks anyhow

>>5216156
I've read what is on the website, it's not very good. Excuse me if I prefer Shakespeare and Leopardi.

>>5216212
Shut the fuck up idiot.

>>5216220
>i promote refined and educated poetry using terms like "shut the fuck up"

Also, nice arguments.

>>5216248
Inherent intellectual and physical capacity is like a PCs hardware. It sets parameters of what is inherently possible to accomplish with the unit.

Education and physical training is like the O.S.
If you have good hardware but a bad O.S, you're going to have a shitty system.

If you have a god-tier education, you've given the "hardware" a good O.S to run on to see it's full potential.

If you try again to tell me that education is not important, I'll tell you to shut the fuck up once more.

>>5216282
>not understanding most people are like terrible hardware computers
>not understanding classical education is a very good, but very heavy os that bloats all that mediocre hardware
>not understanding all that mediocre hardware forms a network
>not understanding such a network is obviously very slow and inefficient
>not understanding a godlike machine with the godlike classical os is constantly underperforming, and almost useless, in such a terrible and restrictive network

I should stop debating with kids on Chinese cartoon forums, for Heaven's sake.

Also,
>not understanding classical education is now freeware and open source, while it was closed and very expensive back in the day
>not understanding it's much easier for anyone to learn greek and have access to classical texts today than 300 years ago

Adieu, bel imbécile

>>5216318
>Adieu, bel imbécile
But that's French, not Greek.

>essential
George Bowering
Al Purdy
Bliss Carman
>less essential but still "important" and/or "good"
Anne Carson
Evelyn Lau
Rawi Hage
Zsuzsi Gartner
Douglas Coupland (later works are far better written, Nostradamus-Gum Thief is his sweet spot)
Christian Bok
Garry Thomas Morse
Gilles Henault
Patrick deWitt
Roger Farr
SD Chrostowska
Leonard Cohen
Graeme Gibson
Miriam Toews
Richard Wagamese

Whatever you do, OP, don't come to Quebec. Ever. Not even to check it out.

>>5213607
He is on a student visa, maybe they expect him to learn while there.

>>5216402
What's wrong with Quebec?

>>5216318
Shut the fuck up, fool.

>>5215219

where was everyone when I was a McGill undergrad last year T_T

p.s. take a creative writing class if you can

>>5216466
what was ur GPA in high school?

>>5216481
Not him or OP, but I had like a 4.4 in the end, and like a 3.8 or 3.9 at the beginning of senior year when I was accepted.

>>5215984
L O N D O N
O N D O N
N D O N
D O N
O N
N

>>5216211
What if the person saying it is white?

>>5216803
They're just indoctrinated into leftist self-hating bullshit then

>>5216809
Following your thinking: If a white person says white people are the only racists she is brainwashed, if a non white person says white people are the only racists, she is racist. So everybody is either brainwashed on racist. Seems to me that nobody is racist and you're the one who's brainwashed

>>5216845
or people who admit that other races can be racist are acknowledging the truth and therefore are neither racist or brainwashed

>>5215219
grad, sorry

>>5216862
The only problem is that it destroys any hope of cooperation between races sp its not an option. It's hard to pretend to like somebody when you publicly say you hate him.

Why does a question about quintessential canadian literature is mostly anwered with self-hatred to then devolve into racism?

essentials:
canada made me
duddy kravitz
fifth business

>>5216926
Sorry.

>>5216926
because we have no identity and many blame this on the immigrants. if we read a little more we would be aware we never had an identity outside of quebec

>>5216947
I don't know what's sadder, your statement or that nobody said anything to the contrary.

>>5213727
Get fucked, canuck

>Montreal is tits

Saul Bellow was born in Quebec.
So just read him.

>>5213799
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Government funded TV and Radio Stations. Tv is shit, respectable news coverage for tv though. Radio is hit and miss. Very popular with the political left.

>>5213595
Ones that teach you the difference between who and whom

>>5217052
eh, it's a fine country to be mediocre in.

degrassi is canadian and so i will always hold the country in the highest esteem.

Official province rankings

>Top-tier
Quebec, BC, Newfoundland, PEI

>Mid-tier
New Brunswick, Nova Scotia

>Low-tier
Saskatchewan, Manitoba

>Shit-tier
Alberta, Ontario

>Uninhabited-tier
All the territories

>>5215887
>Winnipeg
stopped reading there

>>5216125
"Talent" isn't something completely self sufficient that comes fully formed into the world out of nowhere. It needs to be cultivated and provided with proper social context in which it can grow and emerge. Ever wonder why hunter-gatherer societies don't have any great artistic geniuses?

ruh-ruh-ruh-robertson davies?

>>5217300
>BC over Alberta

Enjoy your taxes

>>5216166

asians are disdainful of white canadians and only conform to canadian society enough to make money. I've met asians who have been living here since they were 6 years old and still have halting english. at university asian girls wont talk to you and the boys treat you like a waiter. is it racist to want people to speak the language of the country they live in, at least competently?

indians/pakistanis hate white people for being religious heathens or past oppressors and will beat the shit out of you if their wife isn't around to take the hits. big gang of drunken punjabis: watch out.

>>5213727
>cracker

This is such a weird insult to me, the name literally comes from white people whipping their slaves. It's practically like calling somebody your master

>>5217416
>Wanting to live surrounded by racist rich oil goons and poor racist white trash oil sand workers
>Wanting to live in the truck nuts capital of canada
>Wanting to live in shit-prairie-flatland over beautiful BC

>>5213595
5th business

/thread

>>5217510
I know man, it's tough having autism these days.

>tfw live in Toronto
>tfw rest of country hates us

>>5213941
I recently read Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Good stuff.

>>5213690
lol if youre in grade ten sure

If there is anything that Canada excels in, it's animated series:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB1xI3EaAEM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FKpU0pnne8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuEJWmxWkKw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2W_3uXqsfw

Is Canada the most uncultured country on the planet?

They haven't produced shit that wasn't an American rip-off.

>>5218849
> shit-prairie-flatland
I've lived in Alberta my entire life. I can tell you that it is in no way just a shitty flatland. If you drive two hours from Calgary you're in the mountains to do as you please. And during the summertime if you do find yourself in the flatlands, you'll see pretty canola fields all around you.

I agree on the white trash part, it seems like they're everywhere and becoming more numerous each year. It's the reason why I'm moving to Vancouver, so I can be surrounded by rich Chinese immigrants.

>>5213595
the beggars garden michael christie

i mostly read poetry but here's what i'd recommend to get a sense of the literary feel of the place

- anything by bill bissett (once you've read one book you've read them all
- anything by bpnichol
- Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
- In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje (some people say this paints a great portrait of early Toronto but i personally found it forgettable)
- Here Is Where We Disembark by Clea Roberts (amazing images from the northern part of the country)
- anything by Douglas Coupland (gosh he's just really good)
- i think William Gibson is canadian too so there's that?
- any short story collection by Alice Munro
- i've heard really good things about Richard Wagamese but i haven't looked into him personally

there's probably more but hopefully some of those help. have fun in the frozen north when you get here

>>5220601
We literally have no culture. It does not exist. There is no Canadian identity. Canada's only chance at having a distinctive culture war being the good son of Britain with beautiful geography. Stable, wealthy, ex-colony borrow its parent's aesthetic. Unfortunately some exceedingly unintelligent individuals decided Canada would be "multicultural", which in effect means culture-less. It's an ugly, depressing consumerist shithole filled with people who practically see themselves as Americans. My history teacher literally said "we" when he was talking about the American exploits in the Pacific Theatre. We are a part of America without anything that makes America distinct.

By now it's far too late for Canada to make anything of itself, it's simply too whored out. Constant immigration and complete disregard for anything resembling assimilation has guaranteed that Canada's citizenry will forever remain broken.

>>5221837
was* and borrowing*
Speaking of exceedingly unintelligent...