Go to the questions
(It takes time to for the images to be transferred to your computer.)

In answering the following questions, you should not repeat in your choice of texts, and you should use The Seven Streams of River Ota once.

1. How is the theme of survival in the city treated in the Canadian texts we have read/watched?

Are there any elements that make the problems they deal with specifically urban?
Choose two texts (one literary and one filmic) as your examples, and also compare the similarities and differences between them.

[Clues: to answer this question, you need to
-- define what survival means (to survive, overcome or live with what social and psychological problems and/or personal trauma);
-- how the characters survive (Do they go through a process of mourning?  A ritual?  Are they self-indulgent or helped by others?  Do they enjoy a comfortable space in the city, live in  their own world, or in many worlds at the same time?    Do they need to play different roles or be untrue to their own selves?)

2.  How is the city of Toronto or Montreal (choose one) presented in the texts we deal with?   Choose two texts.
[Where to start?  Examine your texts

• by thinking the general characteristics of a city:
-- its public spaces of gathering (hotel, museum, parking lot, train/subway station, road, airport, department stores, senior citizen's home) and secret corners (strip dance bar, sauna, small hotel room and "home");
-- its rapid flows of people, information, traffic, money, and the energy and instability caused by these flows.
-- its history and/or present postmodern conditions (e.g. rapid flows and fast pace, the dominance of video screens [hyperreality] as well as other media and technologies, disaffection, multiple spaces [suggesting multiple possibilities?]).
• by thinking about how the city is experienced and looked at:
-- from a collective point of view or individual point of view; from a central position or marginal position, from the point of view of a man, a woman, the older generation or the younger?
-- And experienced with what activities (working, walking, photographing, shopping)?
-- What places or aspects of the city are focused on (its history, its national identity, its gender relations, etc.)?
-- realistically or symbolically?

In other words, examine your texts with the above-mentioned questions and categories, and then pick up your focus.  You cannot deal with all of them!

Choose 1 from the following 2:

3. Do a close analysis of one text in which different genres and texts (e.g. of film and literature, fairy-tale, painting, video, photograph) are mixed and blended to convey the text's overall messages.  Discuss how the use of these texts and/or genres help enrich the text's meanings.

4. Do a close analysis of a text and discuss how its (filmic and/or literary) techniques help convey its meanings.