Independent Studies | University of Waterloo

Vaughn Barclay is mother of a grown daughter, a writer, and an arts worker, currently living in Guelph, Ontario. Vaughn enrolled in the Independent Studies program in 2006 to complete a Bachelor’s degree through intensive study of literature, critical and cultural theory, poetry, and an interdisciplinary element in philosophy. This work was preceded by the first year of a Liberal Arts degree at the University of Ottawa many years before.

Vaughn’s independent studies included an historical survey of English Literature beginning with classical texts and moving through the main literary periods to postmodernism, including a survey of western hemisphere writing. She also studied literary and cultural theory surveying the main thinkers and approaches of the last thirty years, applying them in written work. These studies were complemented by a course on poetry including composition of a long poem in response to Robert Kroetsch’s “The Seed Catalogue,” and an interdisciplinary course based on the text The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas. These studies were formed by her interest as a creative writer and encompassed her interest in culture.

Vaughn’s thesis research carried forward her interest in culture, leading her to the work of Terry Eagleton, Raymond Williams, and Walter Benjamin, and included a multi-disciplinary study of narrative. Her studies of the history of literature and of cultural theory, aligned with an interest in the cultural functions of narrative and storytelling, led her to study the short fiction of Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod, whose work incorporates and illustrates these themes of timelessness and historicity. Vaughn’s readings in critical and cultural theory led her to create her own methodology for approaching MacLeod’s work.

Vaughn graduated with her BIS in 2008, and has applied to the Capacity Development and Extension MSc graduate program at University of Guelph for September 2009.

“The Independent Studies program appeared in my life at the right moment as the answer to a long-standing question: How and where can I carry on my studies in a way that is appropriate to my stage of life, as well as my need and ability to work independently? What program will recognize my life experience and allow me to devise a course of study that will both engage my passions and mark my academic achievement in doing so?

The program and the many people whose vision and skills for thirty years have provided this forum to the community, are providing an essential need within our educational institutions ( one of our primary cultural storytellers), in allowing students to walk their own path. In a dramatically shifting world of work and in facing our present planetary imperatives, such programs are more crucial than ever to seed creative visions for our future.”

You can read Vaughn's thesis in PDF format here: Writing to Tell, Telling to Live: Reading the Storyteller in Alistair MacLeod‘s Short Fiction.

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Vaughn Barclay This page was last reviewed on March 20, 2009