Graduate Course Offerings

ENGL 815* Topics in Literary Study I

Imagined Ecologies

Instructor: Glenn Willmott
Offered: Winter Term 2014
Course Group: 3

Description: An ecocritical exploration of fantasy representations of human and nonhuman habitats and inhabitants in modern prose fiction, graphic narrative, and some poetry from the turn of the 20th century to the present. The focus is on “funny animals” and “dark ecologies.” Literary authors planned for the syllabus are H. G. Wells, H. P. Lovecraft, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, D. H. Lawrence, George Herriman, Ray Bradbury, Dr Seuss, Alan Moore, Kurt Vonnegut, Junko Mizuno, Matthew Forsythe, Indra Sinha, Derek Winkler, and Adam Hine.

Requirements: One organized presentation-discussion (25%), one research paper (50%), and weekly critical reading responses (25%).

ENGL 824* Topics in Medieval Literature I

Medieval Popular Culture: The Popular Literature of Late Medieval England

Instructor: Ruth Wehlau
Offered: Fall Term 2013
Course Group: 1

Description: This course will investigate the notion of medieval popular culture (usually seen in opposition to either courtly aristocratic culture, or to the culture of the clerical elite), as it was manifested in a variety of literary forms from the 14th through the 16th centuries in England. During the course, we will examine works of popular literature, including lyrics, ballads, plays, and popular romances, especially those dealing with popular chivalric heroes such as Gawain, and outlaw heroes such as Robin Hood. Discussions will include the role of orality and performance in popular culture of the period, and of carnivalesque inversions of authority as found in festivals such as the Lords of Misrule. We will also devote some time to investigating medieval popular piety. All works will be read in the original Middle English, and instruction on the reading and pronunciation of Middle English will be provided. As one goal of the course involves the role of oral performance in popular culture, students will be expected to prepare (but not memorize) a text (a lyric, romance or part of a play) for performance.

Requirements: Essay: 40%; class presentation: 20%; performance project: 20%; class participation: 20%.

ENGL 827* Topics in Medieval Literature IV

Drama and Devotional Culture in the Middle Ages

Instructor: Margaret Pappano
Offered: Winter Term 2014
Course Group: 1

Description: This course will introduce students to the strange and fascinating world of late medieval popular religion, including vernacular plays, blood piety, relic and saint worship, visionary experience, ritual processions and pilgrimage. We will study what piety meant and did, how lay piety interacted with institutional religion, how heretical movements influenced devotional practices, how spiritual power can be situated in relation to social and economic power, how the gendered body figures in spiritual expression. We will use a wide variety of materials to address these issues: plays, poetry, chronicles, trial documents, treatises, civic records, visual culture, manuscripts. The course will concentrate on England and provide instruction in Middle English, but will cover some Continental material as well. In addition, by carrying our analysis into the sixteenth century, the course will consider how Reformation practices influenced relations between the spiritual and theatrical. There will be several screenings scheduled outside of class time.

Requirements: class participation, oral presentation, research paper.

ENGL 834* Topics in Early Modern Literature and Culture IV

Shakespeare and Early Modern Textual Culture

Instructor: Marta Straznicky
Offered: Spring Term 2014
Course Group: 1

Description: This course will approach Shakespeare’s plays and poems as texts circulating in the overlapping realms of oral, manuscript, and print publication. We will investigate the mechanisms and agencies through which Shakespeare’s works were constituted as text, how they were transformed across the realms of manuscript production, vocal recitation, print publication, and, frequently, back into manuscript or theatrical re-presentation. The course will focus on those works of Shakespeare, some apocryphal, that have a particularly interesting or complicated textual history: Venus and Adonis, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Hamlet, A Yorkshire Tragedy, King Lear, the Sonnets, Pericles, and the manuscript fragment of Sir Thomas More in Shakespeare’s handwriting. Topics of study will include the uses of manuscript in the theatre (actors’ parts, rehearsal scripts, promptbooks, companies’ literary archives); the printing and publishing trades (licensing and censorship, copyright, papermaking, manufacture of books, social coding of formats, patronage, bookselling); and early modern reading practices (‘analogical’ reading, commonplacing, annotation, oral reading, coteries, bookbinding and patterns of book ownership). Students will work closely with facsimiles and become familiar with some major research resources in early modern studies (the Short-Title Catalogue, the Stationers’ Register, the database Early English Books Online, the Database of Early English Playbooks, and Greg’s Bibliography of English Printed Drama to the Restoration). Although focused on Shakespeare and early modern textual culture, the course will also be designed to provide an introduction to the methodologies of cultural bibliography and book history that should be of use to all students.

NB: If at all possible, students should read the above-mentioned Shakespearean works prior to the beginning of the course.

ENGL 842* Topics in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature II

Literature in the Age of Sensibility and the Sublime

Instructor: Christopher Fanning
Offered: Fall Term 2013
Course Group: 2

Description: The great neoclassical satirists Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift died in 1744 and 1745, respectively. The passing of these writers, who had defined the forms and standards of literary expression for decades, marked a watershed in English poetry: “For who durst now to poetry pretend?” asked one anonymous writer in 1744. This course will examine the attempts of later eighteenth-century authors to fill this perceived void on their own terms. Rather than continue to emulate the traditional ideals of Augustan Rome, authors of the 1740s and subsequent decades sought to cultivate native British traditions, to define themselves against Pope in particular, and to define an aesthetic in tune with human emotion and the natural world, redefining and revaluing concepts of fancy and imagination, reorganizing the canon of English authors, elevating genres such as the lyric (the ode) and the novel.

Requirements: Class Participation: 25%, Seminar Presentation: 25%, Critical essay, 15-20 pgs, 50%.

ENGL 844* Topics in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature III

The Garrick Stage

Instructor: Leslie Ritchie
Offered: Fall Term 2013
Course Group: 2

Description: Eighteenth-century actor David Garrick was, in the words of one of his contemporaries, “the Phoenix of the age”: a prodigiously talented innovator who changed acting technique forever. As the manager and part-owner of Drury Lane Theatre, Garrick also controlled the repertoire and the acting company at one of London’s two official theatres. His effects on the canon of English drama, and particularly upon the modern Shakespeare industry, cannot be overstated. This course will examine Garrick as actor, manager, writer, adapter, and media celebrity. We will read Garrick’s own plays, such as the popular farce Lethe; examine his adaptations of Restoration plays, such as The Country Girl (adapted for late-eighteenth-century tastes from Wycherley’s The Country Wife); consider his adaptations and popularization of Shakespeare’s work, including the Stratford Jubilee and the battle of the Romeos; and read excerpts from the critical pamphlet and newspaper wars that raged around the Garrick stage, as well as relevant criticism by contemporary and modern critics.

Requirements: Participation: 15%; Abstract: 15%; Seminar: 30%; Research Paper: 40%.

ENGL 852* Topics in Romanticism II

Secret Witnesses: Abolition, Revolution, and the Transatlantic Imaginary

Instructor: Chris Bongie
Offered: Winter Term 2014
Course Group: 2

Description: In this course, we will be examining representations of slavery and its abolition in a number of texts published on both sides of the Atlantic between the late 1780s and 1833 (the year the British Parliament passed the Abolition of Slavery Act). The course will proceed chronologically, starting with such founding texts of the abolitionist movement as Thomas Clarkson’s 1786 Essay on slavery and Olaudah Equiano’s 1789 Interesting Narrative, and proceeding at least as far as Mary Prince’s 1831 History. The goal of this course is two-fold. First, to gain an in-depth exposure to the complexities of abolitionist discourse, as expressed in the literary practice of a variety of Romantic-era writers and as analyzed in recent theoretical interventions concerned with understanding the genealogical origins of our own present-day “humanitarian moment.” The second main goal will be to examine some of the key (historical and fictional) representations of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) from the first three decades of the nineteenth century (such as Leonora Sansay’s Secret History and Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal) in order to gauge the extent to which that world-historical revolution challenged the ideological assumptions of abolitionist discourse and the literary conventions upon which that discourse relied (e.g., those associated with the sentimental and Gothic novels).

Requirements: One term paper (12–15 pages), one oral presentation, active participation, and regular attendance.

ENGL 853* Topics in Romanticism III

The Discourse of Illumination in William Blake

Instructor: John Pierce
Offered: Winter Term 2014
Course Group: 2

Description: A study of the development of Blake’s poetry, with special emphasis on his use of biblical sources and experimentation with a variety of narrative forms. The evolution of his pictorial and poetic style will offer a focus for our examination of Blake, covering briefly the early works such as The Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and concentrating more heavily on the latter works, including such works as the Lambeth poems, Vala or The Four Zoas, and Milton. This course will also consider the significance of conscious verbal and narrative obscurity as part of Blake’s attempt to present an apocalyptic vision of the world that challenges conventional modes of thinking, perception, and interpretation.

ENGL 857* Topics in Victorian Literature II

Queerness in Victorian Literature

Instructor: Maggie Berg
Offered: Winter Term 2014
Course Group: 2

Description: A great deal of attention has been paid to Oscar Wilde as a key figure in the rise of awareness of homosexuality in the late nineteenth century and to Michel Foucault’s claim that at this time “the homosexual became a species.” This course will trace literary representations of queerness beginning much earlier, with Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor, in order to question and problematize Foucault’s claim. We will read recent histories of gay identity in the nineteenth century, theory by authors such as Judith Butler and Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, and a selection of authors including Charlotte Brontë, Oscar Wilde, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and John Addington Symonds.

Requirements: Seminar 30%, position papers 30%, research paper 40%.

ENGL 861* Topics in Modernism I

T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf

Instructor: Gabrielle McIntire
Offered: Winter Term 2014
Course Group: 3

Description: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf were almost exact contemporaries (born in 1882 and 1888, respectively), readers and critics of each others’ work, and close friends for over twenty years. Although they are rarely considered together as a pair, Eliot and Woolf exemplify some of the most fascinating contestations at the heart of literary modernisms: aesthetic and formal innovation, cultural critique, gender troubling, and explorations of the sacred and the secular after “the death of God.” Together we will consider some of the striking correspondences and affinities that exist in Eliot and Woolf’s poetic, aesthetic, and thematic preoccupations as we read Eliot’s major poetry from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” through “Gerontion,” The Waste Land, “Ash Wednesday,” and Four Quartets, and engage with several of Woolf’s most important novels, including To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Waves. Alongside these texts we will be reading some of the major critics of Eliot and Woolf, including David Chinitz, Wayne Koestenbaum, Jewel Spears Brooker, Jane Marcus, and Elizabeth Abel, while we will also consider philosophers and theorists who either anticipated or participated in literary modernism, including Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Requirements: 35% seminar presentation, 45% 15–20 page final paper, 20% informed and active participation.

ENGL 862* Topics in Modernism II

Modernist Elegy

Instructor: Patricia Rae
Offered: Fall Term 2013
Course Group: 3

Description: This seminar will explore the discourse of elegy in British and American modernist literature (1914–1939). Our starting point will be the tension between elegy and “anti-elegy” in writing on loss inspired by the First World War: that is, between the kind of writing encouraging what Freud considered “success” in mourning, and the kind that disrupts closure, fostering melancholia. We’ll then go on to consider the ways in which modernist formal experimentation (for example, devices such as depersonalization, allusion, fragmentation, and ellipsis) reflect and develop this tension. While our starting point in war literature will lead us to consider the ways nationalism shapes mourning practices (and vice versa), modernism was a transnational movement, and elegy, as a genre, lends itself to cross-pollination across national divides. We will therefore be alert to the ways in which various cultural traditions inflect the injunctions to mourn (or resist mourning) in the works we study. As we move through term, we will also trace an increasing self-consciousness in the use of consolatory discourse during the 1930s, as the threat posed by Fascism intensifies and the prospect of another World War looms. We’ll see writers asking pragmatic questions about which consolations have a chance of surviving the repetition of World War, and adjusting their standards for truthfulness in elegy accordingly.

The seminar will encourage the close reading of poetry and both fictional and non-fictional prose. It will also incite discussion about the politics of mourning practices and about how the concepts of elegy emerging from World War I may have produced problematic distortions in the literary history of modernism as we know it.

Authors considered will include Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Vera Brittain, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and Edwin Rolph, but students will be free pursue work in their term papers on other modernist authors of special interest to them.

Requirements: One seminar presentation, preparation of discussion questions, final research paper.

ENGL 867* Topics in Contemporary Literature and Culture II

Forging “Democratic Readers”: Ideology and Identity in the Works of Philip Pullman

Instructor: Shelley King
Offered: Fall Term 2013
Course Group: 3

Description: Visionary Romantic poet William Blake refers to writing as “the wond’rous art”: perhaps in deference to Blake’s vital influence on his own work, contemporary British author Philip Pullman describes reading, its counterpart, as “a subtle art.” Pullman's fascination with reading is evident in all aspects of his work: from the intertextual nod to his own wide-ranging literary experience given by the complex epigraphs scattered throughout his oeuvre, to representations of the interpretive act such as that figured in Lyra’s ability to read the alethiometer in The Golden Compass, to the concept of a “democracy of reading” used by Pullman to articulate his sense of reading as an ideological act, the works of this award-winning author present reading from multiple perspectives to an audience ranging from neophytes to seasoned academics. Beginning from the premise that Pullman treats reading not as a simple means of accessing ideological content, but rather as a sophisticated ideological act, this course explores the function of narrative, genre and intertextuality in the works of Philip Pullman through examining their role in his award-winning trilogy, His Dark Materials (1995, 1997, 2000) and its associated short fiction Lyra’s Oxford (2003) and Once Upon a Time in the North (2008), as well as in his works for younger readers: Spring-Heeled Jack (1989), Count Karlstein (1991,1998), The Firework-Maker’s Daughter (1995), Clockwork (1996, 1998), I Was a Rat! (1999, 2000), The Scarecrow and His Servant (2004), and the recent Tales from the Brothers Grimm (2012).

Requirements: Seminar 20%, research paper 50%, participation 20%, readers’ journals 10%.

ENGL 871* Topics in Canadian Literature I

Studies in Ontario Poetry

Instructor: Tracy Ware
Offered: Fall Term 2013
Course Group: 3

Description: This course will study the poetry of postwar Ontario, with a special interest in the region between Toronto and Kingston. Specifically, the course will read five or six poets in depth: Al Purdy, Michael Ondaatje, Gwendolyn MacEwen (depending on availability), Margaret Atwood, Don McKay, and Dionne Brand. Toronto is often regarded as a center against which the regions react, even within Ontario, and so we will need to be careful about the idea of “regionalism.” We will begin with Purdy, and so the course will raise questions about regionalism and nationalism, though other approaches are both possible and desirable, especially those based on gender, class, or ecocritical concerns. Is a regional identity more viable than Purdy’s kind of nationalism? If Purdy is so influential, why does Sam Solecki call him “the last Canadian poet”? Perhaps even Purdy needs to be liberated from the nationalist approaches that he encouraged. Could anything be further from Canadian nationalism than “The Cinnamon Peeler” and thirsty? Is nationalism more important for critics than for poets? How compatible are cosmopolitanism and regionalism? The selection of texts will depend on availability, but they will probably include Purdy’s Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets, Ondaatje’s The Cinnamon Peeler, McKay’s Camber, Brand’s thirsty, and a selection of MacEwen. For Atwood we will probably read The Circle Game and a recent collection.

Requirements: Marks will be based on a seminar presentation, a term paper, a final examination, and participation.

ENGL 877* Topics in Postcolonial Literatures II

Postcolonialism: Hopes and Impediments

Instructor: Asha Varadharajan
Offered: Winter Term 2014
Course Group: 3

Description: This course will serve as a broad introduction to the historical depth and geographical scope of what has come to be known as the “postcolonial” condition. We will read Anglophone fiction, poetry, and drama from colonies of the British Empire contending with the cultural, political, economic, and psychic legacy of imperialism with and against non-fiction, manifestos, historiography, theory, and visual, digital, performance, and aural/oral cultural production. The emphasis in this course will be on postcolonial “writing” as a passionate and tongue-in-cheek repudiation and rearticulation of colonial language, values, and systems. Some of the questions we might ask are: what does it mean for postcolonial subjects to describe themselves as “black skins, white masks?” how do postcolonial writers communicate in a language not their own, an experience all their own (Chinua Achebe)? how has the colonial experience contributed to the current shape of our world—its economic disparities and its social and cultural melange? what is the difference between mimic and creole identities? how do gender and sexuality intersect with postcoloniality? how has the long history of independence from colonization altered the literary forms and socio-political and cultural concerns of postcolonial writing? how has the shift to the environmental, the diasporic, the global, the multicultural, the cosmopolitan, the biopolitical and the animal (to name a few!) diluted or enhanced the force of anti-colonial struggle?

Requirements: Participation 20%, research paper 50%, seminar 30%.

ENGL 878* Topics in Postcolonial Literatures III

Textual Matters: The Therapeutics of Postcolonial Reconciliation and the Right to Health

Instructor: Rosemary Jolly
Offered: Spring Term 2014
Course Group: 3

Description: This course explores the relations between the promise of a privileged citizenry engaging (to greater and lesser degrees) processes of apology and reconciliation with indigenous, post-colonized communities; and the actuality of indigenous communities’ current, lived experiences of rights in the eras of such apologies. We will explore this juxtaposition through the examination of official, documentary and creative texts from Australia, South Africa and Canada. Methodologically, we will be examining the notion of the human subject and her relation to health through the lens of cross-cultural encounters between Western-aligned subjects and postcolonial cultures that have access to ways of thinking abut human health that exceed the tyranny of scientific doctrines. We will be seeking ways to register these cross-cultural experiences of embodied disease and wellness without, on the one hand, resurrecting an idealized version of an Edenic, pre-colonial past, or on the other, subjecting alternative notions of wellness to the gaze of the medical anthropologist that function as what I term the postcolonial medical exotic (Jolly 2012). Texts such as Kevin Patterson’s Consumption (Canada); Antjie Krog’s Country of my Skull (South Africa); reports from the Northern Territory Intervention (Australia) and the South African, Australian and Canadian governments concerning processes of apology and reconciliation. Also included will be films such as Philip Noyce’s Rabbit Proof Fence (Australia) and Armand Garnet Ruffo’s A Windigo Tale (Canada). Children’s literature addressed to Aboriginal youth will also be included, for example, the 7 Generations graphic novel series by David Robertson and Scott Henderson (Canada). Students’ specific interests will be accommodated as widely as is practicable. Interdisciplinary research methodologies for analyzing the chosen texts will be explicitly outlined and their implications addressed.

Requirements: Evaluation will be based on course participation; a seminar presentation; a journal consisting of 2 pp. per week of reflections on course related material, which may involve creative writing at the choice of the student and with the consent beforehand of the instructor; and one essay that may not be less than 12 pages (250 words per page) or more than 15 pages. Research for the essay may include research undertaken with human subjects; however, IF students decide on this option, they must contact Professor Jolly prior to November 30th 2013 in order to submit an ethics application to Queen’s General Research Ethics Board under her supervision. (Research with human subjects is an option, not a requirement; it will not be rewarded merely for its own sake, but, as with any other research, based on the quality for the work completed.)

The mark allocation for the course is flexible, as are the assignments, with the exception of the final essay. These will be decided in collaboration with the students on the first day of classes; however, the essay will be the element that carries the most weight in evaluation of students’ work.

ENGL 803* and 903* Research Forum I and II

Instructor: Various Speakers
Offered: Fall and Winter Terms

Description: A required presentation and discussion course in which first-year MA and PhD students, along with the Department as a whole, will be presented with a number of model research problems and methodologies by members of the English Department faculty and visiting scholars. The aim of the course is to provide and discuss a range of contemporary research models in literary and cultural studies drawn from different fields and supported by different methodologies. There will be twelve scheduled meetings of the forum throughout Fall and Winter terms. The course is graded on Pass/Fail based on attendance and the completion of required assignments.

ENGL 892* Literary Internship

Instructor: Various
Offered: Various

Description: This course is a pass/fail credit course which offers MA students placements in research, literacy, language, and arts-related community organizations, with the aim of providing those students with job experience that is directly related to literary studies. Sample placements may include such organizations as Kingston WritersFest, or the Strathy Language Unit at Queen’s University. To achieve a pass in ENGL 892*, the student shall submit to the Graduate Chair a time sheet (signed by his/her placement supervisor) stating that 50 hours of work have been completed satisfactorily, and hand in a brief written summary report (1200 words) on the experience to the Graduate Chair.

ENGL 800* and 900* Introduction to Professional and Pedagogical Skills I and II

Instructor: Leslie Ritchie
Offered: Fall Term

Description: This course is designed to train beginning graduate students in the skills they will need as Teaching Assistants and to help them make the transition to advanced literary study. Areas to be covered include essay-marking, academic counselling of undergraduate students, writing research papers, time management, academic and non-academic careers, and applying for grants. The course consists of a series of seminars and workshops involving faculty members and it is graded as Pass/Fail based on attendance and the completion of required assignments.

ENGL 825* Topics in Medieval Literature II

Academic Web Design—Principles and Practice

Instructor: Scott-Morgan Straker
Offered: Fall Term 2012
Course Group: 1

Description: The internet is increasingly indispensable to our scholarly work both as researchers and as teachers; however, designing academic web sites poses challenges that are generally not addressed by our graduate training. This course is aimed at students interested in exploring ways in which the web can be integrated into teaching and research, and in getting hands-on experience of site design. It is primarily aimed at students with little or no experience in web design, but students with intermediate or advanced skills are also welcome.

This course will have two components, one practical and one academic. The practical component will be the design and creation of an academic web site: students will work collaboratively to delineate a topic, apportion tasks equitably, research the content, and create the web pages for a site devoted to some aspect of medieval literary study. The precise topic for the site will be agreed upon in the first week of class; its focus on the Middle Ages will give students some background in an area of early literature. The finished web site will be tested by a class of undergraduates (the target audience), who will provide feedback on its usability, design, the usefulness of its information, etc. I will offer advice and some practical assistance, but for the most part students will learn by doing. Shared experience and collective problem-solving are key parts of real-life web design, so students can expect to work both independently and in collaboration. Class time will be devoted to specific design fundamentals and basic technologies: HTML5, CSS, Javascript, but not PHP, ASP, JSP, or MySQL. We will also engage in a more theoretical investigation of what makes academic web sites distinct from commercial, governmental, or personal sites, and how those differences affect design. The rapidly evolving copyright regime in which our intellectual lives are increasingly lived, both on- and offline, will also be an important topic of conversation.

No prior acquaintance with medieval literature or with web design is required. Designing a good web site requires an array of skills, including research, writing and editing, page layout, graphic design, and coding, so even those with minimal computing skills will have valuable contributions to offer. Students can expect to come away from this course with a good grasp of the design process as a whole, and solid experience in one or two areas of that process.

ENGL 844* Topics in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature IV

Samuel Richardson and the Rise of the Novel

Instructor: Christopher Fanning
Offered: Fall Term 2012
Course Group: 2

Description: A course that will spend most of its time reading Clarissa in the context of mid-eighteenth-century culture (literary, social, legal, medical, etc.), philosophy, the development of the novel genre, and Richardson’s place in modern novel criticism. Evaluation by seminar and critical paper. Clarissa is extremely long: please begin reading over the summer! A reader’s guide is available at http://post.queensu.ca/~cjf1/ClarissaGuide.pdf.

ENGL 868* Topics in Contemporary Literature and Culture IV

The Biopolitical Century

Instructor: Molly Wallace
Offered: Fall Term 2012
Course Group: 3

Description: At the close of the last millennium, amidst the proclamations of “post-s” and “ends,” were some equally sweeping prognostications for the new century. Chief among these was the suggestion that, while the 20th was a century dominated by electronics and physics (the computer, the bomb), the 21st would be the “biological century,” in which innovations in biomapping and bioengineering would (re)shape the world in which we live. Accompanying these predictions has been an upsurge in interest in biopower and the biopolitical, terms drawn from Foucault that have taken on an increasingly varied life of their own. In the interest of understanding and intervening in these critical conversations, this course will attempt to map the “biopolitical” in contemporary theory, literature, and culture. We will begin with some of the touchstones (possibly including Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Vandana Shiva, Roberto Esposito, Donna Haraway, and Nikolas Rose), and then move thematically through some sites in the “biological century” as it has unfolded thus far, likely including genetic mapping/engineering, environment and risk (toxics, population), disease (epidemics), and global resistance movements (“the multitude”). The course reading will be obviously fairly theoretical, but we will set this theory to work in literary texts, and among our guiding questions will be what and how literary critics might contribute to a larger interdisciplinary conversation.

ENGL 873* Topics in Canadian Literature III

“carrying the burden of peace”: Exploring Indigenous Masculinities through Literature

Instructor: Sam McKegney
Offered: Fall Term 2012
Course Group: 3

Description: In the language of the Kanien kehaka or Mohawk, the most common translation for the English word “warrior” is rotiskenhrakete, which means literally “carrying the burden of peace.” Kanien kehaka theorist Taiaiake Alfred explains: “The word is made up of roti, connoting “he”; sken in relation to skennen, or “peace”; and hrakete, which is a suffix that combines the connotations of a burden and carrying.” Rotiskenhrakete is not simply an identity formulation but a social role; it doesn’t so much individualize as identify connection through absorption and synecdoche; it suggests what one does as much who one is.

Ironically, the image of the Mohawk warrior has been mobilized in popular Canadian culture to represent forms of Indigenous hypermasculinity delinked from contemporary community concerns and absorbed into a non-Indigenous representational tradition in which Indigenous male characters vacillate among stereotypes of the noble savage, the bloodthirsty warrior, and the drunken absentee. In a contemporary moment saturated by such dehumanizing and decontextualized simulations, and at a time in which traditional Indigenous male roles and responsibilities have been obfuscated by colonial dispossession and other factors, this course will examine the social function of depictions of Indigenous masculinities in recent literature and film. We will employ masculinity theory and contemporary Indigenous literary theory to study poems, novels, life-writings, films, and oral tales by Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, with an eye to how these sources represent, foment, and/or intervene in contemporary crises of Indigenous masculinity. The reading list will include works by authors like Gregory Scofield, Richard Van Camp, Jeannette Armstrong, Daniel David Moses, Tom Porter, and Joseph Boyden. Course assignments will include oral teachings and a major written project, the parameters, scope, and execution of which will be determined by the class using consensus decision-making.

ENGL 874* Topics in Canadian Literature IV

Alice Munro

Instructor: Tracy Ware
Offered: Fall Term 2012
Course Group: 3

Description: Although in Canada and elsewhere short fiction is overshadowed by attention to poetry and the novel, Alice Munro has established such an extraordinary international reputation that Mona Simpson (writing in The Atlantic) has called her “the living writer most likely to be read in a hundred years.” But even her admirers are sometimes perplexed by her recent work, which engages us in ways that we do not expect from short fiction: perhaps, as John Updike observes, Munro has gone from the art of the epiphany to the art of the panorama. If the early stories in Dance of the Happy Shades seem fully mature, they also seem conventional when contrasted with the later work. This course will use the Selected Stories (1996) to survey Munro’s long career, along with one of her more recent collections.

Requirements: Seminar participation (20%); Term paper, approx. 4000 words (50%); Final examination (20%); Class participation (10%).

ENGL 881* Topics in American Literature I

American Transcendentalism

Instructor: Michael Snediker
Offered: Fall Term 2012
Course Group: 2

Description: This course will consider the political, ontological, ecological, and aesthetic contours of the nineteenth-century American Transcendental movement. Especial attention will be given to questions of singularity and generality; personality and impersonality; the convergence and disjuncts of Transcendental poetics and ethics. Authors will include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Jones Very.

Requirements: A seminar presentation, weekly short analyses, and a final 10–12 page paper.

ENGL 816* Topics in Literary Study II

The Eighteenth Century and the Historical Novel

Instructor: Leslie Ritchie
Offered: Winter Term 2013
Course Group: 2

Description: Is the historical novel forever doomed to nestle snugly under covers featuring ripped bodices and raised gilded lettering? Or can this most bourgeois manifestation of an already bourgeois literary genre, with its palimpsests of narrated, perspectival, and critical histories, reveal uncorsetted truths about the relations between history and subjectivity?

In this look at the historical novel, our primary reading list will address works written in or about eighteenth-century Britain. We will read novels such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, and Iain Pears’s An Instance of the Fingerpost, amongst others. We will also discuss criticism of the historical novel by Lukács, Manzoni, de Certeau, Fleishman, and McKeon, and read other works apposite to each novel.

ENGL 817* Topics in Literary Study III

Transnational Perspectives in Contemporary Canadian Fiction

Instructor: Petra Fachinger
Offered: Winter Term 2013
Course Group: 3

Description: This seminar explores literature’s relation to the process of globalization in general and the representation of transnational contexts in contemporary Canadian fiction by women writers in particular. Transnationalism has become fundamental to debates about literature as scholars wrestle with the interrelated phenomena of economic and cultural globalization, migration, and global travel. What are the connections among literature, nationalism, and cultural identity in the context of ever-expanding transnational relations? How is the intersection between the local, the national, and the transnational imagined in Canadian fiction? The increasingly transnational character of Canadian writing also raises questions about the creative, institutional, and political conditions that shape it and about identity formation, trauma, racial memory, and citizenship. In addition to examining the relationship between the national and the transnational and between diaspora and globalization in novels including Jeannette Armstrong’s Slash, Gurjinder Basran’s Everything Was Good-By, Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?, Catherine Bush’s The Rules of Engagement, Camilla Gibb’s The Beauty of Humanity Movement, Maggie Helwig’s Between Mountains, Kyo Maclear’s The Letter Opener, Kerri Sakamoto’s One Hundred Million Hearts, and Madeleine Thien’s Certainty, we will turn to transnational, globalization, and Indigenous studies for answers to these questions.

Requirements: Students will be required to make one seminar presentation, participate in seminar discussion, and write a final paper of 15–20 pages.

ENGL 818* Topics in Literary Study IV

Alexander Pope

Instructor: F. P. Lock
Offered: Spring Term 2013
Course Group: 2

Description: Alexander Pope (1688–1744), the most important English poet between Milton and Wordsworth, is best known as a satirist, especially for his mock-heroic The Rape of the Lock (1712–14). This course will examine a wide range of Pope’s poems in order to build a more complex picture of the scope and variety of his poetic achievements. Among the issues considered will be the several tensions that have been observed in his work: between his neo-classical theory of poetry and his poetic practice; between his poetic personae and what is known of his life and character; between the topical and the universal in his poems; and between imitation and originality. Other topics will include the presentation of women in his poetry; and the extent to which the meaning of his poems is constrained or enabled by his predominant use of a single poetic form, the closed heroic couplet; and Pope’s interest in the typographical appearance of his works, and his self-promotion as a modern classic.

ENGL 826* Topics in Medieval Literature III

Medieval Travel and Ethnography

Instructor: Margaret Pappano
Offered: Winter Term 2013
Course Group: 1

Description: This course will explore the representations produced by medieval European travellers—pilgrims, crusaders, missionaries, merchants, and others—in the high and later Middle Ages. As medieval Europeans traveled to distant lands, they encountered peoples and customs different from their own. We will analyze how medieval people wrote about ethnic differences, and in doing so, consider the discourses available to the medieval person to frame their experience of difference. While medieval travel writing was bound up with the system of auctoritas and thus heavily indebted to preceding traditions, travelers could and did produce alternative ways of seeing the world. We will explore the tensions between the universalizing discourses of Christendom and the individual experience of the traveller, charting the evolving patterns of ethnographic and geographic thought in relation to changes wrought by centuries of contact and exchange of information between Europe and its “others.” Most importantly, this course will introduce students to a time “before European hegemony,” in which the “western” traveller found himself/herself in a world in which power was in the hands of the great eastern empires.

ENGL 833* Topics in Early Modern Literature and Culture III

Humanism and the Drama in Early Modern England

Instructor: Elizabeth Hanson
Offered: Winter Term 2013
Course Group: 1

Description: Humanism was an intellectual movement that began in fourteenth century Italy and was focused on the recovery of classical literature and the cultivation of the eloquence and modes of authority that had characterized classical writers. It manifested in England, by the mid-sixteenth century, as an educational program instantiated in an ever-widening network of town grammar schools. All of the major playwrights of the Elizabethan commercial theatre (e.g., Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson) attended, or are assumed to have attended grammar schools, where they learned Latin by studying and performing Latin drama, imitating the poetry of Ovid and developing the rhetorical craft of Cicero. It can be argued that the spread of humanist culture via the grammar school was a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the flourishing of the drama in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England. But we can also see in some of that drama an ambivalent relation to the assumptions about the power of learning and language that drove the humanist project. In this course we will interrogate the relationship between humanism and the commercial stage. We will begin by reading humanist writers such as Erasmus and Thomas More, looking at their assumptions about knowledge and eloquence and the way these were promoted in grammar schools. We will also look at the role that the drama played in humanist education by reading some academic plays. Then we will turn our attention to the commercial stage, considering such well-known plays as Dr. Faustus, Hamlet, The Alchemist, and The Tempest, asking what they tell us about the intellectual and political legacy of humanism in England.

ENGL 856* Topics in Victorian Literature I

Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Visual Culture

Instructor: Shelley King
Offered: Winter Term 2013
Course Group: 2

Description: At the beginning of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the protagonist asks “And what is the use of a book … without pictures or conversations?” Alice may be reflecting specifically on books for children, but the Victorian reader in general had a taste for illustration, whether in the form of the comic engravings that accompanied each number of a Dickens serial novel or the massive canvasses by pre-Raphaelite artists depicting scenes from poetry by Tennyson or Keats. This course is designed to explore the relationship between literary texts and visual culture in nineteenth-century Britain. Beginning with the importance to Romantic poetry of ekphrasis, a technique in which works of visual art are depicted in language, the course moves to a consideration of representative works by author illustrators like poet William Blake and novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, exploring the importance of the literary work as aesthetic artefact and the relationship between text and image. Along the way we will examine the representation of art and artists in works such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh and dramatic monologues by Robert Browning. The goal of the course is to develop a theoretical understanding of the dynamic interplay of the arts in nineteenth-century Britain as well as a concrete understanding of the role played by technology in the material history of the book in this period.

ENGL 864* Topics in Modernism IV

The Literature and Culture of the Spanish Civil War

Instructor: Patricia Rae
Offered: Winter Term 2013
Course Group: 3

Description: A study of poems, memoirs, journalism, fiction and other forms of cultural production inspired by the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Widely regarded as the opening act of the Second World War (though its veterans were derided as “premature anti-fascists”) the war against Franco’s Fascist-backed coup in Spain inspired volunteers from 53 nations to migrate to that country in support of the cause. As Auden famously put it, they heard the call of Spain “on remote peninsulas, / on sleepy plains, in the aberrant fishermen’s islands…”; they “heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower… They floated over the oceans; / They walked the passes: they came to present their lives” (EA 211–12). They did so, however, in what rapidly became a lost cause.

This course will examine the literature and culture, primarily but not exclusively in English, inspired by this war. Authors considered will include George Orwell, Nan Green, John Cornford, Margot Heinemann, Tom Wintringham, Jack Lindsay, Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gelhorn, Edwin Rolfe, Langston Hughes, Norman Bethune, Dorothy Livesay and Ted Allen, and we will look at anthologies of elegiac poetry (many no longer in print) from Britain, Canada and the United States. We’ll also pay attention to the small newspapers and literary magazines publishing elegiac tributes to the veterans, most notably the soldiers’ own publication, Volunteer for Liberty. We’ll give some consideration, too, to the visual art inspired by the war (the paintings of Picasso, Miro, and Dali, the documentary photography of Robert Capa), and especially to the much belated memorials produced in memory of the volunteers across Britain, the United States and Canada. Theoretical and historical questions we’ll address include why so much about this war and its volunteer effort has been forgotten by governments and mainstream media; why it has been such an object of nostalgia on the political left; why the critical language devised for the literature of the Great War is so inadequate to account for it; the place of women both in the work of the war and in its iconography; the role of the war in changing the face of journalism and in inspiring a resurgence of certain modernist literary practices rejected by the political left in the 1930s.

ENGL 876* Topics in Postcolonial Literatures I

Literature and Dis-ease in the Postcolonial Context—De-colonizing Bodies

Instructor: Rosemary Jolly
Offered: Spring Term 2013
Course Group: 3

Description: Much attention has been paid in the study of postcolonial literatures to “the colonization of the mind” and strategies for its “decolonization” (Ngũgĩ, 1986). On the other hand, the history and sociology of medicine point to poor heath indicators in colonized people and their descendants. For example, rates of HIV infection, drug use, alcoholism, and abuse are higher among Canadian Aboriginal citizens than their non-Aboriginal counterparts. This course explores narratives that represent embodied experiences of indigenous harm—including intergenerational harm—in the wake of colonial violence. Can reading sicken the body, as many narratives concerning the effects of colonialist education practices suggest? On the other hand, can narrative-making—storytelling—mark a form of resilience to diseases of capitalist, cultural neo-colonization, and if so, how? Could the combined visual/textual narratives created in bodymapping play a role both in diagnosing the effects of neo-imperialism on the body and the creative “decolonization” of that body? Potential texts include: Edmund Pellegrino, “The Humanities in Medical Education: Entering the Post-Evangelical Era” (Originator of the Medical Humanities); Kevin Patterson, Consumption; Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions; Maria Campbell, Halfbreed; Lee Maracle, Sundogs; Damon Galgut, The Good Doctor; Indra Sinha, Animal’s People; Margaret Tucker, If Everyone Cared; Phaswane Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow; Jody Cotter, Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself (film).

ENGL 882* Topics in American Literature II

American Exceptionalism: from the Puritans to Obama

Instructor: Sylvia Söderlind
Offered: Winter Term 2013
Course Group: 3

Description: Defined variously as an ideology, a myth, a “national creed,” or a “state fantasy,” the notion of the United States as an exceptional nation destined to be an example to the world has pervaded political and cultural discourse since the birth of the nation. The flip side of this is the view of the United States as a “state of exception”—in which the rule of law can be suspended by sovereign decree. This course will trace the rhetoric of this double-edged national narrative from its—retroactively attributed—origin in the Puritans’ “city on a hill” through the democratic experiment of the Revolution, the 19th-century discourse of “Manifest Destiny,” and the 20th century rhetoric of the Cold War, to the “global war on terror.” We will begin by looking at the role of exceptionalism in shaping the field of American Studies, and we will end by looking at the significance of theories of “the state of exception” to this national narrative (the rumour of whose death has been sometimes exaggerated). The syllabus will comprise examples of the perpetuation as well as the critique of exceptionalist rhetoric in genres central to the American canon: the Puritan sermon, the political speech, the slave narrative, the Western, the postmodern novel, and the television talk show.