ENGL 5900S/4115A: Selected Topic in English Studies I
Prof. Robin Norris

Topic: Plant Literacy

Plants have been important throughout human history for reasons of both survival and culture. Although plants have been central to mythologies and folklore around the globe, today our personal awareness of plants is at an all-time low. This is an experiential learning course that combines fieldwork, experiential learning, and text-based discussion to develop plant literacy and increase awareness of the plant life in our environment while redefining our understanding of literacy. Writing assignments will emphasize reflection on the experiential learning aspects of the course and will include in-class writing and a plant journal. The intersecting goals of the course are to explore the concept of literacy while expanding our ability to perceive and engage with plants, as well as considering new methods of observation and understanding by challenging fixed notions of knowledge and being. 

The post Summer 2026 appeared first on Department of English Language and Literature.

Summer 2025

ENGL 5610S/4115B: Studies in Contemporary Literature I
Prof. Franny Nudelman

Topic: Immersive Documentary, 1945 to the Present

In this course we will study immersive documentary—a form that has flourished in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries. If an objective approach to recording social reality was discredited by the surreal conditions of the Second World War, post-war documentarians explored subjective modes of reporting that placed the perspective of the observer front and center. Further, they argued that subjective reporting was the most accurate and complete way to capture the bizarre properties of modern life. Writers, filmmakers and photographers working in this tradition seek out extreme situations, spend long periods of time with their subjects, explore immersive technologies, and report on how their encounter with a situation, subject, or event transforms the perspective of the documentarian.

ENGL 5900S/4115A: Selected Topic in English Studies I
Prof. Robin Norris

Topic: Plant Literacy

Plants have been important throughout human history for reasons of both survival and culture. Although plants have been central to mythologies and folklore around the globe, today our personal awareness of plants is at an all-time low. This is an experiential learning course that combines fieldwork, experiential learning, and text-based discussion to develop plant literacy and increase awareness of the plant life in our environment while redefining our understanding of literacy. Writing assignments will emphasize reflection on the experiential learning aspects of the course and will include in-class writing and a plant journal. The intersecting goals of the course are to explore the concept of literacy while expanding our ability to perceive and engage with plants, as well as considering new methods of observation and understanding by challenging fixed notions of knowledge and being.

The post Summer 2025 appeared first on Department of English Language and Literature.

The information on this page is tentative and subject to change.

Fall 2025

ENGL 5002F: Studies in Theory I (cross-listed with CLMD 6904F)
Prof. Stuart Murray

Topic: The Dark Enlightenment and Neoreactionary (NRx) Thought—Critiques of Liberal Modernity

This seminar examines the Dark Enlightenment and Neoreactionary (NRx) Thought as reactionary critiques of democracy, egalitarianism, and Enlightenment rationality. Emerging from the digital peripheries of techno-capitalism, these movements—articulated by figures such as Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug), Nick Land, Thomas Carlyle, and Carl Schmitt—reject liberal modernity and propose alternative governance models ranging from monarchy to corporate rule. As these ideological formations seek to reshape contemporary power structures, how do literary and cultural texts resist, unsettle, or aesthetically disaffirm the world they envision?

Situating the Dark Enlightenment within critical theory, biopolitics, and affect studies, we will read reactionary texts alongside literary and cultural works that interrogate the seductive lure of authoritarianism, the racialized logics of techno-capitalism, and the necropolitical structuring of the future. Drawing on Foucault, Berlant, Butler, and Mbembe, among others, we will trace how reactionary modernity constructs itself through esotericism, nostalgia, and technocratic legitimacy. Throughout the course, we will engage with literary fiction, film, and speculative media that expose the fractures in this reactionary imaginary—whether through satire, dystopian critique, or aesthetic experimentation.

ENGL 5402F/4115B: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature
Prof. Hugh Reid

Topic: The Nature and Uses of 18^th Century Book Subscription Lists

This course aims to provide students with the context and nature of subscription lists and give students the opportunity for original research in this field.  Initially students will be given a theoretical background to subscription lists and lessons on how the 18^th century book trade worked: how paper was made, how was type set, how books were printed and bound, what was the role of bookseller, of publishing congers, etc.  The hope is that they will then understand the trade sufficient to deal with book subscriptions.  Then each shall pick a subscription list to work on.  This kind of work could not have been done at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ in the past because the library’s holdings in antiquarian books were inadequate. Now, however, we can access almost all the books published in the 18^th century by subscription (some 3,000).  Students may choose any list.  For example, if they are interested in female poets, they might choose Mary Leapor whose work was published posthumously by subscription. In the seminar, they will report on what they have learned and what has evaded them.  As each student reports we will discuss how each may progress.  There are so many things which we can learn from subscription lists and very little has been done in this field in the past.  Some of the topics which may be examined might include the number of female subscribers, the number of people from the mercantile class, the number of members of the aristocracy, or from academia, or the clergy, or other subgroups.  How did this subscription list fit into the publishing industry in the eighteenth century?

ENGL 5610F: Studies in Contemporary Literature I (cross-listed with CLMD 6104F)
Prof. Franny Nudelman

Topic: Culture and Crisis: Creating New Life from Old Things

In this course, we will consider contemporary writers and image-makers who use the materials of the past to grapple with the crises of our present, including pandemic, rising fascism, environmental catastrophe, and war. Taking our cue from Jared Farmer, who imagines people and ancient trees as “coauthors of survival stories,” we will explore cultural producers who use old objects—animate and inanimate—to narrate, figure, analyze and remediate present conditions. These artists take up the detritus of the past—forgotten texts, ruined buildings, fallen trees, mute relics—and infuse them with altered meanings. We will examine a range of media including photography, film, and sculpture, while focusing our inquiry on narrative nonfiction. Here are some of the questions we will pursue together: How do writers and artists use the biographies of earlier writers, theorists, and artists to structure and complicate their reflections on the present? How do they engage the natural world—plants, trees, fossils—to construct continuity between the present and the distant past and reorient our relation to time? How do they innovate in their use of narrative structure, imaging technology, or hybrid form in order to defamiliarize our relationship to both past and present? How do they reimagine traumatic events and repurpose the objects that memorialize these events?

ENGL 5804F: Studies in Canadian Literature I (cross-listed with CDNS 5201A/WGST 5902A)
Prof. Jennifer Henderson

Topic: (Re)reading ‘Women’s Liberation’

This course takes a historical materialist and intersectional approach to the ‘Women’s Liberation’ movement of the 1970s as moment of political eruption. We look at archival materials, media representations from the period, as well as recent scholarship on ambivalent relations to this complex, haunting past. Our materials include movement publications, autobiography, film, and ephemera from the period, as we work with several Canadian archives. Our central interests are rhetorics, figures, emotions, atmosphere; practices, direct actions, imaginations; concepts of ‘woman’ and ‘women’ as unstable and contested. We pay particular attention to the analysis of social reproduction as a legacy of the WLM and work to understand the movement as occurring within and against capitalism, colonialism, regimes of race, heteronormativity, and binary gender. The course will be an inclusive, 2SLGBTQ-positive space and is for anyone interested in learning how to think historically, investigate critical concepts in their moment of messy eruption, and consider political memory as a complex, embodied inheritance.

ENGL 5900F/4609A: Selected Topic in English Studies I
Prof. Janne Cleveland

Topic: Theatre of the Absurd

Theatre critic Martin Esslin coined the term Theatre of the Absurd in 1961, in a close examination of works by Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, and others. In this course we will explore the form, the context of its development, and a selection of plays that are understood to exemplify it in order to understand its extraordinary influence on 20^th century theatre-making. Esslin suggested in part, that Theatre of the Absurd referenced a world that was devoid of meaning, and thus presented a struggle for finding reasons to continue. Students will sign up for a seminar presentation at the beginning of the term from a list of possible topics provided. You will be expected to consider such questions as why did this style of writing and staging emerge then, after the Second World War? In examining the context in which this style emerged, one might expect this to be a time of celebration that such a global trauma had ended. How then, does the philosophy of Existentialism contribute to the development of Theatre of the Absurd? We will consider the social and political landscape in which the style came to represent a new theatrical form that signaled the postwar era following World War II in order to think about its influence later in the 20^th century. We will consider whether and how Theatre of the Absurd continues to be influential in dramatic staging in the 21^st century. What can we learn from earlier practitioners of the style in terms of posing meaningful questions about the world we live in now, inundated as we are with questions of the meaning of our existence against the backdrop of war, pestilence, and plague? How does humour, with which Theatre of Absurd is associated, work to navigate such anxiously fraught scenarios? We will especially consider how the seeming contradictions contained in the form become part of the strategy for making social and political commentary about the world we inhabit now. We will look at how Theatre of the Absurd takes the position exemplified by Samuel Beckett in his famously quoted “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

ENGL 5900G/4607B: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with WGST 4812C/5901C)
Prof. Jodie Medd

Topic: Ban This Book: Censorship, Sexuality, Diversity, and Questions of “Harm”

This course will explore laws, policies, trials, and practices that have targeted books—and bookstores and libraries—for representations of 1) marginalized sexual and gender identities & desires and, more recently, 2) racialized identities and information about racist and imperial histories. The latter may include, on one end, the suppression of historical information and analyses of slavery and imperialism, and on the other, suppression or removal of “classic” literature that includes racist language.

We will research and discuss books that have been suppressed as well as the context of their legal (or not so legal) suppression, seizure, burning, or other forms of censorship. Learning about literary censorship is painful for any student of literature; we will aim to alleviate—and counter—the weight of this learning though the pleasures and value of reading and discussing powerful, impactful literature that has faced suppression. We will also learn about those who have sought freedom and social transformation through literature while actively resisting censorship.

ENGL 6003F: Theories and Foundations in the Production of Literature
Prof. Julie Murray

Topic: What is a Book?

This course takes as its focus both the book as a material object and the field that has emerged around its study: the history of the book. The immediate context for our explorations will be the near certainty, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, that the printed book was rapidly becoming obsolete. Not only has that reality not come to pass, but in the words of two recent scholars, “[i]nstead of heralding [its] demise, the twenty-first century offers new reasons to reckon with the physical book.” We will begin with a case study: eighteenth-century novelist Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, a novel that is famously attentive to the materiality of the printed book. Our engagement with Sterne’s novel will include several sessions in the MacOdrum Library’s Book Arts Lab with Master Printer Larry Thompson. We will then survey developments in print culture and media from the late-eighteenth century to the present day, by reading a selection of foundational essays outlining these shifts. Topics will include: the bibliomania, bookishness, dark academia, books in the age of digital media, and more.

Winter 2026

ENGL 5004W (cross-listed with CLMD 6102W/EURR 5201B/MGDS 5002D)
Prof. Sarah Casteel

Topic: Black Europe

This seminar explores “Black Europe” as a historical phenomenon, a theoretical framework, and a set of artistic practices. We will engage with a series of creative and critical works that foreground Europe’s historical and contemporary entanglements with Africa and its diasporas. Reframing European history and culture from Black perspectives, these works challenge an understanding of Europe as a bounded, racially homogenous space.

The range of topics will include: European travel narratives by Black authors; novels of the “Windrush generation” of early postwar Caribbean immigrants to Britain; Black German activist poetics and autobiography from the 1980s onward; Black musical performers and genres in Europe from the 19^th century to the present; and recent artistic and curatorial interventions that recuperate Black women muses of white European writers and painters.

The interdisciplinary design of this course is critical to its excavation of Black European cultural histories that have been occluded by more conventional disciplinary lenses. Reading across different media will help to expose the “bundles of silences” (Trouillot) surrounding the contributions of Black artists—especially Black women artists—to European literature, art history, and music.

ENGL 5120W/4115E: Book Arts Workshop
Prof. Robin Norris

This experiential learning course immerses students in the practical arts and histories of book production, with its roots in the early Middle Ages. Students will engage in a range of activities representative of the pillars of the book arts, including bookbinding, calligraphy, papermaking, decoration, and typesetting/printing. Activities may include transcription of manuscript texts, calligraphy, creating and printing linocuts, papermaking, typesetting and letterpress printing, hand sewing of paper gatherings to create pamphlets or multiple section books, and exploration of manuscripts and early printed books from ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s Archives and Special Collections. The class will be held in the MacOdrum Library Book Arts Lab, where students will work collaboratively with the Master Printer, lab staff, the professor, and their classmates.

ENGL 5303W: Studies in Early Modern Literature I
Prof. Micheline White

Topic: Tudor Queens:  Sex, Power, and Writing in the Lives of Katherine Parr, Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth I

Renaissance queens have long fascinated the reading public, but their political power and literary writings have only recently become the objects of academic study. In this seminar, students will develop an in-depth understanding of three Renaissance queens who made the most of their unusual social status and made lasting contributions to English culture. In this course, we will explore early modern attitudes towards the concepts of a “queen consort,” a “queen regent,” a “queen regnant” and a “dowager queen,” and we will focus on three English queens’ textual and visual productions including speeches, published prose works, diplomatic letters, poetry, translations, and portraits. Students will be introduced to early modern paleography and book history. Those who wish can also explore digital versions of manuscript writing. We will also consider the depictions of these queens in recent films and TV programs.

Katherine Parr (1512-1548) was the final wife of Henry VIII. Although she is often depicted in popular culture as the woman who nursed Henry in his old age, she was actually a literary powerhouse and one of the most influential religious activists of the 1540s. We will examine her three published literary texts, her narrow escape from being arrested and executed, and her scandalous marriage to Thomas Seymour after Henry’s death.

Mary Tudor (1516-1558) was the daughter of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon. After acceding to the throne in 1553 as queen regnant, she restored England to Catholicism and became famous for overseeing the burning of three hundred Protestants. For centuries she has been vilified as “bloody Mary” and as an incompetent ruler, but current scholars are offering new accounts of her political skills and successes.

Elizabeth I (1533-1603) was Parr’s step-daughter and Mary’s half-sister, and she is one of the most famous British monarchs. As a queen regnant, Elizabeth obviously wielded extraordinary agency and yet her status as an unmarried woman was an on-going concern throughout her reign. Through an examination of her public speeches, private letters, portraits, proclamations, poems and prayers we will consider how she managed her image and how she contributed to important political, social, and literary developments. Recent movies will be addressed.

ENGL 5402W/4401A: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature
Prof. Julie Murray

Topic: Jane Austen, Our Contemporary

2025 marks the 250^th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen in 1775, and the 30^th anniversary of the 1995 “Austenmania.” Ever since Amy Heckerling’s film Clueless was released in 1995, critics and fans have talked excitedly of a “Jane Austen revival.” Thirty years later, the revival shows no sign of abating and in fact demands that we rethink the very idea that Austen needed to be “revived” in the first place. She has always been popular in the strongest sense of the word, and in this course we will explore the history of her reception beginning in the early nineteenth century and continuing up to the present moment. Topics we will consider include: early readers and critics of her novels; circulating libraries, literary societies, “Janeites,” and book clubs; biographical constructions of Austen as, variously, spinster, recluse, feminist, Regency satirist, patriotic embodiment of “Little England,” and “Aunt Jane”; the canonization and professionalization of her work in the early twentieth century by R.W. Chapman’s 1923 edition of The Novels of Jane Austen; and the perhaps surprising popularity of Austen’s novels among soldiers (the original “Janeites”) in the trenches of the First World War. We will also devote time to our own cultural moment and the Jane Austen phenomenon – that is, to Austen’s pervasive and persistent popularity in contemporary popular culture. We will explore Austen as robust global brand: the thriving literary tourism and heritage industry devoted to capitalizing on Austenmania; the love affair with Hollywood; and the seemingly infinite variety of ways in which Austen and her novels have been commodified, consumed, personified, impersonated, ventriloquized, appropriated, remediated, parodied, satirized, and embodied.

ENGL 5804W: Studies in Canadian Literature I
Prof. Jody Mason

Topic: Indigenous Resurgence and Settler Nationalisms in Late Twentieth-Century Canada

The 1960s and 70s were important decades for the pan-Indigenous political movement known as “Red Power” and the related emergence of Indigenous writing in English. Both were informed by the decolonization movements of the Third World, but Indigenous activists and writers, seeking self-government and cultural revitalization, adapted the thinking of these movements in important ways that were specific to their experiences of settler colonialism.

Contemporary with this decolonial activism and writing was the institutionalization and canonization of English Canadian and Quebecois literatures. National literatures were in both cases finding the institutional supports that were understood to be crucial to sovereign cultures. Supporting the institutionalization of these settler literatures was a rhetoric of “colonization” that was expressed very differently in anglophone and francophone contexts but that, in both cases, drew on writers’ firsthand experiences of African and other Third World decolonization movements.

What was the relation of these movements to one another? Were they cognizant of one another, antagonistic, sympathetic?

We’ll study creative texts in many genres by Jeannette Armstrong (Syilx Okanagan), An Antane Kapesh (Innu), Hubert Aquin, Margaret Atwood, Michael Kanentakeron (Kanien’kehà:ka), Margaret Laurence, Dennis Lee, Daphne Odjig (Potawatomi / English), and Joyce Weiland, as well as critical work by Harold Cardinal (Cree), Glen Sean Coutlhard (Dene), Dalie Giroux, Eva Mackey, George Manuel (Secwépemc), and Sean Mills, among others.

ENGL 5900W: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with CDNS 5301B and CLMD 6103W)
Prof. Orly Lael Netzer

This graduate seminar will contend with urgent socio-cultural challenges in Canada through contemporary approaches to the study of national culture on Turtle Island, asking what does it mean to research and practice cultural studies in socially responsible ways (responsible to whom and how)? what can culture and its study offer at times of relational crises? and how / can cultural studies foster a site of relation making between communities, or rather, make relations right?

In our discussions we will attend to the state’s pivotal role in shaping Canada’s cultural industries and national identity, historicize the study of culture in/about Canada, and examine contemporary and emerging theories and approaches in cultural studies (from multiculturalism, to critical refugee studies, Indigenous literary nationalism, Black feminisms, ecocriticism, ethics of care, memory, performance, and queer studies).

ENGL 6004W: Approaches to the Production of Literature
Prof. Travis DeCook

Topic: Theories of Authorship, from Plato to AI

“What is an author?” is a perennial question, currently at the heart of debates over intellectual property, the nature of cultural production, and so-called “artificial intelligence.” This seminar will explore theories of authorship articulated by Plato, Sidney, Shelley, Freud, Nietzsche, Eliot, Borges, Barthes, Foucault, and others. We will examine topics such as inspiration and its secularization; the relationship between the “death of the author” and politics; the ethics of authorship; the origins of intellectual property; notions of social authorship; the relationship between the material book and concepts of authorship; the implications of new media; contemporary “post-copyright” cultural formations; and the implications of artificial intelligence for how we understand the nature of authorship.

The post Fall 2025 – Winter 2026 appeared first on Department of English Language and Literature.

Fall 2024

ENGL 5005F: M.A. Seminar
Prof. Sarah Brouillette

Topic: Professing English: Disciplinary Debates and Horizons

What does it mean to study “English” today? What are the stakes involved in teaching it? And what, in fact, are we to study and teach, exactly? How might graduate students most effectively navigate their own research and teaching at a time when disciplinary boundaries seem more porous than ever, and when the assumptions about what constitutes sound scholarship or even effective pedagogy are by no means self-evident or mutually agreed upon by members of the profession? This course provides MA students with a primer on the tumultuous history of English Studies and a roadmap to the current state of the discipline in several key areas: disciplinary boundaries and interdisciplinarity; methodological debates; and pedagogy. In addition to considering theoretical questions raised by these issues, the course will assist students with a range of practical matters: developing graduate research strategies, grading essays, leading seminars, crafting grant proposals, and understanding employment and academic opportunities available to graduates, both inside and outside the university.

ENGL 5120F: Book Arts Workshop
Prof. Jody Mason

Topic: Small-Press Publishing in Canada

This course takes twentieth- and early twenty-first-century small-press publishing in Canada as its focus. A book arts workshop that will be conducted in the Book Arts Lab and taught with the assistance of Master Printer Larry Thompson, the course brings together the history and theory of small-press activity in Canada with experiential learning activities that will help us to think in material terms about small-press objects and their production processes.

Our experiential work will include encounters with small-press publishers; interaction with small-press texts from the university’s Archives and Special Collections; and book arts demonstrations / activities, culminating in a letterpress printing project.

The history/theory component of the course will unfold in relation to a series of small-press case studies. We’ll be theorizing small-press activity through questions such as the following:

• What is small-press publishing? How did it come to exist, and how might it be distinguished from other publishing practices?
• Does small-press publishing rely on a concept of independence, and, if so, what kind of independence does it claim (aesthetic, political, economic)? How and in what conditions are these claims made and sustained?
• What production practices, literary forms, and genres are distinct to small-press publishing and how do these relate to the practices, forms, and genres of large-scale publishing?
• Why did small-press publishing expand so dramatically in late twentieth-century Canada? What forms of state support have enabled small-press book publishing to flourish in Canada? Have these been constant? What challenges do these forms of support bring?
• What are the gender and race politics of Canada’s small-press cultures? Why has the modernist, masculinist (and very white) concept of the small press been so influential on small-press activity in Canada? How have publishers and writers of the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries contested and revised this concept?
• How might we theorize the function of the small press in the context of a contemporary global literary field dominated by a handful of media corporations?

ENGL 5402F: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature
Prof. Hugh Reid

Topic: The Nature and Uses of 18^th Century Book Subscription Lists

This course aims to provide students with the context and nature of subscription lists and give students the opportunity for original research in this field.  Initially students will be given a theoretical background to subscription lists and lessons on how the 18^th century book trade worked:  how was paper made, how was type set, how were books printed and bound, what was the role of bookseller, of publishing congers, etc.  The hope is that they will then have an understanding of the trade sufficient to deal with book subscriptions.  Then each shall pick a subscription list to work on.  This kind of work could not have been done at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ in the past because the library’s holdings in antiquarian books was inadequate.  Now, however, we can access almost all the books published in the 18^th century by subscription (some 3,000).  Students may choose any list.  For example, if they are interested in female poets they might chose Mary Leapor whose work was published posthumously by subscription.   In the seminar, they will report on what they have learned and what has evaded them.  As each student reports we will discuss how each may progress.  There are so many things which we can learn from subscription lists and very little has been done in this field in the past.  Some of the topics which may be examined might include the number of female subscribers, the number of people from the mercantile class, the number of members of the aristocracy, or from academia, or the clergy, or other sub groups.  How did this subscription list fit into the publishing industry in the eighteenth century?

By the end of the course, the hope is that each student will have done sufficient research (and learned how to do it) to produce a paper worthy of presentation at a conference or as an article in a journal.

ENGL 5610F: Studies in Contemporary Literature I (cross-listed with DIGH 5902F)
Prof. Brian Greenspan

Topic: Digital Dystopia

A survey of utopian and dystopian thinking around media and technology.

The enormous popularity of dystopian narratives in recent years is hardly surprising, given the daily barrage of stories about climate change, mass surveillance, pandemics, fake news, digital viruses, and AI. What is surprising is that even the most disturbing stories of technological apocalypse (both real and imagined) continue to inspire utopian hope, and to shape our identities in ways that are progressive and collective. Does literature still offer a promising enclave within the broader networks of new media? How can fiction help us to imagine a better world in a “post-truth” era that coopts the strategies of fictionality itself?

This seminar will explore the role of new media and technologies in contemporary fiction. We will read utopian and dystopian narratives alongside studies of technology, literary and social media, intentional communities, e-literature, and digital games. We will also explore new digital tools for analyzing texts, visualizing data, authoring stories and games, and building simulations in order to better evaluate the discourses (whether hopeful or apocalyptic) that have always surrounded new media.

ENGL 5804F: Studies in Canadian Literature I (cross-listed with CDNS 5201F and WGST 5902A)
Prof. Jennifer Henderson

Topic: Rereading ‘Women’s Liberation’

This course takes a materialist and intersectional approach to the ‘Women’s Liberation’ movement of the 1970s, as we look at recent scholarship on the rhetorics and affects of the movement as well as dig into its Canadian archive. Recent scholarship has been revising settled views of experience, organizing, and expression in this moment of eruption. Working with concepts of eventfulness, articulation, and ghostly trace, we question a progressivist view of history that would assume either our own relative advancement or the finishedness of this past. Grounding ourselves through discussion of the relationship between feminism and neoliberalism in the present, we then turn to archival materials and media representations from the 1970s. We ask how this historical feminism was heterogeneous in its rhetorics and positionalities, and was made public in selective, uneven ways.

Our primary materials include print ephemera—newsletters, magazines, and flyers, as well as film, autobiography, anthologies, art activism, and journalism. We read for style and emotion as well as for the arguments and analyses presented. A central preoccupation is the moment’s framing of social reproduction as a terrain of struggle and the pertinence of that struggle today. Throughout the course, we ask how feminist discourse and organizing occurs within and against regimes of race, heteronormativity, binary gender, state governance, and global capitalism. We approach Canada as a settler-colonial, racialized space, a space of Indigenous homelands and transnational flows in which ‘woman’ and ‘women’ are unstable and contested subjects. The course will be an inclusive, 2SLGBTQ-positive space.

ENGL 5900F: Selected Topic in English Studies I
Prof. Adam Barrows

Topic: Madness and Time in Twentieth-Century Fiction

This course explores the temporal experiences of madness. We examine, across a range of twentieth-century novels, characters whose deviation from accepted norms of behaviour, speech, and thought has placed them in a unique and even radical relationship with time. Literary works depicting “descents into madness” have long had pride of place in most literary canons, inspiring a great deal of literary commentary and theoretical formulation. The madness of these texts, however, has often either been poeticized in terms of a quasi-mythical Nietzschean radicalism (see Deleuze and Guattari), or else medicalized and rationalized by psychiatric models of “mental health.” Disability studies, however, and Mad studies most recently, have offered new ways of approaching this body of material, refusing both the diagnostic immiseration of the medical model as well as the romantic mystification of all-too-ableist cultural theory. Prioritizing survivor narratives, experiential auto-ethnographies, and the lived experiences of the mad, we find new ways of understanding and speaking about the times and temporalities of the existential experience of “being” or “going” mad.

ENGL 5900H: Selected Topic in English Studies I
Prof. Philip Kaisary

Topic: Ruth and Mark Phillips Professor Seminar: “Worlding Law and Literature”

When it emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, the interdisciplinary field of Law and Literature cast itself as a “movement.” This seminar takes up the stakes of that claim. First, we will pay close attention to the field’s formation, goals, situation, theoretical investments, and ideological thrust. Second, we will draw on recent debates within world literary studies and the critical tradition of cultural materialism to explore whether these offer Law and Literature a way to live up to not only the claim, but also the responsibility, of being a movement. We will consider a diverse corpus of primary materials (spanning literature, film, visual arts, case law, and constitutional law) drawn from both “peripheral” and “core” global locations (likely locations include Brazil, Canada, Congo-Brazzaville, Cuba, Great Britain, Haiti, and the United States). This seminar is open to graduate students in Cultural Mediations, Law, and English. No prior knowledge of law is required.

ENGL 6003F: Theories and Foundations
Prof. Julie Murray

Topic: What is a Book?

This course takes as its focus both the book as a material object and the field that has emerged around its study: the history of the book. The immediate context for our explorations will be the near certainty, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, that the printed book was rapidly becoming obsolete. Not only has that reality not come to pass, but in the words of two recent scholars, “[i]nstead of heralding [its] demise, the twenty-first century offers new reasons to reckon with the physical book.” We will begin with a case study: eighteenth-century novelist Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, a novel that is famously attentive to the materiality of the printed book. Our engagement with Sterne’s novel will include several sessions in the MacOdrum Library’s Book Arts Lab with Master Printer Larry Thompson. We will then survey developments in print culture and media from the late-eighteenth century to the present day, by reading a selection of foundational essays outlining these shifts. Topics will include: the bibliomania, bookishness, dark academia, books and publishing in the age of digital media, and more.

Winter 2025

ENGL 5002W: Studies in Theory I (cross-listed with CLMD 6904W)
Prof. Stuart Murray

Topic: The Perfomatives of Pleasure/Pain

While the concept of performativity may indeed be “well-worn,” as Jeffrey T. Nealon suggests in Fates of the Performative, few phenomena are as fateful and complex as pleasure and its performatives. Often relegated today to the realm of the taboo, pleasure carries a dark, atavistic undercurrent. It is suspect today for its raw corporeality, its indifference to consent, social contracts, and even conceptualization. Yet, pleasure is both performed and performative—two intertwined yet distinct processes. This course will explore the political and cultural implications of this difference, with a sustained focus on the fleshly, the carnal, and the embodied experiences of pleasure/pain.

While Judith Butler’s foundational work on gender performativity is widely known, their more recent thoughts on rhetorical invention and the “untranslatable” offer fresh avenues for understanding the performative. In Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024), Butler explores how performative language constructs new possibilities for a “liveable life,” arguing that terms like “gender” or non-binary pronouns are not merely descriptive but enact a form of desire that resists lexical capture. This course will consider the performative as a “translation” of that which exceeds language—a critical approach to understanding pleasure and pain as forces that defy containment, yet shape political, social, and cultural spaces.

To ground these theoretical inquiries, we will survey key texts on performativity, tracing their intersections with pleasure, pain, and desire. Course readings will span philosophical, psychoanalytic, and queer and feminist theory, but remain anchored in visceral, embodied experiences.

ENGL 5004W: Studies in Transnational Literatures (cross-listed with CLMD 6106W/MGDS 5002D)
Prof. Sarah Casteel

Topic: Memory and Migration

This course explores the relationship between memory, migration, and aesthetic representation. We will consider the role of particular literary and artistic genres in producing, preserving, and circulating migrant memories. How do diasporic writers and visual artists negotiate between personal or familial memory and official, state memory? How do they reconstruct memories that have been disrupted, fragmented, or lost as a result of forced or voluntary migration? What is the role of creativity and the imagination in these acts of mnemonic recovery? Among the literary genres and artistic mediums we will address are memoir, graphic memoir, fiction, poetry, installation art, photographic portraiture, and photomontage.

ENGL 5303W: Studies in Early Modern Lit I (cross-listed with ENGL 4301A/HUMS 4902B)
Prof. Micheline White

Topic: Tudor Queens: Sex, Power, and Writing in the Lives of Katherine Parr, Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth I

Renaissance queens have long fascinated the reading public, but their political power and literary writings have only recently become the objects of academic study. In this seminar, students will develop an in-depth understanding of three Renaissance queens who made the most of their unusual social status and made lasting contributions to English culture. In this course, we will explore early modern attitudes towards the concepts of a “queen consort,” a “queen regent,” a “queen regnant” and a “dowager queen,” and we will focus on three English queens’ textual and visual productions including speeches, published prose works, diplomatic letters, poetry, translations, and portraits. Students will be introduced to early modern paleography and book history. Those who wish can also explore digital versions of manuscript writing. We will also consider the depictions of these queens in recent films and TV programs.

Katherine Parr (1512-1548) was the final wife of Henry VIII. Although she is often depicted in popular culture as the woman who nursed Henry in his old age, she was actually a literary powerhouse and one of the most influential religious activists of the 1540s. We will examine her three published literary texts, her narrow escape from being arrested and executed, and her scandalous marriage to Thomas Seymour after Henry’s death.

Mary Tudor (1516-1558) was the daughter of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon. After acceding to the throne in 1553 as queen regnant, she restored England to Catholicism and became famous for overseeing the burning of three hundred Protestants. For centuries she has been vilified as “bloody Mary” and as an incompetent ruler, but current scholars are offering new accounts of her political skills and successes.

Elizabeth I (1533-1603) was Parr’s step-daughter and Mary’s sister, and she is one of the most famous British monarchs. As a queen regnant, Elizabeth obviously wielded extraordinary agency and yet her status as an unmarried woman was an on-going concern throughout her reign. Through an examination of her public speeches, private letters, portraits, proclamations, poems and prayers we will consider how she managed her image and how she contributed to important political, social, and literary developments. Recent movies will be addressed.

ENGL 5804W: Studies in Canadian Literature I
Prof. Sara Jamieson

Topic: Aging (Alongside) Animals

In a chapter subtitled “The Family Dog as Time Machine,” Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child: Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century develops an argument about narratives in which lateral (or “sideways”) relationships between  children and dogs offer ways of being and growing that depart from a culturally dominant figuration of “growing up” as a “vertical movement upward . . . toward full stature, marriage, work, reproduction, and the loss of childishness” (2). This course also examines connections between non-human animals and normative expectations about human life stages, but in a way that asks how we might broaden the focus on “growing up” to incorporate “growing old.” You will be introduced to a range of texts including novels, short stories, poems, and a documentary film that situate human development and longevity in relation to a whole menagerie of animals: these include an old and (possibly) talking horse, a (supposedly) 300-year-old tortoise, a (suspiciously) long-lived laboratory mouse, plus elephants, cats and cat ladies, menopausal orcas, assorted birds and dogs, and a coyote. You will be invited to consider how these textual representations can help us to re-think a range of concepts at the heart of cultural understandings of aging—development and growth, maturity and wisdom, senescence and decline, disability, dependency, and care, pastness, futurity, and generational time—outside of strictly human(ist) frameworks. Our interpretations of these texts will be guided by a range of theoretical sources drawn from the fields of age studies, queer theory, animal studies, and posthumanism, all of which share a commitment to decentering the humanist conception of the individual as an autonomous, (re)productive, and implicitly youthful subject on a life trajectory ordered toward a maximum productivity to be sustained for as long as possible. In contrast to the current cultural obsession with the extension of individual human lives as a measure of what it means to age “well” (a search for longevity often extracted from the bodies of non-human animals), this course represents an opportunity to situate human aging in the context of what environmental historian Jared Farmer calls a “more-than-human timefulness” that highlights the shared vulnerability that defines our animal being.

Texts will include “Houyhnhnm” by André Alexis; Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant; The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy; Cat Ladies directed by Christie Callan-Jones; “The Animals in their Elements” by Cynthia Flood; Excerpts from Flash Count Diary by Darcey Steinke; The Tuning of Perfection” by Alistair MacLeod; Wells, by Jenna Butler; and Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper.

Theoretical readings will be drawn from works by Cary Wolfe, Donna Haraway, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Jack Halberstam, Marlene Goldman, and Alice Kuzniar.

ENGL 5900W: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with CLMD 6903W)
Prof. Barbara Leckie

Topic: Co-writing the Climate Crisis

This course offers an interdisciplinary approach to the climate crisis through the lens of co-writing. The idea of co-writing will be treated capaciously: writing through and with other voices, conversations, people, places, and things. It will envision writing as a kind of craft or making in which we think out loud together. With respect to the climate crisis, humans write on and with land and climate; this course will, accordingly, ask if co-writing can broaden our sense of what writing means.

The course will approach questions of cowriting via three interconnected categories: conversation; correspondence; and cohabitation. While each of these terms have a bearing on the larger questions of climate and the planetary that the course will address, they will also be approached, more narrowly, in relation to talking, writing, and teaching, respectively. Our discussions will be underpinned by the ways in which ideas of the co-, in general, help us to rethink the individual, the nation, and the land. Overall, we will read the work of Judith Butler, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Achille Mbembe, Anna Tsing, and Sylvia Wynter, among others, to consider more closely how disciplines in the humanities can contribute to climate action.

ENGL 5900X/4115A: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with WGST 4812B/5901D)
Prof. Jodie Medd

Topic: Queer/Feminist/Life/Writing

This course will take queer/feminist/life/writing as a broad and suggestive constellation for exploring a range of written texts, including biofiction, autobiography, memoir, creative nonfiction, the personal essay, and autotheory. Reading twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts, we’ll consider how authors have engaged with and innovated upon forms and genres for narrating feminist and queer lives; how they have blended personal writing with political, theoretical, philosophical and academic discourse; how their texts mattered to the moment of their composition; and how and why they matter now. Students will have leeway to research, write, and present on areas of interest to them, from literary form and style to socio-cultural-political content and connections. Content may include (but is not limited to) childhood; parenthood; loss and grief; Black life and the afterlife of slavery; racial capitalism; trans narratives; queer Indigeneity; illness narratives; subjectivity, representation and the writing “I;” community and care; art, academia and activism . . . and more.

ENGL 5900Y: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with CDNS5103/CLMD6105)
Prof. Orly Lael Netzer

In this course we will explore cultural studies on Turtle Island,asking what does it mean to research and practice cultural studies in socially responsible ways (responsible to whom and how)? what can cultural studies offer at times of relational crises? and how / can cultural studies make relations between communities, or rather, make relations right?

In our discussions we will attend to the state’s pivotal role in shaping Canada’s cultural industries and national identity, historicize the study of culture in/about Canada, and examine contemporary and emerging theories and approaches in cultural studies (from multiculturalism,
to critical refugee studies, Indigenous literary nationalism, black feminism, ecocriticism, ethics of care, memory, performance, and queer studies).

ENGL 6004W: Approaches to the Production of Literature
Prof. Grant Williams

Topic: The Renaissance Love Arts: Theorizing and Philosophizing Blazons in English Erotic Poetry

When we think of love today, we often think of its fatalistic spontaneity, succinctly captured by Christopher Marlowe’s memorable line “Who ever lov’d, that lov’d not at first sight?” The Renaissance love arts (1550-1700) demonstrate, however, that there was nothing natural and predetermined about loving: they involved teaching and learning, artifice and artifact, arising from Ovid’s verse in classical times, modified by courtly love and Petrarchanism, and responding to particular historical circumstances and social institutions—church, education, law, and family—circumscribed by the early modern nation state.

This course studies a rhetorical form that pervades the Renaissance love arts: the blazon praises a beloved by cataloguing and describing their body parts, whose value and desirability are compared to precious objects. (Take for example the famous parody by Shakespeare, Sonnet 130, “My Mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.”) Since the 1970s, blazons have attracted the feminist critique of the objectification of women, not unlike the subordination of the female body to the cinematic male gaze. More recently, however, queer studies has complicated the feminist discourse around Renaissance sexuality and gender identity, and cognitive studies has compelled scholars to consider the image of the body within different types of thinking, imagining, and remembering. As a result, the slippery fantasies and shifting values captured by the polymorphic eroticism of various blazons evade simplistic, totalizing ideological critique.

This course defamiliarizes modern romantic love, while interrogating its forgotten roots. Seminars will contextualize and materialize exemplary blazons within the Renaissance love arts, analyze them according to different theories of gender, sexuality, race, and class, and address philosophical questions of politics, ethics, and phenomenology. Early modern blazons find themselves as strange bed fellows with big yet problematic ideas, including but not confined to mortality, truth, God, alterity, and alienation.

Summer 2025

ENGL 5610S/4115B: Studies in Contemporary Literature I
Prof. Franny Nudelman

Topic: Immersive Documentary, 1945 to the Present

In this course we will study immersive documentary—a form that has flourished in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries. If an objective approach to recording social reality was discredited by the surreal conditions of the Second World War, post-war documentarians explored subjective modes of reporting that placed the perspective of the observer front and center. Further, they argued that subjective reporting was the most accurate and complete way to capture the bizarre properties of modern life. Writers, filmmakers and photographers working in this tradition seek out extreme situations, spend long periods of time with their subjects, explore immersive technologies, and report on how their encounter with a situation, subject, or event transforms the perspective of the documentarian.

ENGL 5900S/4115A: Selected Topic in English Studies I
Prof. Robin Norris

Topic: Plant Literacy

Plants have been important throughout human history for reasons of both survival and culture. Although plants have been central to mythologies and folklore around the globe, today our personal awareness of plants is at an all-time low. This is an experiential learning course that combines fieldwork, experiential learning, and text-based discussion to develop plant literacy and increase awareness of the plant life in our environment while redefining our understanding of literacy. Writing assignments will emphasize reflection on the experiential learning aspects of the course and will include in-class writing and a plant journal. The intersecting goals of the course are to explore the concept of literacy while expanding our ability to perceive and engage with plants, as well as considering new methods of observation and understanding by challenging fixed notions of knowledge and being.

The post Fall 2024 – Winter 2025 appeared first on Department of English Language and Literature.

Summer 2024

ENGL 5101S: Historical Linguistics: English (cross-listed with LING 4802A/5802A)
Prof. Dan Siddiqi

This course deploys a wide array of theoretical linguistics techniques and skills, primarily morphological, phonological, and syntactic analysis as well as typological and diachronic analysis, in order to examine the historical development of a particular well-studied language:  English.  This class will study the origins of English starting with Proto-Indo-European progressing through Common Germanic and then ultimately the stages of English itself.  This course is a theory-intensive course and will focus on historical linguistic topics such as the development of English from a scrambling language to a V2 language to a strict SVO language.  Other topics include the phonological sound changes and phonemic inventories at different stages, the change from a fusional language to an isolating language, and the drastic changes in inflectional system of the language.

NOTE: Please be advised that this course is distinct from a History of English course. ENGL 5101S is a historical linguistics course.

ENGL 5900R/4301A: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with HIST 4101A)
Prof. Paul Nelles

Topic: Travel & Mobility in the Early Modern World

This seminar explores the experience of travel and mobility through the eyes of the Florentine merchant Francesco Carletti. In 1594, Carletti departed from Spain to make his fortune as a private merchant. He travelled to Mexico and Peru, to the Philippines and Japan, to China and India. The early modern period experienced an unprecedented level of mobility, both within Europe and globally. We follow Carletti’s journey by reading his chronicle of his travels, My Voyage Around the World. Each week of the course we study in detail some of the places Carletti travelled and the peoples he encountered. The seminar covers topics such as life at sea, slavery, food and drink, sexuality, the rise of global commerce, and natural history.

The seminar considers the social and cultural context of early modern mobility at the transnational and global levels. The seminar seeks to re-create the material and cultural world of early modern travel. We explore how linguistic and cultural difference were experienced, how travellers made sense of unfamiliar places, social customs, and cultural practices, and the ‘things’ that also moved on journeys.

ENGL 5900S/4115A: Selected Topic in English Studies I
Prof. Robin Norris

Topic: Leaves of Leaves: Plant Literacy and Literature

Plants have been important throughout human history for reasons of both survival and culture. Although plants have been central to mythologies and folklore around the globe, today our personal awareness of plants is at an all-time low. This is an experiential learning course that combines fieldwork, experiential learning, and text-based discussion to develop plant literacy and increase awareness of the plant life in our environment while redefining our understanding of literacy. Writing assignments will emphasize reflection on the experiential learning aspects of the course and will include in-class writing and a plant journal. The intersecting goals of the course are to explore the concept of literacy while expanding our ability to perceive and engage with plants, as well as considering new methods of observation and understanding by challenging fixed notions of knowledge and being.

ENGL 5900T/4609A: Selected Topic in English Studies I
Prof. Janne Cleveland

Topic: TBC

This is a seminar course intended to explore the form and function of comedy in performance.

We will examine the theories and cultural practices of comedy as a form of social commentary in dramatic literature and essays. Is the function of comedy only, as Beaumarchais (the creator of the character Figaro in The Barber of Seville) has noted, to entice laughter “in order I may not weep”?  Through reading theories of comedy and its performance strategies we will look to apply these in the contemporary context. These might include (but are not limited to) stand up, social satire, political performance, as well as performance emerging from feminist, racialized, queer, ableist, and/or class perspectives. We will seek to understand how the comic is utilized as a means of making social critique in a variety of ways. From the ancient Greeks to SNL to Barbie we will consider how and why comedy and the laughter it produces are so important to us in the contemporary moment.

ENGL 5007S/4961A: Studies in Indigenous Literatures
Prof. Brenda Vellino

Topic: Re-storying Resurgence in Indigenous Popular and Multi-Media Genres

Contemporary Indigenous literary and multi-media artists from northern Turtle Island (also known as Canada) have increasingly taken up popular genres and modes such as speculative fiction, graphic novels, the horror film, stop motion animation film shorts, documentary, drama, spoken word, and performance art. These practices decolonize settler genre norms, represent complex contemporary social realities, and assert Indigenous sovereignties and resurgence. This course will enable us to consider the politics and ethics of cultural production and reception within the intersecting conditions of ongoing settler colonial impacts and Indigenous decolonisation and resurgence work.  Our course methodology will feature careful attention to specific Indigenous, Inuit, and MĂŠtis cultural contexts, social realities, protocols, and priorities.  Whenever possible, our discussion will centre Indigenous knowledge keepers, along with literary, performance, and cultural critics such as Greg Younging, Jo-Ann Archibald, Grace Dillon, Alicia Eliot, Warren Cariou, Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber, Daniel Heath Justice, Dorothy Christian, and Kyle Whyte. Topics may include residential schools legacies, contemporary urban or rez realities, MMIWG2S interventions, relational kinship ethics, revitalization and resurgence practices, Indigenous justice, climate change interventions, and re-embodiment and decolonial love, particularly informed by questions of gender and sexuality. We will pursue this central question: what draws Indigenous writers and artists to popular and multi-media genres and how do they revise and refashion them to decolonize, intervene, and assert cultural sovereignty and resurgence? Experiential learning through attending Indigenous cultural events or teachings in addition to class readings and viewings will be a priority.

ENGL 5708S/4709A:  Studies in American Literature II
Prof. Franny Nudelman

Topic: United States Culture in the Age of Experiment: 1945-1989

This course explores the role of experimentation in the culture and politics of the US during the Cold War era. The decades following World War Two witnessed the development of new kinds of warfare; transformative movements for gender and racial equality; the advent of live television; the widespread use of hallucinogenic drugs and other techniques for altering consciousness. In the realm of culture, innovation was afoot as writers, painters, filmmakers, and musicians explored an aesthetic of spontaneity, intensity, and interiority that might adequately represent the strange conditions of modern life. We will consider significant trends in the culture of the era—including abstract expressionism, direct cinema, hard bop, and confessional poetry—as well as the social conditions that generated these new forms of expression.

The post Summer 2024 appeared first on Department of English Language and Literature.

Summer 2023

ENGL 5900S/ENGL 4609A: Selected Topic in English Studies I
Prof. Janne Cleveland

Topic: Performing Activism on Social Media

This seminar course will examine how social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, TikTok become spaces of performance within the context of activism and protest. We will consider how these platforms take on a theatrical dimension, and what the implications are for both the actors and spectators of these activist actions.

ENGL 5900T/ENGL 4301A: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with HIST 4101A)
Prof. Paul Nelles

Topic: Travel & Mobility in the Early Modern World

This seminar explores the experience of travel and mobility circa 1500–1750. The early modern period experienced an unprecedented level of mobility, both within Europe and globally. People moved across space and across distance for all sorts of reasons: the faithful pilgrimaged to holy sites; merchants journeyed to buy and sell material goods; the sick moved for health; diplomats travelled to spy and negotiate; missionaries crossed oceans to save souls; non-Europeans experienced coerced migration in the form of African slavery and the colonial enclosure of indigenous peoples. The seminar considers the social and cultural context of early modern mobility at the local, transnational, and global levels. We also explore the technologies of travel – how did people move from place to place?  where did they stay? what did they eat and drink? what mechanisms, practices, and sites facilitated movement in the early modern period?

The seminar seeks to re-create the material and cultural world of early modern travel. We explore how linguistic and cultural difference were experienced, how travellers made sense of unfamiliar places, social customs, and cultural practices, and the ‘things’ that also moved on journeys. The class pays close attention to the sources that constitute early modern ‘travel writing:’ travel journals, letters, diaries, ship’s logs, missionary reports, and the like.

ENGL 5901S/ENGL 4115A: Culture and the Text
Prof. Robin Norris

Topic: Leaves of Leaves: Plant Literacy and Literature

Plants have been important throughout human history for both reasons of survival and culture. Although plants have been fundamental to mythologies around the globe, today plant literacy is at an all-time low. This class has multiple intersecting goals: to explore plants in literature and culture; to increase students’ plant literacy; to explore the concept of literacy; and to re-evaluate how plant literacy influences our experience of literary texts. One abiding question will be the distinction between nature and the garden. This is an experiential learning course that requires field work to develop plant literacy, and assignments will be designed to bolster the experiential learning aspects of the course.

ENGL 5120S/ENGL 4115B: Book Arts Workshop
Prof. Robin Norris

This experiential learning course immerses students in the practical arts and histories of book production, with its roots in the early Middle Ages. Students will engage in a range of activities representative of the pillars of the book arts, including bookbinding, calligraphy, decoration, and typesetting/printing. Activities may include transcription of manuscript and inscribed texts, reproduction of early medieval bookhand, creating and printing woodcuts and/or linocuts, typesetting and letterpress printing, hand sewing of paper gatherings to create pamphlets or multiple section books, and exploration of manuscripts and early printed books from ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s Archives and Special Collections. The class will be held in the MacOdrum Library Book Arts Lab, where students will work collaboratively with Master Printer Larry Thompson, Professor Norris, and their classmates.

The post Summer 2023 appeared first on Department of English Language and Literature.

Fall 2023

ENGL 5005F: MA Seminar
Prof. Sarah Brouillette

Topic: Professing English: Disciplinary Debates and Horizons

What does it mean to study “English” today? What are the stakes involved in teaching it? And what, in fact, are we to study and teach, exactly? How—in practical terms—might graduate students most effectively navigate their own research and teaching at a time when disciplinary boundaries seem more porous than ever, and when the assumptions about what constitutes sound scholarship or even effective pedagogy are by no means self-evident or mutually agreed upon by members of the profession? This course provides MA students with a primer on the tumultuous history of English Studies and a roadmap to the current state of the discipline in several key areas: disciplinary boundaries and interdisciplinarity; methodological debates; and pedagogy. In addition to considering theoretical questions raised by these issues, the course will assist students with a range of practical concerns, including: developing graduate research strategies, grading essays, leading seminars, crafting grant proposals, and understanding employment and academic opportunities available to graduates, both inside and outside the university.

ENGL 5120F: Book Arts Workshop
Prof. Jody Mason

Topic: Small-Press Publishing in Canada

This course takes twentieth- and early twenty-first-century small-press publishing in Canada as its focus. A book arts workshop that will be conducted in the Book Arts Lab in MacOdrum Library and co-taught with Master Printer Larry Thompson, the course brings together the history and theory of small-press activity in Canada with experiential learning activities that will help us to think in material terms about small-press objects and their production processes.

Our experiential work will include encounters with small-press publishers; interaction with small-press texts from the university’s Archives and Special Collections; and book arts demonstrations / activities, culminating in a letterpress printing project.

The history/theory component of the course will unfold in relation to a series of small-press case studies (e.g., First Statement Press [Montreal]; Coach House Press [Toronto]; Sister Vision Press [Toronto]; Gaspereau Press [Kentville, NS]; and Kegedonce Press.

ENGL 5610F: Studies in Contemporary Literature I (cross-listed with CLMD 6104F)
Prof. Franny Nudelman

Topic: Documentary and Crisis

This course considers crisis documentary from 1945 to the present. We will study documentary filmmakers, photographers, and writers who respond to the unanticipated and often incomprehensible crises of their age and, in the process, create new forms of documentary expression. Taking an expansive view of the field, we will consider documentary texts that deal with war, forced migration, climate emergency, poverty, gendered violence. We will ask: How do documentarians represent what they cannot yet fully understand? What role does literary and visual culture play in making disruptive change real? How have documentarians helped to define an ethics of witnessing? How are the methods and aims of documentarians transformed by new technologies and alternative forms of collectivity? Throughout, we will explore the power of documentary to respond to catastrophic events and uncharted social conditions as they unfold.

ENGL 5804F: Studies in Canadian Literature I (cross-listed with CDNS 5201F and WGST 5902A)
Prof. Jennifer Henderson

Topic: Rereading ‘Women’s Liberation’

This course takes a materialist and intersectional approach to the ‘Women’s Liberation’ movement of the 1970s, as we look at recent scholarship on the rhetorics and affects of the movement as well as dig into its Canadian archive. Recent scholarship has been revising settled views of experience, organizing, and expression in this moment of eruption. Working with concepts of eventfulness, articulation, and ghostly trace, we question a progressivist view of history that would assume either our own relative advancement or the finishedness of this past. Grounding ourselves through discussion of the relationship between feminism and neoliberalism in the present, we then turn to archival materials and media representations from the 1970s. We ask how this historical feminism was heterogeneous in its rhetorics and positionalities, and was made public in selective, uneven ways.

Our primary materials include print ephemera—newsletters, magazines, and flyers, as well as film, autobiography, anthologies, art activism, and journalism. We read for style and emotion as well as for the arguments and analyses presented. A central preoccupation is the moment’s framing of social reproduction as a terrain of struggle and the pertinence of that struggle today. Throughout the course, we ask how feminist discourse and organizing occurs within and against regimes of race, heteronormativity, binary gender, state governance, and global capitalism. We approach Canada as a settler-colonial, racialized space, a space of Indigenous homelands and transnational flows in which ‘woman’ and ‘women’ are unstable and contested subjects. The course will be an inclusive, 2SLGBTQ-positive space.

ENGL 5900F: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with ANTH 5205A/ANTH 4205A)
Prof. Abra Wenzel

Topic: Language, Place and the North

An investigation of language, places, spaces, and environment, focusing on Indigenous peoples and the Arctic and subarctic regions of Canada. Topics include critical understandings of language use, northern environments, Indigenous homelands, and the role of Indigenous languages in defining and transforming cultural and geographic space.

ENGL 5900G: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with CLMD 6902F/LAWS 5904F)
Prof. Phil Kaisary

Topic: Directions and Dead Ends in the ‘Law & Literature’ Movement

This course critically analyzes themes, approaches, and debates in the ‘Law and Literature’ movement and the related field of ‘Law, Culture, and the Humanities’ (‘LCH’). The first half of the course begins by tracing the formation of the ‘Law and Literature’ movement from c. 1965 to the present day, paying particular attention to its goals, situation, theoretical investments, and ideological thrust. Observing the movement’s Eurocentrism, the tendency of scholars working in the field to reference only an attenuated corpus of literary and cultural materials, and its indebtedness, on the one hand, to liberal humanism, and, on the other, to post-structuralism, we will assess the productive capacities and critical limitations of the field as it is presently constituted.

Having established a working knowledge of the field in theoretical and historical terms, as well as the tendencies of its purview, we will move to consider: (1) the critical traditions of cultural materialism and Marxist cultural studies, the major thinkers of which are conspicuous by their absence – or extreme scarcity – within Law and Literature scholarship, and (2) recent debates within world literary studies which have sought to elaborate world literature’s relation to the modern capitalist world-system. In opposition to the predominant approaches, we will consider the potential usefulness of these alternative approaches to a reconstructed and reoriented ‘Law and Literature’ movement.

In the second half of the course, we will undertake a series of experimental readings of primary materials (novels, poetry, films, statute law, and case law) drawn from both ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ global locations in an effort to develop a materialist and worldly approach to ‘Law and Literature’ / LCH. The interpretations that we will collectively strive to generate will draw on a variety of secondary readings and will be considered in relation to other approaches that have gained currency in ‘Law and Literature’.

ENGL 6003F: Theories and Foundation
Prof. Julie Murray

Topic: What is a Book?

This course takes as its focus both the book as a material object and the field that has emerged around its study: the history of the book. The immediate context for our explorations will be the near certainty, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, that the printed book was rapidly becoming obsolete. Not only has that reality not come to pass, but in the words of two recent scholars, “[i]nstead of heralding [its] demise, the twenty-first century offers new reasons to reckon with the physical book.” We will begin with a case study: eighteenth-century novelist Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, a novel that is famously – and extravagantly — attentive to the materiality of the printed book. Our engagement with Sterne’s novel will include a couple of sessions in the MacOdrum Library’s Book Arts Lab. We will then survey developments in book culture and media from the late-eighteenth century to the present day, by reading a selection of foundational essays outlining these shifts.

Winter 2024

ENGL 5208W: Studies in Middle English Literature
Prof. Siobhain Calkin

Topic: Manuscripts and Mayhem: Re-reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

No English author can match the uninterrupted reading history that connects Chaucer to the present, and this course will explore why Chaucer has proven so engaging from the Middle Ages through to today. Despite having died 600 years ago, Chaucer still attracts a great deal of attention in text, scholarship, and film. New editions of his texts are still being produced, and scholarly debates erupt over how best to teach his work to modern audiences. In the past twenty years he and his texts have been lightning rods for discussions in medieval studies about issues as varied as manuscripts, race, religion, gender identity, feminism, and rape culture. Why do we care today about the writings and life of this fourteenth-century bureaucrat? How do his texts challenge our familiar ways of reading and of thinking about authorship? What issues do his texts raise about sex, class, gender, and power relations? What do his texts tell us about constructs of masculinity and femininity then and now? How, and to what effect, does Chaucer, a medieval Christian, depict other Christians, Jews, and Muslims in his Tales? How do we, and how did medieval readers, reconcile Chaucer’s bawdy humor and criticism of the Church with his more straightforwardly “moral” tales? ENGL 5208 explores these questions and more as it works through the entirety (or as close as we can manage!) of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and positions the Tales in relation to some of the heated scholarly debates they have occasioned recently. Come and find out what 600 years of hype are all about.

ENGL 5402W/4115B: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature
Prof. Hugh Reid

Topic: The Nature And Uses of 18^th Century Book Subscription Lists

This course aims to provide students with the context and nature of subscription lists and give students the opportunity for original research in this field.  Initially students will be given a theoretical background to subscription lists and lessons on how the 18^th century book trade worked:  how was paper made, how was type set, how were books printed and bound, what was the role of bookseller, of publishing congers, etc.  The hope is that they will then have an understanding of the trade sufficient to deal with book subscriptions.  Then each shall pick a subscription list to work on.  This kind of work could not have been done at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ in the past because the library’s holdings in antiquarian books was inadequate.  Now, however, we can access almost all the books published in the 18^th century by subscription (some 3,000).  Students may choose any list.  For example, if they are interested in female poets they might chose Mary Leapor whose work was published posthumously by subscription.   In the seminar, they will report on what they have learned and what has evaded them.  As each student reports we will discuss how each may progress.  There are so many things which we can learn from subscription lists and very little has been done in this field in the past.  Some of the topics which may be examined might include the number of female subscribers, the number of people from the mercantile class, the number of members of the aristocracy, or from academia, or the clergy, or other sub groups.  How did this subscription list fit into the publishing industry in the eighteenth century?

By the end of the course, the hope is that each student will have done sufficient research (and learned how to do it) to produce a paper worthy of presentation at a conference or as an article in a journal.

ENGL 5610W: Studies in Contemporary Literature I (cross-listed with DIGH 5902A)
Prof. Brian Greenspan

Topic: Fictionality

Fictional discourse continues to grow in prominence in our “post-truth” era, due in part to the social media, deep fakes, AIs, and conspiracy theories that threaten to alter our consensus reality. As the public sphere grows ever more hyperreal, it isn’t surprising that writers and scholars alike should shy away from the parody, relativism, and textual play that marked literature of the last century, while embracing rumours of an emergent “metamodern” affect or post-postmodern “New Sincerity.” At the same time, revitalized critical debates over the status of fictional discourse offer growing evidence that truth and authenticity are not opposed to fictionality, but dependent on it.

This seminar will survey narrative fictions in various media and genres (such as alt-history, science fiction, urban fantasy, comics, games, transmedia, Virtual and Augmented Reality, autofiction, metafiction, and hyperfiction), alongside recent theories of fictionality and new media. We will also explore new digital tools and methods for creating or detecting fakes and fictions. Our approach will be purely exploratory, experimental, and collaborative; no prior programming or special computer skills are required, though you might pick up a few along the way.

ENGL 5900W/4609A: Selected Topic in English Studies I
Prof. Janne Cleveland

Topic: Epic Theatre for the 21^st Century

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.” – Bertolt Brecht

In the early to mid-20^th Century, dramatist, and playwright, Bertolt Brecht developed a style of theatre he called Epic Theatre. Emerging from the staging strategies of German Expressionism, Brecht was influenced by Marx in perfecting his craft. He saw a need for theatre to shake off the complacency of bourgeois spectatorship and become something that could entertain but also provoke thought about the world and the nature of human relationships in a politically charged landscape. In this course we will examine Brecht’s theories, alongside some of his well-known plays with an eye to understanding the influence of his work in our contemporary moment, which it can be argued is equally as fraught as the world Brecht navigated in exile in the 1940s. Do we still see manifestations of Epic Theatre in new works? Is there a place for didacticism in the theatre? We will delve deeply into Brecht’s work to see how and where his legacy continues to be felt in contemporary theatre.

ENGL 5900X: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with CLMD 6903W and HIST 5906A)
Prof. Barbara Leckie

Topic: Co-writing the Climate Crisis

This course offers an interdisciplinary approach to the climate crisis through the lens of co-writing. The idea of co-writing will be treated capaciously: writing through and with other voices, conversations, people, places, and things. It will envision writing as a kind of craft or making in which we think out loud together. With respect to the climate crisis, humans write on and with land and climate; this course will, accordingly, ask if co-writing can broaden our sense of what writing means.

The course will approach questions of cowriting via three interconnected categories: conversation; correspondence; and cohabitation. While each of these terms have a bearing on the larger questions of climate and the planetary that the course will address, they will also be approached, more narrowly, in relation to talking, writing, and teaching, respectively. Our discussions will be underpinned by the ways in which ideas of the co-, in general, help us to rethink the individual, the nation, and the land. Overall, we will read the work of Judith Butler, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Achille Mbembe, Anna Tsing, and Sylvia Wynter, among others, to consider more closely how disciplines in the humanities can contribute to climate action.

ENGL 5900Y/4115A: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with WGST 5901D/4812B)
Prof. Jodie Medd

Topic: Queer/ Feminist/ Life/ Writing

This course will take queer/feminist/life/writing as a broad and suggestive constellation for exploring a range of written texts, including biofiction, autobiography, memoir, creative nonfiction, the personal essay, and autotheory. Reading twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts, we’ll consider how authors have engaged with and innovated upon forms and genres for narrating feminist and queer lives; how they have blended personal writing with political, theoretical, philosophical and academic discourse; how their texts mattered to the moment of their composition; and how and why they matter now. Students will have leeway to research, write, and present on areas of interest to them, from literary form and style to socio-cultural-political content and connections. Content may include (but is not limited to) childhood, parenthood, loss and grief, illness and disability, Black life and the afterlife of slavery, racial capitalism, trans narratives, queer Indigeneity, subjectivity, representation and the writing “I,” community and care, art, academia and activism . . . and more.

ENGL 6004W: Approaches
Prof. Julie Murray

Topic: The Production of Literary Criticism at the Present Time

This course focuses on the current state of literary criticism as a bellwether of the discipline of literary studies more broadly. We will explore critiques of the discipline from a range of perspectives, including but not limited to: defenses of disciplinary specificity in the various returns to form, formalism, and form-as-politics versus the “salvaging” of the discipline seen in recent years in the surging popularity of creative writing programs and the digital humanities; the flight from criticism/critique on view in the form of Latourian “post-critique”; and the current work of “undisciplining” visible in many fields/periods/areas of literary studies in response to the ongoing reckoning with racism, anti-blackness, and the anti-black foundations of the profession as such.

Summer 2024

ENGL 5101S: Historical Linguistics: English (cross-listed with LING 4802A/5802A)
Prof. Dan Siddiqi

This course deploys a wide array of theoretical linguistics techniques and skills, primarily morphological, phonological, and syntactic analysis as well as typological and diachronic analysis, in order to examine the historical development of a particular well-studied language:  English.  This class will study the origins of English starting with Proto-Indo-European progressing through Common Germanic and then ultimately the stages of English itself.  This course is a theory-intensive course and will focus on historical linguistic topics such as the development of English from a scrambling language to a V2 language to a strict SVO language.  Other topics include the phonological sound changes and phonemic inventories at different stages, the change from a fusional language to an isolating language, and the drastic changes in inflectional system of the language.

NOTE: Please be advised that this course is distinct from a History of English course. ENGL 5101S is a historical linguistics course.

ENGL 5900R/4301A: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with HIST 4101A)
Prof. Paul Nelles

Topic: Travel & Mobility in the Early Modern World

This seminar explores the experience of travel and mobility through the eyes of the Florentine merchant Francesco Carletti. In 1594, Carletti departed from Spain to make his fortune as a private merchant. He travelled to Mexico and Peru, to the Philippines and Japan, to China and India. The early modern period experienced an unprecedented level of mobility, both within Europe and globally. We follow Carletti’s journey by reading his chronicle of his travels, My Voyage Around the World. Each week of the course we study in detail some of the places Carletti travelled and the peoples he encountered. The seminar covers topics such as life at sea, slavery, food and drink, sexuality, the rise of global commerce, and natural history.

The seminar considers the social and cultural context of early modern mobility at the transnational and global levels. The seminar seeks to re-create the material and cultural world of early modern travel. We explore how linguistic and cultural difference were experienced, how travellers made sense of unfamiliar places, social customs, and cultural practices, and the ‘things’ that also moved on journeys.

ENGL 5900S/4115A: Selected Topic in English Studies I
Prof. Robin Norris

Topic: Leaves of Leaves: Plant Literacy and Literature

Plants have been important throughout human history for reasons of both survival and culture. Although plants have been central to mythologies and folklore around the globe, today our personal awareness of plants is at an all-time low. This is an experiential learning course that combines fieldwork, experiential learning, and text-based discussion to develop plant literacy and increase awareness of the plant life in our environment while redefining our understanding of literacy. Writing assignments will emphasize reflection on the experiential learning aspects of the course and will include in-class writing and a plant journal. The intersecting goals of the course are to explore the concept of literacy while expanding our ability to perceive and engage with plants, as well as considering new methods of observation and understanding by challenging fixed notions of knowledge and being.

ENGL 5900T/4609A: Selected Topic in English Studies I
Prof. Janne Cleveland

Topic: TBC

This is a seminar course intended to explore the form and function of comedy in performance.

We will examine the theories and cultural practices of comedy as a form of social commentary in dramatic literature and essays. Is the function of comedy only, as Beaumarchais (the creator of the character Figaro in The Barber of Seville) has noted, to entice laughter “in order I may not weep”?  Through reading theories of comedy and its performance strategies we will look to apply these in the contemporary context. These might include (but are not limited to) stand up, social satire, political performance, as well as performance emerging from feminist, racialized, queer, ableist, and/or class perspectives. We will seek to understand how the comic is utilized as a means of making social critique in a variety of ways. From the ancient Greeks to SNL to Barbie we will consider how and why comedy and the laughter it produces are so important to us in the contemporary moment.

ENGL 5007S/4961A: Studies in Indigenous Literatures
Prof. Brenda Vellino

Topic: Re-storying Resurgence in Indigenous Popular and Multi-Media Genres

Contemporary Indigenous literary and multi-media artists from northern Turtle Island (also known as Canada) have increasingly taken up popular genres and modes such as speculative fiction, graphic novels, the horror film, stop motion animation film shorts, documentary, drama, spoken word, and performance art. These practices decolonize settler genre norms, represent complex contemporary social realities, and assert Indigenous sovereignties and resurgence. This course will enable us to consider the politics and ethics of cultural production and reception within the intersecting conditions of ongoing settler colonial impacts and Indigenous decolonisation and resurgence work.  Our course methodology will feature careful attention to specific Indigenous, Inuit, and MĂŠtis cultural contexts, social realities, protocols, and priorities.  Whenever possible, our discussion will centre Indigenous knowledge keepers, along with literary, performance, and cultural critics such as Greg Younging, Jo-Ann Archibald, Grace Dillon, Alicia Eliot, Warren Cariou, Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber, Daniel Heath Justice, Dorothy Christian, and Kyle Whyte. Topics may include residential schools legacies, contemporary urban or rez realities, MMIWG2S interventions, relational kinship ethics, revitalization and resurgence practices, Indigenous justice, climate change interventions, and re-embodiment and decolonial love, particularly informed by questions of gender and sexuality. We will pursue this central question: what draws Indigenous writers and artists to popular and multi-media genres and how do they revise and refashion them to decolonize, intervene, and assert cultural sovereignty and resurgence? Experiential learning through attending Indigenous cultural events or teachings in addition to class readings and viewings will be a priority.

ENGL 5708S/4709A:  Studies in American Literature II
Prof. Franny Nudelman

Topic: United States Culture in the Age of Experiment: 1945-1989

This course explores the role of experimentation in the culture and politics of the US during the Cold War era. The decades following World War Two witnessed the development of new kinds of warfare; transformative movements for gender and racial equality; the advent of live television; the widespread use of hallucinogenic drugs and other techniques for altering consciousness. In the realm of culture, innovation was afoot as writers, painters, filmmakers, and musicians explored an aesthetic of spontaneity, intensity, and interiority that might adequately represent the strange conditions of modern life. We will consider significant trends in the culture of the era—including abstract expressionism, direct cinema, hard bop, and confessional poetry—as well as the social conditions that generated these new forms of expression.

The post Fall 2023 – Winter 2024 appeared first on Department of English Language and Literature.

ENGL 5606S/4609A: Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature
Prof. Brenda Vellino

Topic: Bordercrossings on the Contemporary Stage: Conflict Transformation, Environmental Justice, and Refugee Theatre

In this seminar, we will consider how contemporary theatre engages bordercrossing encounters between diverse historical and contemporary contexts, cultures, and audiences, and performance contexts.   We will explore interconnections between communities, nations, hemispheres, and continents from the perspective of multiple forms of transnational bordercrossing.  Organized into three thematic clusters—eco- justice, conflict transformation, and migrant theatre—this course seeks to engage theatrical responses to historical and contemporary moments of crisis and transition across multiple global contexts.  The course is informed by decolonial, Indigenous, diaspora, gender, environmental humanities, and human rights humanities theories and methodologies.  We will engage playwrights from Indigenous, African-American, South African, Lebanese, Syrian, British, and Canadian contexts. Along with reading one play per week, we will also engage supporting theoretical, critical, or performance focused essays to contextualize the discussion.

ENGL 5708S/4709A: Studies in American Literature II
Prof. Franny Nudelman

Topic: United States Culture, 1945-1989

This course explores the culture and politics of the US during the Cold War era. The decades following World War Two witnessed the development of new kinds of warfare; transformative movements for gender and racial equality; the advent of live television; the widespread use of hallucinogenic drugs and other techniques for altering consciousness. In the realm of culture, innovation was afoot as writers, painters, filmmakers, and musicians explored an aesthetic of spontaneity, intensity, and interiority that might adequately represent the strange conditions of modern life. We will consider significant trends in the culture of the era—including abstract expressionism, new journalism, and direct cinema—as well as the social conditions that generated these new forms of cultural expression.

ENGL 5900S/4115B: Selected Topic in English Studies I
Prof. Sarah Brouillette

Topic: The Future of Literary Culture

The purpose of this seminar is to study literary forms, sites, and practices that emerge in conditions where support for cultivation of the traditional literary sphere is waning. Indebted, prolonged austerity governments are busy managing the fallout from decades of economic decline and are disinclined to back the social programs they once did, including higher education and library and other arts and culture funding. For readers, contemporary conditions include rising tuition, stagnant wages, fear of joblessness, underemployment, and insecure work, and a reordering of leisure time and mental energy that shapes how people are inclined to spend shrinking entertainment budgets. The golden age of retail literary fiction – and the traditional English department – may thus be behind us. With the rise of digital platforms, we’ve seen falling book prices and diminishing possibilities for making one’s living by writing. Yet, though making it as a professional writer is becoming more difficult, the ease of digital self-publishing has led to a rapid increase in sheer numbers of published, if seldom read, fiction. With new social conditions come new forms of literary expression and experience. What are these forms? What will they be?

ENGL 5901S/4115A: Selected Topic in English Studies II
Prof. Robin Norris

Topic: Leaves of Leaves: Plant Literacy and Literature

Plants have been important throughout human history for both reasons of survival and culture. Plants have been fundamental to mythologies around the globe, but today plant literacy is at an all-time low. This class has multiple intersecting goals: to explore plants in literature; to increase students’ plant literacy; to explore the concept of literacy; and to re-evaluate how plants, literacy, and plant literacy influence our understanding of literary texts. An abiding question will be the distinction between nature and the garden. Students will conduct group and individual field work to develop plant literacy. COVID permitting, examples of excursions may include the Dominion Arboretum across the canal from campus; Archives and Special Collections at MacOdrum Library, which has a number of herbals; and the Canadian Museum of Nature. Assignments will be designed to bolster the experiential learning aspects of the course and may include a personal literacy narrative, a photo journal, and reflections on the course texts. Students will have both opportunities for conversations about core texts and options to conduct focused reading on their interests. Course texts may include Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, the video series °ż˛Ô°ěˇÉ˛š˛ÔĂł˛Ôłó°ěˇÉ˛š ‘Our Medicines’ by Ra’nikonhrĂ­:io Lazare and KatsenhaiĂŠn:ton Lazare, the work of Alexis Nikole Nelson @blackforager, Days by Moonlight by Andre Alexis, Catherine Parr Traill’s Studies of Plant Life in Canada, the Garden of Eden in Paradise Lost, Old English runestaves, and Circe by Madeline Miller, as well as a range of poetry and articles/chapters from the sciences.

The post Summer 2022 appeared first on Department of English Language and Literature.

Fall 2022

ENGL 5002F: Studies in Theory I (cross-listed with CLMD 6904F)
Prof. Stuart Murray

Topic: The Alt-Left Politics of Pleasure:  Identity, Consent, and Cancel Culture

This course explores the perils and possibilities of “pleasure” in a social climate where bodies and pleasures are increasingly sites of suspicion and subject to new normative constraints, regulatory measures, and moral approbation. Our study of pleasure will comprise a sustained critique of identity politics—both alt-right and alt-left—as well as the ways that liberal political commitments to “free expression” have become so highly contested across our contemporary culture wars. Through a reading of key theoretical, literary, and cultural texts, it seeks to better theorize the stakes of identity and informed consent at a time when neoliberalism and hyperindividualism have proven to be morally bankrupt as paradigms of ethical responsibility and free speech/acts.

Specifically, this course hopes to reflect critically on (1) informed sexual consent on campus and in the workplace, (2) the effects of social media and meme culture on identity, (3) cancel culture, and (4) the liberal political investment in “free speech” on campus and in the press. While there has been no shortage of liberal outrage and moral indignation from the Left (it is sometimes ostentatiously “woke”), these made-for-social-media sentiments of fleeting solidarity often conceal the many ways that the Left remains complicit in wider structural inequalities, including racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. If liberal individualism continues to be our basis for understanding pleasure, what might this mean for political action beyond our scripted expressions of outrage or injury? Might we begin to reconceive a politics of pleasure that does not abandon responsibility or consent, but that re-thinks them, first and foremost, as necessarily social and collective endeavours?

ENGL 5207F/4105A: Studies in Old English (cross-listed with LING 4805A)
Prof. Robin Norris

Topic: Introduction to Old English

The oldest form of the English language is known as Old English. After 1000 years of language change, 76% of the most common Old English words are still in use today, and 83% of our most common words are from Old English. In this class, we will explore manuscripts and magic, riddles and runes, as well as the afterlives of the early Middle Ages.

ENGL 5303F/4301A: Studies in Early Modern Literature I (cross-listed with HUMS 4902)
Prof. Micheline White

Topic: Tudor Queens:  Sex, Power, and Writing in the Lives of Katherine Parr, Mary Tudor, Elizabeth I, and Mary Queen of Scots

Renaissance queens have long fascinated the reading public, but their political power and literary writings have only recently become the objects of academic study. In this seminar, students will develop an in-depth understanding of four Renaissance queens who made the most of their unusual social status and made lasting contributions to English culture. In this course, we will explore early modern attitudes towards the concepts of a “queen consort,” a “queen regent,” a “queen regnant” and a “dowager queen,” and we will focus on the four queens’ textual and visual productions including speeches, published prose works, diplomatic letters, poetry, translations, and portraits. Students will be introduced to early modern paleography and book history. Those who wish can also explore digital versions of manuscript writing. We will also consider the depictions of these queens in recent films and TV programs.

Katherine Parr (1512-1548) was the final wife of Henry VIII. Although she is often depicted in popular culture as the woman who nursed Henry in his old age, she was actually a literary powerhouse and one of the most influential religious activists of the 1540s. We will examine her three published literary texts, her narrow escape from being arrested and executed, and her scandalous marriage to Thomas Seymour after Henry’s death.

Mary Tudor (1516-1558) was the eldest daughter of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon. After acceding to the throne in 1553 as queen regnant, she restored England to Catholicism and became famous for overseeing the burning of three hundred Protestants. For centuries she has been vilified as “bloody Mary” and as an incompetent ruler, but current scholars are offering new accounts of her political skills and successes.

Elizabeth I (1533-1603) was Parr’s step-daughter and is one of the most famous British monarchs. As a queen regnant, Elizabeth obviously wielded extraordinary agency and yet her status as an unmarried woman was an on-going concern throughout her reign. Through an examination of her public speeches, private letters, portraits, proclamations, poems and prayers we will consider how she managed her image and how she contributed to important political, social, and literary developments. Recent movies will be addressed.

Mary Stuart (1542-1587) acceded to the Scottish throne when she was only six days old and lived a life plagued by assassinations, political rebellion, and political intrigue. During her sixteen years of house arrest in England, Mary used poems and tapestries to attempt to negotiate with her cousin, Elizabeth I. We will consider Mary’s political strategizing and the afterlife of her execution. We will consider her depiction in Mary Queen of Scots, directed by Josie Rourke (2018).

ENGL 5402F/4401A: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature
Prof. Julie Murray

Topic: Being Human in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Does literature “make us human”?  Since the eighteenth century, such a sentiment has grounded justifications of literature’s exceptional status, and its distinction from other kinds of writing. In this course we will explore how eighteenth-century readers and writers understood their relationship to books and to reading, and how the act of reading a book made readers feel something, or made them “feel human.” We will also consider how eighteenth-century writers explored the question of the “human” or “humanity” precisely by paying close attention to the non-human: to animals and inanimate objects. From gothic fiction, to the harrowing spectacle of London after the Great Plague of 1665, to “it-narratives” in which bank notes figure as central characters in a society transformed by commercial modernity, to horses that speak, to dogs that narrate their heroic adventures, to “monsters” that learn to read, we will examine the fluid boundaries between literary animals, literary humans, and eighteenth-century readers. We will also consider the cultures of feeling and affect, sentiment and sympathy, by and through which they are formed and unformed.

ENGL 5610F: Studies in Contemporary Literature I (cross-listed with CLMD 6903F)
Prof. Franny Nudelman

Topic: Documentary and Crisis

This course considers crisis documentary from 1945 to the present. We will study documentary filmmakers, photographers, and writers who respond to the unanticipated and often incomprehensible crises of their age and, in the process, create new forms of documentary expression. Taking an expansive view of the field, we will consider documentary texts that deal with war, forced migration, climate emergency, poverty, gendered violence. We will ask: How do documentarians represent what they cannot yet fully understand? What role does literary and visual culture play in making disruptive change real? How have documentarians helped to define an ethics of witnessing? How are the methods and aims of documentarians transformed by new technologies and alternative forms of collectivity? Throughout, we will explore the power of documentary to respond to catastrophic events and uncharted social conditions as they unfold.

ENGL 6003: Theories and Foundations
Prof. Grant Williams

Topic: Shakespeare’s Sonnets

This course will survey a range of theoretical frameworks (from book history and formalism to gender and the cultural) by applying them to Shakespeare’s sonnets—the course’s foundational literary text. The sonnets will allow us to digest and internalize abstract concepts and methods, while its criticism, theoretically diverse and innovative, will give us some models of how to put into practice these concepts and methods.

Winter 2023

ENGL 5004W: Studies in Transnational Literatures (cross-listed with CLMD 6102W and MGDS 5002D)
Prof. Sarah Casteel

Topic: Memory and Migration

This class explores the relationship between memory, migration, and aesthetic representation. We will consider the role of particular literary and artistic genres in producing, preserving, shaping, and circulating transnational and diasporic memories. How do writers and artists recover memories that have been disrupted or lost as a result of forced or voluntary migration? How do they negotiate between personal or familial memory and official, state memory? Among the genres we will address are memoir, graphic memoir, historical fiction, photographic portraiture, and landscape art.

ENGL 5606W/4607B: Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature (cross-listed with WGST 4812A/5901W)
Prof. Jodie Medd

Topic: A GOAT in Woolf’s clothing: Reading Virginia Woolf

The actor Jonah Hill recently referred to his co-star, Meryl Streep, as the “.” Streep took it as a teasing pet name, but Hill clarified it was an acronym for “The Greatest of All Time.”

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), in fact, earned the pet name “the Goat” as a child, for her mischievous antics. As an adult, she continued to sign letters to her intimates as “the Goat” or even “Billy.”  This course wagers that Woolf qualifies as a GOAT among English novelists (in Hill’s sense) for her rich, complex and spectacularly experimental literary oeuvre. Indeed, the sharp juxtaposition between her high literary achievements (as The GOAT) and her irreverent humour and life writing (as the Goat) signals the range I hope we will study and enjoy together in this course.

A white, British, upper-middle class, woman, Woolf pushed against the limits of her time and place in ways that made for richly productive paradoxes and a powerful legacy: married, not only were her most passionate relationships with women, but she was also a key member of the “Bloomsbury group” infamous for its ; an admitted highbrow literary “snob,” Woolf also taught at the Working Men’s College and was strongly aware of economic disparities, social inequities, and the contortions of colonial-capitalism; a sharp critic of British imperialism, , masquerading with her friends as Abyssinian Royals to prank British Navy officials; now revered as a ‘canonical’ writer, her experimentalism was only possible because she and her husband started their own press so she would not be beholden to editors; neuroatypical and subject to the psychiatric treatments of her day, Woolf was an informed critic of medical approaches to mental trauma; a passionate lover of life’s beauty and richness, she before the age of 60. Precisely because Woolf was born in 1882 to an upper-middle class household—which she hotly critiqued for its stifling heteropatriarchal Victorianism, not to mention its cover for sexual abuse—she became one of the most eloquent feminist thinkers and experimental writers of the 20^th century.

Indeed, Woolf remains disarmingly relevant today: ; (first, second, third, next wave?) and gender theorist; ; queer studies; ; imperialism; white privilege; ecocriticism; slow time; anti-militarism; new materialism; affect studies; the end times….Chances are virtually any pressing contemporary cultural or intellectual interest can be related to Virginia Woolf. Interested in artistic, literary, and/or historical contexts? Our course invites you to explore Woolf and genre (biography, autobiography, memoir, elegy, the novel, etc.); twentieth-century modernity; modernist style; formations and definitions of modernism and the literary canon; visual art and aesthetics; Bloomsbury and Woolf’s contemporaries; the Hogarth Press and the publishing market; the world wars and the rise of fascism; the history of feminism; history of science; political critique and philosophical inquiry; psychoanalysis and other psychological approaches (then and now)…and more. You will also have the opportunity to explore Woolf’s afterlife and legacies, such as the work of , , , and , among other literary, film, and artistic adaptations and reworkings of Woolf’s work and life.

Seminar members will have the freedom to choose the focus of their research seminar, final paper, and informal written reflections over the term. Our course emphasizes peer exchange and the pleasures of intellectual community; cross-listed between English and Women’s and Gender Studies, this course welcomes enlivening conversations across disciplines and research interests.

ENGL 5900W/4401B: Selected Topic in English Studies I
Prof. Hugh Reid

Topic: The Nature And Uses Of 18^th Century Book Subscription Lists

This course aims to provide students with the context and nature of subscription lists and give students the opportunity for original research in this field.  Initially students will be given a theoretical background to subscription lists and lessons on how the 18^th century book trade worked:  how was paper made, how was type set, how were books printed and bound, what was the role of bookseller, of publishing congers, etc.  The hope is that they will then have an understanding of the trade sufficient to deal with book subscriptions.  Then each shall pick a subscription list to work on.  This kind of work could not have been done at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ in the past because the library’s holdings in antiquarian books was inadequate.  Now, however, we can access almost all the books published in the 18^th century by subscription (some 3,000).  Students may choose any list.  For example, if they are interested in female poets they might chose Mary Leapor whose work was published posthumously by subscription.   In the seminar, they will report on what they have learned and what has evaded them.  As each student reports we will discuss how each may progress.  There are so many things which we can learn from subscription lists and very little has been done in this field in the past.  Some of the topics which may be examined might include the number of female subscribers, the number of people from the mercantile class, the number of members of the aristocracy, or from academia, or the clergy, or other sub groups.  How did this subscription list fit into the publishing industry in the eighteenth century?

ENGL 5900X: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with CLMD 6903W)
Prof. Barbara Leckie

Topic: Co-writing the Climate Crisis

This course offers an interdisciplinary approach to the climate crisis through the lens of co-writing. The idea of co-writing will be treated capaciously: writing through and with other voices, conversations, people, places, and things. It will envision writing as a kind of craft or making in which we think out loud together. With respect to the climate crisis, humans write on and with land and climate; this course will, accordingly, ask if co-writing can broaden our sense of what writing means.The course will approach questions of co-writing via three interconnected categories: conversation; correspondence; and cohabitation. While each of these terms have a bearing on the larger questions of climate and the planetary that the course will address, they will also be approached, more narrowly, in relation to talking, writing, and teaching, respectively. Our discussions will be underpinned by the ways in which ideas of the co-, in general, help us to rethink the individual, the nation, and the land. Overall, we will read the work of Judith Butler, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Achille Mbembe, Anna Tsing, and Sylvia Wynter, among others, to consider more closely how disciplines in the humanities can contribute to climate action.

ENGL 5900Y: Selected Topic in English Studies (cross-listed with LAWS 5903 and CLMD 6xxx)
Prof. Phil Kaisary

Topic: Directions and Dead Ends in the ‘Law & Literature’ Movement

This course critically analyzes themes, approaches, and debates in the ‘Law and Literature’ movement and the related field of ‘Law, Culture, and the Humanities.’ The first half of the course begins by tracing the formation of the ‘Law and Literature’ movement from c. 1965 to the present day, paying particular attention to its goals, situation, theoretical investments, and ideological thrust. Observing that the movement is especially indebted, on the one hand, to liberal humanism, and, on the other, to post-structuralism, we will assess the productive capacities and critical limitations of the field as it is presently constituted. Having established a working knowledge of the field in theoretical and historical terms, we will move to consider the materialist critical traditions of cultural materialism and cultural Marxism, the major thinkers of which are conspicuous by their absence – or extreme scarcity – within Law and Literature scholarship. In opposition to the predominant approaches, we will consider the potential usefulness of cultural materialism and cultural Marxism to a reconstructed and reoriented ‘Law and Literature’ movement. In the second half of the course, we will undertake a series of experimental readings of primary materials (novels, films, legal texts) in an effort to develop a materialist approach to ‘Law and Literature’. The materialist interpretations that we will collectively strive to generate will draw on a variety of secondary readings and will be considered in relation to other approaches that have gained currency in ‘Law and Literature’. The course is open to graduate students in the Department of English Language and Literature and the Department of Law and Legal Studies. No prior knowledge of the field is required.

ENGL 6004W: Approaches to the Production of Literature
Prof. Julie Murray

Topic: The Production of Literary Criticism at the Present Time

This course focuses on the current state of literary criticism as a bellwether of the discipline of literary studies more broadly. We will explore critiques of the discipline from a range of perspectives, including but not limited to: defences of disciplinary specificity in the various returns to form, formalism, and form-as-politics versus the “salvaging” of the discipline seen in recent years in the surging popularity of creative writing programs and the digital humanities; the flight from criticism/critique on view in the form of Latourian “post-critique”; and the current work of “undisciplining” visible in many fields/periods/areas of literary studies in response to the ongoing reckoning with racism, anti-blackness, and the anti-black foundations of the profession as such.

Summer 2023

ENGL 5900S/ENGL 4609A: Selected Topic in English Studies I
Prof. Janne Cleveland

Topic: Performing Activism on Social Media

This seminar course will examine how social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, TikTok become spaces of performance within the context of activism and protest. We will consider how these platforms take on a theatrical dimension, and what the implications are for both the actors and spectators of these activist actions.

ENGL 5900T/ENGL 4301A: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with HIST 4101A)
Prof. Paul Nelles

Topic: Travel & Mobility in the Early Modern World

This seminar explores the experience of travel and mobility circa 1500–1750. The early modern period experienced an unprecedented level of mobility, both within Europe and globally. People moved across space and across distance for all sorts of reasons: the faithful pilgrimaged to holy sites; merchants journeyed to buy and sell material goods; the sick moved for health; diplomats travelled to spy and negotiate; missionaries crossed oceans to save souls; non-Europeans experienced coerced migration in the form of African slavery and the colonial enclosure of indigenous peoples. The seminar considers the social and cultural context of early modern mobility at the local, transnational, and global levels. We also explore the technologies of travel – how did people move from place to place?  where did they stay? what did they eat and drink? what mechanisms, practices, and sites facilitated movement in the early modern period?

The seminar seeks to re-create the material and cultural world of early modern travel. We explore how linguistic and cultural difference were experienced, how travellers made sense of unfamiliar places, social customs, and cultural practices, and the ‘things’ that also moved on journeys. The class pays close attention to the sources that constitute early modern ‘travel writing:’ travel journals, letters, diaries, ship’s logs, missionary reports, and the like.

ENGL 5901S/ENGL 4115A: Culture and the Text
Prof. Robin Norris

Topic: Leaves of Leaves: Plant Literacy and Literature

Plants have been important throughout human history for both reasons of survival and culture. Although plants have been fundamental to mythologies around the globe, today plant literacy is at an all-time low. This class has multiple intersecting goals: to explore plants in literature and culture; to increase students’ plant literacy; to explore the concept of literacy; and to re-evaluate how plant literacy influences our experience of literary texts. One abiding question will be the distinction between nature and the garden. This is an experiential learning course that requires field work to develop plant literacy, and assignments will be designed to bolster the experiential learning aspects of the course.

ENGL 5120S/ENGL 4115B: Book Arts Workshop
Prof. Robin Norris

This experiential learning course immerses students in the practical arts and histories of book production, with its roots in the early Middle Ages. Students will engage in a range of activities representative of the pillars of the book arts, including bookbinding, calligraphy, decoration, and typesetting/printing. Activities may include transcription of manuscript and inscribed texts, reproduction of early medieval bookhand, creating and printing woodcuts and/or linocuts, typesetting and letterpress printing, hand sewing of paper gatherings to create pamphlets or multiple section books, and exploration of manuscripts and early printed books from ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s Archives and Special Collections. The class will be held in the MacOdrum Library Book Arts Lab, where students will work collaboratively with Master Printer Larry Thompson, Professor Norris, and their classmates.

The post Fall 2022-Winter 2023 appeared first on Department of English Language and Literature.

SUMMER 2021

ENGL 5007S/ ENGL 4961A: Studies in Indigenous Literatures II
Prof. Susan Birkwood

“You Say You Want a Resolution”; or, “Weird-Ass Chats with Rabid Dogs”*

In Why Indigenous Literatures Matter, Daniel Heath Justice writes,

Indigenous wonderworks are neither strictly ‘fantasy’ nor ‘realism,’ but they may be both at once, or something else entirely. . . . They’re rooted in the specificity of peoples to their histories and embodied experiences. They make space for meaningful engagements and encounters that are . . . central to cultural resurgence and the recovery of other ways of knowing, being, and abiding. They insist on possibilities beyond cynicism and despair. (154)

Justice includes the example of Eden Robinson’s “classic Monkey Beach” in this discussion. Given the recent publication of Robinson’s Return of the Trickster—some thirty years after the short story “Traplines” first appeared in Prism International—this seems like a good time to engage in a study of a body of work that includes short stories published in the 1990s (among them, the narrative of a serial killer’s child and a tale of dystopian Vancouver), Monkey Beach (2000), and the Trickster trilogy (Son of a Trickster, 2017; Trickster Drift, 2018, and Return of the Trickster, 2021).

*Two of the chapter titles in Trickster Drift

ENGL 5303S/ ENGL 4301A: Studies in Early Modern Literature (cross-listed with HUMS 4902A)
Prof. Micheline White

Topic: Tudor Queens:  Sex, Power, and Writing in the Lives of Katherine Parr, Mary Tudor, Elizabeth I, and Mary Queen of Scots

Renaissance queens have long fascinated the reading public, but their political power and literary writings have only recently become the objects of academic study. In this seminar, students will develop an in-depth understanding of four Renaissance queens who made the most of their unusual social status and made lasting contributions to English culture. In this course, we will explore early modern attitudes towards the concepts of a “queen consort,” a “queen regent,” a “queen regnant” and a “dowager queen,” and we will focus on the four queens’ textual and visual productions including speeches, published prose works, diplomatic letters, poetry, translations, and portraits. Students will be introduced to early modern paleography and book history. Those who wish can also explore digital versions of manuscript writing. We will also consider the depictions of these queens in recent films and TV programs.

ENGL 5900S/ ENGL 4115A: Selected Topics in English Studies
Prof. Robin Norris

This is a student-centred capstone experience for advanced readers that takes a holistic view of the student as self. In Spring 2021, you the reader will become the text, and the culture in question is the changing environment in which you find yourself reading. There will be opportunities for creativity, collaboration, prioritization of process over content, application of learning beyond the classroom, and experiential approaches to reading and writing. We will discuss and apply several new interdisciplinary ideas about narrative, the purposes of reading, self-understanding, and human language and cognition. Sensory and kinetic experiences of text may include reading aloud, listening to text, writing by hand, memorizing a poem, and creating artifacts of self as reader in a variety of contexts. Students may also choose to (re)examine key texts such as: the first book you remember reading, the last novel you enjoyed, a book you’ve been meaning to read, representations of reading, two versions of a beloved text, the arts that have sustained you during the pandemic, a text that has stayed with you from your career as an English student. These conversations will be facilitated by the participants, Megan Strahl (through the Students as Partners Program), and Prof. Norris.

ENGL 5900X/ ENGL 4115B: Selected Topic in English Studies I
Prof. Patricia Whiting

Topic: The Have-Nots in Literature

Before the pandemic, events such as the Occupy Wall Street movement, anti-globalization protests around the world, and continual media references to “the 1%” had the effect of bringing to light the growing disparity between rich and poor, and now, in the pandemic, the disproportionate number of COVID deaths among the poor and unequal access to the vaccine continue to make the news. Although the poor may currently feature more prominently now than formerly in the news, poverty’s brutal narrative of hardship and deprivation on the page, on the screen, and in real life has not only been unremitting, but it has also co-existed alongside a less obvious but persistent myth that the poor are in some ways lucky because poverty saves people from the crushing anxiety and ambition that come with money.

Using fiction, memoirs, and poetry, this class will consider texts about people who are born poor, people who are made poor, and people who choose to be poor. We will examine the causes of poverty, but mostly we’ll examine its effects on those whose lives are shaped by it, with a view toward determining what representations of poverty in literature can contribute not only to our understanding of literature but also to our understanding of poverty in the real world.

Students will have to write on every text in the course, and active, productive participation in synchronous discussions will comprise a large part of the final mark. This is a blended online course.

The post Summer 2021 appeared first on Department of English Language and Literature.