Undergraduate English Courses 2017/18

This course will focus on novels, plays, and graphic novels that deal with the end of the world. Topics studied will include the collapse of western culture, ecological cataclysm, political dystopias, nuclear holocaust, and zombie apocalypse. Students will be expected, by end of term, to have facility with these different genres, to analyze literary works, and to produce cogent written arguments on selected topics regarding these works.

In addition to the lecture, students are required to attend a tutorial.

In this course, we will focus on the genre of fiction, considering the way writers are influenced by different cultural traditions, literary movements and historical periods. We will also keep a number of questions in mind as we read this genre: What are the major conventions of short fiction? How does fiction “rebel” against these conventions? When does a story lose sight of “reality” and enter the realm of the fantastic or allegorical? What are the building blocks of literary analysis? Readings will include short stories, experimental fiction and novels.

In addition to the lecture, students are required to attend a tutorial.

This course is designed as an intensive reading course that introduces students to the elements of literature and literary analysis through a variety of approaches and texts from different historical periods and cultural contexts. Students will read three novels, written between the 19th century and the present day, a sampling of poetic genres, and several short stories. Each text will provide a different avenue for exploring fundamental questions about literature: What is it? How is it produced? How can it be understood and what is its purpose?

This course introduces students to the conventions and expectations of writing at the university level. Through a variety of writing assignments, including the argumentative essay, the journal article review, and the reflective journal, students will practice skills central to achieving sound academic writing, including planning, drafting, revising, and editing. Students will learn and apply the grammatical conventions fundamental to achieving fluency and clarity in written English, as well as be familiarized with practices of academic citation. Through continuous instructor and peer assessment, this course aims to equip students with the skills they need to achieve strong, polished texts.

Introduces students to poetry and poetics from a wide range of styles and periods, and includes an ongoing discussion about poetry's influence on culture. Ideally, students learn to read formal, stylistic, and rhetorical features in the poems, and to consider the ways that poetry challenges our perspectives on language and delves into enduring questions about how meaning is made. Forms and genres may include the sonnet, lyric, villanelle, elegy, ode, spoken word, ballad, dramatic monologue, prose poem, or free verse. This course encourages students to come to a greater appreciation of the pleasures and rewards of reading poetry.

Category 4

A study of different sports as portrayed in contemporary literature, with attention to both competitive and leisure pursuits. The course will consider poems, stories, songs, novels, and essays, looking at how authors use different aesthetic approaches to write about team and individual sports. Themes to be examined will include: the body as a site of exhilaration, effort, and pain; the highs and lows of spectacle and spectatorship; heroes and anti-heroes; amateurism versus professionalism; sport’s relationship to fantasy, ritual and myth; the role of gender, race, and performance in sports; and connections between sport, nationalism, and other forms of group identity. Authors whose works are likely to be studied include Angie Abdou, Lynn Coady, David Foster Wallace, Carrie Snyder, Sherman Alexie, and Randall Maggs.

Category 3

This course explores a selection of Shakespeare’s tragedies and history plays, with an emphasis on their literary, theatrical and cultural contexts. We will consider Shakespeare’s contribution to the genres of the “tragedy” and the “history play” by analyzing his narrative and theatrical strategies in the context of the early modern period. Along with close readings of the texts, we will focus on the production histories of these plays, drawing on audio and visual resources, to demonstrate how they have been adapted and why they remain so relevant to audiences around the world–in theatre, film, and television.

Exclusions: EN232, EN351

Category 1

This course introduces students to the classic readings in science fiction from the 19^th and 20^th century. A survey of iconic novels and short stories, including 19^th-century tales in which science and technology provide the central extrapolation, political allegory and the utopian scenarios of the early 20^th century, the “golden age” of science fiction between WWII and the cultural revolution of the 1960s, and developments in modern science fiction from the 1960s-1980s. Students will explore the history of science fiction as a genre and its defining literary characteristics and narrative devices, as well as consider recent challenges to the traditions of science fiction, particularly challenges presented from the perspective of gender studies, race studies, and ecocriticism. Texts will include novels, short stories, and critical essays.

Category 4

A study of the development of the crime genre in fiction from 19th-century mystery stories to contemporary police narratives. In this course, crime stories are read and analyzed in relation to questions of gender, class, race, and law and order in the different social, historical, economic, and national contexts that define and shape the various subgenres of the detective story.

Category 4

This course introduces students to American literature of the twentieth century through an exploration of the fiction, poetry, and essays of some of the period’s leading authors – William Faulkner, Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes. Through an investigation of a variety of literary genres and aesthetic forms, we will explore some of the major political and economic forces that shaped twentieth-century American society: capitalism, feminism, race, civil rights.

Exclusion: EN216

Category 3

This course focuses on the creative processes involved in the making of literature, especially fiction and poetry. Using authors' drafts, diaries, letters, and interviews, we will discuss the dynamics of the creative process through examples from historical and contemporary literature, including the effect of collaboration and the impact of events, people, and ideas that influenced the development of the texts. We will concentrate especially on changes the authors made during their revision process, coming to an understanding of the significance of rewriting as a crucial stage in the creative process. Texts may include work by Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, W.B. Yeats, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Erin Mouré, Dennis Lee, Jordan Abel, Nourbese Philip, bp Nichol, and Raymond Carver, among others.

Exclusion: EN209n

Category 4

This course will introduce students to the practice of creative writing and literary analysis by reading short fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction as models for students’ creative writing. The course will include an ongoing discussion of how to read like a writer, and will explore literary genres and creative methods with opportunities for writing practice in short assignments designed to broaden students’ skills and abilities. The dual guiding principles of the course will be examination of how language works in written forms and compositional experimentation with a variety of writing styles.

Category 4

This course will introduce students to the vibrant and still emerging cyberpunk movement in literature and film. The cyborg tends to unsettle all categories of difference, moving beyond the “meat/machine meld” to threaten additional hierarchies, including those of race, class, and gender. Students will explore central literary and cinematic texts of the cyberpunk movement, including foundational works by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Philip K. Dick, and Ridley Scott. Students will also have the opportunity to consider the current direction of cyberpunk fiction in more recent texts, including the phenomenally successful Matrix series and the movement of the cyborg into mainstream children’s fare, as in Disney’s Treasure Planet. Additionally, students will investigate a number of theoretical concepts central to cyberculture, including Baudrillard on the simulacrum, Benjamin and the panopticon, and Benedikt on the architecture of lightness.

Exclusion: EN209d

Category 4

According to Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid Walsh, the tween is commonly understood to be a "construction of the present day"—one that is largely market-driven, defined by commodity culture, and "exclusively or almost exclusively female"(Seven Going on Seventeen 6). In this course, we will consider these claims. What is it about our current cultural moment that has brought this new category into being? How does this category affect literary activity? Why is it gendered?  And if the tween is a market driven category based on the disposable income of 8-12 year girls, then how do we ethically engage with representations of children who lie beyond its purview? We will consider these questions as we explore a diverse range of literature produced for children in intermediate school. Emphasis will be on texts published since the 1960s.

In addition to the lecture, there is an online component.

Category 4

The Romantic Age is generally understood as spanning the years 1780-1840, and this course will consider the diverse poetry and prose produced in the second half of this period by writers such as Lord Byron, Jane Austen, Percy and Mary Shelley, John Keats, Thomas De Quincey, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon and John Clare.  Often in dialogue and occasionally in dispute with earlier writers like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Godwin and Wollstonecraft, the work of second-generation Romantics is characterized by a deep engagement with the supernatural and transcendent, with nature as a source of terror and upheaval as well as consolation, with the role of writing as a tool of social reform, and, perhaps above all, with the life of the mind—the layers and labyrinths of consciousness, the weight of memory and the psychology of isolation.

Exclusion: EN294

Category 2

This course involves the study of British and Irish poetry, drama, fiction, and essays from the turn of the 20^th century to just after the First World War. The texts will be related to social, intellectual, and political life in these decades, including events/developments/artistic movements such as Modernism, the Irish Question, the Women’s Movement, and the First World War. Authors include James Joyce, G.B. Shaw, W.B. Yeats, Charlotte Mew, Cicely Hamilton, and D.H. Lawrence.

Exclusion: EN258

Category 2

A critical and cultural survey of the flourishing of the novel as a literary form during the Romantic and Victorian periods. Six representative works are usually selected for study, with emphasis on form, narrative technique and social context (including class and gender). Authors often chosen include Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Wilkie Collins, W.M. Thackeray, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde.

Category 2.

This course offers a wide-ranging historical survey of the most enduring, influential and controversial critical approaches to literary studies. We will explore such contested territories as classical theory, formalism, historicism, structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalytic theory, gender studies, postcolonialism, cultural studies, post-structuralism and deconstruction.

Exclusion: EN291

Category 4; required for Honours English majors

An examination of literary representations of physical, economic, social and political instabilities and upheavals. The course will consider ways in which transgressive acts against authority of the law serve to interrogate the boundaries between self and other, between a culture's desires and fears.

Category 4

This course offers a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary examination of current human rights discourse through a variety of cultural forms (eg. literature, film, photos, Webmedia, music, legal documents, etc). We will explore a variety of human rights issues such as imprisonment, torture, censorship, women's, children's, refugee rights, modern slavery, environmental rights, genocide and conflict resolution. Activism will be a key class component, as will personal reflection. Summer Reading Suggestions: Ben Jelloun's Blinding Absence of Light, Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation, Hatzfeld's Machete Season.

Exclusion: EN309z

Category 3

A study of poetry, non-fictional prose and drama of 1660-1800, a period that has been described as the age of "tormented reason." This literature is rich in political and social thought, satire, philosophy and sentiment, as well as amatory expression, comedy, and fantasy. Selections of works may include genres such as Restoration plays, mock heroic poems, biography, transcripts of criminal trials, essays, diaries, letters and travel writing, read in their cultural and intellectual contexts.

Students will engage with the literature in traditional ways (presentations, essays, tests) as well as with short online blogs.

Required textbook: Vol. 3 of The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: The Restoration and the Eighteenth-Century. 2^nd ed. Ed. Joseph Black et al., 2012.

Exclusion: EN355

Category 2

This course explores plays written between the 1580s and 1642, when Parliament closed London theatres. These plays explore issues such as the exercise of power in the family and the state, social inclusion and/or isolation, and representations of race and gender. Students will analyze how language, dramatic techniques, and performance practices produce particular intellectual, emotional, theatrical, and political effects. Authors include Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, Webster, Ford, and others.

Exclusion: EN354

Category 1

The Caribbean evokes images of eternal sunshine, white sand beaches, and holiday dream-scapes. But take a different kind of voyage, through the writer’s pen rather than the tourist’s lens, and you will find, in the cross-cultural encounter between peoples of African, Asian and European origin, a vibrant literary tradition energized by an "island" sensibility and imbued with the "muse of history." In this course, students will learn about the various contexts (such as Jamaica and Trinidad), innovations (such as calypso and dub poetry) and major figures of the Caribbean and its diasporas, including Shani Mootoo, Caryl Phillips and Sam Selvon.

Category 3

Industrialisation, increased mobility, and migration to cities ushered in enormous changes throughout the nineteenth century. Through a survey of selected fiction, prose, and, poetry of the Victorian era, by writers such as Dickens, Gaskell, Wilde, and Mayhew, this course will examine representations of the city and urban life, and the ways in which the changing Victorian city shaped the writing of the period. In exploring the Victorian city, we will consider the development of capitalism and the new science of economics, and investigate issues surrounding sex, crime, the law, disease, and class unrest, as well as travel, migration, and empire.

Category 2

In this course, we will study poetry and prose that addresses human conceptions of and engagements with the natural environment. Beginning with foundational questions about what constitutes nature, environment, and ecology—especially as they intersect with human being and dwelling—we will consider the various ways in which writers have framed the natural world, whether as divine bequest, aesthetic object, resource for exploitation, moral teacher, interrelational space, etc. A survey of the history of environmental literature will be combined with a consideration of how contemporary writers are confronting some of the most pressing ecological issues of our time.

In addition to the lecture, students are required to attend a tutorial.

This course will examine works in a variety of literary genres (such as fiction, plays, poetry, graphic novels and others) on the topics of crime and criminality, with the intent of introducing students to literature addressing themes of surveillance, law-breaking, justice, suspense, villainy, violence, espionage, true crime, civil disobedience, and/or imprisonment. Note that this is not a detective fiction course (see EN249: Mystery and Crime Fiction).

In addition to the lecture, students are required to attend a tutorial.

This course is designed as an intensive reading course that introduces students to the elements of literature and literary analysis through a variety of approaches and texts from different historical periods and cultural contexts. Students will read three novels, written between the 19th century and the present day, a sampling of poetic genres, and several short stories. Each text will provide a different avenue for exploring fundamental questions about literature: What is it? How is it produced? How can it be understood and what is its purpose?

An introduction to academic writing, reading, and research at the university level. The course will cover different genres of academic writing such as the book review, annotated bibliography, and research essay, in addition to citation and documentation techniques. Students will gain practical experience through in-class writing exercises and a series of linked assignments. The course includes opportunities for instructor and peer assessment, but will also promote a reflexive approach to writing as a process by helping students develop strategies for self-evaluation and improvement.

This course focuses on strategies for clear and effective communication, with an emphasis on genres of writing related to employment and business contexts. Students will write and revise letters, reports, memos, summaries, and resumes in order to hone their abilities as professional communicators. Attention will also be paid to the links between effective writing and oral presentation, as well as best practices in digital communication.

Non-designated writing course.

This course explores the literary legacy of punk aesthetics in the evolving genre of steampunk. We begin with the foundational cultural moment of punk music and fashion as an aesthetic and political movement, and then consider the defining features, cultural origins, and popularity of steampunk as a literary genre. In particular, we will explore the meaning of the "punk" as a rebellious, marginalized figure and the problem of counter-cultures which subsequently move to the mainstream. Texts may include books, short stories, graphic novels, films, and video games, such as: Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, Scott Westerfield's Leviathan, Kenneth Oppel's Airborn, Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle, and Irrational Games' Bioshock.

Category 4

A study of the ways in which literature of various periods and nationalities functions to criticize its milieu. Emphasis will be placed on the specific socio-historic contexts and ideologies of the period in which the works were written.

Category 4

This course explores the figure of the African child and is great for students considering Teacher’s College. We briefly survey Western representations of the African child, from 18th century discourses to the present-day (e.g., Disney’s adaptation of the Queen of Katwe). More importantly, we delve into African texts such as an African “Harry Potter” and investigate such issues as children in African epics, neo/colonial education, gender and ethnicity, child soldiers, AIDS orphans, immigrant children, sentimentalism and humor etc. Reading Suggestions: Okorafor’s Akata Witch, Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, Evaristo’s Blonde Roots.

Exclusion: EN209j

Category 3

Women writers and women’s writing in a variety of literary genres. Some special attention is given to feminist literary criticism and theory and to reading women's literature through a spectrum of social and political perspectives.

Category 4

Fairy tales are so short, yet their spell seems everlasting. Do fairy tales still enchant you? Do you still enjoy Disney films or fairy tale adaptations (e.g. the musical Into the Woods, the Shrek films or TV series Once Upon a Time)? Do you want to learn something about how fairy tales evolved historically? Finally – are you ready to take fairy tales seriously – via literary criticism? If so, then this is the course for you! Studying a variety of fairy tales (e.g., Perrault, Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen), we will explore how fairy tales evolved historically and continue to impact our lives today, and we will also investigate some of the critical lenses that can be applied to fairy tales (e.g. psychoanalysis, feminism, postmodernism).

Summer Reading: Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber and the original fairy tales that Disney films are based on. (Please feel free to email the instructor, Dr. Madelaine Hron, for selections!)

In addition to the lecture, there is an online component.

Exclusion: EN209r

Category 4

This course will begin with an exploration of J. R. R. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories” in order to better understand the author’s definition of, and approach towards, the genre of fantasy. The remainder of the class will concentrate on a close reading of The Lord of the Rings from various critical perspectives. Some discussion of Peter Jackson’s film version of the text will also be undertaken.

Exclusion: EN309t

Category 4

This course introduces students to some of the significant literary works and the principal historical periods of British Literature, dating from the eighth century to 1660. Students learn to situate literary works within their historical contexts and to trace patterns of influence and ideas that link certain literary works across the various periods. The course also introduces students to some of the important forms of literature, e.g., epic, lyric, tragedy. Possible authors for study include Chaucer, Spenser Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton.

Exclusions: EN122, EN244

Category 1

Through the study of a range of literary works across genres, this course introduces students to British literature from 1660 to the early 20^th century. Particular emphasis will be placed on helping students learn to situate literary works within their historical contexts and to recognize patterns of influence that connect literary works across periods. Authors studied may include Pope, Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Dickens, the Brontës, Woolf, Eliot, and Joyce.

Exclusions: EN122, EN244

Category 2

This course will examine literature by Indigenous writers (mainly from what is now Canada), with a particular focus on key concepts and historical events that have shaped the field of Indigenous Literature. We will consider how Indigenous people represent themselves, their cultures, and their physical environments, as well as how they respond to non-Native representations, looking at expressions that range from creation stories and other orature, to speeches, letters, short stories, poems, plays, and novels. We will also explore stories of resilience and humour that counter the assumption that Indigenous stories are only ever tragic ones. Students will develop skills in commenting critically on these works while also gaining knowledge of the historical, political, and cultural contexts out of which they emerge.

Exclusion: ID280

Category 3

This course involves the study of poetry, fiction, drama, essays and little magazines published in Britain in the twenties and thirties (the ‘interwar’ period). There will be a focus on modernism as well as other major tendencies rooted in the social, intellectual and political life of these decades. Some attention will be given to the development of modern criticism. Key authors include Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Stevie Smith, and Aldous Huxley.

Exclusion: EN258

Category 2

This course examines representative works by British authors published after 2000. Texts to be studied include novels, Andrew O'Hagan, The Illuminations, Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending, Ali Smith, There But For The; a memoir, Alan Cumming, Not My Father's Son; and a YA novel, Frances Hardinge's The Lie Tree. Issues to be discussed include postmodernism, gender, aging, life writing, celebrity, fantasy, globalization, and memory.

Category 2

This course will cover prose, poetry, drama, nonfiction essays, and theory by Canadian women writers from various communities and perspectives. Questions of gender and sexuality, ethnicity, race, and class will be considered alongside contemporary developments in literary theory and practice. We will look at some earlier iterations of women’s writing in Canada to lay the historical groundwork for more recent texts and critical conversations, discuss the challenges women have faced in getting their writing into print, and finally consider some of the ways women writers have pushed the literary envelope by exploring transgressive or unconventional relationships.

Exclusion: EN309r

Category 3

This course brings together the scholarly study and practical application necessary to write literary short fiction. Students will be expected to read, analyze and discuss individual examples of short fiction, both in English and translation, as well as writings by selected authors on aspects of artistic practice and craft, to consider how culture, politics, theory, and technique ultimately come together in given works. A student's mark will be determined through written and oral assignments culminating in the production of a final assignment in the form of a critical exegesis accompanying a sustained and coherent work of short fiction developed from exercises throughout the term. There will be discrete workshopping sessions during class time in which students will have opportunity to share and comment on each other's creative work. As well, this course will offer strategies on being published in journals, and how to properly approach an agent and a literary press. Students will complete the course with a sense of the basic craft necessary to begin writing fiction, and an understanding of the major intellectual and aesthetic currents that have occupied writers of short fiction from the early 19^th century to the present.

NOTE: Entrance to this course is by application only.  Students must submit a portfolio of 6-8 pages of original fiction (i.e., written by the applicant) to Prof. Tamas Dobozy (tdobozy@wlu.ca). Portfolios may be submitted between May 15 and August 15, 2017, and will be evaluated in order of receipt. These portfolios will form the basis of admission to the course.  Upon approval of the portfolio, successful applicants will be given overrides in order to register.  For any further information or queries, please contact Prof. Dobozy directly.

Exclusion: EN331

Category 4

This course examines key non-Chaucerian literary compositions of the Middle Ages that reflect the amazing diversity of that age. We shall examine influential works such as the spectacular medieval mystery plays, the often absurdly comic medieval lyrics, the profoundly moving romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the powerful religious writings of Langland and Margery Kempe, and the deeply provocative romances of Sir Thomas Malory and other writers, both male and female. In terms of topics, the course includes study of saints, knights, mystics, mythological heroes, and exotic beasts such as dragons. Approaches will include attitudes to issues of diversity: race, gender, disability, and religion.

Exclusion: EN352

Category 1

Critical study of change and resistance in later 19th-century English literature (1860-1900), with some emphasis on writings involved in symptomatic critical and public controversies, from the so-called "fleshly school of poetry" (the PreRaphaelites) to the notorious Decadent Nineties and the trial of Oscar Wilde. The exploration of other literary cultures or communities might include the Aesthetic Movement, the pseudonymous "Michael Field" (a collaboration of two women poets), the cult of sensation fiction, and the increasingly sharp tensions between writers and the "Victorianism" of their public readership and reviewers. Authors often selected for study include Christina and Dante Rossetti, George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans), Wilkie Collins, Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Michael Field" (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Lionel Johnson, Oscar Wilde and Thomas Hardy.

Exclusions: EN230, EN357

Category 2

This course will examine canonical works of or relating to the distinctly American art form, Jazz. Students will be expected to develop an historical awareness of the development of the music from its earliest roots in the communal music making of West African slaves, to the significance of the American Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, to Jim Crow, the Harlem Renaissance, the Swing, Be-Bop and Free Jazz eras, including concurrent movements in segregation/de-segregation, civil rights, and the Black Power and Black Arts movements. Students will also be expected to think about how different artistic genres can be bridged or mixed, and what this entails culturally, politically and aesthetically. Finally, students will be expected to contribute the bulk of material vocally to the seminar and to participate fully in the life of the class.

Category 3

This course provides students with an in-depth analysis of the bildungsroman, or coming of age novel. We begin with a brief history of the genre as it takes its form in the later half of the 18th century in response to new notions of "development." We will turn to different definitions of development (personal, historical, economical) as we attempt to understand how the genre charts individual formation alongside, and in response to, notions of social and national progress. While we are interested in the genre as a literary form, we will pay particular attention to the way gender has been represented within its confines. What are the markers of maturation for females in canonical coming-of-age novels, and how are these markers changed and reprioritized as the genre is taken up in various contexts?

Category 4

In this course we will consider some of the ways that writers and other artists have imagined North American border zones, paying particular attention to the promises and limits of continental approaches to literature, culture, politics, and environment. Questions to be investigated include the following: how have projects of nation building affected those living in the borderlands? What kinds of traffic do borders regulate, or fail to regulate? How have experiences of border crossing changed or stayed the same over the last 150 years or so? How does border literature of Canada, the US, and Mexico prompt rethinking of literary models organized along national lines? We will explore these questions by studying a range of works including novels, creative nonfiction, poetry, and film.

Category 4

Writing in the early 1990s, Robert Stam observes that, while “many of the cinematic adaptations of self-conscious novels…incorporate certain reflexive devices, they [often] do not metalinguistically dissect their own practice or include critical discourse within the [film] text itself”. This course brings together recent theories of intermedial adaptation (Grusin and Bolter; Stam; Hutcheon) with the genre of meta-fiction in both literature and film in order to examine the hybrid genre of metafilmic adaptations: films that self-reflexively discuss and include, thematically and narratively, the process of adaptation of the source-text within the film itself. By exploring these metafilmic productions, which encourage the viewer to engage in the (re)construction and/or (re)coding of a particular text, we will expose the metafilm’s subversion of viewer’s expectations of adaptations, and what this suggests about the current state of media literacy and spectatorship. These metafilmic productions expose the destabilization and impermanence of such literary conventions as authorship and genre, as the metafilms explore and discuss which elements should be changed and/or critiqued, while also probing the illusorily hermetic nature of the ‘text’ itself. This new approach to (re)coding texts lies at the heart of current and future adaptation studies, focusing on adaptations that directly engage their respective source texts in an overtly self-conscious dialogue, in order to not only embrace the ‘politics of adaptation’, but also to illuminate the internal structures and components of the films’ literary models, as well as the comparably constructed nature of both adaptation and source-text. The most pertinent questions regarding adaptation theory to be addressed are: What can we learn from adaptive texts that move beyond the standard binary of original and (relatively ‘faithful’) reproduction? How does the process of adaptation influence our understanding of the texts themselves? And, most importantly, what does this notion of ‘self-consciousness’ and the desire to promote active viewership say about our current state as media consumers?

In addition to the lecture, students are required to attend film screenings.