Graduate Courses

• Professor: Katherine Bell
• Day/Time: Wed. 4:00 - 6:50 pm
• Location: 1-101A Woods Bldg.

This course introduces students to bibliographic and research methods, theoretical models, and professional skills and issues related to English and Film Studies. The course is required for all MA students, and attendance is compulsory.

Note: The student’s performance in the course will be graded as either “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory.” Failure to complete EN600 or to obtain a grade of “satisfactory” may result in suspension from the MA Program. A student’s final grade for the course will not be assigned as “satisfactory” until a grade of “satisfactory” has been obtained in all of the sessions.

• Professor: Mariam Pirbhai
• Day/Time: Tues. 10:00 - 12:50
• Location: 2-105 Woods Bldg.

Caribbean Women's Fiction immerses students in the literary traditions and cultural landscapes of the Caribbean region and its diasporas. While the course emphasizes 'gendered' readings of the Caribbean, the wider aim is to provide students with a critical and regional overview of Caribbean literature, touching on its recurring tropes and preoccupations, such as the legacy of slavery and indenture; the construct of the island and the tropics in imperial and post-imperial discourse; the cultural economy of Caribbean tourism; and the concept of 'creolization' as a central aspect of Caribbean identities. We will also trace the stylistic and formal innovations found in this body of writing, including 'ora-literary' traditions, historiographic practice and neo-slave narratives, while also engaging in a range of theoretical approaches to the literatures, including ecocriticism, queer, post-colonial, and Caribbean cultural theories. Text selections will introduce students to some of the region's best known figures, such as Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, Shani Mootoo and Michelle Cliff, while also providing a comparative view of the region's literatures from its largest English-speaking nations (e.g., Jamaica, Trinidad and Guyana), as well as English-language works by Haitian, Cuban or Puerto Rican writers. 

• Professor: Philippa Gates
• Day/Time: Mon. 12:00 - 2:50
• Location: P118 Peters Bldg.
  

What happens to a traditionally male genre—the detective story—when women occupy the key position of hero, criminal, and/or author? This course explores women’s subjectivity as author and protagonist, and also the representation of women’s relationship to law and order as detective and criminal in detective fiction and film. While early crime authors worked within the same conventions in the early decades of the genre, the 1940s saw a polarization of gender, genre, and nation as the predominantly male American hardboiled tradition attempted to differentiate itself from the predominantly female British classical tradition. In the 1980s, both fiction and film saw the resurgence of the female-authored and –centered crime stories and in new direction, including ‘dyke noir’ and the criminalist narrative. We will explore literary as well as cinematic examples of the genre in conjunction with critical texts addressing issues of gender, race, nation, sexuality, and class.

• Professor: Robin Waugh
• Day/Time: Thurs. 10:00 - 12:50
• Location: 2-108 Woods Bldg.

This course examines key literary compositions of the Middle Ages that reflect the amazing diversity of attitudes toward sex and sexuality that exist and develop during this 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, powerful religious writings, and several deeply provocative compositions by Geoffrey Chaucer. In terms of topics, the course includes study of knights, prostitution, transvestism, same-sex desire, early Christian saints, mythological heroes, and attempts to regulate sexual behaviours. Approaches will include psychological perspectives, queer theory, and attitudes toward issues of sexual diversity. No previous knowledge of Middle English is needed before taking this course.

• Professor: Ken Paradis
• Day/Time: Wed. 10:00 - 12:50
• Location: 2-108 Woods Bldg.

Over the past several hundred years story forms have struggled to keep up with shifting ideas about where reality ends, and where something else – that realm whose existence was once taken for granted, engaged by superstition and revealed in religion – began, and how these two realms interact.  The “reality” that was coalescing in the modern period (and arguably eroding in the past half-century) was represented fictively, using conventions of literary "realism," and what lay outside of the shrinking boundaries of the real became the province of fantasy.   We will explore ways that theorists have articulated this moving zone of modern reality, and its negotiation in literary culture. And we will look at how modern and contemporary writers have created fictional worlds that not only accommodate cultural desire, anxiety and intuition, but which, by providing visions of other ways of being, also enable reflection on the seemingly immutable moral and political order of modern society.

• Professor: Katherine Spring
• Day/Time: Wed. 2:30 - 5:20
• Location: 4-106 Woods Bldg.

How do historians analyze and reconstruct the past for contemporary readers? What patterns of narrative, if any, characterize historical writing? Why are some histories entered into a discipline’s canon while others remain marginalized? Such questions of historiography form the crux of this graduate seminar on how the history of cinema has been written since the 1970s. We'll consider how historians have appealed to rhetorical devices, including causation, objectivity, and narrative discourse, and we'll examine controversies that have arisen in film historiography, such as the definition and scope of classical Hollywood cinema. Although examples used throughout the course emphasize American cinema of the first half of the 20th century, students will have occasion to develop broad transferable skills, including the undertaking of research of primary sources, the analysis of historical writing, and the development of original historical arguments.

• Professor: Markus Poetzsch
• Day/Time: Thurs. 2:30 - 5:20
• Location: 4-106 Woods Bldg.

Foregrounding the tension between post-structuralism’s over-arching concern with rhetoricity and ecocriticism’s insistence on the materiality of “nature,” this course examines the interplay of nature-as-word and nature-as-world in the literature of the Romantic Era. From a wide array of lyric and loco-descriptive poetry, travelogues, natural histories, guidebooks and journals by writers such as William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Thelwall, Blake, Smith, Burns, Baillie, Shelley, Byron, Hemans, Clare and Ruskin, we will consider the artistic processes that alternately celebrate nature as parent or guide, that attempt to make nature as aesthetic spectacle subservient to human ends, that give nature a distinctive voice and moral agency, and, finally, that signal its unrepresentable otherness, what Timothy Morton calls its “strange strangeness.”

• Professor: Tanis MacDonald
• Day/Time: Mon. 10:00 - 2:50
• Location: 4-106 Woods Bldg.

The act of reading Canadian literature has been from its earliest formulations a process of creating and supporting a national imaginary; however, Canadian literature written since 2000 offers ways to debate the concept of a national literature that was formed as a response to the 1967 centennial of Confederation. How does the literature that has been produced in the twenty-first century articulate a variety of “Canadas”? This course will explore the context of a “CanLit” tradition as a cultural entity and as a commercial product as well as investigating challenges to that tradition.

• Professor: Richard Nemesvari
• Day/Time: Thurs. 10:00 - 12:50
• Location: 4-106 Woods Bldg.

The increasing status of literary realism as the Victorian era progressed was in many circles viewed as both the antidote to earlier forms of “inappropriate” writing, and as a sign that prose fiction had matured and could now be taken seriously.  The focus of realist texts on the psychology of character, along with their emphasis on “believable” events and naturalist description, reassured their audience that they were not wasting time on frivolous reading.  Yet even as realism’s dominance grew, many novelists continued to employ alternative genre elements that demonstrated their discontent with the strictures of “the real.”  This course will explore the ways that discontent found expression in five novels: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1861), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.

• Professor: Ian MacRae
• Day/Time: Tues. 12:00 - 2:50
• Location: 4-106 Woods Bldg.
  

By now it is common knowledge that the planet’s biosphere is changing, but global climate change is only one of nine ‘earth system processes’ in rapid transformation. With our species a global force of nature, climate scientist and geologists have proposed the Earth system is entering a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene. This graduate seminar course interrogates this awareness as its starting point in considering the arts, literature, and politics in an era of climate change. We will contemplate, with Roy Scranton, what it means to die in the Anthropocene, and address what Indian-American novelist Amitav Ghosh calls “the Great Derangement” of our times. But our course, like Ghosh’s book, is a three-legged stool, and if one of the legs is the scope of climate change and our inability to think about it, the other two are our relationships to literature and to politics. If the Anthropocene challenges our sense of what it means to be human, then literature and the creative arts are essential in imagining other forms of human being. In so doing, we will practice the ephemeral arts with Andy Goldsworthy; take up wisdom and metaphor with poet-philosopher Jan Zwicky; consider classical Indigenous literature and the politics of translation; and read memoir, spirits, and dreams with Inuit and settler artists, poets, and scholars.

• Professor: Dr. Katherine Bell
• Day/Time: W 5:30 - 8:20
• Location: TBA

This course introduces students to bibliographic and research methods, theoretical models, and professional skills and issues related to English and Film Studies. The course is required for all MA students, and attendance is compulsory.

Note: The student’s performance in the course will be graded as either “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory.” Failure to complete EN600 or to obtain a grade of “satisfactory” may result in suspension from the MA Program. A student’s final grade for the course will not be assigned as “satisfactory” until a grade of “satisfactory” has been obtained in all of the sessions.

• Professor: Dr. Lynn Shakinovsky
• Day/Time: M 1:00 - 3:50
• Location: TBA

This course investigates selected major Victorian novels of the 1850s. As one of only two countries to evade the revolutionary wave that swept Europe, and having survived the Chartist disruptions of the 1840s, the England of the 1850s appears to be characterised by placidity, calm, and widespread social consensus. However, while the novels of the period may indeed represent the multiple ways in which mid-Victorian culture successfully resists disquietude, disturbance, and change, they also draw on tension, much of it suppressed. Through close analysis of the primary texts, as well an investigation of the economic, historiographical, and historical background of the period, this course will explore topics such mid-nineteenth century ideas of nation; domesticity; sexuality; cosmopolitanism; shifting imperial relations; migration, emigration, and immigration.

• Professor: Dr. Jing Jing Chang
• Day/Time: R 10:30 - 1:20
• Location: TBA

This course focuses on the various impacts of the advent and developments of film as technology, art and politics in the cinematic traditions of such countries as China, Mexico, and Iran, among others. Our main goal will be to examine film going as a modernizing yet colonizing social practice as well as films as cultural documents that mobilized imagination in the processes of nation-building. The modern technology of film brought about a new form of leisure and entertainment, but it also introduced people to new ways of conceiving time and space that were at once violent and disruptive. Informed by issues and problems tackled by such cultural studies and film scholars as Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha and Ella Shohat among others, we will engage in in-depth analytic discussions of primarily non-Western national films in light of tradition and modernity, the urban and rural, women and family, body and sexuality, and colonialism and post-colonialism.

• Professor: Dr. Andrea Austin
• Day/Time: W 11:30 - 2:20
• Location: TBA

This course will consider the cosmetic as cultural product, spiritual ideal, and iconographic practice.  We will progress from a fundamental framework in aesthetics theory, particularly constructions of "the beautiful" in the visual arts, to a social history of the cosmetic, ranging from the cosmetic use of "natural poisons" (such as lead and arsenic) in the eighteenth century to the advent of a corporate cosmetics industry in the nineteenth century and the trend towards "organics" in the late twentieth century. A focus on DIY aesthetics, domestic/corporate and organic/synthetic dialectics, and the ontological significance of being "made up" will inform our readings of the primary course fictions. Selections from print and film texts, and secondary readings in aesthetics and cultural theory, will form our primary readings. This course may also include a field trip.

• Professor: Dr. Mariam Pirbhai
• Day/Time: F 10:00 - 12:50
• Location: TBA

This course considers South Asian Canadian literatures within the context of what is now more than a century of South Asian Canadian settlement, and from the point of view of the multigenerational histories of this diaspora. We will look to writing by South Asian Canadians as part of the Canadian national narrative, and its expressions and contestations of citizenship, accommodation and belonging. We will consider innovations in a range of genres, including the historical novel or intergenerational saga to account for the centennial presence of South Asian-Canadians; experimental poetic works that draw on official Canadian annals including court proceedings and national archives; as well as dramatic or fictional works of political protest driven by contemporary issues and concerns, including the “war on terror,” intersectional minority rights, refugeehood and migration, gendered violence, and queer or trans- identities. As the centennial history of South Asian Canadian settlement suggests, this diaspora has come of age alongside its literary communities comprised of award-winning authors such as Michael Ondaatje, Anita Rau Badami, Shani Mootoo and Shyam Selvadurai, pioneering theatre practitioners such as Rahul Varma or Ajmer Rode, and emergent voices pushing the envelope in literary and new media forms. Students can expect to read “South Asian Canadian Literature” as an aspect of Canadian literary studies and postcolonial, multicultural and diaspora theories, and in light of citizenship itself, as a discursive, legal and symbolic construct.

• Professor: Dr. Katherine Bell
• Day/Time: M 1:00 - 3:50
• Location: TBA

This course offers a critical genealogy of youth; we will study how youth identity is shaped by historical context and we will explore the governing scripts for youth subjectivity in Canadian literature from the end of the 19th century to the present. We will analyze juvenile, YA and adult literature alongside a social history of Canadian youth, and we will draw on feminist, structural, and aesthetic theories of bildung to help us consider how the traits and developmental trajectories of our literary protagonists have been conceptualized in relation to the development of the nation. This relation between youth and the larger body politic is fraught with tension; we will consider the ethical stakes involved in portraying youth as the symbolic concentrate for modernity, and how both literary youth and their 'real' counterparts handle the sturm und drang of societal expectations and ideals. Considerations of race, region, class and sexuality will expand our understanding of the various roles youth have played, and continue to play, in the country's national imaginary.

• Professor: Dr. Jenny Kerber
• Day/Time: T 10:00 - 12:50
• Location: TBA

This course will consider some of the ways that recent Canadian writing engages with the fraught term “nature,” moving beyond traditional themes of wilderness, the garrison, and survival to reflect more overtly “environmentalist” concerns related to phenomena such as pollution, extinction, and climate change. By reading works across a range of genres, and by incorporating insights from interdisciplinary work in the environmental humanities, our discussions will tackle many of the following issues: the relationship between resource-based communities and larger global structures; the connections linking intra-human domination and ecological degradation; the portrayal of human-animal interaction in light of habitat pressures and the erosion of the species barrier; the tension between national literatures and transnational environmental problems; the challenge of representing environmental phenomena that are protracted in time and space; and the potential benefits of bringing an environmental perspective to bear on the forces of colonialism and neo-colonialism. We will also bring questions of language and form to our readings, considering how language becomes a field of ecological relations and the literary work constitutes an environment that responds to the physical world while also being a world unto itself.

• Professor: Dr. Eleanor Ty
• Day/Time: R 10:00 - 12:50
• Location: TBA

Life writing, the recording of the events, experiences, and memories of one’s life or another’s, is a growing academic field of study and encompasses a variety of narrative forms and styles. Some of these forms include autobiography, biography, memoir, diary, letters, illness narratives, and graphic memoirs. This course discusses life writing issues and practices using five 21st century narratives by Asian North Americans. The personal lives of these authors are overlaid by historical events, shaped by notions of American exceptionalism, global humanitarianism, and the belief in the American dream. In their narratives, the authors discuss problems of racial injustice, displacement, loss, migration, gender identities, familial belonging, media and self-representation. A number grapple with illness, the repercussions of war, and trauma. Authors to be studied include Ocean Vuong, Jenny Wills, Lynda Barry and Eddie Huang.

• Professor: Dr. Russell Kilbourn
• Day/Time: W 11:30 - 2:20
• Location: TBA

This course considers the fate of memory in the posthuman era. Although the topic of memory is still an under-explored area of posthumanist studies, it affords unique opportunities for posthumanist inquiry. ‘Posthuman(ist)’ captures the idea of what comes after the ‘human’ and, at the same time, the notion of an attitude that is critically reactive to the legacy of Western Enlightenment Humanism. Through a comparative analysis of select literary and cinematic texts (e.g. works by Samuel Beckett, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, W.G. Sebald; films by Claire Denis, Michael Haneke, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Zacharias Kunuk, Denis Villeneuve), with a critical-analytical methodology informed by selected readings from the canon of posthumanist theory, students will explore the faculty/phenomenon/medium of memory at the 3-way intersection of cinema, literature, and memory studies.

• Professor: Dr. Kathryn Carter
• Day/Time: M 10:00 - 12:50
• Location: TBA

This course explores the popular genre of autobiography. We will investigate whether or not “autobiography” has any real meaning as a generic term or if it is too imprecise, embracing (as it does) everything from oral testimony to carefully shaped memoirs. It includes the very elastic form of the diary, which Virginia Woolf famously described as “some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through.” What counts as life writing? What are the consequences for telling the story of your life? Possible answers to this question will be formulated by considering examples of life writing from those whose lives have been in “the margins,” primarily from the nineteenth century. Possible texts include excerpts from Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie letter, Hannah Cullwick’s diary as a Victorian maidservant, Mary Prince’s History, Susanna Moodie’s memoirs of Roughing it, or Life in the Bush, or the oral testimony of South African Notrose Nobumvu in There was this Goat.