Graduate Courses

• Professor: Katherine Bell
• Day/Time: M 8:30 - 11:20
• Location: P331 Peters 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: Jing Jing Chang
• Day/Time: Thurs. 11:30 - 2:20
• Location: P351 Peters Bldg.

This course focuses on the various impacts of the advent and development of film as technology, art and politics. Our main goal will be to examine filmgoing as a modernizing yet colonizing social practice and films as cultural documents that mobilized imagination in the processes of nation-building. Informed by issues and problems tackled by such 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 postcolonialism.

• Professor: Eleanor Ty
• Day/Time: W 8:30 - 11:20
• Location: 3-105 Woods Bldg.
  

An examination of a selection of contemporary graphic novels produced by artists and writers primarily from Canada and the U.S. Emerging from comics books and comics strips, which were perceived as cheap ephemeral entertainment for children and a mass audience, the graphic novel has now gained recognition as a respectable literary genre for adult and young adults. Critical and theoretical essays about the development of the genre are studied alongside the graphic novels.

• Professor: Tamas Dobozy
• Day/Time: T 2:30 - 5:20
• Location: 3-103 Woods Bldg.

The Poetics of "The Troubles" will introduce students to the literature emerging out of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. Although the bulk of the course will be devoted to writing produced during 1968-1998, we will undertake readings published before and after this period pertinent to framing and revisioning the literature emerging from it. Students will be expected to study the history, cultural contexts, and representations (literary, scholarly, theoretical, and popular) that inform what Alex Houen calls the competing "topographies"—"whether of ideology, myth, narrative, modernism, or post-modernism"—that overlay, intersect within, and obstruct dynamic understandings of the period and its conflicts. The Poetics of the "Troubles" will thus engage with the ways in which the myriad and intricate politics of the period came to be embodied in discrete works of literature which were themselves often material contributors to the discourses they emerged out of, responded to, and in turn helped to inform, or, as Ciaran Carson puts it, how they comment on the disorientations of a political moment marked by an "in-betweenness . . . neither / One thing nor the other." The reading list may include writers such as J.G. Farrell, Bernard Maclaverty, Christina Reid, Ciaran Carson, Seamus Heaney, Anna Burns, Ron Hutchinson, Michael Hughes, Eoin McNamee, as well as films such as Yann Demange's ’71.

• Professor: Katherine Spring
• Day/Time: R 4:00 - 6:50
• Location: 1C16 Arts Bldg.

How do historians analyze and reconstruct the past for contemporary readers? What patterns of narrative 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 film history has been written from the 1970s through to today. We consider how film historians have appealed to rhetorical devices, including causation, objectivity, and narrative discourse,and examine controversies that have arisen in film historiography, such as the definition and scope of classical Hollywood cinema.

• Professor: Katherine Bell
• Day/Time: M 8:30 - 11:20
• Location: BA308 Bricker Academic Bldg.

This course offers a critical genealogy of youth; we study how youth identity is shaped by historical context and we explore the governing scripts for youth subjectivity in Canadian literature from the end of the 19th century to the present. We analyze juvenile, YA and adult literature alongside a social history of Canadian youth and we 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.

• Professor: Jenny Kerber
• Day/Time: W 8:30 - 11:20
• Location: P331 Peters Bldg.

This course considers some of the ways that recent Canadian writing engages with environmentalist concerns  related to phenomena such as pollution,extinction, resource politics, and climate change. Our reading of fiction,  nonfiction, drama, and poetry is informed by current approaches drawn from the environmental humanities, and  covers such topics as environmental justice, human-animal interaction, slow violence, the Anthropocene, and the  relationship between local and global environmental problems. We also consider questions of language and form,  considering how language becomes a field of ecological relationships and the literary work constitutes an  environment that responds to the physical world while also being a world unto itself. Among the writers whose works may be studied are Don McKay, Jeannette Armstrong, Marie Clements, André Alexis, Warren Cariou,  Adam Dickinson, and Douglas Coupland.

• Professor: Madelaine Hron
• Day/Time: T 2:30 - 5:20
• Location: 2-101 Woods Bldg.

This course explores the figure of the child in children’s rights and humanitarian discourse. It begins by examining diverse representations of children and childhood and then delves into various rights issues related to children (e.g., child soldiers, child slaves, child refugees, right to education, environment, health, culture, play etc.) The course will conclude by focusing on youth activists (e.g., Malala, Greta Thurberg, Autumn Peltier etc.) and consider future rights (e.g. cloning, robots etc.). Texts studied will be in various genres (e.g., legal documents, memoirs, films, graphic novels, sci-fi/fantasy), and students will be encouraged to pursue their own interests in assignments.