Graduate Courses

• Professor: Katherine Bell
• Day/Time: Thurs. 8:30 - 11:20
• Location: 3-103 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: Markus Poetzsch
• Day/Time: Wed. 4:00 - 6:50pm
• Location: P331, Peters 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: Mariam Pirbhai
• Day/Time: Thurs. 1:00 - 3:50pm
• Location: P331, Peters Bldg.
  

This course considers South Asian Canadian literatures within the context of what is now more than a century of South Asian Canadian settlement. 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 intersectional minority rights. 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, as well as more recent writing that continues to push the literary envelope. Students can expect to read “South Asian Canadian Literature” as an aspect of Canadian literary studies as well as postcolonial, multicultural, diaspora and other relevant theories.

• Professor: Russell Kilbourn
• Day/Time: Tues. 11:30am - 2:20pm
• Location: BA431, Bricker Academic Bldg.

The course surveys the field of critical posthumanism, exploring specific theories, concepts and debates through the comparative analysis of selected literary and cinematic texts. Addressing the question of what comes after the ‘human’, posthumanism also names the critically conscious attitude that has arisen in the 21^st century in reaction to the continuing legacy of Western Enlightenment Humanism, which manifests most significantly in the figure of the (human) subject. As the basis of the self, in occidental culture at least, the subject is at the heart of most posthumanist critiques, even as it persists as a necessary construct. We will therefore begin by examining the philosophical roots of critical posthumanism and how the critique of Humanist, anthropocentric thinking that privileges mind over body has launched new thinking on the human and its relations to other beings, and other modes of being in the world, together with alternative modes of representation, narration, or mediation. Through a comparative analysis of selected literary and cinematic texts (e.g., works by Samuel Beckett, Marlen Haushofer, and Tanya Tagaq; films by Claire Denis, Alex Garland, Zacharias Kunuk, Denis Villeneuve), we will inquire into the ethical implications of reconceptualizing the human, transhuman and nonhuman alike in posthumanist terms.

• Professor: Ken Paradis
• Day/Time: Mon. 2:30 - 5:20pm
• Location: BA308, Bricker Academic 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 began: the realm we came to call "the supernatural" whose existence was once a taken-for-granted extension of reality, revealed in religion and engaged by everyday practices and beliefs that we came to call "superstition." The contours of the "natural" mundane reality that coalesced over the modern period (and that has arguably eroded over the past half-century) was represented fictively using conventions of literary "realism," while what lay outside of the shrinking and hardening boundaries of the real became the province of something called fantasy. We will explore ways that theorists and critics have looked at literary culture to articulate this moving zone of modern reality. We will also look at how modern and contemporary writers have created fictional worlds of fantasy that not only accommodate cultural desires, anxieties and intuitions that "realism" cannot, but which, by providing visions of other ways of being, enable reflection on the seemingly immutable moral and political order of modern society. 

• Professor: Richard Nemesvari
• Day/Time: Mon. 11:30am - 2:20pm
• Location: BA307, Bricker Academic 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 employed alternative genre elements, such as gothic tropes and sensationalist plot devices, 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 (1895).

• Professor: Philippa Gates
• Day/Time: Tues. 8:30 - 11:20am
• Location: P351, 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. In conjunction with critical texts addressing issues of gender, race, nation, sexuality, and class, we will study novels including Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage, Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Forrest’s Amateur City and watch films including Phantom Lady (1944), Silence of the Lambs (1991), and Bound (1996).

• Professor: Robin Waugh
• Day/Time: Thurs. 4:00 - 6:50pm
• Location: P331, Peters 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: Tanis MacDonald
• Day/Time: Wed. 8:30 - 11:20am
• Location: P331, Peters 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.