Graduate Courses

• Professor: Katherine Bell
• Day/Time: TBA
• 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: Jing Jing Chang
• Day/Time: TBA
• Location: TBA

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: TBA
• Location: TBA
  

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: Lauren Weindling
• Day/Time: TBA
• Location: TBA

In this course, we will interrogate the concept of love (‘romantic’ and otherwise) in Shakespeare’s canon. We will undertake questions such as: If the Shakespearean comedy definitionally ends in marriage, then is love necessarily its subject? Is love an unequivocally positive value? Is love strictly heteronormative, or is robust emotional intimacy to be found in same-sex friendship? Does love have boundaries, and is some love truly illicit? Or is “all fair in love,” whereby one should obtain one’s desires by any means possible? In answering these questions together, we will have an eye towards contemporary performance and adaptation as well as how these notions of love inform our contemporary cultural imaginary. Or in other words, how has Shakespeare shaped our current notions of love? Some theorists may include the work of Denis de Rougemont, C.S. Lewis, bell hooks, Ann Carson, Octavio Paz, Alain Badiou, and Elizabeth Brake. Shakespearean texts will include (but not limited to): The Sonnets, Venus and Adonis, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love’s Labours Lost, Othello, All’s Well That Ends Well, As You Like It, and Antony and Cleopatra.

• Professor: Katherine Spring
• Day/Time: TBA
• Location: TBA

This seminar examines key methods, debates, and archival discoveries that have animated the work of film historians over the last half-century, from the "historical turn" of the 1970s through to more recent scholarship on media archaeology. Through weekly film screenings and readings drawn from the disciplines of film studies, philosophy, and history, we ask questions such as: How do historians analyze and reconstruct the past for contemporary readers? What patterns of narrative, if any, characterize historical writing? Why do some histories enter a discipline's canon while others remain marginalized or excluded? The first unit, "Principles and Methods," considers philosophies of history and how film historians have appealed to three rhetorical devices - causation, objectivity, and narrative discourse - as they develop their arguments. The second unit, "Debates," examines controversies that have arisen in film historiography over the last half-century, including those concerning teh emergence of nickelodeon theatres in the 1900s, the consolidation of Hollywood's studio system in the mid-20th century, and subsequent transitions to "post-classical" and digital cinemas. The third and final unit, titled "Whither Film History?," introduces examples that expand the boundaries of canonical film historiography. For their final papers, students develop research projects that engage with primary archival resources.

• Professor: Katherine Bell
• Day/Time: TBA
• Location: TBA

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: Tamas Dobozy
• Day/Time: TBA
• Location: TBA

The aim of this course is to consider the intersection of literature, utopianism and music in selected 20th and 21st century works of fiction by writers Eudora Welty, Kazuo Ishiguro, David Mitchell, and Janice Galloway. While each of our core texts emerge from different cultural and political contexts—whether the post Civil-War southern United States, late 20th century Central Europe; various global times zones past, present, and future; or 19th century Europe—all share what Jacques Attali, in his study, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, identifies as the shattering of aesthetic conventions (or their radical reconstitution) in order to "stockpile wealth no longer, to transcend it, to play for the other and by the other, to exchange the noises of bodies, to hear the noises of others in exchange for one's own, to create, in common, the code within which communication will take place" (143). Attali rightly identifies a common utopianism underpinning the musical practices examined by our novels, and this course will explore this commonality while also drawing attention to the considerable differences between authors on the basis of nationality, gender, culture, and historical context, as well as considering other (particularly poststucturalist) utopianisms evident in the works. The course will thus consider the intersection of 20th century theories of the utopian, the aesthetics of radical or avant-garde music-making, and the ways in which literary texts aspire to, counter, and/or further extend the "noise" that aspires to be the "common [. . .] code within which communication will take place."