Graduate Courses

• Professor: Katherine Bell
• Day/Time: W 5:30 - 8:20
  
• 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: Lynn Shakinovsky
• Day/Time: R 8:30 - 11:20
• Location: 1C17 Arts Bldg.

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: Andrea Austin
• Day/Time: W 11:30 - 2:20
  
• Location: BA308 Bricker Academic Bldg.
  

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 Athe beautiful@ in the visual arts, to a social history of the cosmetic, ranging from the cosmetic use of Anatural 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 Aorganics@ in the late twentieth century.  A focus on DIY aesthetics, domestic/corporate and organic/synthetic dialectics, and the ontological significance of being Amade 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; course may also include a field trip.

• Professor: Mariam Pirbhai
• Day/Time: F 10:00 - 12:50
  
• Location: P327 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: Sandra Annett
• Day/Time: M 1:00 - 3:50
  
• Location: BA305 Bricker Academic Building
  

Adaptation is one of the key storytelling strategies of the digital age. According to media scholars, the mass media of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries is characterized by complex adaptation strategies such as “convergence culture” (Jenkins 2006), “media mix” (Steinberg, 2012), and “post-cinematic adaptation” (Constandinides, 2014). Nowhere is this more evident than in graphic narrative adaptations. In the 2000s-2010s, films based on comics, manga, and graphic novels have boomed in popularity, finding favour among mainstream audiences as well as fan subcultures. This course will introduce the historical background and contemporary media theory required to understand graphic narrative adaptations. It will address three major visual traditions around the world: American comic books, Japanese manga, and European BDs. Each tradition will be studied through representative graphic narrative/film pairings, with a close attention to the relation between printed text, drawn image, and cinematic style.

• Professor: Jing Jing Chang
• Day/Time: R 8:30 - 11:20
  
• Location: 3-106 Woods Bldg.
  

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: Katherine Bell
• Day/Time: M 1:00 - 3:50
  
• Location: BA307 Bricker Academic Building
  

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: Jenny Kerber
• Day/Time: T 10:00 - 12:50
  
• Location: 1-101B Woods Bldg.
  

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

This course looks at 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. We will study six graphic novels, as well as read critical essays about the development of the genre. Issues to be discussed include the relationship between image and text; aesthetics and narrative; the use of nostalgia, memory, fantasy; representations of the self, illness and aging, trauma, gender, sexuality, and race.

• Professor: Tamas Dobozy
• Day/Time: W 2:30 - 5:20
  
• Location: P327 Peters Bldg.
  

The aim of this course is to consider the intersection of literature, utopianism and music in selected 20^th and 21^st century works of fiction by writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Ann Patchett, William Gass, and Madeleine Thien. While each of our core texts emerge from or deal with different cultural and political contexts—whether late 20^th century Central Europe; Latin America during the 1990s; the Second World War and mid-century America; or China during and after Mao's revolution—all share what Jacques Attali, in his study, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, identifies as a utopianism underpinning the musical practices examined by our novels. 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.

• 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: Markus Poetzsch
• Day/Time: TBA
• Location: TBA

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: TBA
• 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. 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: TBA
• Location: TBA

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: TBA
• Location: TBA

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: TBA
• Location: TBA

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: TBA
• Location: TBA

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: TBA
• Location: TBA

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: TBA
• Location: TBA

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: Ian MacRae
• Day/Time: TBA
• Location: TBA
  

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.