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: Mariam Pirbhai
• Day/Time: TBA
• Location: TBA

This course considers South Asian Canadian literatures in 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 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, such as 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, which includes internationally celebrated figures such as Anita Rau Badami, Shani Mootoo and Shyam Selvadurai, pioneering theater practitioners such as Rahul Varma or Ajmer Rode, and emergent voices pushing the literary envelope. Students can expect to read “South Asian Canadian Literature” as an aspect of postcolonial theory, as well as Canadian literary studies, diaspora studies, South Asian studies, and memory studies.

• Professor: Sandra Annett
• Day/Time: TBA
• Location: TBA
  

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 the success of such strategies more evident than in contemporary graphic narrative adaptations. Since at least the early 2000s, 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 graphic narrative 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: Andrea Austin
• Day/Time: TBA
• Location: TBA

This course examines the genre of cyberpunk from its genesis as a literary genre through its evolution into film and Hollywood blockbuster (although this evolution is itself a matter of debate). We will explore: the genre’s precursors, including science fiction by Mary Shelley and Philip K. Dick; the defining “cyberpunk moment” with works by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Lewis Shiner; and the drift from margin to mainstream with films like The Matrix. We will also consider questions of related categories like “science fiction,” “speculative fiction,” and “postmodernist fiction,” and contextualize cyberpunk against the sociopolitical backdrop of computing technologies and Hacker culture.

• Professor: Richard Nemesvari
• Day/Time: TBA
• Location: TBA

The course explores how, even as realism increasingly became the dominant mode of Victorian fiction, many novelists continued to employ alternative genre elements that demonstrated their discontent with constructed strictures of "the real." The novels discussed are: Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; George Eliot, Adam Bede; Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret, Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure.

• Professor: Philippa Gates
• Day/Time: TBA
• Location: TBA

This course explores women's subjectivity as author and protagonist and also the representation of women's relationships to law and order as detective and criminal in detective fiction and film from the 1880s to today. This course explores what happens to a traditionally male genre - the detective story - when women occupy the key position of hero, criminal, and/or author. Literary and cinematic examples of the genre will be explored, in conjunction with critical texts addressing issues of gender, nation, race, sexuality and class. Consideration is given on how the individual texts can be regarded as a challenge to the mainstream through an emphasis on anti-heroes, gender-bending, and formal stylization.

• 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 and the human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism that this sustains. 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 and anthropomorphic 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, Virginia Woolf, Susan Taubes, Ursula K. Leguin, Elena Ferrante, Tanya Tagaq; films by Michelangelo Antonioni, Shane Carruth, Julia Ducourneau, Michelangelo Frammartino, Spike Jonz, Zacharias Kunuk, David Lowery, Alex Garland, Denis Villeneuve), we will inquire into the ethical implications of reconceptualizing the human, transhuman and nonhuman alike in posthumanist terms.