Detailed Course Descriptions

English Studies: Special Topics Courses FALL 2012

ENGL 2206, Gender, Literature, and Culture: War, Gender, and Literature
Group 2
This course looks at some of the roles of war in cultural constructions of gender in the 20th and early 21st centuries. World War Two, in particular, has generated many notable representations of both masculine heroism and masculine barbarism, but it has also influenced the social conditions under which essentialist ideas of femininity and its difference from masculinity have been challenged. The course will look at several works from the 1939-45 period, and will also take up more recent works that re-view WW2 through late 20th- and early 21st-century ideas about gender. The course will invite students to consider implicit or explicit ways in which such recent works bear on current wars, where gendered role divisions seem, for better or for worse, to be less distinct than ever. Texts will include 3-4 novels, some short fiction and poetry, and possibly some films.

ENGL 3037, Studies in Media: Media and Censorship
Group 2
This course considers ways in which technological, social, and political developments of recent decades have affected debates about censorship and about related topics such as the boundaries between public and private spheres. Given that the context of expression (where and how something is uttered, and to whom) inevitably affects its content (what it is saying, and how this is interpreted), how have the characteristics of particular media helped to shape important debates about censorship in the 20th and 21st centuries? A key text will be Paul Hoffman’s The Golden Age of Censorship (2007), a novel about the ethical, philosophical, psychological, and practical problems of film censorship. The course aims to test and complicate the assumption that the effects of the printed word are now necessarily less powerful or less potentially controversial than those of moving images or digital media.

ENGL 3126, Professional Writing for Mass Media: Challenging Popular Forms
Group 3
This course introduces students to the major forms and genres of professional writing for mass media. The focus is specifically on popular forms such as magazine articles, advertising plugs, writing about global issues and political events, as well as personal columns such as “fashion,” “culture,” and “life.” In this course, we study works by established journalists, reporters, literary writers, and non-fiction essay writers, including professional literature on strategy and leadership.

ENGL 3486, Studies in Genre:  The Short Story
Group 1
In this course, students study the origins and development of the short story. We examine the history of the form by beginning with classic early stories and the generic expectations they helped establish. When we turn to contemporary writers, or writers innovate in style or content, we attend to the expansion of generic potential. We also read essays to anchor our own assessments in the critical history of the genre, and occasionally we read what authors say about their own literary practice

ENGL 3606, Studies in Pop Culture I:  Representing Artificial Intelligence
Group 2
In May 1997, a computer named Deep Blue won a match against the world chess champion. In February 2011, a computer named Watson beat two of the best Jeopardy! players; acknowledging his defeat, one player of the quiz show wrote, “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.” What has been imagined, anticipated, and feared for at least a century is now happening: computers are becoming smart. This course studies popular representations of artificial intelligence, including robots and cyborgs. We will talk about the anxieties surrounding intelligent machines. We will study to what extent these digital entities are extensions of the human mind, the human body, and the human condition and to what extent they challenge standard notions of community, class, gender, and identity. The course focuses primarily on science fiction novels and movies, and will include other genres as well. The course may treat such movies as Blade Runner and the Terminator movies and such novels as I, Robot, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Neuromancer.
NOTE:  This course can used as a Digital Humanities elective.

English Studies: Honours Seminars FALL 2012

ENGL 4506, Early Modern Cross-Dressing (Dr. M. Owens)
Group 2; British
What are we to make of a culture that sustains a professional theatre featuring male actors impersonating women while enforcing laws against cross-dressing in all other public places? And why is the performance practice of cross-dressing, which is supposedly invisible to audiences through the combined effects of deeply entrenched custom and willing suspension of disbelief, so often highlighted in early modern plays through the inclusion of cross-dressing as a plot device? In this seminar we will explore some striking ambiguities connected with cross-dressing as a theatrical practice, plot device, literary subject, cultural fantasy, and historical phenomenon.  As we investigate the ways in which early modern drama participated in the cultural construction of gender difference, our discussion will coalesce around some central questions: Does cross-dressing in drama tend to stabilize or destabilize dominant assumptions about gender difference? How does erotic desire figure in narratives of cross-dressing? How do fantasies about transvestism relate to concerns about social class, religion, and ethnicity? In addition to reading early modern plays that feature cross-dressing as a plot device, we will consider Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando and a selection of recent films dealing with cross-dressing in both early modern and modern settings.

Reading List: William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, Antony & Cleopatra, and selected sonnets; Ben Jonson, Epicoene; Thomas Middleton & Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl; Virginia Woolf, Orlando; Anonymous, Hic Mulier; or, The Man-Woman; Anonymous, Haec Vir; or, The Womanish Man; selected critical articles and short prose texts.

Films: Shakespeare in Love, Stage Beauty, Paris is Burning, Orlando

ENGL 4516, The Victorian Fantastic (Dr. R. Breton)
Group 1; British
If “the classic ideal of nineteenth-century realism was ostensibly one of order, coherence, and limitation,” as Stephen Prickett says, what do we make of the Victorian fascination with ghost and fairy stories, mystery and adventure tales, crime and sensation writing, gothic and horror fiction, and so forth?   Running counter to the prevailing realism of the period and an official culture of respectability was a popular craving for implausible, outrageous, creepy, unworldly (and ‘under-worldly’), sexually suggestive (if not explicit), bizarre, violent, and often provocatively repulsive literature.  Why was melodrama, for example, a favoured form for interrogating Empire, domestic norms, sexual standards, and political normalcy?  We will be reading a variety of unrealistic narratives so as to better conceptualize Victorian literary and cultural history.  We will be looking for the political counterparts to extreme and excessive storytelling, theorizing on the ability of the marvellous and supernatural to both confront and consent to the social and cultural status quo.

Readings will likely include (but are subject to change):

• Ghost Stories: Elizabeth Gaskell, “Old Nurse’s Story”; Charles Dickens, “To be Taken with a Grain of Salt”; Sheridan Le Fanu, “Green Tea”
• Gothic Fiction: Bram Stoker, Dracula; Richard Marsh, The Beetle; Sheridan Le Fanu, “Carmilla”
• Adventure Fiction: H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines
• Penny Dreadful: Thomas Preskett Prest, The String of Pearls (Sweeney Todd)
• Sensation Fiction: Eliza Wood, East Lynne (dramatic version)
• Newgate and Crime Fiction: tales from the New Newgate Calendar; William Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard (dramatic version)
• Fairy Stories: John Ruskin, “The King of the Golden River”
• Nonsense Literature: Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
• Utopian Fiction: Edward Bulwer Lytton, The Coming Race

ENGL 4536, 21st-Century Scottish Literature and Culture (Dr. P. Clandfield)
Group 1; British
Since the 1990s, Scotland has been experiencing something of a renaissance, indicated both in vital cultural activity and in growing political autonomy and even the prospect of independence from Britain. In studying a range of contemporary Scottish cultural products—from literary works to film and television productions to music and visual art to urban development schemes—we will look not only at the state of Scotland but at the changing status of Britishness. We will consider works that emphasize the growing confidence of Scots and Scotland, but also ones that take critical account of persistent problems such as crime and economic inequality.

Further, students will be invited, though not required, to consider notable links between Scotland and Canada: aside from the fact that many Canadians have Scottish heritage, both territories have inescapable but complicated and shifting connections to Britain and the (former) British Empire, and both are relatively small nations (population-wise) with powerful neighbours to the south that have at times threatened to overwhelm them economically, dominate them politically, and/or subsume them culturally. For Canadians, thus, looking at Scottish culture may be helpful in defining and preserving our own sense of identity. Yet, looking at a “national” culture such as Scotland’s can also help us to consider the effects of (so-called) globalization on local cultural production, so we will ask how far it still makes sense to see culture (literature, film, art, music, etc.) as originating primarily from specific historical and cultural environments and traditions. For a detailed reading list, students are welcome to contact the instructor during the Spring or Summer.

ENGL 4546, Texts As Work:  The Ergodic (Dr. A. Graff)
Group 3
In Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997), Espen Aarseth used the word “ergodic” to describe a class of texts which make the reader “work,” i.e., that require a “non-trivial effort” to be made meaningful (ergon is Greek for “work”). What is potentially problematic about Aarseth’s concept is that (a) it assumes there are some texts that can be appreciated with merely a trivial effort and (b) cybertext poses conceptually new or different problems/kinds of work for the reader. In this honours seminar, we will seek to better understand “the reader”—a role which cannot be easily defined or fixed—and challenge Aarseth’s assumptions about the comfortably supine reader and magically transparent text. Along with supplementary critical essays, we will read Roland Barthes’s The Pleasures of the Text (1975) to establish the theoretical frame. Literary texts may include Calvino’s If on a winter’s night… or Nabakov's Pale Fire, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Hoban’s Riddley Walker or Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Federman’s Double or Nothing, and Jackson’s Patchwork Girl along with Joyce’s afternoon.


ENGL 4556,  Harry Potter (Dr. S. Winters)
Group 2; British
This course analyzes the Harry Potter novels (1997-2007) through both the critical and cultural debates surrounding them.  Areas of critical inquiry will include the following: generic tensions in the series between quest-romance, school story, detective story, and Bildungsroman; the relationship in the series between Christian myth and historical allegory; the textual treatment of class, race, and gender; the films (2001-2011) as adaptation; the series (books and films) as cultural phenomenon; transformative works (for example, fan fiction, fan vids, parodies, amateur musicals) in fandom.

Students are expected to have read the novels and seen the films before the course begins.

English Studies: Special Topics Courses WINTER 2013

ENGL 2116, Texts and Intertexts: Jane Eyre and Its Intertexts
Group 2
Patsy Stoneman has argued that, with so many “takes” on Jane Eyre, we have an indication that the heroine is “still dangerous enough to need expensive deflation.”  But not all retellings of the novel – and there are many of them – attempt to deflate Jane. Rather, Jane Eyre has become a source of intricate historicism in which gender subjectivities, class boundaries, national identities and literary conventions are revisited and rethought.  In this course, we will read Jane Eyre and a number of novels that remember or recreate the figures and frames of Brontë’s novel in culturally significant ways.

ENGL 3036, Studies in Media:  Digital Anxieties
Group 2
The digital world is vast and dominant. From personal computers and the Web to smart phones and SMART boards, digital technology now invades our lives: for an increasing portion of the population, it is a necessary medium of communication and an essential source of information. Many people agree that the digital world’s impact upon society is significant, though not all agree upon the nature of that impact. Some embrace the digital world as revolutionary and as the beginning of a brighter tomorrow, while others prophesy the downfall of language, learning, individuality, and humanity in general. This course will study reactions to, both for and against, the importance and influence of the digital world and its component media. We will read five to seven books, most published within the past two years, focusing our attention on the arguments being made and the rhetoric used to present those arguments. Our discussions will revolve around topics such as identity, creativity, reality, education, and language. We will have plenty of opportunity to discuss the importance and impact of individual digital media such as the Internet (including web sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia), electronic books, computer games, smart phones, and electronic gadgets.
NOTE:  This course can be used as a Digital Humanities elective.

ENGL 3127: Professional Writing for Digital Media: From Tweeting to Establishing a Professional Online Presence
Group 3
This advanced course in writing for digital media, specifically for the web, examines the ethics of professional writing in the age of Facebook, Twitter, and blogging. While such media platforms constitute an important means of networking, they do not necessarily instigate professionalism. What are the challenges of establishing a professional online presence? Topics of discussion include technology, publishing, manuscript editing, creativity, professional glass ceiling, political activism, and ethics.
NOTE: This course can be used as a Digital Humanities elective.

ENGL 3487, Studies in Genre: Crime Fiction and Beyond
Group 1
This course investigates crime fiction’s tendencies to escape generic boundaries by infiltrating or mixing with works apparently belonging to other genres (fantasy, war) and by displaying qualities more customarily associated with (so-called) literary fiction, such as stylistic sophistication and formal innovation, multi-layered narrative structure, and interest in not-necessarily-criminal matters of social justice or cultural identity (for example). Texts will include novels by widely-respected writers such as Ian Rankin, along with at least one “mainstream” or “literary” novel, such as Ann-Marie MacDonald’s The Way the Crow Flies (2003), a Canadian epic which can also be read as a detective story. For comparative purposes, we will also look at examples of crime fiction which (apparently) remain within traditional conventions. The course will ask students to consider how far generic labels and categories are still actually helpful outside bookstores (and perhaps classrooms).

ENGL 3607, Studies in Popular Culture:  Adaptations, Remakes, and Sequels
It can be tempting to assert that current popular culture is overrun with originality-challenged and tawdry product: reductive adaptations of successful novels, heavy-handed remakes of classic films or television series, endless sequels or prequels to successful movies, shallow cover versions or depthless samplings of popular songs, etc. Yet critics and theorists also point out that cultural recycling is far from a new phenomenon: in A Theory of Adaptation (2006), for example, Linda Hutcheon assesses adaptations and remakes as instances of a principle of repetition-with-variation found perennially at many levels of culture (176). So, one of our main questions will be how to distinguish worthwhile examples of recycling (adaptation, remaking, covering) from exploitative or inane ones. Assignments (including two essays as well as shorter projects) will allow students to adapt the course somewhat to their own interests.

English Studies: Honours Seminars WINTER 2013

ENGL 4517,  Existentialism and Literature: Wide Awake at 3 A. M. (Dr. G. Phillips)
Group 1; British
In this class, we bring together some theories about the nature of being in the world with stories, plays novels and films produced (mainly) in Britain after 1900.  Even though we will really just scratch the surface of texts by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre, be prepared for some heavy philosophy readings in the first part of the course. Still, this is an English Studies course, not a philosophy course, so the majority of the term’s work will focus on the ways in which the fundamental questions generated by these philosophers have been taken up in various ways in fiction. Since fiction is by definition about the nature of being in the world, almost any narrative text involving character and events can be examined through the lens of existential ideas.  However, this course focuses on texts which are more explicit than most in their level of engagement, especially in their concern with some of the “big questions” emanating from philosophy: what does it mean to be human, alive and conscious?  How can humans find an essential meaning in a universe without God? What are freedom and choice?  What is responsibility?  How can we be together? How do we exist apart?  In the first phase of the course, we will explore these questions (along with many others) by reading a selection of introductory essays on each of the philosophers mentioned above, and then by finding evidence of their ideas in the fictional texts which are the primary focus of our study. We’ll begin with early writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Joseph Conrad, linking them with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.  Heidegger and Sartre will be paired with Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard. In the second phase, we will turn our attention to film, such as Mike Leigh’s Naked and novels by contemporary writers such as Douglas Adams, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift and Ali Smith. The questions directing our discussions of these will be drawn from the philosophy introduced in phase one.

ENGL 4527, Theories of the Dramatic Monologue (Dr. M. Plamondon)
Group 1; British
The dramatic monologue is a poetic genre that was created (it seems) simultaneously and independently by Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning. It became an important poetic vehicle during the nineteenth century and then lost much of its prominence during the twentieth century. The genre of the dramatic monologue itself has been difficult to define: it is usually seen as a curious hybrid of lyric and dramatic poetry. It is often a means by which poets explore complex, subtle, and sometimes psychotic personalities. This course will examine a variety of recent attempts to define the dramatic monologue and explain its origins. We will draw upon work from other disciplines such as psychology, gender theory, and opera to help us theorize about the genre. Our readings will include many of the great dramatic monologues of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as scholarly essays by Robert Langbaum, Ralph Rader, Herbert Tucker, and others.  By the end of the course, students will possess a solid understanding of the dramatic monologue genre and the major critical statements about the genre, and they will have read many of the best and most powerful dramatic monologues.


ENGL 4537,  Narratives of Ecstatic Consumption: The Spectacle of Global Dystopia in Contemporary American Fiction (Dr. P. Radia)
Group 1
If the late twentieth century was the century of simulacra, the new millennium ushers in the age of global spectacle and dystopia. This spectacle, as Guy Debord defines it, is “a concrete inversion of life, and as such, the autonomous movement of non-life.”  With the increasing globalization of cultures and borders, the world is not only shrinking, but the human subject is teetering on the edge of life and non-life as technology, the Internet and the cyberspace are redefining the boundaries of humanity, ethics, and being. On the global stage, the body becomes the ultimate commodity, the fetish of ecstatic consumption. In the world of commodity, corporate logic, and make-believe cyborgs, the very notion of identity is turned into a spectacle, yet simultaneously mobilized by the search for the ecstatic, avatar (anti-)forms. What constitutes this grand spectacle? Does the culture of greed and Hollywood romance contribute to the disappearance of the human subject or the rise of the ecstatic body? Through a close reading of selected works by contemporary American writers, we will examine how their fictions respond to these ecstatic dystopias, but also how they challenge and exceed the generic limits of form by blurring the line between poetry and fiction, cinematic production and fictional representation, or graphic novel and theatre. With Don DeLillo and Marge Piercy, we will encounter the human puppet within while Jane Smiley will take us to Hollywood’s finest parties where bliss morphs into nightmare. We will also examine how the racialized spectacle of consumption figures in Mat Johnson’s Pym. We will then explore how the grand American spectacle of consumption is perceived and appropriated by the non-West as we read Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent, Nick Carbo’s poetry/mock novel, Secret Asian Man, and Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker. Last but not least, examining the relationship between the need for spectacle and dealing with global atrocities such as September 11th will be crucial to our discussion of Alissa Torres’s graphic novel, American Widow.

The readings will include the following works:

ENGL 4547: The Art of Sacrifice (Dr. K Lucas)
Group 1; British
This focus of this seminar is sacrifice in theatre and film. We consider its religious, ethical, and political implications in works from three different historical periods—medieval, early modern, and contemporary. We begin with religious drama of the Middle Ages, where the main figures involved are fathers and sons. Our texts are drawn from medieval pageants and include Abraham and Isaac, and The Crucifixion. With Denys Arcand’s film, Jesus of Montreal, we address the continuities and ruptures between and medieval and contemporary Passion. In the early modern period, the sacrificial bond shifts to father-daughter, or husband-wife, and we read plays in which women are subjected to ritualized, often eroticized, deaths. These plays both enact and problematize the sacrificial economy and we will be attentive how and why they do so. The course ends with late 20C plays (possible authors include Friel, Bond, and Kushner), which fuse sacrificial violence with contemporary issues such as poverty, militarism, and the global economy, and at least one film by Lars von Trier. Drama and film comprise our primary material; secondary readings may include theory, art history, body/performance theory, and literary criticism.

Common Sense: the seminar addresses sacrifice in theatre and film; the subject matter is inherently violent, and we deal with text, image, and film.

Possible texts include:


ENGL 4897,  Environments in Contemporary Literature (Dr. P. Clandfield)
Group 1
Literature is obviously about people, but it is also concerned with places and spaces: the specific environments—built or (seemingly) natural—in which people live. This course explores ways in which, and effects to which, physical settings in literary works (and other cultural products) become subject-matter rather than just background. We will consider how recent works address questions such as the following. Can nature be understood separately from culture? What are the dangers of urban sprawl and environmental damage? Should cities be seen as distinct from nature, or as vitally connected to nature? Are architects, developers, and urban planners the unacknowledged authors of narratives that we play out in our everyday lives? Are suburbs restored Edens, sterile purgatories, or something between? What defines a home? What is homeliness, and what generates unhomeliness? In a growing and globalizing world, how are people to be housed equitably and sustainably?

The course will travel some paths mapped by ecocriticism, and will also refer to the work of theorists such as Michel de Certeau, David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre, Doreen Massey, Timothy Morton, Raymond Williams, and Sharon Zukin. A key primary text will be Ian McGillis’s novel A Tourist’s Guide to Glengarry (2003), a seemingly-simple narrative about a young boy’s day in the suburban Canada of 1971. We will consider several additional novels, along with short fictions, poems, and possibly some screen works (film and/or television). Assignments will offer students space to build on their own particular interests within the fairly broad subject area of the course. For a more detailed reading list, students are welcome to contact the instructor during the Spring/Summer or Fall.