Graduate courses

Summer 2024 - May 21-31st

 

Mess and Method – Maintenance, Repair and Sustainability Edition, 2024 

602.1 GA, Darren Wershler. Read the full description here.  

Please note that the provisional schedule is 9AM - 12PM from May 21-24 (online), and 9AM - 5PM from May 27-31 (in person presence is mandatory.)    

This summer, Dr. Darren Wershler, the Acting Director of the Centre for technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) at the Milieux Institute and a Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Science, will be leading a two-week three (3) credit course on interdisciplinary research at Concordia University. The course will be co-taught with guest faculty Dr. Lai-Tze Fan, Canada Research Chair in Technology and Social Change (Tier 2 SSHRC) and Director of the U&AI Lab at University of Waterloo, and will introduce students to a range of contemporary critical and philosophical approaches to interdisciplinary research. 

Students from diverse academic and experiential backgrounds are encouraged to apply. All are welcome, and no particular technical knowledge is necessary. Guest lectures (to be confirmed) will include talks by Steven J. Jackson, Associate Professor in the Department of Information Science and Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University; and Phil Reilly from Right to Repair. Details about the course offered can be found below.

“There are in fact no [masses] methods. There are only ways of seeing [people] studies as [masses] methods.”

— Raymond Williams, “Culture is Ordinary,” as edited by Jonathan Sterne  

This course will introduce students to a range of contemporary critical and philosophical approaches to interdisciplinary research whose focus is contextual, material and discursive rather than textual and hermeneutic.

The purpose of “Mess and Method” is to encourage students to think about culture in terms of a set of interrelated concepts such as: controversies and messes, articulations, assemblages and networks, materiality, practices and techniques, parallax and incommensurabilities. Many of the texts we’ll be looking at consider some or all of these concepts simultaneously, but they each have their particular strengths.

In this particular instance of the course, our focus will be on the practices and techniques of maintenance, repair, and sustainability. Drawing on readings from across the disciplines, we will be considering how incorporating such practices into our scholarly work requires us to move beyond the comforts of individual expertise and into a kind of collective engagement that Steven J. Jackson calls “broken world methodology” in his influential work, “Rethinking Repair” (a central text for the course).

Program Details:

The course will take place from May 21-24 online and May 27-31 onsite at the Milieux Institute. The first week will occur as an online seminar, and will provide the theoretical context for the practical work during week 2. The second week will consist of in-person (mandatory) team-based work in the Milieux Institute on a series of projects to be determined in the first week. The course concludes with a colloquium in which we will share our research with each other in the form of brief presentations.

All are welcome to apply. The working assumption of the course is that we will all bring different competencies and different weaknesses along with us, which is why the course emphasizes group work and collective thinking.

Registration:

• To enrol, please contact Liz Burgess, the Graduate program assistant at the Concordia Department of English, at grad.english@concordia.ca. Please provide your student ID number. 

• For more information, contact Darren Wershler d.wershler@concordia.ca.

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Fall 2024

Chaucer

608.2 A, Monday & Wednesday, 16:15 - 17:30 , Stephen Powell (period) 

(Cross-listed with ENGL 434.2 A)

Students This course will be focused on the works of Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400), read from multiple theoretical and critical perspectives and contextualized by the examination of medieval texts that influenced his work.  By the end of the course, students will have read and discussed a sizeable portion of Chaucer’s complete works and delved deeply into their own individual research projects—and, if they wish, research-creation or creative projects—that highlight aspects of Chaucer’s work that are of importance to them. 

By confining ourselves, narrowly, to consideration of one individual’s oeuvre, we can dig deeply, but we can also then provide the space for voices from multiple theoretical and aesthetic points of view.  My hope is that that students will feel at liberty to pursue lines of reasoning and projects that approach Chaucer in ways that accommodate their own interests and concerns.  To that end, some of the decisions about primary texts to be read will be made by the class.

The course is aimed at three groups: students specializing in medieval and early modern literature; students with other specializations who are interested in thinking, in depth, about a single author whose works loom large over the history of literary production in English; and creative writers who may find something to learn from in Chaucer’s narrative and poetic techniques and goals—a writer whose distinctive voice, varied stories, and stylistic virtuosity have given him an audience for over six centuries. 

Students who complete the course will be well prepared to teach Chaucer in the undergraduate classroom in a survey course, for example, or an introductory course on narrative or poetry—something some find they dread.  My hope, moreover, is that students will be not just prepared for but will also come to relish such opportunities.  

Students who have read Chaucer before will still find much to learn from this course, but the course presupposes no previous exposure to Chaucer or to medieval texts.

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Slow Time, Fast Time: Media, Technology, and the Pace of Literature 

624.2 A, Thursday, 14:45-17:00, Jonathan Sachs (period/theory) 

Slowness is not a quality that we traditionally associate with the emergence of modernity, which is more generally characterized by a perceived acceleration or speeding up, one commonly instigated by advances in technologies of communication and mobility like print and the railway. And yet fundamental discourses of modernity, including those we now refer to as evolution and geology, emphasize the slow movement of time. This course focuses on the changing relationship between fast and slow as exhibited in the literary production of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century, the moment when the slow time of geology collided with the perceived acceleration of modernity and what Adam Smith called “the hurry of life.” In this context, literary writing can serve as a unique register of discontinuous temporality. Our primary archive will include works by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, Shelley, De Quincey and others. These authors will be read in relation to ideas of earth’s deep history developed by Buffon, Cuvier, Darwin and others and to theorists of media and modernity like Reinhart Koselleck, Hartmut Rosa, Giovanni Arrighi and Paul Virilio. Particular attention will be paid to experiences that complicate the assumption of acceleration, including slowness, deep time, boredom, longing, and nostalgia.

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Shifting (Dis)locations in American Literature and Film

626.2 A, Wednesday, 12:00 – 14:15, Nicola Nixon (period)

Citing a Pew Research Center report, contending that the US “is often portrayed as restless and rootless” but is now “settling down” (with only 11% moving across state lines), Larissa MacFarquhar begins her New Yorker article affirming that portrayal: America, having been “formed by the romance of the frontier,” has citizens who “were for a long time the most mobile people in the world,” unlike those in “most places on earth.” Puzzling over the (statistical) waning of a romance that has historically driven both economic and social mobility in the US, she understands the “sounds of alarm” of non-mobility and asks, “Why aren’t people leaving to find work, or better lives, as they used to?” Here we have, in short, a case of ideologically-driven history: the frontier romance, bulwarking the promise of betterment through migration; and the more generalized mobility romance, undergirding ideals of democratic income distribution, as workers move “mostly from poor areas to richer ones.” But MacFarquhar conveniently disregards all other forms of movement—those, say, of itinerant pickers, hobos, vagrants, train-hoppers, or even cowboys, as if they were not crucial to the economy. As this course suggests, the frontier romance is a convenient as a placeholder, failing to register that mobility in America is simultaneously favoured and censured, mythologised and disavowed, celebrated and hidden. From The Virginian and On the Road, to Wendy and Lucy and Nomadland mobility in the US is only mythologised in certain forms but critiqued in many; we will take up some of them.

Students may also develop research-creation or creative final projects on request.

Potential Literary works:

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Anne Carson, “Just for the Thrill”

William Gresham, Nightmare Alley

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Tom Kromer, Waiting for Nothing

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Joyce Carol Oates, A Garden of Earthly Delights

Jack Shaefer, Shane

Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

Owen Wister, The Virginian 

Potential Films: 

Sam Raimi, The Quick and the Dead

Kelly Reichardt, Wendy and Ludy

Ernest Tidyman, High Plains Drifter

Duncan Tucker, Transamerica

Chloé Zhao, Nomadland  

Potential Critical Works:

Nels Anderson, The Hobo

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Mai Bay, Travelling Black

William Beverly, On the Lam

Todd Depastino, Citizen Hobo

Jeff Ferrell, Drift: Illicit Mobility and Uncertain Knowledge

Henri Lefbvre, The Production of Space

Will Norman, Transatlantic Aliens

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Literature and Medicine across the Long Twentieth Century: Illness, Disability & the Puzzling Body-Mind

628.2 AA, Thursday, 17:45 - 20:15, Omri Moses (period/theory) 

(Cross-listed with ENGL 446.2 AA)

This course delves into the intricate relationship between literature, medicine, and the complexities of the body-mind connection. Traveling through the long twentieth century, we explore narratives of illness, disability, and the enigmatic interplay of the body and mind in literary works that test the legitimacy of biomedicine and explore alternative modes of healing and social acceptance. Our attention to literature will help us see that health, and illness are not only biological phenomena. They are also organized by complex cultural metaphors and narratives. Students will engage with a diverse range of texts, including novels, essays, medical case studies, and critical writings that explore uncertainty, subjectivity, and often challenging experiences associated with ambiguous illnesses and impairments. Students will be given a critical introduction to the health humanities, which examines the social and cultural dimensions of illness experience and seeks to grant a unique role to literature as a historical lens, a source of critique, and a tool of medicine. Writers may include Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, Janet Frame, Ken Kesey, Leslie Marmon Silko, Audre Lorde, David Wojnarowicz, Joan Didion, Esmé Weijun Wang, Anne Boyer, and Lars Horn. Students may also develop research-creation or creative final projects on request.

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Extractivism and African Aesthetics 

666.2 AA, Tuesday, 17:45 - 20:15, Jesse Arseneault (period/theory) 

(Cross-listed with ENGL 454.2 AA)

Legacies of extractivism in Africa saturate our everyday lives but are invisible in their ubiquity. Conflicts over oil resources generate global mobilities, coltan mining sustains cycles of electronic use and waste subtending digital cultures, and the toxins generated by these processes infuse the very air we breathe. Jennifer Wenzel goes so far as to suggest that global modernity and postmodernity could not have been “invented … without the resources of the Congo” (2006, 2). Commentary on extraction increasingly pervades the Environmental Humanities, but it has been central to several decades of African post- and anti-colonial art, theory, and activism. This course explores this location’s longstanding attention to the cultural consequences of extraction, ranging from global cultures galvanized by extractive economies to local artists salvaging aesthetic resistance amid widespread “wastelanding” (Voyles 2015). Our course incorporates elements of critical Anthropocene theory but, because of its tendency “to elide the specificities of site-based, local events of climate change” (Aghoghovwia 2020), our study will revolve primarily around several regions in Southern Africa. Given the continent’s longstanding artistic and activist resistance to extraction, this course centres writers, artists, theorists, and activists in the region deploying imaginative work to frame vital ties between human, ecological, and geological forms as more than mere resource. The course is primarily an investigation into aesthetic modes generated by, alongside, and against extraction, expanding African studies’ frequent political and ethnographic responses to the continent’s artistic movements (Macharia 2016). Course content, while anchored in literatures from the DRC, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, will also consist of an interdisciplinary range of film, conceptual art, and theories of extraction. Course themes will include the aesthetics of waste, petrocultures, mining, the energy humanities, and the “geontologies” (Povinelli 2016) embedded in African aesthetic mode. Please note: students may develop research-creation or creative final projects on request. 

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Race and Place: Environmental Custodianship and Theories of Roots

800.2 A, Monday, 12:00 - 14:15, Cynthia Quarrie (theory) 

(Cross-listed with ENGL 628.2 B. MA students must register under this number)

This course seeks to explore the vexed relationship between environmental custodianship— which often comes from what we think of as an affective or spiritual connection to the land — and narratives of ancestral or autochthonous belonging. The European tradition of rootedness, from the ancient Greek chthon to Heideggerian Bodenständigkeit (rootedness-in-soil), is implicated in the kinds of blood and soil ideologies that underwrite re-emergent neo-nationalisms today. In the North American Indigenous context, however, an analogous configuration of land-based identity has given rise to a very different set of epistemologies and practices, and is the basis for a very different politics; and in the African diaspora of North America and the Caribbean, yet another set of specific histories of displacement is the basis for very divergent notions of belonging and care-taking. 

In this class we will triangulate between thinkers from these three locations to historicise the naturalisation of “race and place,” and to understand the stakes of different metaphors for belonging that emerge from these contexts. We will also spend some time articulating our investments and ambivalences regarding our own personal histories of belonging (or not belonging). And finally we will read fiction that negotiates the slippage between environmentalism and nativism, and that rewrites and/or reinscribes the relationships between people—and their racialised and gendered selves and histories—and the planet.

Authors read will include Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Glen Coulthard, Hazel Carby, Édouard Glissant, Waubgeshig Rice, Mark Rifkin, Tiffany Lethabo King, Sarah Moss, and more. Evaluation will be based on in-class presentations, one personal essay, and a final research paper. There will be an opportunity to turn the personal essay into a longer "research creation" project as a final assignment. 

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Winter 2025

 

Feminist Manifestos

601.4 AA, Tueday, 18:00 - 20:15, Danielle Bobker (theory)   

This course investigates the rhetorical form and political force of feminist manifestos. We will seek to understand the array of revolutionary theories, practices, and actions that have shaped and been shaped by fervid calls for equity in gender and sexuality over the past four centuries while paying close attention to their devastating, invigorating language—their insistent rhythms, intricate ironies, imaginative flights, riffs, rampages, tender dreams, screams, and especially the polemical rigour and power of their demands for education, reproductive rights, clean water and air, for freedom from violence, poverty, racism... Readings will include manifestos by such authors as Mina Loy, Valerie Solanas, Jessa Crispin, Donna Haraway, and Paul Preciado. The anchoring text will be the anthology Feminist Manifestos: A Global Documentary History (NYU 2018) in which Penny A. Weiss (with Megan Brueske) has gathered 150 revolutionary statements from over 50 countries collectively authored between 1642 and 2017. Students will be welcome to develop research-creation or creative final projects on request.

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Early Modern Wonder 

611.4 A, Wednesday, 11:45 - 14:30, Darragh Languay (period) 

(Cross-listed with ENGL 437.4 A)

The modern conception of wonder largely emerges from Renaissance debates about the merit of curiosity.  Descartes still shared the traditional fear that wonder impaired the faculty of moral judgement, especially in the case of women, aligned with Eve’s fatal curiosity.  Yet in Paradise Lost Milton aligns it equally with the appropriate relationship to God’s creation, as when Adam responds to natural facts “with wonder, but delight, and, as is due, / With glorie attributed to the high Creator.”  “Who knows but birds, which under th’azure skies/ Do fly, know whence the blustering winds do rise/ And what a thunder is, which no man knows/ And what a blazing star, or where it goes”?” asks Margaret Cavendish in “Of Birds”, a poem that co-opts the reader into her generative sense of wonder.  Thomas Traherne identifies this receptivity with childhood and urges the preservation of such early “inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful” perception. Such works anticipate by centuries the modern ecological promotion of awe as the impetus for a reciprocating, interconnected conservationism, as when Rachel Carson in The Sense of Wonder ties this “instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring” to childhood. It is the wonder of expansive young Miranda in The Tempest and the aging physician Thomas Browne, whom Samuel Taylor Coleridge commends for transforming the ordinary into the marvelous in “Hydriotaphia”: “Reading nature neither by sun, moon, nor candlelight, but by the light of the faery glory around his own head; so that you might say that nature had granted to him in perpetuity a patent and monopoly for all his thoughts.”  This “faery glory” animates, too, the essays Michel de Montaigne, Robert Hooke’s Micrographia and Michael Drayton’s topographic epic (including William Hole’s phantasmagorical maps) Poly-Olbion. This course will explore the conflicted early modern culture of curiosity and wonder in the diverse work of these and other writers of the period when the revival of Classical learning, colonial first contact, modern science and generic innovation (such as the theatrical pastoral romance, the essay, chorography) impelled now-prevailing discourses of wonder.  

Assessment will be based on participation, a seminar presentation, and a term essay.  Students may also develop a research-creation project.    

Possible Texts: 

Margaret Cavendish, Poems and Fancies, Grounds of Natural Philosophy 

Francis Bacon, “Parasceve” ending the Novum Organon 

Michel de Montaigne, “Of Experience” 

John Milton, Paradise Lost 

Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica and Hydriotaphia 

Robert Hooke, Micrographia

Michael Drayton/Hole, Poly-Olbion\ 

William Shakespeare, The Tempest 

Thomas Traherne Centuries and poems 

Selected secondary Readings: 

Benedict, Barbara. Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry 

Campbell, Mary Baine. Wonder & Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe. 

Cottegnies, Line. Women and Curiosity in Early Modern England and France 

Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World 

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Modern American Animals

625.4 A, Tuesday & Thursday, 13:15 - 14:30, Andre Furlani (theory/period)

The classical canon of American literature abounds in such heraldic animals as the Coyote of Native legend and Br’er Rabbit of African-American folktale, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and E. A. Poe’s raven, the mockingbird of Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and Emily Dickinson’s buzzing Fly, the warring ants of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Mark Twain’s “Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” With preliminary attention to this lineage, the seminar examines post-Darwinian American literary representations of the animal with reference to the rise of ethology, the philosophy of the animal and environmental literature.

The course focusses on modern American writers who depict the kinship between animals and humans, conveying porosity between species, taxonomic vagueness, ontological continuity and rift. The texts invite redefinition of the human through ecologically embedded animal figures that detract from the American humanist strain of possessive individualism. The course also considers what imaginative literature brings to such reconceptualization.

Readings (excerpts and complete works) extend from the desert fauna of Mary Austin’s The Land of Little Rain to the marine fauna of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea; from the Br’er creatures of Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men to the Abenaki animals of Joseph Bruchac’s Thirteen Moons on Turtle’s Back and the Chickasaw environs of Linda Hogan’s “The Bats”; from the huskies of Jack London’s adventure tales to the domestic poodles of Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner’s hunted “Bear,” the circus bear of Saul Bellow and the grizzly of conservationist Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac; from Wallace Stevens’ uncanny Blackbird to Charles Olson’s postmodern “Kingfishers”; from the verse bestiaries of Marianne Moore to Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath; from Vladimir Nabokov’s butterflies in Speak, Memory to the insectarium of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; from the barn animals of Wendell Berry to Lydia Davis’s cows and the horse of Alice Walker’s “Am I Blue.” Students are invited to propose other works.

Assessment is based on participation, a presentation, a short paper and a research essay.

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Late Modernism and World War II: A Comparative Introduction

627.4 A, Monday, 12:00 - 14:15, Stephen Ross (period)

Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, “enriched” by all this. 

-Paul Celan, Bremen Literature Prize speech (1958)

This course offers a comparative introduction to major late-modernist literature in Russian, English, and German written in and around World War II. Taking Paul Celan’s words from the Bremen Prize speech as our starting point, we will examine how literatures produced within the communist, liberal democratic, and fascist contexts mediate the historical abyss of the 1930s and 1940s. Our studies will be divided into three units examining writer-pairs: 1) Soviet writers Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam 2) US poets H.D. and Ezra Pound; 3) German-language writers Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann.

The course is designed for students with all levels of familiarity with literary modernism, the methodologies of comparative literature, and the history of World War II. Given the linguistic diversity of our readings, it will be of special interest to translators/students of translation.

Primary texts include lyric poetry, long-poems, a memoir, and a novel:  

Osip Mandelstam, Black Earth: Selected Poems and Prose (New Directions)

Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope (Everyman’s Library)

H.D., Trilogy (New Directions)

Ezra Pound, Pisan Cantos (New Directions)

Paul Celan, Selected Poems and Prose (Norton)

Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina (New Directions)

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The Tragic Universe: Literature, Philosophy, Politics

635.4 AA, Monday, 18-00 - 20:15, Nathan Brown (theory)

What is tragedy? This is a question for literary criticism and theory, first addressed by Aristotle’s account of the formal structure and emotional effects of tragic drama. But beyond the literary features tragic representations may have in common, how might we also understand the tragic universe these representations bring into being and their capacity to transfigure history and politics? We will approach these questions through key examples of tragedy across its history— from ancient Athens through early modern drama, modern opera, fiction, and cinema. We will study the development of the concept of “the tragic” in German idealism and romanticism, and we will ask how the political implications of the genre are transformed by modern histories of colonialism and slavery, as tragedy becomes a key means of working through histories of revolution and decolonization. 

Texts (provisional)

Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music

Aeschylus, Oresteia trilogy; Sophocles, Theban Cycle

Jean Racine, Andromache in Three Plays of Racine, trans. George Dillon

Friedrich Hölderlin, The Death of Empedocles

Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

Richard Wagner, Tannhäuser; Tristan and Isolde

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo

Aimé Césaire, The Tragedy of King Christophe

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

Chantal Akerman, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Toni Morrison, Beloved

Selected essays on tragedy and the tragic

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Reading for Infrastructure 

801.4 AA, Wednesday, 18:00 - 20:15, Mary Esteve (theory/period) 

(Cross-listed with ENGL 603.4 AA. MA students must register under this number.)

A landfill resembling a “valley of ashes”; a water faucet that an immigrant boy can’t reach and a third rail that nearly takes his life; an ineptly sabotaged hydroelectric dam; a theft of electricity from “Monopolated Light and Power”: all this is the stuff of literary fiction (more precisely, The Great Gatsby, Call It Sleep, The Old Drift, and Invisible Man). It is also the stuff of infrastructure, be it in the form of sanitation and plumbing systems or power generation and delivery networks. When infrastructure emerged in the 2000s as a keyword in literary studies, it primarily designated public utilities which, as Bruce Robbins explains, “unlike commodities,” are “the object of no one’s desire” but nevertheless merit critical attention because their configuration in literary works plays into some of modernity’s keenest concerns, such as government bureaucracy and law, privatization and the commons, capitalism and welfare statism, and postcolonial nationality. Since then, critical infrastructure studies has branched out to address what the editors of a recent volume of essays consider “the flexible and temporally unstable structures that organize biological and social life: the assemblages that ground the living nexus of modernity as an ongoing project of racialization, affective embodiment, and environmental praxis.” 

This seminar aims to introduce students to the conceptual and embodied dynamics of critical infrastructure studies. We will first examine various approaches in literary criticism, anthropology, and social theory, reading essays and chapters by such scholars as B. Robbins, M. Rubenstein, B. Larkin, C. Levine, L. Berlant, J. Wenzel, and D. Alff. We will then consider a few works of fiction—probably M. Hasid’s Exit West, C. Abani’s GraceLand, and possibly D. Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year—whose stories of infrastructural relations have received provocative attention from critics. With these critics’ essays serving as “portable” models of interpretation and analysis, students will ultimately develop a critical paradigm suitable to their academic pursuits. Final research projects will entail applying an infrastructural approach to one or more literary works of their choosing. Alternatively (and on request), students may develop an evaluative analysis of critical infrastructure studies, or a project oriented around research-creation. 

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Creative Writing Workshops

Please note that the creative writing workshops are only available to students registered in the creative writing option of the M.A. program. 

Fiction Workshop – Fall/Winter 2024-2025, 6 cr. 

672.3 BB, Tuesday, 13:15 - 15:30, Sina Queyras

Grounding ourselves in a range of aesthetics and approaches to contemporary prose, we will focus our discussion on identifying and amplifying the most original and vibrant aspects of each other’s writing. Emphasis will be placed on building a sustainable creative practice rather than the mastery of a specific “genre.” Students will develop strategies for generating content, as well as thinking through constraints and forms, building scenes, working with characters, questions of authorial voice and style, creating the grand vision. Authors referred to include: Rachel Cusk, Renee Gladman, Isabel Waidner, Jamaica Kincaid, Sheila Heti, Lydia Davis, Mavis Gallant, Ali Smith, Annie Ernaux, Billy Ray Belcourt and Adania Shibli. 

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Playwright's Unit: From Page to Stage – Fall 2024, 3 cr.

670.2 A, Thursday,11:45 - 14:30, Instructor TBD

(Cross-listed with undergraduate class ENGL 429.2 A. Please note that there are limited spaces for graduate students)  

This course will focus on workshopping your script as if it was scheduled for a production. We will cover all the different aspects involved in getting a play from page to stage, starting with the script itself. 

Over the course of the semester, you will write two drafts of your play. 

An essential component of the Unit is play readings. Each draft will be read aloud (by the rest of the Unit). As a unit, we will work cohesively as a group to support and offer feedback to each other. One of the crucial components of the Unit is peer feedback. In addition to notes/thoughts from the instructor, you will also receive feedback from your fellow playwrights. For the final readings, each playwright will have the opportunity to have their workshop with a guest artist attending, who will give their feedback on specific aspects of playwriting. Some potential guest artists include: actors (who will perform the reading) set/ costume designer, director, Artistic Director and sound designer. In the final class we will discuss how and where to submit your plays and how to write a grant.

NB: You must bring to the class a working first draft. It does not have to be a completed (100%) first draft, but it should be substantial (at least 85% written).

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Creative Non-Fiction – Fall 2024, 3 cr.

671.2 A, Wednesday, 18:00 - 20:15, Josip Novakovich  

In this workshop, you will have the opportunity to write creative non-fiction (personal essays, memoirs, travelogues, profiles, etc.). You will get constructive feedback from your peers which will help you to develop your pieces (or chapters if you want to write a book); and likewise, you will critique your peers’ work. For the paradigms of what’s possible in creative nonfiction, we’ll read The Art of the Personal Essay by Philip Lopate and several first chapters of recently published and reviewed nonfiction books available in the public domain on the NYTBR website, first chapters. Sometimes the line between nonfiction and fiction is blurry—in auto-fiction, for example—and if you are crossing the genres, you are nevertheless invited to join our workshop. We’ll cover some of the practical aspects of where to publish, how to look for agents, writer’s colonies, and the MFA and Ph.D. programs.

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Poetry – Winter 2025, 3 cr.

673.4 B, Wednesday,13:15 - 15:30, Stephanie Bolster

This workshop will draw for its reading list from the interests of the group’s participants. Possible areas of focus for reading, writing, and discussion include attention, erasure, ekphrasis, and process. In the workshop itself, our goal is to create a community of active writers and readers who desire to make conscious macro and micro elements of their own – and each other’s – poetry and poetic practice. Discussions of poems, books of poetry, and/or critical readings on craft, process, and career will accompany the workshop process. Participants should be prepared to provide detailed, considered, and respectful written and oral critiques of each other’s work and to be active in class discussion. We’ll hold a reading at the end of the course. Assessment will be based on a final portfolio of 8-10 pages of revised poetry, one essay or presentation, regular attendance, timely submissions, class participation and preparation, and creative development.

Summer 2023 - May 15-26 

602.1 GA: Mess and Method: Maintenance, Repair and Sustainability Edition 

 “There are in fact no [masses] methods. There are only ways of seeing [people] studies as [masses] methods.”

 — Raymond Williams, “Culture is Ordinary,” as edited by Jonathan Sterne 

This course will introduce students to a range of contemporary critical and philosophical approaches to interdisciplinary research whose focus is contextual, material and discursive rather than textual and hermeneutic.  

The job of “Mess and Method” is to encourage students to think about culture in terms of a set of interrelated concepts: controversies and messes, articulations, assemblages and networks, materiality, practices and techniques, parallax and incommensurabilities. Many of the texts we’ll be looking at consider some or all of these concepts simultaneously, but they each have their particular strengths. 

Our particular theme for this instance of the course will be practices and techniques of maintenance, repair and sustainability. Drawing on readings from across the disciplines, we will be considering how incorporating such practices into our scholarly work requires us to move beyond the comforts of individual expertise and into a kind of collective engagement that Steven J. Jackson calls "broken world methodology" in "Rethinking Repair" (a central text for the course). 

The course will take place over two weeks in May. The first week will occur as an online seminar and will provide the theoretical context for the practical work during week 2. The second week will consist of in-person team-based work in the Milieux Institute on a series of projects to be determined in the first week. The course concludes with a colloquium in which we will share our research with each other in the form of brief presentations. All are welcome, and no particular technical knowledge is necessary; the working assumption of the course is that we will all bring different competencies and different weaknesses along with us, which is why the course emphasizes group work and collective thinking.   

ENGL will be taught by Darren Wershler and Dr. Lori Emerson, Program Director of the Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance PhD at university of Colorado, Boulder, and the founder of the Media Archaeology Lab at UC Boulder.  

Please note that the provisional schedule is 9AM - 12PM from May 15-19 (online), and 9AM - 5PM from May 22-26 (in person presence is mandatory.) 

For more information, please see the here.  

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Fall 2023   

Modern Poetics: Poet's Prose 

603.2 A, Thursdays, 13-15-15:30, Stephen Ross (period) 

(Cross-listed with 801.2 A)

Two formal innovations mark poetry of the past two hundred years as “modern”: poet’s prose and free verse. This course examines the former innovation, defining “poet’s prose” as any practice that releases poetry from its traditional prosodic moorings (the line, the stanza, meter, rhyme) and lays claim to the prosaic (the sentence, the paragraph/prose block, prose rhythm). Why, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, did European and North American poets begin to turn from traditional poetic forms toward prose? What happens to “poetry” when its traditional forms are dissolved or virtualized? We will pursue these and other questions in a range of texts that mark inflection points in the development of poet’s prose over the past century and a half. 

Students may submit a research-creation project in lieu of a final essay, pending my approval

Readings: 

Selections: Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen (1869); Arthur Rimbaud Illuminations (1873-75)

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)

Emily Dickinson, selected letters and poems (early-mid 1860s)

Blaise Cendrars, Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France (1913)

René Char, Leaves of Hypnos (1943-44)

Jack Spicer, After Lorca (1957)

John Ashbery, Three Poems (1972)

Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina (1974)

Nathaniel Mackey, Eroding Witness (1985)

Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (1985)

Will Alexander, Across the Vapour Gulf (2017)

Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal (2020)

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Virgins, Martyrs, Transfolk, Bureaucrats: The Early English Saint’s Life 

608.2 A, Tuesdays, 11:45-14:30, Stephen Yeager (period)

This course will survey hagiographic writing from medieval England. We will explore the origins and permutations of medieval popular devotion to saints cults, identify hagiographic conventions in secular romance and in lived systems of ethical practice, and explore the long afterlife of saints in contexts from popular culture to historiographic methodologies. Readings will begin with Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which is an account of the conversion of the English to Christianity and a work that frequently ventures into hagiographic storytelling. We will then read a series of major medieval saint’s lives in conversation with their conventional hagiographic types, including for example virgin martyrs like St. Juliana and St. Ursula, milites christi or “soldiers of Christ” like St. Edmund the Martyr and St. Sebastian, hermits like St. Guthlac and St. Anthony the Great, trans and genderqueer saints like St. Euphrosyne and Joan of Arc, and effective administrators like Pope Gregory I and Dunstan of Canterbury. The course will conclude with the mystics Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, whose affective piety exemplifies the impact of saints’ lives on later English literatures and cultures. Students will be encouraged to develop research-creation approaches to the material, appropriate to the multivalent networks of texts, practices, and other forms of media and mediation that have attached themselves to saints and their cults from the start of the medieval period to the present day.  

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The Renaissance of Dialogue

611.2 A, Mondays, 13:15 – 15:30, Darragh Languay  (period)

Dubbed a “Renaissance Phenomenon”, the Classical philosophical dialogue was revived and expanded in early modern Europe.  The seminar studies a form that, Virginia Cox notes, has “always presented a challenge to theorists of literature, defiantly straddling , as it does, the boundary between fictional and non-fictional discourse.”  We examine diverse examples of this popular and adaptable form, which was employed to debate art, ethics, education, economics, government, gender, colonialism, ecology, love, language, and more.  We trace why the form re-emerged and became so important at this time.  Along with the revival of antiquity in the Renaissance, the dialogue is an indicator of the ‘oral residue’ in prose described by Walter Ong; becomes a preferred form for the expression of the equally serious and playful; and when read aloud emulated the dialogue performed on stage.  In “The Renaissance Dialogue,” Peter Burke classifies the form in four categories depending upon their degree of “openness”; there is the catechism, the drama, the disputation, and the conversation.  We might ask whether an unclassifiable text like, for instance, Margaret Cavendish’s “Sociable Letters” might fit somewhere on this spectrum.  We consider this chapter in generic history as prose finds ways to borrow from antiquity and the early modern drama in order to extend the scope and diversify the perspectives of discursive writing. 

With reference to Bakhtin’s dialogism and to such recent critical texts as Peter Womack’s Dialogue, we consider the ways in which the Renaissance colloquy opens up a dialogue between alternative sides of a question, just as early modern students of rhetoric were instructed to argue in ultramque partem.  We explore the ways in which rhetoric is invoked not only for persuasion but for inquiry (as Altman demonstrates in The Tudor Play of Mind).  The form could also offer camouflage for potentially subversive beliefs. 

Students may also develop research-creation or creative final projects on request.

Texts may include:

More, Utopia

Castiglione (and the Hoby translation), The Book of the Courtier

Stubbes, The Anatomy of Abuses

Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland

Walton, The Complete Angler

Cavendish, Sociable Letters, Philosophical Letters

Ascham, Toxophilus

Bodin, Colloquium of the Seven About Secrets of the Sublime

Dekker(?)The Great Frost  

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The Anxiety of Confluence: Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop

626.2 AA, Thursdays, 18:00 – 20:15, Andre Furlani  (period)

The seminar examines the emerging conditions of a specifically female form of literary mentorship at American midcentury through focus on Marianne Moore as preceptor and paragon, fostering the talents of Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop while exposing them to the conflicts and contradictions of an inherently paternalistic dynamic.  

The seminar considers theories of precedence, from anxious and agonistic Oedipal rivalry to alternative models of reciprocation and nurture.  The syllabus includes texts that reflect continuities between Moore and her disciples, e.g. poems on the question of the animal and environmental themes, as well as poems that affront the mentor’s poetics, e.g. Bishop’s structurally untidy and Plath’s thematically untidy departures from Moore’s formally scrupulous, reticent, impersonal, and disinterested aesthetic. 

The course additionally considers the poetics and politics of female apprenticeship in relation to often fraught commerce with domineering male coevals; for Moore, these included Ezra Pound, for Plath, Ted Hughes; for Bishop, Robert Lowell.  Students consider, for instance, Hughes’s editorial legerdemain with the Ariel manuscript and Bishop’s rebuke to Lowell’s egregious poetic liberties.  The discrepancies between an intimate, fostering coterie culture, one in which Hilda Doolittle edited and published Moore’s first book, and the contractual commercial print culture that published her second, is examined with reference, for instance, to Moore’s professional relationship (e.g. as editor of The Dial, a chief organ of American modernism) with T.S. Eliot, Plath’s professional relationship with A. Alvarez and Eliot, and Bishop’s with New Yorker editor Katherine White.  The relevant context of expatriation also figures in discussion – Plath’s in England and Bishop’s in Brazil, contrasted with Moore, whose enforced displacement from Manhattan to Brooklyn was long felt as an impoverishing exile.  The course puts Plath’s and Bishop’s work in the context of such relevant contemporaries as Adrienne Rich, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, and Barbara Guest.  We consider a range of genetic, historical, and theoretical criticism to relate the poets to the larger historical situation of midcentury feminism and to modern American poetry more generally. 

Assessment is based on participation, a presentation, a short paper and a research essay. 

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It’s Alive! Life Writing and its Variations

640.2 AA, Wednesday, 18:00-20:15, Marcie Frank (theory)

In this course we explore ways of thinking about the life and afterlives of life writing, narrative techniques for the writing (of) life, and the proliferation of categories around life-writing from the novel to autofiction, both of which draw upon the essay and thus probe the boundaries of fiction itself. The course design is modular, not chronological, with the aim of exploring aspects of these questions close-up and through their instantiation in clusters of related texts drawn from different historical periods and selected for the ways they amplify one another. The aims of the course include investigating the value of literary history in understanding some of the today’s most vexed questions: who can speak and for whom? what kind of undertaking is literary criticism and what forms can it take? how can literary studies illuminate questions of aesthetic value as they do and don’t line up with the expression of personal experience? 

1. In the first section of the course, we examine some of the conditions required for writing the self, as well as some of the conventions to be found in journal writing. Working though the analytic of temporality, we will read: 

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

Stuart Sherman on Defoe in Telling Time

Virginia Woolf’s essays on Defoe in The Common Reader

Woolf, Orlando

“A Room of One’s Own”

Marion Milner, A Life of One’s Own

Thomas Ogden, “On Holding and Containing” 

2. In the second section of the course, we will work though the analytic of technique to examine narrative point of view in:

Montaigne, selections

Defoe, Moll Flanders

Haywood, Love in Excess

Thomas Manganaro, Against Better Judgment

Nicholas Paige, Before Fiction

Dorrit Cohn on the autobiographical contract 

3. In the third section of the course, we will look at techniques of repetition and splitting in: 

James Hogg, Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina

Persons and Things by Barbara Johnson

Being of Two Minds by Jonathan Goldberg 

4.In the fourth section of the course, having read both fictional and non-fictional writing of the self, we will move on more explicitly to address question of genre and the problem of fictionality. We will read selections from Encyclopedia of Autobiography on life-writing, autofiction, and autotheory and critics on fictionality and sexuality including Catherine Gallagher, David Brewer, Caroline Levine, Christina Lupton, Timothy Bewes alongside 

Monkey Grip by Helen Garner + selected non-fiction and diaries

Chris Kraus, I Love Dick and Video Green

Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty and Argonauts

Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People

Annie Ernaux, The Years/ Cusk on Annie Ernaux 

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Losing the Plot

641.2 BB, Tuesdays, 18:00 – 20:15, Kevin Pask (theory)

What is the status of plot in contemporary narrative? The premise of this course is both our fascination with plot and our suspicion of it. In earlier periods—from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century—the word “plot” more often referred to a conspiracy than to narrative action, lending itself to the idea that the literary plot was itself capable of manipulating the reader or viewer. The literary plot also derived from the practice of Renaissance theatrical companies, which borrowed the idea of a “plot,” in the sense of a plot of earth, to map out the action on the stage. All three possible meanings of plot—narrative action, conspiracy, and a plot of ground—intersect in the witty title of Alfred Hitchcock’s last film, The Family Plot. Beginning with Aristotle’s Poetics, we will look at some of the theories of plot as well as debates concerning its significance for narrative fiction. This will include the exploration of the “double plot” in Renaissance drama (theorized by William Empson), interpolated tales in early novelistic fiction, Gustav Freytag’s widely disseminated tripartite model of plot (still used by scriptwriters), and the questioning of the centrality of novelistic plot emerging in debates between Henry James and contemporaries such as Robert Louis Stevenson and H. G. Wells. Narrative theory will be read alongside texts such as Sophocles, Oedipus the King, Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, Henry James, In the Cage, short fiction by Ernest Hemingway and Katherine Mansfield, Agatha Christie, Murder at the Vicarage, Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot, and Rachel Cusk, Kudos.  

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Modern Poetics: Poet’s Prose

801.2 A, Thursdays, 13-15-15:30, Stephen Ross (period)

Two formal innovations mark poetry of the past two hundred years as “modern”: poet’s prose and free verse. This course examines the former innovation, defining “poet’s prose” as any practice that releases poetry from its traditional prosodic moorings (the line, the stanza, meter, rhyme) and lays claim to the prosaic (the sentence, the paragraph/prose block, prose rhythm). Why, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, did European and North American poets begin to turn from traditional poetic forms toward prose? What happens to “poetry” when its traditional forms are dissolved or virtualized? We will pursue these and other questions in a range of texts that mark inflection points in the development of poet’s prose over the past century and a half.

Students may submit a research-creation project in lieu of a final essay, pending my approval.

Readings:

Selections: Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen (1869); Arthur Rimbaud Illuminations (1873-75)

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)

Emily Dickinson, selected letters and poems (early-mid 1860s)

Blaise Cendrars, Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France (1913)

René Char, Leaves of Hypnos (1943-44)

Jack Spicer, After Lorca (1957)

John Ashbery, Three Poems (1972)

Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina (1974)

Nathaniel Mackey, Eroding Witness (1985)

Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (1985)

Will Alexander, Across the Vapour Gulf (2017)

Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal (2020) 

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Winter 2024 

 

Critical Acts

622.4 A, Tuedays, 13-15-15:30, Jason Camlot  (period/theory) 

"Criticism has become a very difficult word, because although its predominant general sense is of fault-finding, it has an underlying sense of judgment and a very confusing specialized sense, in relation to art and literature, which depends on assumptions that may now be breaking down.” This opening comment about criticism in Raymond Williams’s Keywords serves as a useful point of departure for our seminar which will focus on how fiction and non-fiction prose of the Victorian period functioned (or tried to function) as a medium of aesthetic, social, and cultural critique. We will expend critical effort attempting to understand what it meant to engage in critique in the Victorian period and will consider the contemporary relevance of the array of critical stances and methods presented in the course readings. What are the assumptions that make criticism possible as a viable endeavor? What kinds of criticism were being written in the Victorian period? What positions of authority were imagined from which a judgment could be issued? How was such authority signaled with specific discursive, generic, formal, formatic, and stylistic tactics? What is the relationship between criticism as a discreet generically identifiable method, and creative forms (such as the novel) that engage with social and aesthetic problems? How do conceptions of character and the individual figure in social and cultural critique? How did the relationship between social criticism and aesthetic criticism change as the nineteenth century moved forward? How are the methodologies of contemporary literary studies implicated in those of the nineteenth-century critics and novelists who form our object of study? These are a few of the questions we will be considering as we read examples of social, theoretical and aesthetic criticism, critically inclined ("social problem", socially descriptive, and socialist) novels of the Victorian period, as well as contemporary debates about the status of criticism in literary studies. 

The readings we will study have been selected to achieve three main goals: to analyze key examples of Victorian criticism, to engage with contemporary arguments about the function of literary criticism at the present time, and to consider inquiries into the affordances of different of different formal and generic critical forms. Through our engagement with these readings we will study key themes, methods and contexts of Victorian criticism, engage in contemporary debates about the purpose of criticism, and reflect on the affordances of different modes of sharing knowledge so that they can inform our own methods of doing criticism.

Assignments and evaluation:

Assignments will include in-class discussion-leading of weekly readings (with a prepared lesson plan), a prospectus for a final critical act of your own that identifies and justifies the subject, goal, and form of the work to be developed, and the completion of a first draft or iteration of that project as a final seminar assignment. Participation in the seminary meetings throughout the semester will also count toward the final grade.

Readings:

Primary source materials:

• "The People’s Charter" (1837) 

• Thomas Carlyle, “Signs of the Times”

• Friedrich Engels, The Conditions of the Working Class in England Chapters 1-6, 8, 11 

• Henry Mayhew, from London Labour and the London Poor 

• Broadside Ballads, A Selection from Bodleian Literary Broadside Ballads: The Reform Bill, The Pitmen’s Union, The Collier’s Hymn, Success to the Collier Lads, The Pitman’s Dream, The Pleasures of Pay-Night, The Painful Plow/Stood Amid, The Painful Plow/I’ve Been Roaming.

• Ebenezer Elliot, "The Ranter" from Corn Law Rhymes

• Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

• John Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic” from The Stones of Venice

• John Stuart Mill, "What is Poetry?",  On Liberty

• Matthew Arnold, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time"

• Walter Pater, The Renaissance (selections) 

• William Morris, News From Nowhere, “The Lesser Arts of Life”), “The Socialist Ideal: Art”, “How I Became a Socialist”

• George Gissing, New Grub Street

• Oscar Wilde, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism", "The Critic as Artist"

Secondary source discussions of criticism:

• T.W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society”

• Raymond Williams, “Criticism” from Keywords (Moodle).

• Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation"

• Terry Eagleton, from The Function of Criticism 

• Ian Small, from Conditions for Criticism 

• Julie Ellison, “A Short History of Liberal Guilt” 

• Martha C. Nussbaum, “Terror and Compassion"

• Stefan Collini, "Reading the Ruins: Imagining the Future of Universities" [lecture, 1 March 2016].

• Amanda Anderson, “The Cultivation of Partiality” from The Powers of Distance

• John Guillory, from Professing Criticism

• Rita Felski, from The Limits of Critique

• Michael Clune, from A Defense of Judgment

• Sarah Ahmed, Feminist Killjoy, Complaint!

Secondary source discussions of critical form:

• Theodor W. Adorno, "The Essay as Form"

• Graham Good, "The Essay as Genre."

• Erving Goffman, "The Lecture"

• Altieri, Charles, "The Poem as Act: A Way to Reconcile Presentational and Mimetic Theories"

• Charles Bernstein, "Artifice of Absorption" from A Poetics

• Hannah McGregor and Stacey Copeland, "Why Podcast? Podcasting as Publishing, Sound-Based Scholarship, and Making Podcasts Count." 

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Romanticism, Ecocriticism, and the Anthropocene

623.4 B, Wednesdays, 13-15-15:30, Jonathan Sachs (theory/period)

What is at stake in the relationship of Romantic writing to nature and the environment? How did ecological crises in late eighteenth-century Europe shape Romantic thinking? How does Romantic writing present the human engagement with nonhuman nature? These questions are important because Romantic poetry is often conflated with nature poetry, and Romantic ecocriticism frequently finds the roots of the environmental movement in the Romantics’ emphasis on nature. The transition to industrial capitalism and related demographic movement to cities certainly inflected literary practices at this pivotal moment, as Raymond Williams, John Barrell, and Leo Marx among others have shown. Further, recent work on the “Anthropocene,” an epoch framed by the effect of human activity on atmospheric and geological transformations, commonly locates the destabilization of nature in the technological, demographic, and economic changes that we associate with Romanticism. Bearing these concerns in mind, this course will survey the intersections between Romanticism, ecocriticism, and the idea of the Anthropocene. Critical work on ecocriticism and the anthropocene will be read alongside literary works by Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, John Clare, John Keats, Shelley, Byron, and others. We will pay particular attention to how changing ideas of “nature” inflect questions of futurity, continuity, and the spatial and temporal scales through which Romantic writers and subsequent critics understand both historical and everyday experience.

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Literature of Disability: Neurodiversity and Modernism

625.4 AA, Tuesdays, 18:00 – 20:15, Omri Moses (theory/period)

This course will use modernist literature as a springboard to consider the psychological, social, ethical, and experiential dimensions of disability, particularly cognitive disability. Through the analysis of novels, poems, short stories, and non-fiction, we will consider the way that bodily experiences, material conditions, and cultural constructions of normalcy shape our understanding of the self in sickness and health. Rather than taking “disability” as a reliable category, we will be giving scrutiny to different ways of classifying and conceptualizing unconventional body-minds, seeking to historicize the eventual political dominance of the term “disability.” To this end, we will be working through the latest iteration of the Disability Studies Reader. As we wrap up the course, we may also examine the legacy of modernist rhetorics of disability in contemporary memoir and autofiction, two important genres of our time. Writers may include William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Jean Toomer, Samuel Beckett, Eudora Welty, and others. Students may also develop research-creation or creative final projects on request. 

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Heavy Weather

626.4 B, Mondays, 13:15-15:30, Nicola Nixon (theory/period)

Although weather has featured in texts for millennia, often (though not exclusively) in the form of pathetic fallacy, metaphor, or symbol—so much so that Mark Twain would begin his 1892novel, The American Claimant, with the announcement that “No weather will be found in this book”—there is a shift, in an increasingly secularized twentieth century, to a representation of weather as something other than a reflection, extension, or divine intervention/judgement. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick points out, in her reading of Proust, what emerges is a recognition of the interplay between the unacknowledged “cyclical economy” of weather and its fully “unpredictable contingency.” How various authors and filmmakers manage this accidental contingency (in forms that are always fully scripted) is the focus of this course, emphasizing not only representations of what Sedgwick calls the “psychology of surprise” but also the ways in which artists play with (or against) expectations about the textual or visual import of weather.

Possible Texts:  

Jacques Demy, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

Nella Larsen, Passing

Fernanda Melchor, Hurricane Season

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Possible Criticism:

Sharae Deckard, “The Political Ecology of Storms in Caribbean Literature”

James Fleming, Fixing the Sky

Matthew Gumpert, The End of Meaning

Alexandra Harris, Weatherland

Kristi McKim, Cinema as Weather

Bernard Mergen, Weather Matters

Sydney Miller, Weather Ex-Machina

Katherine Schulz, “Writers in the Storm”

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Weather in Proust 

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Early German Romanticism and Literary Theory

645.4 AA, Thursdays, 18-00-20:15, Nathan Brown (theory/period)

Between the years 1797-1801, a remarkable group of German thinkers working between philosophy and literature developed new concepts of poetry and criticism, along with new forms of theoretical activity. Through their short-lived but enduringly influential journal, Athenaeum, Friedrich Schlegel’s circle in Jena sought to articulate a theory and practice of romantische Poesie as the ground of all the arts, of the sciences, and of ethical life, inventing new kinds of critical and speculative writing in accordance with this “romantic imperative.” Relayed in key texts by Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot, the project of the Jena romantics would become tremendously influential in the development of what we know as “theory” in the second half of the twentieth century. In this seminar, we will retrace this lineage and its theoretical consequences – particularly as these bear upon the concept of literature and the theoretical exchange between French deconstruction and German hermeneutics. 

Tentative Texts

Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments; Dialogue on Poetry

Novalis, Philosophical Writings; Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia

August Wilhelm Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (selections)

Friedrich Schliermacher, General Hermeneutics

Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, School for Aesthetics (selections) 

 

Walter Benjamin, The Concept of Criticism in Early German Romanticism

Maurice Blanchot, “The Athenaeum”

Peter Szondi, On Textual Understanding and Other Essays (selections)

Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Literary Absolute

Werner Hamacher, Premises (“Hermeneutic Ellipses”; “Position Exposed”)

Audrey Wasser, The Work of Difference (selections)

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New Methods of Scholarly Publishing: The Podcast

662.4 A, Thursdays, 14-45-17:00, Katherine McLeod (theory/period)

In this graduate course, students collaboratively devise a peer-review process for podcasting as scholarship. Students read and evaluate criticism on scholarly podcasts (McGregor and Copeland); debate the effectiveness of open or closed peer-review in relation to forums for publishing literary criticism in Canada (McGregor and McMenemy on open review of podcasts; Ross-Hellauer and Görögh on open review of print journals); consider what counts as scholarship and what this means for graduate education (Alperin; Fitzpatrick); and act as peer-reviewers themselves for their own class projects. These class projects will take the form of written essays with audio clips or full podcast episodes with writing and editing as part of the production process. Research creation and creative approaches to these projects will be encouraged. As a graduate course in Canadian literature, the content of these final projects will relate to audio-focused texts and literary audio recordings produced in Canadian literary contexts (Jordan Abel; Oana Avasilichioaei; Billy-Ray Belcourt; Dionne Brand; Kit Dobson; Larissa Lai; Lee Maracle; Dylan Robinson, Fred Wah, Phyllis Webb, among others). Drawing upon episodes from The SpokenWeb Podcast, among other literary podcasts, the course teaches podcasts as literary audio (with comparisons to poetry readings, audiobooks, oral history interviews, and radio). Topics covered in examining literary podcasts may include methods of literary listening, contextualizing archival audio, analysis of sonic forms and formats, media affordances, gendered voice, ethics of editing, and transcription. The course involves hands-on work with audio but does not require any prerequisites for audio production since skills in scripting, recording, voicing, and basic audio editing are all integrated into the course design. The scholarship produced through this course aims to critically engage with our world otherwise, with strategies such as feminist audio editing and practising an ethics of care in editorial processes. By combining innovations in scholarly publishing with new approaches to literary audio in the podcast format, the course explores how scholarship about literature can most effectively – and affectively – respond to the challenges of our time. 

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Critical Humour Studies 

668.4 AA, Mondays, 18:00 – 20:15, Danielle Bobker (theory)

This course aims to help you become a sharper and more sensitive critic of funny things – whether you encounter them in old or new literary texts, visual or digital media, live or recorded performances, or improvised and ephemeral incidences in real life. Drawing on research from across the fields of literary studies, philosophy, affect theory, psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, performance and media studies, Black studies, Indigenous studies, and gender and sexual studies, we will define key concepts in contemporary humour analysis while developing nuanced perspectives on the issues that feel most urgent to us today – including the rise of niche comedy scenes, alt-right “irony,” and legal and other forms of accountability for comic harms. We’ll also take field trips to live comedy shows, and (whether experienced or not) students inclined to do so are welcome to develop and share their critical perspectives by way of their own stand-up or other comic media.  

Creative final projects are welcome

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Scale and the Environmental Humanities

800.4 A, Tuesdays, 10:15 – 12:30, Jesse Arseneault (theory)   

(Cross listed with 604.4 A & HUMA 889.4 A) 

This course aims to expose students to a dynamic body of research in which Concordia is a key player, the Environmental Humanities (EH). A primary goal of the course is to offer participants an interdisciplinary range of cultural theory under the umbrella of the humanities—including animal studies, the so-called new materialisms, critical posthumanism, post- and de-colonial thought, Indigenous thought, Black studies, and queer theory—via these fields’ contributions to EH. More specifically, we will look at readings for how notions of scale inflect framings of the environment and the humanities. The course explores what Neel Ahuja calls the “queer scales of relation” that structure our world of shared material and multispecies belonging, “from the grand vantage of planetary geology and climate … down to the microbial, molecular, and quantum worlds of matter” (2016, p. viii). While Dipesh Chakraborty reads the Anthropocene as a marker of the disproportionate “geological agency of humans” (2009, p. 208), the course will examine the material and multispecies planetary relations that make that geological agency possible.

The course will approach questions of scale embedded in a range of topical units that subtend how we conceptualize environments of concern in EH research. Potential units in the course might include: how cultural theories negotiate between the transcendent planetary scale of climate effects and the immanent arena of individual and collective affect, response, and action; how, in the era of post-pandemic speculation, theories of contagion navigate between global pandemic forces and the microbial pathways of viral transmission; vast geological timescales and the immediate threat of climate change’s apocalyptic temporalities; the distance between the Global Northern/whitened discourse of EH (what Sheelah McLean calls the “whiteness of green” [2017]) and climate change’s disproportionate effects on Black, colonized, and Indigenous peoples, as well as communities of colour; decolonial and critical race theory that frames ecological imperialism as a vast process of planetary terraforming; relations between humans and other-than-human life ranging from microbes to megafauna, from discrete entities to entire species; the energy humanities; and the critical geologies of the inhumanities.

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Creative writing workshops

Please note that the creative writing workshops are only available to students registered in the creative writing option of the M.A. program. 

Poetry Workshop – Fall/Winter 2023-2024, 6 cr. 

672.3 A, Tuesdays 13:15 – 15:30, Liz Howard  

In this workshop we will explore poetry as an energetic field of potential where inquiries and intentions such as connection, experimentation, and resistance can be made to sing. Readings will consist of craft essays, interviews and works of poetry that expand upon the frame of the possible such as works by Claudia Rankine, Solmaz Sharif, Dianne Seuss, Canisia Lubrin, Divya Victor, Terence Hayes, Natalie Diaz, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Joshua Whitehead, Erin Moure and others. We will trace how lines of inquiry and intention reverberate within and across collections and how these lines can inform our own creative process. We will develop a vocabulary and conceptual fluency to articulate our intentions, methodology, and process as a considered poetics (the theory and mechanics behind our work). We will become attuned and generative readers of each other’s poetry during intensive workshops. Our workshop model will be collaborative, author-centred, and guided by principles of anti-oppression. Coursework will involve student presentations based on core texts, the crafting of a statement of poetics, and the production of a chapbook consisting of 15 pages of revised poetry.

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Graduate Fiction Workshop – Fall 2023, 3 cr.

671.2 BB, Wednesdays, 18:00-20:15, Josip Novakovich  

A graduate fiction workshop concentrating on generating and revising fiction. Every participant will get feedback on their work from their peers and the instructor on at least two occasions. We will discuss a variety of techniques and genres, some of which will be examplified in our reading of published work. Our objective is to improve as writers; to experiment and get ideas how to conceive, write, rewrite, and polish stories and novel chapters.

Texts:­

Highsmith, Patricia. Strangers on a Train

LaMott Anne, Bird by Bird.

Malamud, Bernard. The Assistant.

And a few stories available online in the public domain.

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Techniques of Fiction – Winter 2024, 3 cr.

673.4 B, Wednesdays,18:00-20:15, Mikhail Iossel 

The central objective of this course is to help you strengthen your grasp on the craft of fiction. It takes as much learning and technical skill to write a strong short story or a meaningful novel as it does to play a musical instrument well – and no one is born with such skill. Apprenticeship is a crucial element of mastering the craft of writing. All writers stand on their predecessors’ shoulders. Still, there is no uniform, how-to-do-it recipe for writing fiction. Everyone must follow their own path, which means that everyone must find first the right path for themselves. We will try to figure out, and put to proper use, the various modes of writing potentially suitable to your literary style and allowing your work to live up to its full potential. By trying out the various technical approaches to writing – from autofiction to OULIPO, from samizdat to "found" prose – we will be tracing the origins of the story, its beginnings, style, characterization, point of view, background, time and place, form and plot, intent and meaning. The primary course material for this class will be texts of stories and novels found online, as well as your own work.  

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The Cauldron of Story: What Fairytales Can Teach Us – Fall 2023, 3 cr.

673.2 A, Mondays & Wednesdays,1:15-2:30, Kate Sterns 

(Cross-listed with undergraduate class ENGL 429.2 A) 

The Cauldron of Story has always been boiling and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty. (Tolkien) 

Writers as diverse as Shakespeare (King Lear) Margaret Atwood (Bluebeard’s Egg), and Helen Oyeyemi (What is Not Yours is Not Yours) have long looked at fairy tales, and the folk tales from whence they came, as a source of both inspiration, and instruction.

This course will explore how fairy tales have been adapted across centuries, cultures, and genres, and will look to see what contemporary writers can learn from them on such topics as: structure, brevity, utilizing archetypal stories and characters, incorporating the fantastic and much more. This is a seminar class with a considerable workshop component.

Summer 2022: May 2 to June 15

Divine Comedies: Modern Readings in Dante (theory)

602.1 A, Tuesdays & Thursdays, 13:15 to 15:30, Stephen Ross

This seminar surveys the modern and contemporary legacies of foundational European poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). Our project will be twofold: 1) to grasp some of Dante’s major formal and conceptual innovations by reading key works in English translation, and 2) to examine the rich and varied ways in which writers of the past two centuries have taken up his work—its inventions in literary form, its grand metaphysics, and/or its theories of language—either directly or obliquely. We will begin by examining how Dante’s important early work, The New Life, a prosimetron or hybrid of poetry and prose, anticipates experimental modernist texts by William Carlos Williams and others. We will then conduct an intensive study of Dante’s Inferno, the first of the Divine Comedy’s three canticles, followed by readings of book-length works by Arthur Rimbaud, Amiri Baraka, and Alice Notley that respond to and accompany Dante’s masterpiece. Finally, we will turn to Dante’s important treatise on language, On the Eloquence of the Vulgar Tongue, and consider how poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Lisa Robertson have entered into dialogue with Dante about poetics, language, and citizenship.

Texts:

The New Life, Dante Alighieri
[tr. Rossetti, NYRB Poets, ISBN: 9781681370514]

Inferno, Dante Alighieri
[tr. Mandelbaum, Bantam Classics, ISBN: 978-0553213393]

On the Eloquence of the Vulgar Tongue, Dante Alighieri [PDF]

Spring and All, Williams Carlos Williams
[New Directions, ISBN: 978-0811218917]

A Season in Hell, Arthur Rimbaud [PDF]

The System of Dante’s Hell, Amiri Baraka
[Akashic Books, ISBN: 978-1617753961]

The Descent of Alette, Alice Notley
[Penguin, ISBN: 978-0140587647]

“Conversation on Dante,” Osip Mandelstam [PDF]

Thresholds: Prosody of Citizenship, Lisa Robertson [PDF]

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2022-2023 Course offerings

Literary Pedagogies — Winter 2023

601.4 A, Tuesdays, 14:45 to 17:00, Danielle Bobker (theory)

In this course you will develop your skills and self-awareness as a teacher of literature while gaining a fuller understanding of the sociological, institutional, architectural, technological, and psychological structures shaping contemporary classrooms. Though we will generally focus on undergraduate English instruction and teaching assistantships in the context of Concordia and other North American universities, we'll also consider how these pedagogical principles and concepts may apply in CEGEPs, high schools, and other formal and informal educational settings.

The course is organized around seven core themes, each of which will engage us over two class sessions: (1) the inclusive classroom, (2) literary analysis & criticism, (3) lecture & discussion, (4) teaching writing, (5) evaluation, (6) institutions, and (7) affects. In the first session on each theme, we’ll work with a range of theoretical and practical pedagogical texts to identify and define the concepts and strategies we find most pertinent. The second session will afford an opportunity to reinforce or interrogate these concepts and strategies in a more embodied way as part of a student-led activity or lesson. In addition to reading about and discussing a wide variety of pedagogical issues, requirements will include leading a class, participating actively each week, writing weekly journal entries, and, at the end of the semester, writing a statement of teaching philosophy that could accompany a job application.

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Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies — Fall 2022

603.2 A, Wednesdays, 14:45 to 17:00, Jason Camlot (theory)

This seminar is designed to explore, discuss and develop sound-focused studies of literary works, events and performances in a manner that draws connections between the fields of literary studies and sound studies. The past 20+ years have yielded a rich field of critical work that explores the relationship between literature and sound, both on and off the page, going back to the edited collections of Adelaide Morris (Sound States, 1997) and Charles Bernstein (Close Listening, 1998), to the special issue of ESC edited by Louis Cabri and Peter Quartermain (On Discreteness: Event and Sound in Poetry, 33.4 2007), up to recent studies by Katherine Robson (Heartbeats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem, 2012), Raphael Allison (Bodies on the Line, 2014), Matthew Rubery (The Untold Story of the Talking Book, 2016), Jennifer Stoever (The Sonic Color Line, 2016), Jason Camlot (Phonopoetics, 2019), among many others. This body of criticism has explored how sound, hearing and listening have been represented in literary works of different periods, and, increasingly, has focused on the cultural significance of literary representation, production, and performance when it is manifest as sound in events and documentary recordings of literary performances, readings, storytelling, sound poetry, and literary sound art.  Sound Studies is an interdisciplinary field of research and theopry that focuses on audible events and their related social, institutional and technological contexts. It deploys methods of inquiry from media history (Jonathan Sterne, Lisa Gitelman), cultural studies (David Morton; Jacob Smith; Emily Thompson), philosophy and phenomenology (Don Ihde; Salomé Voegelin; James Steintrager and Rey Chow), disability studies (Mara Mills; Michele Freidner and Stefan Helmreich), Indigenous studies (Dylan Robinson), critical race studies (Nina Eidsheim; Nicole Furlonge), film studies (Michel Chion), rhetoric (Steph Cesaro), among many others.  It also represents a significant, emergent branch of digital humanities that focuses on methods of analyzing and presenting audio signals in digital environments (Tanya Clement; Damon Krukowski). Literary sound studies, the still speculative interdisciplinary field of theories and interpretive methods we will explore, approaches literary history and poetics through engagement with new sonic concepts and entities, and potentially opens a range of new approaches to researching, conceptualizing, and understanding “the literary” and literary cultures.

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Lyric and Lyrics: Song and Poetry in the Renaissance and Beyond — Winter 2023

603.4 B, Thursdays, 14:45 to 17:00, Kevin Pask (period)

Are song lyrics poetry? “Lyric” applies both to the dominant form of modern poetry and to song lyrics. The ancient Greeks classified lyric poetry by its musical accompaniment (the lyre, among other instruments). In the Renaissance, there was often at least a nominal connection between song and poetry, but often a practical connection as well. Thomas Wyatt refers to playing the lute to accompany his words. Thomas Campion was best known as a song lyricist. Shakespeare wrote songs for several of his plays, some of which approach the status of musicals, and it is likely that the songs were well known outside the theatre as well. Beyond the Renaissance period, the class will examine some key moments for the literary use of song, centrally including the ballad tradition (John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera and Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads). The traditional ballad is also important for the literary status often granted to the songwriters associated with the Folk Revival of the twentieth century. The course will conclude with a discussion of the “lyrical” status of the song tradition that includes Vachel Lindsay and Langston Hughes, Tin Pan Alley songwriters, the libretti and song lyrics of W. H. Auden, Gil Scott Heron, and the collaboration of the lyricist and musician Warren Zevon with the poet Paul Muldoon.

Some of the critical/theoretical texts will include John Hollander, James Winn, Maureen McLane, Jonathan Culler, Elizabeth Helsinger, and Philip Furia (on Tin Pan Alley).

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Gothic Across Media — Fall 2022

604.2 AA, Tuesdays, 18:00 to 20:15, Marcie Frank (period/theory)

In this course we look at 18th-century Gothic in print and performance and at a range of later adaptations across media in order to identify its atmospheres, moods, compulsions, and the techniques used to sustain them. The goal is to come to an understanding of its elements, affects, and the relations to media at its roots in order to see if and how these inform its more recent branches. We explore the concepts needed to study Gothic: affect, genre, media, mood, archive, technology, and embodiment.

Texts will include:

Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother plus Jan Svankmajer

Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest and James Boaden, The Count of Narbonne

Godwin Caleb Williams, and Pixérécourt’s adaptation

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein and multiple Frankensteins on stage/screen

E.A. Poe in print and on screen (Roger Corman)

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Resisting Redemption — Winter 2023

604.4 BB, Wednesdays, 18:00 to 20:15, Nicola Nixon (theory)

In Mary Gaitskill’s “Connection,” in Bad Behavior, Susan tells her friend Leisha, in response to an ongoing talk about careers and direction: “I want to work at Dunkin’ Donuts when I get out of school. I want to get fat. Or be addicted to heroin. I want to be a disaster.” Although feminist critics have tended to emphasize the redemptive narrative of female power, subversion, and/or resistance in women’s works since the 1950s, there is a vein of women’s writing and film making that actively resists such a narrative. Rather than representing female victimization or empowerment, and thus creating a legible riposte to a monolithically-conceived “patriarchy,” the women whose work I want to examine in this course interrogate such simplifications. Their cinematic and literary texts offer women like Gaitskill’s Susan and Lionel Shriver’s Eva Khatchadourian, whose “bad behaviour” makes them distasteful, unsympathetic, and therefore not subject to any easy forms of feminist reclamation. They make problematic accounts of feminist uplift, accentuating instead such affective zones as disgust, shame, and abjection.

Possible literary texts/films:

Lizzie Borden, Working Girls

Joyce Chopra, Smooth Talk

Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

Flannery O’Connor, selected stories

Lynne Ramsay, We Need to Talk about Kevin

Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin

Connie Willis, selected stories

Possible Theoretical Texts:

Lee Edelman and Lauren Berlant, Sex, or The Unbearable

Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, The Female Complaint

Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror

Kaye Mitchell, Writing Shame

Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings, Our Aesthetic Categories

Elspeth Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame

Silvan Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters

Raymond Williams, Structures of Feeling

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Chaucer and His Afterlives — Fall 2022

608.2 A, Tuesdays, 14:45 to 17:00, Stephen Powell (period)

This course has two main goals. The first: to offer graduate students grounding in Chaucer’s works sufficient for appreciating and understanding Chaucer’s influences on later literatures and for comfortable teaching of Chaucer in undergraduate classes. The second: to study how Chaucer, dead since 1400, has nevertheless lived on.

The first goal will be met through intensive study of parts of The Canterbury Tales alongside shorter works, and modern critical responses to these texts. The length of this part of the course will depend on the previous experiences of the seminar’s members.

The second goal turns the class from examining Chaucer within his medieval context to exploring post-medieval reception of Chaucer in both scholarly and popular works. It will engage, in ways determined in large part by student interests, the rich history of transmission and reading of, and reactions to, Chaucer.

Among possible topics: editorial work (more or less continuous from the fifteenth century to now); retellings, translations, and adaptations (in verse, prose, film, and TV, and aimed at children, students, and adults); and the political agendas of Chaucer’s fans and detractors (Chaucer as either a shining token of English nationalism, or something much, much worse, and everything in between).

In exploring these afterlives, we will grapple with a startling, long-standing binary: throughout the post-medieval engagement with him, Chaucer is held up as a prime exemplar of medieval authorship and yet also portrayed as a proto-modern writer who has burst out of the Middle Ages, rejecting the past’s sensibilities and confronting modern issues. Throughout, then, we will seek to understand Chaucer as a medieval writer but also the reasons for the varied cultural uses to which post-medieval “Chaucer” has been put.

No prior experience is required, but those who have studied Chaucer before will nevertheless find much new in this course.

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“Talking Renaissance Landscapes” — Winter 2023

611.4 A, Mondays, 13:15 to 15:30, Darragh Languay (period)

“The Land speaks” is the title of Richard Helgerson’s chapter in his Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England, and in the twenty years since the book appeared the land has been speaking a lot. The reappraisal of topographical literature continues to call for altered conceptions of early modern attitudes to the environment and to embryonic forms of ecology.

An abundant yet discounted literature in the form of “surveys”, “descriptions”, and “chorographies” do not only, in Helgerson’s terms, define “loyalty to England as loyalty to the land,” but also imagine the land as agentic: “Every mountain, forest, river, and valley, expressing in their sundry postures their loves, delights and natural situations” in Drayton’s Poly-Olbion. In contrast to chronicles, these texts, for instance, find value in unimproved lands, border areas and wilderness. Indeed, the attitudes to the land in these books anticipate concerns now familiar to environmental criticism.

This emergent genre of writing has an influence on the way land is imagined as well as catalogued. Land becomes an agent of world formation and not a mere passive subject of dominion. In Paradise Lost Milton repeatedly invokes the newly adopted Dutch term “lantskip” to describe the vistas of Eden with a particularity and care that makes it a character of its own, as Rebecca Buckham and others have noted.

With attention as well to seventeenth century landscape painting, the course considers what happens when we read Milton’s Eden, Shakespeare’s Arden , Marvell’s Garden, Sidney’s Arcadia, Browne’s “Garden of Cyrus” etc. in conjunction with the proliferating proto-environmental literature, including William Harrison’s The Description of England and Michael Drayton’s topographical epic of England and Wales Poly-Olbion, as well as Anne Clifford’s chorographic writings. We will also examine the influence of this genre on such poems as John Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill,” Jonson’s “To Penshurst,” Aemilia Lanyer’s “Description of Cookham,” and Anne Kemp’s “A Contemplation on Basset’s Down Hill.” This course will consider theoretical models from Helgerson’s and Thomas’ historiographical re-evaluation of early modern nature in Man and the Natural world: A History of the Modern Sensibility to Jane Bennet’s vital materialism and exemplary extracts from the contemporary revival of chorography.

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Idioms of Distress: Literature, Medicine, and Metaphor — Fall 2022

626.2 AA, Thursdays, 18:00 to 20:15, Omri Moses (theory)

This course investigates the way literature across the long twentieth century represents physical and mental distress, understood as a socially and culturally resonant prism through which we can examine diagnostic classifications, experiences of pain or difficulty, and understandings of personal or collective resilience. In psychiatry, an “idiom of distress” is both a fresh way of classifying or conceiving what was once referred to as “culture-bound syndromes” and a cross-cultural program of research that seeks to understand how linguistic concepts and metaphors, as well as political and economic processes, shape and construct mental disorders. As we explore such matters, we will be turning toward metaphor theory, asking how to understand the effects that language has on bodies and bodies have on our linguistic expressions. With this in view, we will study the tensions between less formalized ways that literary fiction, poetry, and memoir conceive and represent distress, which draws on prevailing cultural metaphors and folk ideas such as “nerves,” “thinking too much,” and feeling “stressed.” Then we turn to the influence of biomedicine, which seeks to systematize and abstract diagnostic classifications. Our purpose, as we move between literary and psychiatric discourses, is to trace their influence on one another. In the process, we will begin to see how literature contributes to or battles with the cultural forces that lead us to medicalize suffering. We will also focus on shifting cultural metaphors to historicize the ways that Euro-American literary culture makes new sense of human distress and interrogates new treatments and lifestyles.

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The Contemporary (Re)Turn to Ethics — Fall 2022

627.2 A, Mondays, 13:15 to 15:30, Cynthia Quarrie (theory)

In Tiffany Lethabo King’s 2019 book, The Black Shoals, she argues that Black Studies must contend with North American Indigeneity, not in response to “political cajoling,” but rather as part of “an ethics of Black radical struggle, period.” In this class, we will unpack and explore the theoretical category of ethics that she points to in this statement. While the relationship between morality and literature has long been contested, contemporary “ethics” in literary and critical theory came to prominence in the 80s and 90s, especially in conversations between the prominent post-structuralist thinkers Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, as well as other such disparate writers as Martha Nussbaum, Wayne Booth, Judith Butler, J Hillis Miller, Enrique Dussel, and Alain Badiou. Recent years have seen a resurgence of explicitly ethical frameworks in writers such as King, Dorothy Hale, Paul Gilroy, Katherine McKittrick, Christina Sharpe, Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, and Matthias Fritsch.

In this class, we will revisit some of the major ethical theorists of the late 20th century, and we will trace a return to or a recentering of ethical problems and ethical frameworks in contemporary decolonial, feminist, queer, and ecocritical thought. The reigning questions for the class will be: Is ethical theory adequate to the properly political challenges of racism and neo-nationalisms, homophobia and transphobia, extractive capitalism and climate change? Where do politics end and ethics begin (or vice versa)? When we talk about literature, are we also talking about ethics? What are the tools that ethical discourse provides, and what is it about our moment that makes these tools seem necessary and urgent again?

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Samuel Beckett and Modern British & Irish Drama — Fall 2022

636.2 A, Thursdays, 13:15 to 15:30, Andre Furlani (period)

Since the success of Waiting for Godot and Endgame in the 1950s, Samuel Beckett has remained among the most controversial and influential of modern dramatists. With attention to modern dramatic practice as well as to performance and media theory, the seminar examines Beckett’s work for stage, screen, and radio. The seminar also pursues its pronounced impact on subsequent British and Irish drama, including plays by Harold Pinter, Joe Orton, Caryl Churchill, Tom Stoppard, Marina Carr, Brian Friel and Sarah Kane. The focus is upon themes in Beckett that these dramatists developed in their own theatre, such as incarceration and other forms of confinement, ecological collapse, colonial subjection, sexual trauma, the master-slave dialectic, censorship, biopolitics, neurodiversity, and technological change.

Participants study recordings of stage, radio, television and film productions, and become familiar with the rich archival materials, such as Beckett’s theatre notebooks, letters, journals, marginalia, and commonplace books. Participants in this seminar deliver a presentation, circulate a short assignment, and submit a term essay on any aspect of the subject.

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American Immigrant Narratives, Postwar and Contemporary — Winter 2023

655.4 A, Tuesdays, 18:00 to 20:15, Mary Esteve (period)

In Chang-rae Lee’s 1995 novel, Native Speaker, cultural informants (or spies) employed by corporate capitalists insinuate themselves into various American ethnic communities by pretending to belong: “Each of us engaged in our own [ethno-racial] kind, more or less. Foreign workers, immigrants, first-generationals, neo-Americans.” The casual rapidity with which this speaker delivers his assessment of the late 20th century’s convergence of (im)migration flows, fragmented transnational identities, and the rapacious global economy is but one indication of the vast gap between this speaker’s historical and cultural context and that of the late 19th century, when ethnic-immigrant narrative realism began to flourish in the U.S., and the trope of the “melting pot” predominated. Similarly, Lee’s speaker’s knowingness diverges from the narratives of confusion and struggle that mark immigrant fiction of the early post-WWII years. And yet, a novel from 1995 is by no means terminal: novels from the decades after 9/11 indicate even more extreme experiential, geopolitical, and narratological divergence from the “melting pot” roots. Legislative immigration policy of the 1940s and 1960s, for one thing, facilitated such divergences.

This seminar examines American immigrant fiction from the early postwar era to the near-present, with an eye toward the ways such narratives reckon with legislative, socioeconomic, geopolitical, domestic, institutional, and diasporic inflections of American and transnational experience. The seminar will attend to the specific literary and formal aspects informing these novelistic endeavors as well as to relevant theoretical and literary criticism.

Primary texts may include most (but, alas, not all) of the following: Nabokov, PNIN; Marshall, BROWN GIRL, BROWNSTONES; Cisneros, THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET; Mukherjee, JASMINE; Jen, TYPICAL AMERICAN; Lee, NATIVE SPEAKER; Díaz, THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO; Hamid, THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST; Cole, OPEN CITY; Adiche, AMERICANAH; and Ozeki, A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING. Theoretical and secondary criticism may include essays and chapters by Gayatri Spivak; Yogita Goyal; Rachel Lee; Paul Gilroy; Elda Román; Arjun Appadurai; Kwame Appiah; Stuart Hall; and others.

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Classical Persian Poetry as World Literature — Fall 2022

665.2 AA, Wednesdays, 18:00 to 20:15, Reza Taher-Kermani (period/theory)

This is an advanced course in world literature. The goal is to introduce students to the literature and culture of medieval Persia and to explore the place and significance of this influential literary tradition in the canon of world literature. In doing so, the unit focuses on the history of development of classical Persian poetry, studying the works of poets such as Attar, Firdausi, Khayyam, Rumi, Sa'di, and Hafiz. Part of the design of the course is also to study the reception and representation of these poets in the West; classical Persian poetry has been widely popular in Europe and North America since the dawn of the nineteenth century. The course as such takes an interdisciplinary and transregional approach, studying the works of figures such as Sir William Jones, John Malcolm, James Morier, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Matthew Arnold, Edward FitzGerald, Louisa Stuart Costello, Jessie E. Cadell, Robert Browning, and Gertrude Bell. Bringing together some of the other sources influencing these texts, from Persian source material to travel writing, the aim is to explore the literary, political, and historical implications of British conceptions of Persia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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From Negritude to the Haitian Revolution: The Poetics of the Untimely — Winter 2023

668.4 AA, Mondays, 18:00 to 20:15, Nathan Brown (theory)

the poem is not a mill to
grind sugar cane certainly not
– Aimé Césaire, “Reply to Depestre Haitian Poet”

In Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal, Aimé Césaire refers to “Haiti where negritude rose for the first time,” and in his “Reply to Depestre Haitian Poet” he aligns a commitment to the poetics of free verse with “the mad chant of Boukman birthing your country,” referring to the Vodou oath at Bois Caïman which initiated the Haitian revolution. How exactly are we to understand this alignment of free verse and the politics of Negritude with the rupture inaugurated by the Haitian revolution, and with the role of Vodou within it? What are the implications of this relationship for understanding “romantic” and “modernist” orientations toward the politics of poetry and the poetry of politics? What are the implications of Césaire’s implicit claim to the revolutionary genesis of free verse—as an instance of retroactive, speculative, and poetic historiography—for our understanding of the relation between imagination and history?

Engaging with mid-century debates in Présence Africaine concerning decolonization, “national poetry,” and the politics of form, we will address these questions through close readings of works by Aimé Césaire and René Depestre, historical and theoretical accounts of the Haitian Revolution, and writings on Vodou. Throughout, we will try to understand the dialectical entanglement of poetic form, historical rupture, and affirmations of Black power across modernity.

Poetry:
Selections from The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire (trans. Eshleman & Arnold)

Aimé Césaire, Journal of a Homecoming / Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal (trans. Davis)

René Depestre, A Rainbow for the Christian West (trans. Dayan)

Historical and Theoretical Texts (selections):

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

Caroline E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below

Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment

Colin Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods

Willy Apollon, Vodou: A Space for the Voices (draft translations)

Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica

Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti

Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage

Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World

David Marriott, Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being

Anthony Reed, Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production

Texts from the debate on “national poetry” in Présence Africaine (1955)

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Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies — Fall 2022

(cross-listed ENGL 603)

801.2 A, Wednesdays, 14:45 to 17:00, Jason Camlot

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From Negritude to the Haitian Revolution: The Poetics of the Untimely — Winter 2023

(cross-listed ENGL 668)

800. 4 AA, Mondays, 18:00 to 20:15, Nathan Brown

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Creative writing workshops

Please note that the creative writing workshops are only available to students registered in the creative writing option of the M.A. program.

 

Prose Workshop — Fall/Winter 2022-2023

672.3 AA, Tuesdays, 18:00 to 20:15, Mikhail Iossel

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Hybrid Writing Across Genres — Winter 2023

673.4 A, Wednesdays, 18:00 to 20:15, TBA

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Literary Essay & International Magazine Writing — Winter 2023

(cross-listed ENGL 429)

673.4 AA, Mondays, 18:00 to 20:15, TBA

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Poetry Workshop — Fall 2022

674.2 A, Tuesdays, 13:15 to 15:30, Stephanie Bolster

Summer 2021: May 10th – June 23rd

Light Verse

601.1 AA Tues & Thurs, 11:45-14:30, Online, Kevin Pask

This course explores the boundaries of poetic expression, particularly in relation to verse forms not generally accorded the prestige of poetry: ballads, nonsense verse, limericks, and other forms that are sometimes grouped together, since the early twentieth century, as “light verse.” W. H. Auden’s edition of The Oxford Book of Light Verse (1937) identified light verse as the central line of English popular poetry, creating a kind of spectral secondary canon to the “major” tradition of English poetry. Part of the interest of Auden’s collection, however, was that it intersected at key points with the major tradition, including healthy samples of verse from Chaucer, Pope, and Byron. We will read some of those selections as well as Cavalier lyrics of the seventeenth century; the Victorians Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and C. S. Calverley; and more recent examples (including Dorothy Parker and Phyllis McGinley). A primary concern will be the conditions under which the modernist moment seems to have produced its opposite: verse forms generally committed to traditional rhyme and meter along with a rejection of laureate seriousness. Both Auden and T. S. Eliot wrote light verse (Eliot also producing criticism which engages the problem of “minor poetry”), which we will read in relation to their more canonical poetry. Finally, we will consider the fate of light verse since its heyday in the middle ofthe twentieth century: possible versions and reconsiderations of light verse, or even “bad poetry,” in a variety of poets and critics that will include John Ashbery, John Hollander, Allan Grossman, and Ben Lerner (The Hatred of Poetry).

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Fall 2021: September 7 – December 6

Satiric Effects (Theory)

602.2 A Fri, 13:00-15:15, LB 659-4, Danielle Bobker

This course considers the value of twentieth- and twenty-first-century affect theory for describing the feelings fueling, represented in, and generated by eighteenth-century satirical discourse of British, Japanese, and African origin. We will take particular interest in anger, shame/humiliation, and amusement/laughter, the affects typically associated with irony and satiric form, as well as happiness and enthusiasm, the apparently positive orientations that British satirists scornfully associated with modern life. Theories of affect and emotion by such writers as Tomkins, Gates, Sedgwick, Ahmed, Berlant, Ngai, Ramos-Zayos, and Park-Hong will be read alongside satirical discourse by Collier, Gay, Swift, Hiraga, and others. The hypothesis of the course is that eighteenth-century satirical discourse is itself a form of affect theory that exposes the contingencies and costs of normative emotional experiences, challenges the mainstreaming of positive feeling, and turns everyone into an affect alien.

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Global Modernist Poetics: Caribbean, Arab World, Ashkenazi Jewish Diaspora

604.2 A Mon, 14:45-17:00, LB 646, Stephen Ross

This seminar examines modernist poetry and poetics of the Caribbean, the Arab world, and the Ashkenazi Jewish Diaspora. Taking these poetries as a representative grouping of “global modernism,” or modernism uncoupled from a canonical “western” teleology, we will study the lines of exchange and filiation between these and other modernist poetic practices. We will also critique the oppositional rubrics of the “global” and the “western” themselves as they have conditioned modernism’s reception and scholarship.

The seminar begins with Black diasporic modernist poetry of the Caribbean in Spanish, French, and English. We will then turn to modernist poets of the Arab world writing in French and Arabic across modernizing regions both inspired by independence struggle and swallowed up by authoritarianism in the mid century decades. Finally, we will read modernist poetry of the Ashkenazi Jewish Diaspora and study the starkly divergent fates of poets on three trajectories: those who immigrated to North America and wrote in Yiddish and English; those who made aliyah to Mandate Palestine and became Hebrew poets; and those who remained in Europe and faced Nazi extermination. In working toward an understanding of the particularities and cross-resonances of these poetic modernisms, we will not pursue an overarching narrative about them so much as triangulate them in a number of ways relating to: intersections with avant-gardes such as the Harlem Renaissance and international surrealism; articulations of diasporic, exilic, and/or stateless modernist aesthetics; negotiations of language politics, especially questions of “standard v. non-standard” language choice; and linking of modernist practices to liberation struggle and decolonization. All non-English texts will be available in translation.

Poets: Nicolás Guillén; Aimé Césaire; Kamau Brathwaite; M. NourbeSe Philip; Edmond Jabès; Joyce Mansour; Nazik Al-Mala’ika; Adonis; Abdellatif Laâbi; Mikhl Likht; Dvoyre Fogel; Avot Yeshurun, Paul Celan.

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Green Thoughts in Renaissance Literature (Period)

611.2 A Tues, 14:45-17:00, LB 646, Darragh Languay

Early modern literature abounds in those who, like the speaker of Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden,” seek “green thoughts” in a “green shade.” Milton’s Eden is a paradise of variety, and its first couple, according to William Shullenberger, is dignified by discovering for themselves “delightful work to do, in extending the Creator’s impulse toward order, beauty, and fertility through the arts of gardening” (131). Darwin’s one book on the Beagle was Paradise Lost, and John Leonard, who discerns Milton’s influence in the closing of The Origin of the Species, speculates that this is because, “more than any other poet (except perhaps Lucretius), Milton celebrates biodiversity” (82). The Fall in Paradise Lost is figured as ecological--it marks humankind’s ruptured relations with the natural world; many other literary works of the period imagine a return to Eden and to harmonious relations with and in Nature. In her Convent of Pleasure, Margaret Cavendish images a pastoral retreat from heteronormativity while utopian possibilities are explored in Amelia Lanyer’s exclusively female withdrawal into the accommodating natural world at the Countess of Cumberland’s Cookham. Isabella Whitney’s “A Sweet Nosegay” offers herbal wisdom to counteract the noxiously inhospitable city. Such acts of recuperation and amendment are the impetusal so, for instance, of Browne’s “Garden of Cyrus” which transcribes quincuncial forms uniting the heavenly and earthly spheres, the angelic and the animal. Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler, too, “studies to be quiet” in contemplation of God’s “other Book” of Nature, a refuge from the world of political and religious controversy. Traherne’s Centuries make natural processes rather than sacred texts the basis of civic and religious education while it meditates on the right relationship to Nature’s splendour.

The course will examine alternative thoughts and spaces offered by the green world and give students tools relevant to the “greening” of early modern studies with its materialist stress on economic changes in land management, concern for the origin of modern scientific natural history, and attention to anxieties about environmental degradation. It will aim to redress the gap in environmental studies before the Romantics and benefit from Todd Borlik’s recently published Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance: An Ecocritical Anthology (Cambridge 2019).

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Race and Place: Environmental Custodianship and Myths of Origin

628.2 A Wed, 12:00-14:15, LB 646, Cynthia Quarrie

This course seeks to explore the vexed problem of the relationship between environmental custodianship — which often comes from what we think of as an affective or spiritual connection to the land — and myths of ancestral belonging. In Europe, this relationship is associated with blood and soil ideologies that underwrite anti-immigrant sentiment to this day. In North America, the same configuration has a problematic relation to the reduction by white settlers of the indigenous experience to the tragic figure of the noble savage. In this class we will read British and North American fiction (and a film) that negotiates the slippage between environmentalism and nativism, and which rewrites and/or reinscribes the relationship between people—and their racialised and gendered selves and histories—and the planet. We will juxtapose these texts with critical readings that historicise the naturalisation of “race and place.” Through our readings, we will ask: to what extent is the novel complicit in imposing this trade-off between xenophobic nationalism and resource exploitation, and how do these texts complicate this complicity?

Evaluation will be based on three short in-class presentations, online responses, and a final research paper.

Fiction
• Ghost Wall, Sarah Moss
• Satin Island, Tom McCarthy
• The Wake, Paul Kingsnorth
• NW, Zadie Smith
• Future Home of the Living God, Louise Erdrich
• Moon of the Crusted Snow, Waubgeshig Rice
• “Spider the Artist,” Nnedi Okorafor
• “Children of Men,” 2006 film based on 1994 novel by P. D. James.

Non-Fiction (excerpts)
• The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh
• Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination,
Mark Rifkin
• Real England: The Battle Against the Bland, Paul Kingsnorth
• The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and
Environmental Protection, Dorceta E. Taylor
• “Adorno and the Weather: Critical Theory in an Era of Climate Change,” Ackbar
Abbas
• Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination, Mark Rifkin

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21st Century Poetry & Poetics

630.2 AA Mon, 18:00-20:15, LB 646, Nathan Brown

This will be a survey course, but we will work toward some depth by reading complete poetry volumes—one per week. Our approach will be inductive, encountering the books without too much theoretical framing and attempting to derive from them a sense of what is happening in twenty-first century poetry and poetics, tracing different approaches to form, to the politics of aesthetics, to the relationship of poetry and criticism with other arts and disciplines. Since we are reading complete volumes we’ll have occasion to think through how the book functions as a form in contemporary poetry, and how the conception of a volume of poems *as* a volume intersections with the development of free verse and open field poetry. Seriality, performance, the mediation of geography and history by language will all be focal points. Most importantly, though, I hope to proceed without too many presuppositions, allowing our sense of what is at stake in these works to emerge through the constellation they come to compose amongst themselves—which is why the syllabus will be organized according to the arbitrary device of alphabetical order.

Texts

Caroline Bergvall, Goan Atom (2001)
Nicole Raziya Fong, Perfact (2019)
Nora Collen Fulton, Thee Display (2020)
Tania Lukin Linklater, Slow Scrape (2020)
Nathaniel Mackey, Blue Fasa (2015)
Lisa Robertson, R's Boat (2010)
Solmaz Sharif, Look (2016)
Jennifer Soong, Near, At (2019)
Shanxing Wang, Mad Science in Imperial City (2005)
Ronaldo V. Wilson, Poems of the Black Object (2009)
Simone White, Of Being Dispersed (2016)
Andrew Zawacki, Unsun: f/11 (2019)

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Pestilence and Postcolonialism (Theory)

665.2 AA Thurs, 18:00-20:15, LB 646, Jesse Arseneault

Animals abound in postcolonial literature and thought, though these are not always the charismatic mammals or companion species celebrated by animal advocacy. Often orientated around colonialism’s dehumanization and animalization of colonized lives, the field sees a host of nonhuman animals rendered abject, verminous, and pestilent. If much scholarship and activism has been devoted to remedying that dehumanization by positing the humanity of those aligned with such figures, this course looks at other possibilities. Attention to the mobilities and irruptions of life rendered verminous or pestilent might also be useful companions for thinking through modes of collectivity, survival, and resistance in the wake of colonial capitalism’s ongoing ravages on land, water, and life. On the one hand, the pestilent might consist of figures who agitate or eas away at existing social structures. Equally, on the other, the tricky figure of the pest might mirror the deleterious and hyperconsumptive effects of extractive colonialism. In either case, this course seeks to understand the role of undesirable, eradicable, and pestilent life in postcolonial texts. Such animals, as this course will explore, also promise to challenge the anthropocentrism that reads colonized worlds exclusively through the category of the human, and emphasize how the category of the human is constructed in relation to various other forms of life deemed subhuman.

Broadly speaking, this course draws on a range of thought from postcolonialism, animal studies, and posthumanism to consider the imaginative possibilities generated by pestilence in postcolonial cultural texts. It also aims to explore how pestilent life challenges or reframes the ways in which we think about the divide between human and nonhuman life. In paying attention to campaigns to exterminate pests, we will attend to how pestilence becomes more than mere bare life to be eradicated in postcolonial thought, but also how pestilence is created in and by the very worlds that seek to eradicate it. While we will fixate much our attention on campaigns of animalization and dehumanization, our course will also explore how the imaginative form of the pest, when deployed in various postcolonial literatures, offers ways of living and becoming otherwise in colonized worlds.

Students will take up the above topics as they examine fiction from writers such as Rawi Hage, Mohsin Hamid, Njabulo Ndebele, Indra Sinha, K. Sello Duiker, and Gabeba Baderoon. Alongside these texts, students will consult theoretical readings that include selections from Julietta Singh, Neel Ahuja, Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Leanne B. Simpson, Val Plumwood, and Nicole Shukin.

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Innovative Writing: Sound, Performance, Poetry & Narrative

673.2 A Mon, 14:45-17:30, LB 649 TBD

This class is cross-listed with ENGL 429 A

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Literary Essay and International Magazine Writing

673.2 BB Tues, 18:00-20:15, LB 649 TBD

This class is cross-listed with ENGL 429 BB

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Satiric Effects

800.2 A Fri, 13:00-15:15, LB 659-4, Danielle Bobker (cross-listed with ENGL 602)

This course considers the value of twentieth- and twenty-first-century affect theory for describing the feelings fueling, represented in, and generated by eighteenth-century satirical discourse of British, Japanese, and African origin. We will take particular interest in anger, shame/humiliation, and amusement/laughter, the affects typically associated with irony and satiric form, as well as happiness and enthusiasm, the apparently positive orientations that British satirists scornfully associated with modern life. Theories of affect and emotion by such writers as Tomkins, Gates, Sedgwick, Ahmed, Berlant, Ngai, Ramos-Zayos, and Park-Hong will be read alongside satirical discourse by Collier, Gay, Swift, Hiraga, and others. The hypothesis of the course is that eighteenth-century satirical discourse is itself a form of affect theory that exposes the contingencies and costs of normative emotional experiences, challenges the mainstreaming of positive feeling, and turns everyone into an affect alien.

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Fall/Winter 2021-22: September 7 – April 13

Poetry Workshop

672.3 A Tues, 13:15-15:30, LB 659-4, Sina Queyras + Stephanie Bolster

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Winter 2022: January 6– April 13

Mess as Method (Theory)

602.4 B Thurs, 14:45-17:00, LB 646 Darren Wershler

This course will introduce students to a range of contemporary approaches to literary research whose approach is contextual and discursive rather than textual and hermeneutic. Its mandate is to encourage students to think about literature and culture in terms of a set of interrelated concepts: controversies and messes, assemblages and networks, power relations, materiality, practices and techniques, and circulation. Many of the texts we’ll be looking at consider some or all of these concepts simultaneously.

Mess As Method will begin with the discussion of a number of basic but crucial research techniques that are often unfamiliar to new graduate students, like choosing an object of study, formulating research questions and conducting a literature review. We will then proceed to test a set of methods deriving from key readings in discursive analysis, Actor- Network Theory, theories of cultural technique, everyday life theory and material media studies. These readings and the attendant weekly discussions will provide students with enough information to begin pursuing particular trajectories of their own devising. As the course progresses, students will begin applying the methods we are discussing to their own research objects.

The pedagogical assumption that guides this course is that much of academic writing is iterative and collective. Rather than aiming to produce definitive statements on our subjects out of the gate, we will be approaching writing as part of the ongoing process of critical thinking. As such, this course is not designed to teach students how to produce a polished, final paper, but how to work toward the goal of presenting their initial findings to a larger academic community before further development. The course will culminate with an in-class colloquium, in which students present their work to each other in the form of a 20-minuteconference paper.

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Weird Bodies (Theory)

603.4 A Mon, 14:45-17:00, LB 646, Nicola Nixon

Although P.T. Barnum is famous for commodifying, and capitalizing on, the weird body in the mid-nineteenth-century U.S., transforming the European, elite, and private “cabinet of curiosities” (wunderkammer) into a travelling museum or “freak show,” American writers were already registering an interest in weird bodies. Such bodies could be metaphors for a compromised body politic (as in debates around slavery), or they could be metaphors for a case against eugenics. But such bodies could also be the subject of resistance against a perceived normality, or celebrations of difference. Through the critical lenses of disability studies, and gender and queer studies, this course seeks to explore the ways in which weird bodies preoccupy American writers—and to what end.

Possible Primary Texts: Herman Melville, The Confidence Man; Edgar Allan Poe, selected tales; Djuna Barnes, Nightwood; Todd Browning, Freaks; Flannery O’Connor, selected tales; Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding; Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter; Nathaneal West, A Cool Million; Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

Possible Critical Texts by: Rachel Adams; Mikhail Bakhtin; Judith Butler; Eli Clare; Lennard Davis; Rosemarie Garland Thomson; Sarah Gleeson-White; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; Susan Stewart

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Political Nature: Thoreau and After (Theory)

604.4 B Mon, 12:00-14:45, LB 646, André Furlani

The seminar concerns genre history – the rise of modern English nature writing – and the reformist politics with which nature writing comes to intersect. Concentration is on the work of Henry David Thoreau, who extends natural history into conservation and social justice, including abolitionism, female suffrage, Native land rights, and agitation against industrial agronomy and unregulated resource extraction. Texts include his Natural History Essays, “The Dispersion of Seeds,” “A Plea for John Brown,” “Slavery in Massachusetts,” “Civil Disobedience,” and excerpts from Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod and The Journals.

Assessing Thoreau’s dual legacy in relation both to prominent coevals (e.g. R.W. Emerson, Louis Agassiz and Charles Darwin) and antecedents (e.g. Gilbert White’s Selborne and J.W. von Goethe’s “Morphology”), the seminar’s second half examines excerpts from several modern writers (e.g. John Muir, Luther Standing Bear, Mary Austin and Nan Shepherd) in relation to a clutch of contemporary text, many of which further gendered, Native, Latino, African-American and diasporic perspectives on nature and political nature. Among these: Joseph Bruchac, from Story Earth: Native Voices of the Environment; Leslie Marmon Silko, “Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination;” Gary Paul Nabhan, from The Desert Smells like Rain: A Naturalist in Papago Indian Country; Evelyn White, “Black Women and the Wilderness;” Gary Snyder, from The Practice of the Wild; Wendell Berry, “The Making of a Marginal Farm;” Annie Dillard, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; Louise Erdrich, “Big Grass;” Bill McKibbon, from The End of Nature; Robert Macfarlane, from Underland; Jamaica Kincaid, from Among Flowers; and Lydia Davis, “Weeds.”

Assessment is based on a presentation, annotated bibliography, term paper and presence.

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Medieval Montreal (Period)

608.4 A Wed, 12:00-14:45, LB 646, Stephen Yeager

In the anonymous Saga of Eirik the Red, the Norse Greenlanders sailing along the coast of Turtle Island discover a river flowing east to west that some readers believe to be the St. Lawrence. While resting on the river’s southern bank, the warrior Thorvald is run through by a spear thrown by a one-legged creature. As he dies, Thorvald notes that his fat paunch made him an easy target, and observes: “We’ve found a land of fine resources, but we won’t enjoy much of them.” In this class, we will situate this text in relation to other memories of our region and its people circa 1000 CE. The class will be proceed along three axes of investigation: 1) a study of the Vinland Sagas in relation to the other evidence of medieval European arrival in Inuit Nunaat and Turtle Island (textual, archaeological, and oral-traditional); 2) a study of recent Indigenous-authored texts designed to educate audiences about local pre-contact histories, including not only the work of accredited scholars but also educational websites, children’s historical fiction, and graphic novels; 3) a study of popular “medievalism” in Montreal focalized through Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series, the aesthetics of regional breweries, and the city’s culture of creative anachronism. Our work will investigate the methodological implications of a striking contradiction: though the histories of “Viking” arrival contain fantastic elements that mark them as “legendary,” they have long been received as evidence for historical fact by the same institutions of learning and law that categorically reject the authenticity of Indigenous oral claims to rights and title. These contradictions are manifest not only in the official written histories we study in scholarly contexts, but also in our first-hand experiences of the city where we live, and in this class we will aim to better describe and understand their causes and implications.

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Byron & Romanticism (Period)

623.4 A Tues, 14:45-17:00, LB 646, Jonathan Sachs

Notorious for his scandalous personal life, his self-imposed exile from England, and his death in Greece during that country’s wars for independence, Lord Byron is among the most important Romantic poets. Byron became a celebrity early, and wrote poetry based on his own experiences, including his travels, his sexual scandals, his personal relationships, social mores, and his involvement with the tumultuous political events of his time. In so doing, he forged a category that we have come to call “the Byronic,” its hero a wandering, noble outlaw, both erotically-compelling and haunted by loss, defiant and rebellious, stoic yet ultimately a victim of his own passions. From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage through The Corsair and The Giaour and beyond, the immense popularity of Byron’s poems ensured his legacy in Europe and North America, an influence that remains in many cultures to this day. Yet Byron produced a much wider range of poetry than this narrative suggests, including lyrics, satires, dramas, and his ironic epic, Don Juan. In thinking about Byron as a first-rank poet, an important social and cultural commentator, and an international cultural icon, questions to be asked include: Why did Byron’s reputation fare so much better in Europe than in his native England? Why was Byron’s work so consistently overlooked by so many foundational Romantic scholars of the twentieth century? How have more recent poets and scholars made use of Byron’s work, and how does this work change our understanding of Romanticism and the Romantic Period? To address these questions, this seminar will examine a comprehensive selection of Byron’s prodigious output. Finally, in connection with a new critical addition of Byron’s major works, an additional key feature of this course will ask how these questions relate to the textual history of Byron’s works.

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Literature, Cognition, and the Sense of Self (Theory)

626.4 AA Wed, 18:00-20:15, LB 646, Omri Moses

Literary interrogations of consciousness and selfhood have driven narrative innovation and poetic experiments with form for much of the twentieth century till the present. This seminar investigates what literature and neuroscience jointly teach us about the sense of self—how it is created, what it means to have a sense of self, and what happens when that sense of self is disrupted. The goal is to put cognitive literary critical methodologies to work to understand the social contexts, cultural models, and neurological impulses that shape how writers construct literary characters and selves, and how readers respond to them. We will be tracking the emergence of new scientific methodologies and theories from cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience, asking what insights they give us into the role that narrative and metaphor play in organizing this complicated and bewildering phenomenon at the center of our identity. This will help us frame questions about the value of literature both as an object of scientific inquiry and as a cultural force that pushes the limits of our understanding of personhood. We will be reading genres of fiction, poetry, memoir, and drama as they explore boundaries and attachments, the mind- body interface, trauma, and dementia. Neuroaesthetics, cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive literary criticism have turned to these topics to help us understand how selves are formed, divided, integrated, reconstructed, dispersed, and dissolved. The syllabus may include writers like Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Sylvia Plath, Lyn Hejinian, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Siri Hustvedt, as well as a range of scientific theorists from Alexander Luria and Sigmund Freud to Antonio Damasio and Thomas Metzinger.

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Islands: Setting, Experience, Environment

640.4 AA Thurs, 18:00-20:15, LB 646, Marcie Frank

Islands, in early modern and 18th-century texts such as Thomas More’s Utopia, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, William Shakespeare’s Tempest, Henry Neville’s Isle of Pines, William Davenant and John Dryden’s Enchanted Island, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and countless later texts in the genre of the robinsonade, serve as laboratories for probing and/or reproducing the limits of the social world, the relations it fosters, and that which can be known about it. Some latter-day instances retain the association of islands with enchantment, though some explore disenchantment by establishing the proximity of islands to prisons. After surveying the early examples of island literature, we will turn to selected latter-day texts, some from the reception of the Tempest in the Caribbean (Aime Cesaire, Franz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Michelle Cliff) and some rewritings of Defoe (Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” J.M. Coeztee’s Foe and Michel Tournier’s Friday or the Bones of the Pacific) in order to explore the concepts needed to theorize islands, including chronotope, ecology, and adaptation.

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Prose Workshop

674.4 AA Mon, 18:00-20:15, LB 659-4, Josip Novakovich

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Literature, Cognition, and the Sense of Self
801 AA Wed, 18:00-20:15, LB 646, Omri Moses (cross-listed with ENGL 626)

Literary interrogations of consciousness and selfhood have driven narrative innovation and poetic experiments with form for much of the twentieth century till the present. This seminar investigates what literature and neuroscience jointly teach us about the sense of self—how it is created, what it means to have a sense of self, and what happens when that sense of self is disrupted. The goal is to put cognitive literary critical methodologies to work to understand the social contexts, cultural models, and neurological impulses that shape how writers construct literary characters and selves, and how readers respond to them. We will be tracking the emergence of new scientific methodologies and theories from cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience, asking what insights they give us into the role that narrative and metaphor play in organizing this complicated and bewildering phenomenon at the center of our identity. This will help us frame questions about the value of literature both as an object of scientific inquiry and as a cultural force that pushes the limits of our understanding of personhood. We will be reading genres of fiction, poetry, memoir, and drama as they explore boundaries and attachments, the mind- body interface, trauma, and dementia. Neuroaesthetics, cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive literary criticism have turned to these topics to help us understand how selves are formed, divided, integrated, reconstructed, dispersed, and dissolved. The syllabus may include writers like Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Sylvia Plath, Lyn Hejinian, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Siri Hustvedt, as well as a range of scientific theorists from Alexander Luria and Sigmund Freud to Antonio Damasio and Thomas Metzinger.

 

Summer 2020: May 4th – June 23rd

Indigenous Canadian and American Literatures

662.1 AA Tues & Thurs (online) Jessica Bardill

This course will explore fiction, poetry, film, and essays produced by First Nations, Metis, Inuit, and American Indians in the 20th and 21st centuries, with a primary focus on the interrelations of creative production and policy (including legislation, court cases, and constitutions). We will take an interdisciplinary approach to a variety of texts by some of the best-known Indigenous North American writers, who come from a wide range of cultural backgrounds, examining the distinctive individual and tribal cultural, historical, and political contexts from which each writer’s work emerges, as well as shared characteristics of structure, form, and theme. The combination of the literary theory and the literature itself will offer a way to examine different approaches to issues and foci within the communities, including identity, violence, adoption, ancestors, military interactions, environmental concerns, land rights, apocalypse, and sexuality.

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Fall 2020: September 8th – December 23rd

The Poetics and Fictions of Scale (theory)

602.2/801 A Thurs, 15:30-17:45, LB 646 Nicola Nixon

This course seeks to explore the ways in which scale is achieved in literature. From genres (the epic, the encyclopedia, the tall tale, the miniature, sudden fiction) and figures (the catalogue, congeries, ellipsis, paralipsis) to rhetorical style (hyperbole, litotes) and themes (gluttony, excessiveness, scarcity, leanness, diminishment) literary texts have sought strategies to express scale in poetic and fictional discourse. We will question economies of expression—does a Whitmanian catalogue, for example, offer a heft that can stand in contrast to a Dickinsonian elliptical spareness? or are size and scale not determined by word count but ambition? and what does size on the page have to do with scale of representation? We will also question what big or small, major or minor, short or long might mean in literary terms; and we will extend our questions to cinematic considerations of just such queries, thinking about how the “close-up” or “zoom” makes big what is small. Possible Reading Texts may include: Erasmus, On Copia, Rabelais, Gargantua, Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Melville, Moby-Dick, Whitman and Dickinson poems, Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin, Carson McCullers, Ballad of the Sad Café, Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho, Alexander Kluge, The Devil’s Blindspot. Possible Critical Texts may include works by John Guillory, Mikhail Bakhtin, William Ian Miller, Susan Stewart, Rachel Adams, Franco Moretti, Mark McGurl, Leslie Adelman, Mary Ann Doane, Bruno Latour.
 

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Pedestrian Poetics: Walking as Contemporary Aesthetic Practice (theory)

602.2 B Tues, 13:15-15:30, LB 646 Andre Furlani

The course considers how and to what ends walking should flourish as a contemporary aesthetic practice, one that blazes trails in such fields as ecopoetics, new urbanism, and the digital humanities, as well as in genre, cognitive, gender, race and animal studies. Walking structures and modifies diverse contemporary literary forms, including the travelogue (W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital, Lisa Robinson’s “Seven Walks,” André Carpentier’s Ruelles, jours ouvrables), poetry (Seamus Heaney’s “Station Island,” Anne Carson’s “Kinds of Water,” Alice Oswald’s Dart, Jan Zwicky’s The Long Walk, Thalia Field’s “Walking,” Robert Melançon’s L’Avant-printemps à Montréal), the novel (Gail Scott’s My Paris, Ben Lerner’s 10:04, Peter Handke’s A Moment of True Feeling, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Rawi Hage’s Cockroach, Régine Robin’s La Québécoite, Teja Cole’s Open City), short fiction (Lydia Davis’s “The Walk”), the novella (J.M.G. De Clezio’s “Histoire du pied” and Thomas Bernhard’s Gehen), historical fiction (E.L. Doctorow’s The March and José Saramago’s The Elephant’s Journey), political reportage (Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades and Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks), social history (Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse and Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Road), memoir (Werner Herzog’s Of Walking in Ice and Piero Bossi’s Quattro animali in viaggio), children’s literature (Sara O’Leary’s Nightwalk), and comics (“Harold and the Purple Crayon”). There are abundant compelling examples of performance art (Sophie Calle, Françis Alÿs, Marina Abramovic, Bruce Nauman), cinema (Tsai Ming-liang’s Walker and Gus Van Sant’s Gerry), photography (Richard Long and Gary Winogrand), interactive audio (Janet Cardiff’s Audio Walks), and digital art (J.R. Carpenter’s Entre-Ville). The syllabus will include excerpts from a number of the above works, selected partly in consultation with the participants. Assessment will be based on a class presentation, participation, a short paper and a term assignment that may either be academic or literary.

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(Literary) Listening as Cultural Technique (theory)

ENGL 604.2 B Mon, 15:30-17:45, LB 646 Jason Camlot

This seminar will be about listening in different disciplinary and cultural contexts, and especially in the context of literary studies. We assume a lot about listening. In Althussarian terms we might say that we are persistently interpellated, or hailed into listening subject positions, and the cultural or disciplinary assumptions that those listening positions entail. We listen from positions of cultural protocol and assumption and in doing so practice listening as “cultural techniques.” Media theorist Bernhard Siegert argues that “cultural techniques” incite “a more or less complex actor network that comprises technological objects as well as the operative chains they are part of and that configure and constitute them.” They are conceived as “operative chains that precede media”, presuppose “a notion of plural cultures”, “involve symbolic work”, work to operationalize distinctions, and they function both to sustain and institutionalize codes and sign systems, and to destabilize cultural codes, erase signs, and deterritorialize sounds and images. This is but one theory that may be applied to explain how listening practices function as cultural techniques. In our work together we will read a range of discipline-specific theories about audile techniques (listening practices), and will apply concepts from those readings to our discussion and interpretation of printed literary works and audiotexts (recordings of literary performances) with the ultimate aim of formulating readings, interpretations and critical definitions that help describe and explain what listening means within the context of “the literary.”

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Apocalyptic Visions Medieval and Modern (period)

607.2 A Mon, 13:15-15:30, LB 649 Stephen Yeager

The Greek word “apocalypse” refers literally to the “unveiling” of hidden knowledge. Because the fallen world we inhabit is confusing and contradictory, imagining its end is a helpful way of imposing sense on our experience and articulate our values. Perhaps because such visions of the end explicitly aim to represent the unrepresentable, they are often enigmatically allegorical and open to multiple contradictory interpretations. And yet for this very reason, apocalyptic texts are often highly presentist and polemical, working to craft political identities and enable movements towards change. In this on-line, largely asynchronous class, students will work in collaboration with the instructor and their peers in explorations of apocalyptic writing that will move between four nodes: first, a survey of the history of European apocalypticism from the Book of Revelation and St. Augustine to Martin Luther and Christopher Columbus; second, a theoretical examination of the apocalyptic tendencies in Marx’s Communist Manifesto and 1844 manuscripts; third, a focused examination of medieval English apocalyptic poetry circulating in the period between the Black Death and the Peasant’s Revolt (Pearl, the Prophecies of Merlin, Piers Plowman A version); fourth, a consideration of the intersections between (post-)apocalyptic SF and afrofuturism, focalized around Sun Ra, Phil K Dick, Octavia Butler, and Nnedi Okorafor.

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The New American Poetry: Experimental US Poetics, 1945-1990 (period)

628.2 A Wed, 13:15-15:30, LB 649 Stephen Ross

This seminar surveys experimental US poetry and poetics from 1945 to 1990. Our starting point will be the “New American Poetry,” a congeries of movements and practices that pushed modernist innovation in new directions at the dawning of the Cold War. Using Donald Allen’s influential anthology, The New American Poetry: 1945-60, as a guidebook and provocation, we will examine the advent of “projective verse” and “composition by field” at Black Mountain College in Asheville, NC; the New York School’s poetic assimilation of painterly abstraction and Pop insouciance; and the invention of “serial poetry” on the West coast. We will then turn our attention to the emergence of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and its mobilization of experimental aesthetics as an apparatus of anti-racist politics. Finally, we will examine the rise and flourishing of Language poetry on both coasts in the 1970s and 1980s as a collective critique of American neo-imperialism and the degradation of public speech. Readings will be drawn from the following poets: Black Mountain: Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov; New York School: John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, Bernadette Mayer, Eileen Myles; San Francisco Renaissance: Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Bob Kaufman; Black Arts Movement: LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Gwendolyn Brooks; Language: Rae Armantrout, Ron Silliman, Michael Palmer, Lyn Hejinian.

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Fallism (theory)

665.2 AA Wed, 18:00-20:15, LB 659 Jesse Arseneault

This course explores South African literary and cultural texts through the lens of Fallism, a decolonial concept derived from the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall student protests that gained traction in 2015 at universities across that nation. The movements involved efforts by student groups to dismantle the commemorative statue of colonist Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town, challenge institutional racism at South African Universities, and reverse fee hikes that prohibited poor and (given the racialized distribution of wealth in the nation) Black students from attending university. Spurring calls for decolonization across multiple strata of South African society, Fallism overwhelmingly disrupted tertiary education across the nation and infused national consciousness with heightened awareness of and disappointment in the ongoing legacies of Apartheid that structure South African institutions. Despite this, the movement also gained some high-profile detractors, including dismissive assessments by public intellectuals such as Achille Mbembe and Nomoniso Gasa, and criticism for the way its cooptation by masculinist rhetoric undermined many protestors’ dedication to intersectional themes. Evaluating these struggles’ antecedents and aftermaths through the lens of South African literature and theory, this course seeks to understand the political, cultural, and pedagogical ramifications of this decolonial endeavor, as well as the anticolonial movements in the Apartheid and post-Apartheid periods that have shaped Fallist sentiment. It will also consider how or whether this movement contains lessons for those in decolonial movements beyond South Africa. Readings in the course will involve a range of contemporary South African literature and theory, as well as readings from influential figures in the region’s decolonial thought, intersectional feminisms, and Black Consciousness whose ideas influenced the movement.

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Poetry – Creative Writing

674.2 AA Tues, 18:00-20:15, LB 655 (Richler) Sina Queyras

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Fall/Winter 2020-2021: September 8th – April 13th

Prose – Creative Writing

672.3 A Wed, 13:15-15:30, LB 655 (Richler) Kate Sterns

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Winter 2021: January 6th – April 13th

Feminism & Comedy: Theories & Controversies

601.4 A Thurs, 14:45-17:00, LB 646 Danielle Bobker

What, exactly, is bad about bad jokes, and what is good about good ones? What are, or should be, their respective effects and consequences? This course pursues these ethical, political, aesthetic, and legal questions at the intersections of feminist theory and humour studies with sharp attention to the categories of power and publicness, pleasure and harm. We’ll explore theories of humour and laughter by such authors as Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, Henry Louis Gates, Michael Billig, Rebecca Krefting, and Anca Parvelescu with an eye to how each navigates issues of systemic oppression. Similarly, we’ll investigate the character of humour in feminist criticism by such authors as Audre Lorde, Hélène Cixous, Kimberle Crenshaw, Donna Haraway, Jack Halberstam, Sianne Ngai, Sara Ahmed, and Roxanne Gay. To test and refine our evolving hypotheses about the qualities, effects, and consequences of humour, throughout the semester we’ll analyze controversies from the eighteenth century through to the present surrounding such writers (and performers) as Mary Wortley Montagu, Oscar Wilde, Mae West, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, 2 Live Crew, Mike Ward, Dave Chappelle, and Hannah Gadsby.

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Cultural Technique (theory)

603.4 A Mon, 14:45-17:00, LB 646 Darren Wershler

"Cultural Technique" is simultaneously one of the most compelling concepts to emerge out of cultural and media studies over the last several decades, and one of the least studied. As Geoffrey Winthop-Young notes in his "Preliminary Remarks" on the 2013 special issue of Theory, Culture & Society on cultural technique, while the term has its relative beginnings in agriculture, it has been used with great frequency to analyze interactions between humans and media, and, "most recently, to account for basic operations and differentiations that give rise to an array of conceptual and ontological entities which are said to constitute culture." For Bernhard Siegert, cultural techniques come into being when chains of operations are formalized into something more coherent that can be performed successfully on a repeated basis. The power and utility of the concept of cultural technique stems from its ability not only to theorize a wide range of cultural practices (everything from slaughtering and meat-packing to the use of grids in mapping to composing a sonnet or conducting a close reading), but to provide a methodology for doing so. As such, students will be learning the techniques of cultural technique theory (and, for that matter, the techniques of academic research presentation) self-reflexively as we proceed through the term).

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The Storyteller (period)

611.4 A Wed, 15:30-17:45, LB 646 Kevin Pask

“The Storyteller” invokes Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay, which associated the decline of the oral culture and oral storytelling with the domination of the novel in modern European culture. In the wake of Benjamin’s essay, this course will examine the relationship between orality and writing in fictions from The Thousand and One Nights to examples from contemporary fiction. Benjamin treated the novel (although not consistently) as inimical to the storyteller, but we will also consider the traces of orality in the formation of the modern novel, including devices such as the “inset tale,” a widely used novelistic device from Cervantes until the nineteenth century, and various forms of direct address to the reader. In the final part of the course, we will also be attentive to newer technological mediations of the effects of orality, from phonograph and radio to the digitized audiobook, and their potential relationship to narrative form. Primary texts will include at least some of the following: The Thousand and One Nights (selections); Boccaccio, The Decameron (selections); William Shakespeare, Pericles; Cervantes, Don Quixote (selections); Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews ; Mario Vargas Llosa, The Storyteller; Rachel Cusk, Outline. Stories by the Grimm brothers, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, Nikolai Leskov, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, I. B. Singer. Criticism and theory: Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Derrida, Walter Ong, Jack Goody, Friedrich Kittler, Benedict Anderson, Matthew Rubery.

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Romanticism, Ecocriticism, and the Anthropocene (period + theory)

623.4 A Tues, 14:45-17:00, LB 646 Jonathan Sachs

What is at stake in the relationship of Romantic writing to nature and the environment? How did ecological crises in late eighteenth-century Europe shape Romantic thinking? How does Romantic writing present the human engagement with nonhuman nature? These questions are important because Romantic poetry is often conflated with nature poetry, and Romantic ecocriticism frequently finds the roots of the environmental movement in the Romantics’ emphasis on nature. The transition to industrial capitalism and related demographic movement to cities certainly inflected literary practices at this pivotal moment, as Raymond Williams, John Barrell, and Leo Marx among others have shown. Further, recent work on the “Anthropocene,” an epoch framed by the effect of human activity on atmospheric and geological transformations, commonly locates the destabilization of nature in the technological, demographic, and economic changes that we associate with Romanticism. Bearing these concerns in mind, this course will survey the intersections between Romanticism, ecocriticism, and the idea of the Anthropocene. In addition to those mentioned above, readings will include critical work by Jonathan Bate, Lawrence Buell, Amitav Ghosh, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Kathryn Yusuff, to be read alongside literary works by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Clare, Keats, Shelley, Byron, and others. We will pay particular attention to how attention to “nature” inflects questions of futurity, continuity, and the spatial and temporal scales through which Romantic writers and subsequent critics understand both historical and everyday experience.

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Twentieth-Century Literature and the Brain Sciences (theory)

626.4 AA Wed, 18:00-20:15, LB 659 Omri Moses

Literature requires very particular kinds of mental effort. But experimental findings regarding particular brain functions have only recently begun to be of field-wide interest to literary critics. This course looks at older philosophical accounts of consciousness as well as fin-de-siècle psychology and more recent neuroscience in order to examine what, if anything, we may be able to surmise about literature as an exercise of the mind as well as an evolutionary social practice. We will begin by informing ourselves about neuroscientific findings in domains relevant to literature, such as the formation of selfhood (important for investigations of literary character), multimodal sensory awareness (important for aesthetic response), and the workings of feelings and emotions (the materials for literary response). We will investigate these topics in fields as neuroaesthetics, cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive literary criticism, delving into more particular arenas such as the neurobiology of reading, theories of embodied cognition, and brain-body interactions. Because humanistic inquiry into these fields is nascent, we will be exploring the kinds of questions that may be fruitful as an analytic perspective on literature. As the course unfolds, we will examine writers’ attention to such matters as memory, habit formation, self-knowledge, and mental access to one’s own thoughts. Ultimately, we will want to know whether neuroscience has something to learn from literature and literary studies as well as the reverse.

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Towards a Genealogy of Autofiction

640.4/800 A Thurs 11-13:15, LB 646 Marcie Frank

Contemporary fiction displays a marked preference for first-person narration, often in texts that blur the boundaries between the narrating “I” and the biographical author. The term “auto-fiction” was coined in 1977 by Serge Doubrovsky (with reference to his own novel, Fils), to name this narrative mode. Doubrovsky looked back to Proust through the lens of the nouveaux romanciers and Roland Barthes, but his category can also encompass practitioners of écriture feminine and a group of American writers loosely affiliated under the rubric of New Narrative (including Dennis Cooper, Kevin Killian, Kathy Acker, Cookie Mueller, and others) equally informed by French literary examples and structuralist and post-structuralist theory. This course proposes to investigate what it would take to establish a critical genealogy for Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, Ben Lerner’s 10:04, Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be, the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s multi-volume My Struggle, and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonoauts.

Together, we will explore the aims of this narrative modality to capture or problematize authentic personal experience, bearing in mind the identification of these same goals in classic novel theory (Watt, McKeon, Armstrong) and narratological accounts of narration (Genette, Bal, Fludernik). Can Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), in which she appears as a scribe to the Empress of the imaginary Blazing World, count as a precursor, especially in view of its 2014 rewriting by Siri Hustveldt? What about Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722), a fictional diary about the Great Plague of 1665/6? We will explore the ways the historical and critical frames of reference help or hinder the project of this genealogy at the same time as we consider what the belated naming of the narrative modality, and its current popularity, says about the status of the novel in our time.

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Writing the American Economy: Postwar to the Present

657.4 AA Tues, 18:00-20:15, LB 659 Mary Esteve

Over the past seven decades or so the American economy has evolved from an “embedded liberalism”—in which the market, as David Harvey puts it, was “surrounded by a web of social and political constraints and a regulatory environment”—to a neoliberalism marked by deregulation, privatization, and the financialization of economic resources. In this seminar we will examine the way American fiction engages with these evolving conditions and the political-economic idioms they produce. In addition to addressing era-specific economic phenomena and debates (such as the role of the welfare state, the politics of redistribution/recognition, and the positive and negative dimensions of consumerism, deregulation, and globalization), we’ll consider how literary works register and refract formal elements of the economy (such as money, price, speculation, and corporate personhood). In addition to several novels, required reading will include literary, historicist, and socioeconomic criticism.

In addition to several novels--including Patricia Highsmith, THE PRICE OF SALT, Marilynne Robinson HOUSEKEEPING, Richard Powers GAIN, Don DeLillo COSMOPOLIS, Thomas Pynchon INHERENT VICE--required reading will include literary, historicist, and socioeconomic criticism.

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Poetic Determination - Form and Mediation in Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil

668.4 AA Mon, 18:00-20:15, LB 646 Nathan Brown

At the core of this course will be intensive study of the 1861 edition of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil. We will practice and theorize close reading, learn how to work between translation and original, and familiarize ourselves with the scholarly apparatus for study of a major writer like Baudelaire. In this respect our goal will be a thorough understanding of individual poems, the overall structure of the volume, and the thematic concerns and interpretive problems traversing it. But we will also range more widely in order to think through the relationship between form and mediation—the problem of what I call poetic determination—with Baudelaire’s volume serving as a case study for addressing this larger theoretical and literary-critical question. Thinking “below” the level of form, we will ask how form gets made not only at the level of technique but of the historical, conceptual, phenomenological, and affective genesis of the poem. We will also think about how the making of Baudelaire’s book is situated at the crux of the relation between romanticism and modernism. To address these questions we will read excerpts from Kant and Hegel on mediation and the dialectic along with critical texts by Barbara Johnson, Elissa Marder, Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alexi Kukuljevic, Walter Benjamin, and T.J. Clark, as well as Baudelaire’s own critical writings on art and literature. We will then conclude the course with two sessions on Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal (2020), the novelistic episodes of which are constructed through mediations of Les fleurs du mal and Baudelaire’s prose poems.

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Turning Prose Into Performance – Creative Writing

673.4 AA Tues, 18:00-20:15, LB 646 Greg MacArthur

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Updated June 15, 2020
 

Summer 2019: May 6th - June 19th

Debating the Digital Humanities  

602.1    AA    Tues & Thurs    14:45-17:30    Paul Barrett  

This course introduces students to contemporary debates in the digital humanities and situates those debates within the apparent broader crisis of the humanities. We will investigate the methods and theories of the digital humanities while also considering how the notion of the humanities are transformed by their engagement with the digital. What becomes of notions of criticism, hermeneutics, text, and philology within these new interpretive paradigms? Furthermore, how might a critical digital humanities enable us to interrogate how notions of the humanities enable particular visions of what it means to be human? We will look at a number of texts, theoretical frameworks, and digital tools to consider how digital humanities is changing not only traditional notions of reading and humanities work but also how DH itself is changed through critical engagement with categories of race, gender, class, and nation.

This course will invite students to put theory into practice (while also using theory to critique our practices) by using digital tools to intervene in these debates in the digital humanities. We will look at novels, games, digital texts, and software through the lens of digital humanities as well as theories of race, embodiment, sexuality and citizenship. Students will be asked to reflect on their own interpretive practices when looking at new forms of textuality and use those reflections as the bases for addressing some of the questions raised in class materials, lectures, and discussions.

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Fall 2019: September 3rd - December 2nd

Aesthetics and the Chemical Senses

604.2  A  Mon  13:15-16:00  Hsuan Hsu  (Theory)

The “lower,” “chemical” senses of taste and smell have long occupied a marginalized position at the bottom of the Enlightenment hierarchy of the senses: because they do not respect the perceiver’s autonomy, Kant associated them more with savage and bestial “enjoyment” than with judgments of beauty. Yet the very things that have justified neglecting these senses—their materiality, their “trans-corporeal” biochemical effects, their capacity to bypass reasoned judgment, their affective appeal, and their association with feminine, racialized, and animal passivity—makes them both powerful and vitally connected to critical conversations in the fields of environmental humanities, critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, food studies, atmospheric geography, and affect studies.

How do the chemical, trans-corporeal aesthetics of taste and smell shape ideas about bodies, environmental relations, race, and biopolitics? How have writers and artists engaged with these senses in ways that address the ethics and politics of trans-corporeal environmental relations? How do we communicate about taste and smell across the boundaries of class, gender, race, locality, and time? What might studying these senses tell us about aesthetic phenomena such as synesthesia, as well as bio-social issues such as metabolisms and health disparities? Among the works we will consider are Sylvester Graham’s reflections on bread and masturbation, Parama Roy on food and empire, Kyla Wazana Tompkins on “racial indigestion,” Helen Keller’s descriptions of gustatory and olfactory worlding, Larissa Lai’s novel about durian-human hybrids, Catherine Maxwell’s study of Victorian perfume imaginaries, and scholarship and art concerning sugar plantations (Kara Walker), microbiomes (Anicka Yi, Deboleena Roy), the spice trade (Beatrice Glow), obesity (Lauren Berlant), artificial sweeteners (Caroline Thomas), and the sensory experiences of migrant farmworkers (Helena Maria Viramontes).

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A Cross-Cultural Renaissance

611.2    A    Wed    13:15-15:30    Darragh Languay    (period)       

In his “Digression of the Air,” Democritus Junior (narrator of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy) mounts aloft as a long-winged hawk to his full pitch so that he might look down upon the world and test his geographical knowledge. From this lofty position, too, he reflects on the causes of the differences among peoples of different nations. This inquiry into cultural diversity emerges in a variety of forms in the literature of the Renaissance. In her influential Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Margaret Hodgen demonstrated that the social sciences did not originate in the nineteenth century, but that the study of human cultures had its foundations at least as far back as the sixteenth century, when contact with unfamiliar peoples led Europeans to create ways of describing and understanding social similarities and differences among humans. As a result of trade, travel, and attempts at colonization, English men and women were increasingly exposed to the world outside their borders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and confronted with questions about the value of other cultures. Not only could they read about rare and exotic objects, commodities and unfamiliar practices in travel accounts, but they could see for themselves native people and cultural artifacts brought back and displayed in London.

This course will consider some of the particular ways in which Renaissance drama (its performance conditions and generic features) participated in the study of human cultures as it dramatized exchanges between nations. Anxieties inherent in confrontations with ‘others,’ and the subsequent negotiations of cultural difference are played out in many canonical and non-canonical plays of the period. Works by Jonson, Shakespeare, Fletcher and Marlowe, as well as by lesser known early modern playwrights, will be examined along with relevant historical documents (such as edicts essays, travel narratives, maps, descriptions and woodcuts of cabinets of curiosities and tableaux vivants) and recent theoretical approaches to the subject. Studying representations of cross- cultural exchanges on the early modern stage will illuminate some of the ways in which cultural difference was encountered and understood in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England.
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“The World” of Eighteenth-century British Literature

616.2    A    Tues    18:00-20:15    Marcie Frank    (period)  

“What is a World?” asks Pheng Cheah in the title to his 2016 book investigating the nature and politics of novelistic discourse. Yet his argument takes the canonical “rise of the novel” narrative for granted. So does Amitav Ghosh in his treatment of the limited capacity of the novel to represent climate change in The Great Derangement. Others have problematized the critical intersections of postcolonial, global, and environmental studies with the history of the novel as a genre and with literature more generally most notably Srivinas Aravamudan in Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel and Siraj Ahmed in The Archeology of Babel. In this course we will read three or four early novels and/or oriental tales that deal with “the world” including Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Beckford’s Vathek, to investigate what novel history (pace Aravamudan) and literary critical methods deriving from philology (pace Ahmed) can tell us about the world-making as it is currently construed.

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A Pastoral: The Poetics of Pleasure

640.2    A    Thurs    15:30-17:45    Kevin Pask  

Pastoral is associated with the celebration of shepherds, the natural world they inhabit, and the loves they pursue. In this course, we shall look at all of those traditional aspects of the pastoral form, with particular emphasis on the role of leisure and pleasure. Pleasure here will be multifarious: love and sexuality, the relationship to the natural world, and song itself. By the late Renaissance, moreover, pastoral also represented a cultural alliance, real or imagined, between “high” and “low”—aristocrat and peasant—against the new world of rational economic calculation and sexual self-control associated with the bourgeoisie. The course will begin at the origin of European pastoral, with one class on The Idylls of Theocritus. Much of the course will be devoted to the Renaissance revival and revision of pastoral forms, but there will also be considerable attention to some versions of pastoral (to borrow from William Empson) since the Renaissance.

Primary texts will include at least some of the following:

Theocritus, The Idylls
Spenser, The Faerie Queene, selections from Book 6
Shakespeare, As You Like It; The Winter’s Tale
John Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess
Cervantes, pastoral selections from Don Quixote
Andrew Marvell and Henry Vaughan; Cavalier lyric
John Clare, selections from The Shepherd’s Calendar
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Modern/contemporary poets responding to pastoral: A. E. Housman, William Carlos Williams, H. D., John Ashbery

Some of the critics and theorists used in the course will include William Empson, Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault (on the history of sexuality), Paul Alpers, David Halperin (Before Pastoral), Raymond Williams (The Country and the City), and recent ecocriticism that considers Renaissance pastoral.
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A Race and the Comic Turn (6 credits)

657.2    A    Tues    12:00-16:00    Danielle Bobker, Nicola Nixon

In this course we will use humour theory as a critical lens through which to analyze the racial politics of comedy. More specifically, we will focus much of our analysis on African American comedy, from its cooption of the minstrel show tradition to its readdressing of slavery, from its early days of playing solely to all-black audiences to its current centrality in mainstream media. Taking up theories of humour, by philosophers, psychoanalysts, feminists, and critical race scholars, we will interrogate our assumptions about what or who is funny and about the social and ethical effects of laughter. At the same time, we’ll consider the particular turn that deliberately racialized comedy presents, confronting such questions as audience (excluded and/or included); discomfort; laughing with or laughing at; white supremacism, privilege, and guilt; denigration respun and owned; stereotypes repossessed. Theoretical texts may include those by Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Linda Hutcheon, Robin Means Coleman, Mel Watkins, Glenda Carpio, and Sianne Ngai. Literary and performance texts may include those by Charles Chesnutt, Sterling Brown, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, George Schuyler, Fran Ross, Paul Beatty, Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Richard Pryor, Dave Chappelle, Wanda Sykes,Boots Riley, Spike Lee, and Key and Peele.
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Digital Archives and Alternative Canadian Literatures 1750-1980

662.2    AA    Mon    18:00-20:15    Daniel O’Leary    (period)

This course will introduce students to the use of digital resources as an important element of Canadian print culture studies. Beginning with a survey of Canadian print culture, including neglected periodicals and unexamined authorship, students will be invited to contribute to the opening of a Canadian studies with a wider focus than has been possible in the past. The course will present units on the print culture of the underground railway and the abolition movement, on sources for the study of early indigenous records and print, and on early women’s writing drawn from a spectrum of early Canadian communities. Canadian regional print sub-cultures and their predominant genres will also be considered.

Authors to be treated include Mary Ann Shadd, Henry Bibb, Laura Smith Haviland, George Copway, Orenhyatekha, Kahkewaquonaby, David Thompson, Anne Grenfell, and also figures drawn from the more standard history of Canadian literature, including Emily Pauline Johnson, Susanna Moodie, Catharine Parr Traill, Archibald Lampman, Charles Sangster, Marjorie Pickthall and Nellie McClung. This will be a very “hands on” course, and will invite consideration of the material-cultural implications of book history and semiotics. The final units of the course will extend this treatment to small press publishing and the “little magazine” and will be asked to consider the role of such publications in supporting communities of writers in Canada. In this context students will also examine the rise of Canadian modernism in the work of A. M. Klein, Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood.
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Postcolonial Environmental Humanities

665/802.2    A    Thurs    13:15-15:30    Jill Didur    (theory)

Environmental humanities can be broadly defined by its focus on cultural, political, and historical dimensions of climate change, resource extraction, and human/nonhuman relationality. Postcolonial studies has long been engaged in articulating transnational approaches to understanding the entanglement of nature and culture in the history of empire. Working primarily in the fields of world literature and postcolonial studies, scholars such as Edward Said and Rob Nixon have brought these areas of inquiry together, arguing that “because of the presence of the colonizing outsider, the land is recoverable at first only through the imagination” (Said 1993). The entanglement of nature and culture is intensified in the present through the dramatic effects of human-induced climate change—or what is being referred to as the era of the Anthropocene. These activities are interwoven with the history of global networks established since the Industrial Revolution, as well as colonial empires, traders and capitalists. Theorizations of the Anthropocene within the humanities (Chakrabarty 2006; Haraway 2016; Latour 2017; Morton 2016; Moore 2015) foreground the global character of this history, and dovetail with postcolonial approaches to the study of the environment. Described by Nixon as “slow violence,” this kind of environmental change is “neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing across a range of temporal scales” (2011).

This course will examine how human/nonhuman relationality and representations of the environment are addressed in postcolonial writing. Through attention to writing about exploration, natural history, travel, eco- tourism, gardens, and memoirs of settlement, this course will investigate how colonial ways of knowing and perceiving the environment have contributed to the discourse of human ascendency over nature. In additional to postcolonial approaches to the environmental humanities (Glissant 1989; Pratt 1992; Mukherjee 2010; Nixon 2011; Carrigan 2011; DeLoughrey et al. 2015; Huggan et al. 2015), we will examine theorizations of the Anthropocene and the posthuman that foreground the global character of environmental history. We will ground these theoretical debates in discussions of literary works by writers such as Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, Nadine Gordimer, Helon Habila, Jamaica Kincaid, and Arundhati Roy, Eden Robinson, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Indra Sinha.

Selected secondary readings:
Rosi Braidotti The Posthuman (2013)
Anthony Carrigan Postcolonial Tourism: Literature, Culture, and Environment (2011) Dipesh Chakrabarty “The Climate of History: Four Theses” (2009).
Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (2011) Amitav Ghosh The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016)
Donna Haraway Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016) Bruno Latour Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (2017) Rob Nixon Slow Violence and Environmentalism of the Poor (2011)
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Aesthetic Theory: Romantic, Modernist, Contemporary

668.2    AA    Wed    18:00-20:15    Nathan Brown    (theory)   

At the end of her 2012 study, Our Aesthetic Categories, Sianne Ngai remarks that “it is aesthetic theory that needs resuscitation in our contemporary moment, not the aesthetic as such.” Ngai’s point is that because the forms of sensation we might call “aesthetic” have undergone a hyperbolic expansion in late capitalist culture, aesthetic theory requires new categories and modes of reflection to constitute an adequate critique of structures of feeling. We will approach this problem by studying key formulations of aesthetic theory traversing romantic, modernist, and contemporary cultural moments, focusing on four major texts.

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) inspired romantic aesthetic theory by according a central philosophical role to aesthetic reflection, by identifying beauty with the experience of singularity, and by developing a powerful new theory of the sublime. Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970) refashions Kantian critique from a historical materialist perspective, taking seriously the challenge of modernism to concepts of “art” and developing a dialectical theory of how the formal “autonomy” of the artwork is related to historical determinations. Focusing on supposedly “minor” aesthetic categories (cute, interesting, and zany), Sianne Ngai extends aesthetic theory beyond its traditional focus on the beautiful and the sublime, attending to the configuration and subsumption of subjective affects by contemporary capitalist culture. Fred Moten’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003) asks how blackness bears upon artistic production and reception, with particular attention to structures of temporality, improvisation and ensemble, sexuality and the disruption of origin. Moten’s book is a crucial text for considering the import of black studies, as a contemporary theoretical discipline, for current and future reformulations of aesthetic theory.

Throughout the course, we will reflect upon the major concepts and categories the problem of “the aesthetic” brings into play: the distribution of universality, particularity, and singularity; the relation between sensation and cognition; the theoretical analysis of affects; the historical ground of finite experience; and the relationship between capitalism and race. Thus, while our focus will be on aesthetic theory, this course will also serve as an introduction to major problems in critical
theory more generally.

Texts
Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790)
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970)
Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003)
Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012)
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Winter 2020: January 6th - April 14th

The Wild

601.4    AA    Mon    18:00-20:15    Jess Arsenault    (theory)

This course explores various approaches to wildness in cultural theory. Anti- and post-colonial thinkers have long critiqued the concept’s association with wilderness for, among other things, overwriting the violent underpinnings of colonialism with a mythology of uncultivated landscapes and lending fixity to conservative environmentalist notions of pristine nature. More recently, alongside the rise of posthumanist and animal studies scholarship, wildness has taken on other meanings, emerging as a position from which to refuse participation in biopolitical regimes that structure everyday life across the globe.

This course is neither an effort to exonerate the category of wildness from its violent history nor to uncritically celebrate its resistant potential. Nonetheless, the course hopes to explore the promise wildness holds for those who “remain animated in our pursuit of the unruly, agitated in our desire of the unrest” (Halberstam and Nyong’o, 2018, p. 458). Wildness, for this course, articulates a positionality for those bodies—human, extrahuman, geological—who refuse interpellation,domestication, subjection, and representation in current networks of power and identity. In reading a category that is both compelling in being unmoored from the constraints of civility and uncertain in its potential refusing the domesticatory impulses of institutional frameworks, the course will be devoted to students crafting their own theoretical interventions on this broad topic. The course may include examinations of feral and willful feminisms (Ahmed, 2014, 2017); anti- hierarchical and anti-anthropocentric theories (Agamben, 2004; Calarco, 2014); the commodification of wildness, animal capital, and capitalist natures (Collard and Dempsey, 2015; Shukin, 2009; Wright, 2010); gender, trans* identities, and critiques of gendered taxonomies (Halberstam, 2017; Macharia, 2016); strays, unruly bodies, and resilient ecologies (Haraway, 2016; Oliver 2009; Tsing 2012, 2015); pathogens, the pest, and pesticidal campaigns (Ahuja, 2016; Mavhunga, 2011); human and animal in antiracist thought (Weheliye, 2014); and the violence of domestication and companion species (Haraway, 2003).

Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004. Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke UP, 2017.
Ahmed, Sara. Willful Subjects. Durham: Duke UP, 2014.
Ahuja, Neel. Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species. Durham: Duke UP, 2016.
Calarco, Matthew. “Being Toward Meat: Anthropocentrism, Indistinction, and Veganism.” Dialectical Anthropology
38.4 (2014): 415-429. Print.
Collard, Rosemary Claire and Jessica Dempsey. “A Manifesto for Abundant Futures.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105(2): 322-330.
Halberstam, Jack. Trans*. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018.
Halberstam, Jack and Tavia Nyong’o. Theory in the Wild. Special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 117.3 (2018). Haraway, Donna. Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthlulucene. Durham: Duke UP, 2016.
Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007.
Macharia, Keguro. “5 Reflections on Trans* and Taxonomy (with Neo Musangi).” Critical Arts 30.4 (2016): 495- 506.
Mavhunga, Clapperton Chakanetsa. “Vermin Beings: On Pestiferous Animals and Human Game.” Social Text
29.1 (2011): 161-176.
Oliver, Kelly. Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to be Human. New York: Columbia UP, 2009.
Weheliye, Alexander. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke UP, 2014.
Wright, Laura. “Wilderness into Civilized Shapes”: Reading the Postcolonial Environment. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010.
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Media Archaeology: Inscription Media edition

603.4    A    Tues    13:15-16:15    Darren Wershler    (theory)

What is media archaeology? As Jussi Parikka describes, it is a subfield of media history that scrutinizes contemporary media culture through investigations of past media technologies and creative media practices. Media archaeology takes a special interest in recondite and forgotten apparatuses, practices and inventions. At an historical moment when our own media technologies become obsolete with increasing rapidity, the study of residual forms and practices provides valuable context for analysis, and perhaps the possibility for the emergence of something new.

This course deals with the theory, current practice, and possible trajectories of media archaeology as a discipline. Our chief resource will be the research collection of the new Residual Media Depot of the Media History Research Centre at the Milieux Institute. Work will consist of a mix of writing, thinking, talking, and hands-on encounters with materials from the collection, according to student skills and interests.

This course has been taught twice as an intensive one-week graduate course for the Concordia International Summer Schools -- in 2016, as the pilot for the Summer Schools program itself, and again in 2017. It has been extremely successful on a global scale, drawing students from countries including Canada, China, Sweden, Finland, Spain, Mexico and the USA. For the first time, I am proposing to run it as a full-semester course in winter 2020, and I expect a large cohort of students from departments across Concordia and elsewhere.

I run this course on a "flipped" model, meeting one per week in a 3-hour block. A large amount of additional critical discussion will take place on the class website (see residualmedia.net) in the form of weekly individual blog posts that help to structure conversation.

The first hour each week follows a seminar model. We will make frequent use of breakout groups of various kinds, concept mapping and. In order to provide further context, all seminar members will also spend time locating media examples for in-class screenings in order to provide further contextual information.

The remaining two hours each week consists of work time for an individual or collective project in applied media archaeology. Students must propose their project after the second week of the course. Students will have access to the Depot collection, some support from Research Assistants, plus any other necessary supplies that Milieux can provide (after a student is accepted, the instructors will determine what we can supply and what students will have to supply themselves). Students will also be able to book additional work time on the Depot, according to the availability of my Research Assistants each week.

Projects might include, but are not limited to, the following:
- visual studies of the collection’s hardware
- readings of boxes, manuals and other textual materials
- platform studies of individual consoles in the collection
- media archaeologies, genealogies or geologies of particular consoles
- software studies of particular programs supported by the Depot’s machines
- modding of a particular console (either supplied by the student or purchased for them to work on while here)
- experiments with the Depot's upscaling and signal processing equipment and displays - fieldwork (e.g. a trip to the old Coleco factory, which is now an office loft, or trips to local retro stores, or arcades)
- white papers on the use of particular equipment in the Depot (e.g. how to set up RF consoles like the Atari 2600 or 5200 for classroom use)
- databasing the Depot collection (now underway)
- use the collection to test media-archaeological theory against real technology
- build an emulator, like a Retropie
- build an upscaler
- do some online bibliographic work around retro media collections, archives and labs Students will have access to a full range of Milieux workspaces and equipment during this period.

Readings will be circulated before the course begins. All seminar participants will arrive having completed the readings in advance. The readings themselves will consist in part of major texts from media archaeology, material media studies, cultural technique theory and articulation theory, and in part of new work that the instructors are preparing.

This particular session of the course will focus on inscription media -- forms of analog media that are created as one physical process leaves a trace on the other (e.g. handwriting, typewriting, phonography, film-based photography, etc.). In addition to providing literary graduate students with a much-needed introduction to material media theory, it will provide them with an introduction to media-archaeological methodology and history, paying particular attention to the field's historical relationship to literary studies. (Key authors on the syllabus may include, but are not limited to, Nathan Altice, Wendy Chun, Wolfgang Ernst, Lisa Gitelman, John Guillory, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stuart Hall, Friedrich Kittler, Eric Kluitenberg, Carolyn Marvin, Shannon Mattern, Jussi Parikka, Bernhard Siegert, Vanessa Schwartz, Jonathan Sterne, Cornelia Vissmann, Raymond Williams, etc.).
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Protocol, Hierarchy, the Virtual, Code: Medievalism in Digital Culture

608.4    AA    Tues    18:00-20:15    Stephen Yeager    (Theory)

This course studies the afterlife of medieval literary and cultural forms in digital media through an analysis of four key words. Since the twelfth century, “protocol” has evolved from the name for an authenticating portion of an official papyrus record into a name for predefined strategies for making choices in response to contingent circumstances. “Hierarchy,” a name for angelic and ecclesiastic orders first attested in the work of Pseudo-Dionysius, became both a structural logic for databases and a derogatory term for unequal distributions of power. “Virtual” is a post-classical, scholastic adjectival form of virtus (“virtue”), which carries forward this term’s gendered connotations of “manliness” into its framing of ideal potentiality. Finally, “code” is a term whose English use derives ultimately from the corpus iuris civilis of Roman law, a text whose monolithic value hearkens back to the original root of Latin codex in caudex: not only the stump of a tree, but a large block of wood attached to the feet of slaves as a form of punishment. The semantic range of caudex / “code”—running from
mute, material marker of abjection to a rule-based but theoretically limitless path to virtual freedom—nicely encapsulates the larger contradiction that these keywords each reveal, and that the medievalism of digital media serves to express.

To trace the history of these words and concepts, this course course will pair theoretical readings by Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari with studies of primary evidence taken from medieval historical documents and philosophical texts, and from contemporary digital media and media studies scholarship. Each keyword will be paired with an analysis of a text from that key literary tradition and narrative structure, the grail quest: “protocol” will be paired with Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte du graal, “hierarchy” with the selections from Malory’s Morte d’Artur concerning the Round Table, the “virtual” with Phil K. Dick’s Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ursula Leguin’s The Lathe of Heaven, and “code” with the adventure game Skyrim and its mods.
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Literary Soundings

622/801.4    A    Mon    14:45-17:00    Jason Camlot    (theory)

In this seminar we will study critical attempts to define the differences between oral culture and print culture and theories concerned with the cultural and aesthetic implications of sound and sound media. A key element of our work will be the development of a critical and theoretical vocabulary for analyzing the audible acoustic elements of a performed works of literature within its larger technological, aesthetic, cultural, historical, sociological and institutional contexts. A primary challenge of our endeavor will be the development of useful and compelling ways to approach literary recordings critically. In Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (1998), Charles Bernstein proposes the term "audiotext" for the cultural artifact in question. His term emphasizes the interplay between the written and the oral that will inform our efforts in this seminar, and he highlights the critical activity of careful, interpretive listening, applied with the same close attention and analysis we (literary scholars) use to engage with written works. While his application of the New Critical idea of close reading to the domain of literary audio is evocative, it remains to be seen just how we, as critics, can develop it into a compelling critical methodology. Part of our work together will entail devising methodological approaches for engaging with and interpreting audio productions of literary works ranging from the earliest recordings made in England of by actors and eloctionists, to the Caedmon poetry recordings of the 1930-50s, to recent poetic experiments in recorded talk and sound poetry. Beyond the analysis of the audio signal of literary recordings we will immerse ourselves in the theories and approaches that have come to define the new critical field of sound studies, and consider how this diverse range of theories can inform our understanding of the relationship between literature, sound and voice. And, beyond even analyzing spoken performances of literature and reading critical theory, we will also study a small selection of literary works that themselves thematize the voice, sound and audio media (i.e. those of Du Maurier, Shaw, Beckett, etc.), thus giving written literature its own "voice" upon the subject of our seminar.

Possible Texts:
Jonathan Sterne, ed. The Sound Studies Reader (2012) George Du Maurier, Trilby (Broadview)
George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion (Dover)
T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland and Other Poems (Norton Critical)
Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces (Grove) david antin, Talking (Kulchur 1972 / Dalkey Archive, 2001)
George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo (audio book version)
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Slow Time, Fast Time: Media, Technology, and the Pace of Literature

623.4    A    Tues    14:45-17:00    Jonathan Sachs    (period)   

Slowness is not a quality that we traditionally associate with the emergence of modernity, which is more generally characterized by a perceived acceleration or speeding up, one commonly instigated by advances in technologies of communication and mobility like print and the railway. And yet fundamental discourses of modernity, including those we now refer to as evolution and geology, emphasize the slow movement of time. In this context, literary writing can serve as a unique register of discontinuous temporality. This course focuses on the changing relationship between fast and slow as exhibited in the literary production of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century, the moment when the slow time of geology collided with the perceived acceleration of modernity and what Adam Smith called “the hurry of life.” Our primary archive will include works by Erasmus Darwin, Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith, Anna Barbauld, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge and others. These authors will be read in relation to writings by Buffon, Cuvier, and Darwin and to theorists of media and modernity like Latour, Koselleck, Kittler, and Foucault. Particular attention will be paid to experiences that complicate the assumption of acceleration, including slowness, deep time, boredom, longing, and nostalgia.
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Psychosomatics: Twentieth-Century Literature and Mind-Body Entanglement

626.4    AA    Thurs    18:00-20:15    Omri Moses    (theory)   

This course examines the way literature across the long twentieth century figures the mind-body connection. We will be looking in particular at emotional expressions and other ways that thoughts and feelings are organized by or lodged in the body itself. The purpose is to deepen our understanding of the entangled relationship between somatic and cognitive phenomena, taking advantage of recent neuroscientific and social-psychological paradigms that reassert the importance of the body in our mental lives, especially as it bears on affective experience. We will want to understand better how minds and bodies interact recursively. Feminist scholars and social theorists, such as Michel Foucault, have long told us that the body is discursively constructed. But in what ways is discourse itself constructed by our embodiment? The syllabus will be historically organized to run through major theoretical developments from the late nineteenth century to the present. We start with emergent notions of the body as an expressive instrument, as in the work of Charles Darwin and William James, to psychoanalysis, behaviorism, social constructionism, and our own moment of neo-physicalism, where biomedical institutions prefer to regard disorders of the mind in biophysical and materialist terms. These will be paired with texts that address topics suchas pain, illness, posture, behavioral modification, body prosthesis, and animal morphology. In the process, we will seek to understand how literature reconfigures prevailing conceptions regarding psychosomatic phenomena.
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A Global Modernism

628.4    A    Thurs    15:30-17:45    Stephen Ross    (period)   

While modernism has always been associated with cosmopolitanism, expatriation, immigration, and other concepts connoting transnational mobility and exchange, modernist studies has long labored under the chauvinistic assumption that modernism originated in the West and then spread to the rest of the world (where it was seen as derivative and belated). In recent decades, however, scholars have challenged the “West vs. Rest” model by advancing alternative accounts of modernism as a global phenomenon and process. Where world- systems theorists, for instance, would situate modernism in the context of a “singular modernity” constituted by the combined and uneven logic of core-periphery relations, proponents of a networks model of literary production would emphasize modernism’s relational, rhizomatic, and polycentric lines of circulation and exchange.

This seminar examines the “global” turn in modernist studies. Our main task will be twofold: 1) to study competing efforts by scholars to grasp modernism as a properly “global” concept, and 2) to test the descriptive power of these efforts through analysis of key primary texts drawn from modernism’s varied national, transnational, supranational, regional, diasporic, and stateless formations.

The course emerges from my work as co-editor of Global Modernists on Modernism (Bloomsbury Press UK, 2019) , a 200,000-word anthology that gathers modernist texts—essays, manifestos, statements, forewords, prefaces, and so on—that reflect on the theory and practice of modernism. The anthology will organize our readings and debates of texts by figures such as: Kamau Brathwaite, Chika Sagawa, Nazik Al-Malaika, Can Xue, Wole Soyinka, Mikhl Likht, N.M Rashed, and others. Given the multilingual nature of the seminar’s archive, we will devote considerable energy to thinking about the problematics of translation as well.
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Creative Writing Workshops - Please note that the creative writing workshops are only available to students registered in the Creative Writing option of the MA program
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Fall 2019: September 3rd - December 2nd

Techniques of Fiction

670.2    A    Tues    18:00-20:15    Sina Queyras

In this graduate workshop we will explore writing techniques that are conventional and unconventional, grounding ourselves in a range of writing styles and approaches to contemporary writing. Emphasis will be placed building a sustainable creative practice with a wide range of skills and techniques rather than the mastery of a specific “genre.” Students will develop strategies for conceiving of projects, modes of generating content, conducting research, thinking through constraints and forms, building scenes, characters, questions of authorial voice and style, and creating the grand vision. Authors read and discussed include Renee Gladman, Anne Boyer, Rachel Cusk, Eileen Myles, Louise Gluck, Claudia Rankine, Dionne Brand, Natalia Ginzburg, Marina Carr, Anne Carson, and Sheila Heti.
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Fall/Winter 2019-20: September 3rd - April 14th

Graduate Poetry Workshop

ENGL 672.3    A    Tues    13:15-15:30    Stephanie Bolster

In this workshop, we will pay particular attention to how poems work together across a submission, a manuscript, and a larger body of work. Our goal: to create a community of active writers and readers who desire to make conscious macro and micro elements of their own – and each other’s – poetry and poetic practice. Discussions of critical readings on craft, process, and career (by such poets as Anne Carson, Erin Mouré, Louise Glück, Robert Hass, Mary Ruefle, Solmaz Sharif, Reginald Shepherd, and Matthew Zapruder), and of poems and possibly poetry collections, will supplement the workshop process. Ekphrasis, erasure, and translation will be part of our discussion and in-class activities. Assessment will be based on a final portfolio of 15 pages of revised poetry, two essays or presentations, regular attendance, timely submissions, class participation and preparation, and creative development.
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Winter 2020: January 6th - April 14th

The Solo Play

673.4    A    Mon & Wed    11:45-13:00    Instructor: TBA

The solo play emphasizes audience-performer communication and direct address. It is generally presented in a smaller, more intimate space. This creates a shared space, a shared story through a single performed voice. For the purpose of this workshop, the solo play will be understood to be a play written for a single actor who may play one or more characters.

This workshop will focus on the nature, structure, and practice of writing solo works for the stage.

This course is cross-listed with ENGLISH 416/4/A.
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Graduate Fiction Workshop

674.4    A    Thurs    14:45-17:30    Mikhail Iossel

The primary material for this course will be participants' own work. Additionally, in order to expand class critiques and place them in a broader context of modern literary process, a wide array of topic-specific stories by North American and international authors will be analyzed on a regular basis. Each class will also include discussions on some of the salient issues of the literary praxis and theory, such as the conceptual and substantive differences and similarities between the genres of fiction and non-fiction, the nature of auto-fiction, the interrelation between thought and language, writing as "translation," the collaborative versus the individual aspects of writing, and the experimental potential of Oulipian constraints (freeing literature by tightening its rules).