Summer  -  May 2 – June 18, 2018

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

627.1     AA     Mon & Wed     1315-1530     Andre Furlani

The course examines the emerging conditions of a specifically female form of literary mentorship at American mid-century 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 will consider theories of precedence, from anxious and agonistic Oedipal rivalry to alternative models of reciprocation and nurturing, while maintaining close attention on the texts themselves, including those that both reflected continuities between mentor and disciples, e.g. poems on the question of the animal and environmental themes, and those that deviated from tenet, e.g. Bishop’s structurally untidy and Plath’s thematically untidy departures from Moore’s formally scrupulous, reticent, impersonal, and disinterested aesthetic.

The seminar will additionally consider the poetics and politics of female apprenticeship in relation to often fraught relationships with domineering male coevals; for Moore, these included Ezra Pound, for Plath, Ted Hughes; for Bishop, Robert Lowell.  We will consider, for instance, Hughes’s editorial legerdemain with the Ariel manuscript and Bishop’s rebuke to Lowell’s indiscreet poetic liberties.  The discrepancies between an intimate, fostering coterie culture, one in which Hilda Doolittle edited and published Moore’s first book, and a contractual commercial print culture will be examined with reference, for instance, to Moore’s professional relationship (e.g. as editor of The Dial, a chief organ of 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 will also figure in our discussions – Plath’s in England and Bishop’s in Brazil, contrasted with Moore, whose enforced displacement from Manhattan to Brooklyn proved traumatic. We will consider a range of genetic, historical, and theoretical criticism to relate the poets to the larger historical situation of mid-century feminism and to American poetry more generally.

Assessment will be based on participation, a presentation, and a research essay.
                                                                                                                           

2018 - 2019

Literary Pedagogies       Fall 2018

600.2     A     Mon     1330 – 1545     Danielle Bobker      

This course aims to help you to develop your skills and self-awareness as a teacher of literature and to deepen your understanding of how broader sociological, institutional, psychological, and architectural structures are shaped and reflected in contemporary classroom experiences. Over the course of the semester, we’ll explore seven key pedagogical themes: modes of textual analysis, inclusion, lecture and discussion, teaching writing, evaluation, affects, and the university. Weekly assignments will include numerous readings, collective textual analyses, personal reflections, as well as pedagogical experiments which we’ll evaluate as a group. Students will also be asked to invite guests from across the department, the university, and larger community to talk to us about their most formative teaching experiences. While our readings and discussions will generally focus on undergraduate English courses, students are also encouraged to consider how the principles and concepts under exploration may apply in CEGEPs, high schools, and other educational settings. 
                                                                                                                           

Zoopolitics       Winter 2019

601.4     AA     Mon     1800-2015    Jesse Arseneault      (theory)

This course explores critical theory on the “zoopolitical,” a term implying “an inescapable contiguity or bleed between bios and zoê, between a politics of human social life and a politics of animality that extends to other species” (Shukin 9). Offered by Nicole Shukin as a term that troubles “the assumption that the social flesh and ‘species body’ at stake in the logic of biopower is predominantly human” (9), the zoopolitical offers a lens through which to read multispecies lives as implicated in the political struggles that mark our times. This course is primarily devoted to examining political theories that centralize nonhuman life, but will also explore concepts of the political that might be extended to account for multispecies lifeworlds and the interdependent relationships in which human and nonhuman life exist. Central to this course will be an exploration of those institutions dedicated to the management, breeding, and culling of animal lives, as well as an interrogation of the human/animal boundary so often appealed to in the making of the human as political animal. This course considers the animal as both figure and flesh; that is, it foregrounds the figurative currency of animality as a signifier for the subhumanity of multiple “others” while keeping an eye on the material conditions of many nonhuman lives.

Readings in this course will include selections from the following:

·  Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal and/or Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
·  Neel Ahuja, Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species
·  Matthew Calarco, “Being Toward Meat” and Thinking Through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction”
·  Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population and/or The History of Sexuality Vol. 1
·  Njabulo Ndebele, “The Year of the Dog”
·  Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign
·  Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women
·  Claire Jean Kim, Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age
·   Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times
·  Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe and “Vermin Being: On Pestiferous Animals and Human Game”
                                                                                                                           

Renaissance Self-Help       Winter 2019

610.4     A     Wed     1315-1530     Darragh Languay      (period)

There is at present a renaissance of self-help, literally: a contemporary vogue for the enduring work of Renaissance moral preceptors, including Michel de Montaigne, Thomas Browne, Isaac Walton, John Donne, and Robert Burton.  From how to write sonnets, sit at table, fish, and garden, to how to wed, pray, and die, the Renaissance was keen to advise its emerging class of Humanist pretenders to social position, edifying labour, meaningful leisure, and Christian salvation. The period’s writers experimented in diverse forms, from the anatomy and the essay to the diary and the guidebook, the letter and the conduct book. They made poetry out of them all.

Self-fashioning in the Renaissance involved suavely enterprising, mercenary adjustments to exploit the tantalizing opportunities afforded by early Capitalist, militant Tudor Protestantism; self-help, issuing from a crisis of secular Protestant personhood, was its anxious, insecure double: a set of remedial aids for an instable market, capricious court, and precarious church.

In the resulting literature, the Renaissance pioneered one of the most successful, yet least examined and least respected literary genres, the manual of self-help.  These include Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, Henry Peacham’s The Compleat Gentleman, Isaac Walton’s The Compleat Angler; the Essays of Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon, Thomas More’s Utopia, the form letters of The Merchant’s Avizo, John Donne’s Devotions, Isabella Whitney’s verse letters and maxims, Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, Thomas Traherne’s Centuries, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Thomas Wilson’s Art of Rhetoric and George Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy, John Evelyn’s Directions for the Gardiner, Philip Stubbes’s Crystal Glasse for Christian Women Which Presents The Godly Life and Christian Death of Katherine Stubbes, Juan Luis Vives’ Instruction of a Christian Woman.  Self-admonition is also sponsored by emerging genres of intimacy, like the journal and testament, including the discrete public reflections of Evelyn’s diaries to the profane private confessions of Samuel Pepys’s and the gendered chagrin of Anne Clifford’s.  

We will read excerpts from this absorbing body of Renaissance guides and, since the stage was a preferred location for the display of prototypes, and for entertaining scenarios about the search for reliable self-help, we may read very different plays on the subject, from Christopher Marlowe’s Faust and Moliere’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme to William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedie of Mariam.

Assessment will be based on participation, a presentation, and a research essay.
                                                                                                                           

The Novel and the Limits of Realism       Winter 2019

616.4     AA     Tues     1800-2015     Marcie Frank     (period)

Histories and theories of the novel alike have associated its formal achievement with the techniques and aesthetics of realism. This course surveys key texts from this body of work (Watt; McKeon; Lukacs; Benjmain; Gallagher; Jameson) and examines its challenges. Examples from the canon’s mainstream, including novels by Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James, expose to view the limits of realism, bringing ways of thinking about outliers and other methodological problems into view.  Students will study the theory of the novel and probe its historicity by looking at a range of novels chosen to expose the links between the aesthetics of realism and modernism.
                                                                                                                           

Odd Women of the 19^th Century: Gender, Form, Difference       Fall 2018

621.2     AA     Tues     1800-2015     Ronjaunee Chatterjee     (period)

This course will serve as an introduction to Victorian literature and literary forms, with a focus on their relationship to gender and difference in an era of the abstracted liberal subject. The course title is a reference to George Gissing’s 1893 novel, The Odd Women, which draws its name from one of the several new taxonomies—along with poetesses, spinsters, and femme fatales—that emerge out of the set of 19^th-century debates the Victorians called the “Woman Question,” which refracted the multiple anxieties around women’s participation in social and political life. Feminist literary critics have already noted that the genres at the forefront of the 19^th century—notably the novel—performed ideological work in the service of these taxonomies, defining female agency in terms of emerging liberal ideas about the individual subject.

By contrast, in this course we will examine how femininity negotiates and often pushes against the dominant modes of individuation put forth by the range of narrative and poetic forms that populate the Victorian literary landscape: the dramatic monologue and the lyric poem (Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) and Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862)), the slave narrative (The History of Mary Prince (1831)), the children’s book (Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)), the sensation novel (Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1859)), the colonial novel (Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883)), and others. We will end the course by watching Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 film Under the Skin in an effort to understand how Victorian modes of aesthetic and literary representation continue to infuse the contemporary cultural landscape, particularly through film and visual culture’s engagement with likeness and difference. Overarching questions we may ask are: what is the relationship between literary form and gendered form? How do different genres mediate—either formally or thematically—the idea of difference? What forms of femininity—gendered, racialized, and/or classed— emerge out of literature that contest an idea of the particularized and bounded subject?

Rather than separate off “primary” and “secondary” readings, we will think with a number of feminist theorists by close engagement with excerpts from their work: Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway, Audre Lorde, Iris Marion Young, Sara Ahmed, Jacqueline Rose, and others.
                                                                                                                            

Byron and Romanticism       Winter 2019

623.4     A     Mon     1315-1530     Jonathan Sachs       (period)

Byron’s work has consistently posed a problem for many twentieth century accounts of Romanticism, most of which seem eager either to dismiss or ignore Byron’s prodigious output.  This course takes the problem of this oversight as its starting point. Why did Byron’s reputation fare so much better in Europe than in his native England? Why was Byron’s work was so consistently overlooked by so many foundational Romantic scholars of the twentieth century? How have more recent 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 alongside various influential critical theories of Romanticism. 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. 
                                                                                                                           

Literature and the Science of the Emotions       Winter 2019

625.4     AA     Thurs     1800-2015     Omri Moses      (theory)

Literature activates our systems of emotional response and shapes them in distinctive ways. This course aims to track how the emergence of new scientific methodologies and theories from cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience may help to shed light on the nature of such emotional response. We will be familiarizing ourselves with approaches in neuroaesthetics, cognitive literary criticism, and affect theory, 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 we bring these contemporary theories into focus, we will be confronting a body of modernist and contemporary fiction and poetry that seeks to reorganize normative affective patterns of response. Rather than presume that literature reflects how our feelings work in general, we will be investigating how it intervenes in our emotional lives in forceful ways to make broad cultural claims for the value of reading. Ultimately, we will want to know whether neuroscience has something to learn from humanistic and literary-critical approaches to the emotions as well as the reverse. Prior courses in psychology, neuroscience, or cognitive science are helpful but not required.
                                                                                                                           

Afrofuturism: A Critical Introduction       Fall 2018

626.2     A     Thurs     1530-1745     Stephen Ross       (theory)

This seminar offers a critical introduction to the literature and thought of Afrofuturism. Coinedin the early 1990s by cultural critic Mark Dery, the term Afrofuturism describes both an aesthetic mode and a philosophical concept that investigates the points of overlap of science fiction, technological modernity, and the past, present and future(s) of the African diaspora. More pointedly, it encompasses a wide array of cultural practices and intellectual methodologies— from the novels of Octavia Butler and the poetry of Will Alexander to the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat and the music of Janelle Monáe—that resist the systematic exclusion of Black people and Blackness from the future. As noted Afrofuturist scholar Alondra Nelson notes, “Blackness gets constructed as always oppositional to technologically driven chronicles of progress.” Afrofuturist art and thought contests this narrative, and, in conjuring Black life-worlds to come, powerfully critiques the past and present of racialized violence and cultural erasure.

Our readings will range across a variety of genres (short fiction, novels, poetry, comics) and will address a number of issues at the center of Afrofuturist debate: 1) the theme of alien abduction and the cultural anxieties about the Atlantic slave trade and its legacies which they dissimulate 2) forms of alienation, othering, and being alien 3) fears and fantasies of interspecies breeding 4) post-racial utopian speculation 5) social satires of “passing” 6) the inhabitation of unprecedented and uncategorizable subjectivities. In tandem with our readings we will also consider some exemplary Afrofuturist music, film, and visual art.

Possible primary texts include

-Selected short fiction from Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora(2000, ed. Sheree Thomas)
-Imperium in Imperio, Sutton Griggs (1899)
-Black No More by George Schuyler (1931)
-Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia by Samuel R. Delany (1976)
-Dawn by Octavia Butler (1987)
-Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson (2000)
-The African Origins of UFOs by Anthony Joseph (2006)
-Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor (2010)
-Alien Weaving by Will Alexander (2016)
-Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet (Bk 1) by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze (2016)

Some secondary texts

-Selected critical writings by Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, Mark Dery, Alondra Nelson, and others
-Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci Fi and Fantasy by Ytasha Womack (2013)
-Afrofuturism, special issue of Social Text, Vol. 20, No. 71 (Summer 2002).
-The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (2016) by Louis Chude-Sokei

Other materials
-Film by: Space Is the Place (1974) by Sun Ra; The Last Angel of History (1996) dir. John Akomfrah; Black Panther (2018) dir. Ryan Coogler
-Visual art by: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lina Viktor, Renee Cox, Angelbert Metoyer
-Music by: John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Parliament, Janelle Monáe, Clipping

Adventure as Genre: Form and Canon Formation       Winter 2019

641.4     AA     Wed     1800-2015     Kevin Pask      (period)

From Homer’s Odyssey through the medieval romance and beyond, adventure was an essential aspect of fiction, but it has dramatically fallen out of favour, at least in terms of what has entered the literary canon in the past one hundred years. (It survives, spectacularly, in the culture of Hollywood and gaming as well as popular fiction.) Part of the course, then, will focus on questions of literary genre in relationship to canon formation, and in particular genres like “adventure fiction,” often dismissed as simplistic “genre fiction.” Along with questions of the canonical/non-canonical status of adventure fiction, the course will also examine the role of genre within formal analysis of literary fiction.

The reading tracks the longue durée of literary adventure from the Greek romance of late antiquity onwards, including different types of adventure from both “high” and “low” culture. What is the relationship between adventure and chivalric romance? Between adventure and the novel? Did adventure help to mediate the transition from romance to novel? This will include some consideration of the increasing separation between love and adventure and the association of adventure with boys’ fiction (only to be challenged more recently by girls’ adventure fiction). Why did adventure fall away from the literary novel, and with it the centrality of plot as the guiding principle of narrative fiction? (In some sense, adventure will represent the principle of plot for the purposes of the seminar.)

Texts will include many of the following:
Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon
Selections from One Thousand and One Nights
Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain, the Knight of the Lion
Shakespeare, Pericles and/or The Merchant of Venice
Cervantes, selections from Don Quixote
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma
Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped
John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps (along with the Hitchcock adaptation for film)
Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love
Ursula Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

These primary texts will allow us to look at some important critical and theoretical discussions of adventure, literary form, and canon formation:

Georg Simmel, “The Adventure”
Giorgio Agamben, The Adventure (scheduled to appear in English in 2018)
Victor Shklovsky, writings on genre
Mikhail Bakhtin, on the chronotope of the Greek romance
Tzvetan Todorov, “Narrative Men”
Eric Auerbach, “The Knight Sets Forth,” from Mimesis
Michael Nerlich, from The Ideology of Adventure
Ian Watt, from The Rise of the Novel
Georg Lukacs, “Narrate or Describe?”
Umberto Eco on the James Bond novels
John Guillory, Franco Moretti on issues of popular culture and literary canon formation
                                                                                                                             

Postwar American Fiction and the Cultural Logic of Liberalism, 1945-1973     Fall 2018

655.2     AA     Wed     1800-2015     Mary Esteve      

 “Beyond the war waits happiness.” Such was the bold print of an advertisement appearing in Life magazine in 1942, placed by Revere Copper and Brass, Inc., which was in the business of selling pre-fabricated “homes.” But the end of World War II led to the beginning of the Cold War and later to the Vietnam War. The triumphalist fantasy of postwar happiness and prosperity gave way to numerous psychological and socioeconomic nightmares: nuclear-war anxiety; anti-communist suspicion; suburban and mass-consumerist melancholy; racial conflict and race-related poverty; student unrest and countercultural excess. But beyond both fantasy and nightmare, postwar Americans also managed to envision a world worth affirming and improving—where liberal values like democracy, civil rights, socioeconomic justice, interpersonal respect, and individual autonomy still seemed relevant. This course examines works of American postwar fiction that address these social and political themes, while also attending to the specific literary forms and strategies that writers deployed to represent their worlds.

Instead of the greatest hits of the period (e.g., Invisible Man, On the Road, Lolita, The Crying of Lot 49), this seminar will focus on works that have received less attention from critics but are arguably of no less importance, including Doctorow, THE BOOK OF DANIEL; Roth, GOODBYE, COLUMBUS; Yates, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD; Highsmith, THE PRICE OF SALT; Plath, THE BELL JAR; and Updike, RABBIT REDUX.

American Civil War, Then and Now     Winter 2019

658.4     AA     Tues     1800-2015     Nicola Nixon      (period)

This course seeks to examine representations of the civil war in American literature, from Whitman and Melville’s poetry, written during the war, to Margaret Walker and Bruce Olds’s novels Jubilee and Raising Holy Hell, respectively, written a century or more later. That examination will be filtered through several different paradigms (among them trauma theory and materialist theory), acknowledging the dual force of the civil war as a national—and often perceived as, a familial—trauma from which the US is still reeling and a historical event that is narrativized through ideologically-motivated recapitulations. As recent events in the US suggest, attempts to monumentalize figures from the struggle, to make them somehow stable historically, only lay bare the on-going rewriting of the civil war.

Possible Literary Texts:

Herman Melville, Battle Pieces
Walt Whitman, Drum-Taps
Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches
John DeForest, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion
Stephen Crane, Red Badge of Courage
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
Evelyn Scott, The Wave
Stephen Vincent Benet, John Brown’s Body
Margaret Walker, Jubilee
Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels
Gore Vidal, Lincoln
Bruce Olds, Raising Holy Hell

Possible Critical Texts:

Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel
Frederick Jameson, The Political Unconscious
Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” and “On Mourning and Melancholia”
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain
James Dawes, The Language of War
Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption
Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore
Elizabeth Young, Disarming the Nation
Catherine Clinton, Battle Scars
                                                                                                                           

Indigenous Canadian and American Literatures       Fall 2018

660.2     A     Wed     1315-1530     Jessica Bardill  

This course will explore fiction, poetry, film, and essays produced by First Nations, Metis, Inuit, and American Indians in the 20^th and 21^st 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.
                                                                                                                              

Black Canadas       Fall 2018

662.2     A     Tue     1315-1530     (theory) 

Paul Gilroy's conception of the Black Atlantic is perhaps /the /paradigm for thinking about contemporary diasporic black cultural production. Yet the absence of Canada from Gilroy's formulation leads George Elliott Clarke to describe Gilroy's framework as a "vast Bermuda triangle" into which Canada vanishes. This course takes up Clarke's challenge to consider the unique place of black writing in Canada, both as a node in Gilroy's transnational network and as a major component of Canadian Literature. We will consider the manner in which these texts depict the relationship between race and multiculturalism, the unique forms of blackness practiced in Canada, and the struggle to write blackness into a national imaginary that regularly erases its existence.

Sample Texts: Dionne Brand, /A Map to the Door of No Return/, Dionne Brand /thirsty, /Austin Clarke /MORE/, M. NourbeSe Philip /Zong!/, Canisia Lubrin /Voodoo Hypothesis/, George Elliott Clarke /Whylah Falls, /Dany Laferrière/ How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired, Wayde Compton /The Outer Harbour, David Chariandy /Brother/.
                                                                                                                             
Postcolonial Environmental Humanities     Fall 2018

665.2     A     Thurs     1315-1530     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 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 and 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)

Literary Pedagogies     (cross-listed ENGL 600)

801.2     A     Mon     1530 – 1745     Danielle Bobker     
                                                                                                                           

The Novel and the Limits of Realism   (cross-listed ENGL 616)

800.4     AA     1800-2015     Marcie Frank    
                                                                                                                           

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.
                                                                                                                            

Flaneur in the City : PEDESTRIAN NARRATIVES      Winter 2019

671.4     AA     Thurs     1445-1700         Kathleen Winter

This class prioritizes walking, observation and intuitive note-taking as a basis for writing fictional or creative non-fictional prose. Seemingly random observations gleaned from the practice of hanging about the city of Montreal, and watching, will be used to gradually create a unified essay, short story or combined-genre prose piece of up to 2500 words. We will study examples of this kind of work by contemporary and past authors, focusing on portraiture, landscape, city life and visionary impressionism. The evolution of the class will take us from a place of trustful waiting and documentation to one of being able to recognize a narrative through-line that comes from the author's own creative psyche. Students will be expected to bundle up and walk in all weathers between classes.

Poetry Workshop:  Strict Pleasures : Structure and Constraints       Fall 2018

672.2     A     Mon     1315-1530     Mary di Michele
 
                                                                                   French has no word for home.
                                                                    And we have no word for strict pleasure.
                                                                                                                Jack Gilbert

No verse is truly free for the man [sic] who wants to do a good job. Experimental poets have more in common with new formalists than free verse poets. George Bowering has called the sonnet the ultimate Oulipian exercise. Whether procedural or formal, many poets employ constraints to create structure as well as for exploratory and generative purposes. For the young Adrienne Rich form served as “asbestos gloves” to handle difficult and traumatic content. From the sonnet to OUILPO writers have been experimenting with structures and constraints.

The objective of the course is to develop your range of forms and techniques through reading poetry and essays by modern and contemporary poets who have worked with different forms and constraints, including P.K. Page, Phyllis Webb, George Bowering, George Elliot Clarke, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Ian Williams, Anne Carson, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Rae Armantrout, Terrance Hayes, and Ben Lerner.     
                                                                                                                            

The Solo Play     (cross-listed ENGL 416)       Winter 2018

673.4     A     Mon & Wed     1015-1130          Patrick Leroux

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. After reading and analyzing significant solo plays and writing exercises, by the end of the workshop, the student will have completed a 30 to 50 minute solo piece.

Prose Workshop       Fall/Winter 2018-19

674.3     A     Thurs      1445-1700        Sina Queyras  
  
Grounding ourselves in a range of prose styles and approaches to contemporary fiction we will focus our discussion on identifying and amplifying the most original and vibrant aspects of each other’s prose fiction. Emphasis will be placed building and sustaining a creative practice, developing strategies for generating content, as well as thinking through form and forms, building scenes, working with characters, questions of authorial voice and style. Authors referred to include Rene Gladman, Rachel Cusk, Eden Robinson, Sylvia Plath, Gail Scott, Chris Kraus, Danielle Dutton, Ben Lerner, Eileen Myles, Jamaica Kincaid, JM Coetzee, Zadie Smith and Anne Boyer.    
                                                                                                                           

600.4     A     Wed     15:30 – 17:45          Bobker, Danielle          (theory)

The theory and practice of humour 

In this course we will use theories of humour to ground our analysis of a variety of verbal, visual, and performance texts designed (among other things) to make people laugh, including some highly controversial instances by Lenny Bruce, Stephane Charbonnier, Vanessa Place, Richard Pryor, Mike Ward, and Milos Yiannopoulos. We’ll consider humour theory as a high-cultural discourse that draws on the insights and approaches of philosophy, psychology and psychoanalysis, linguistics, political theory, feminism, and critical studies. At the same time, as we discuss the meaning and social significance of specific instances of comedy, we’ll seek to unearth and interrogate our own and others’ assumptions about what is funny and what is offensive and to understand the ethical implications of this distinction. Our survey of humour and humour theory will draw on classical and canonical works (such as those by Plato, Francois Rabelais, Thomas Hobbes, Mary Wortley Montagu, Jonathan Swift, Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, Oscar Wilde, Mikhail Bakhtin) and as well as more contemporary ones (such as those by Monty Python, Helene Cixous, Ted Cohen, Rob Reiner, Peter McGraw, Anca Parvulescu, Rebecca Krefting, Linda Mizejewski, Wanda Sykes, Lena Dunham, and Daphne Gottleib).

                                                                                                                                                                                601.2     AA     Mon     18:00 – 20:15          Brown, Nathan        (period/theory)

Modernist Architecture, Capitalist Planning, and Poetic Critique:  Remaking Place Ville-Marie

*Note: this seminar will meet biweekly across both the Fall and Winter semesters.

Before being able to register, you must contact Prof. Nathan Brown, nathan.brown@concordia.ca. to obtain permission to register.

A major tension in the development of modernist form is folded into the urban fabric of the capitalist lifeworld: a tension between the communist politics of suprematist and constructivist forms and the seamless integration of the geometrically similar International Style of architecture into capitalist city planning. Taking this tension as a starting point, we will consider its stakes through a case study of the cruciform Place Ville-Marie complex in downtown Montreal. This case study will involve two closely related phases: 1) We will investigate the social history of the development of Place Ville-Marie, the politics of its role within and impact on the city, and the relation of these questions to the architectural form of the complex. 2) Having considered the historical and formal characteristics of the building, we will pursue the possibility of subjecting it to poetic investigation and critique: of taking its formal parameters and historical context as a basis for poetic transformations.

During the second of these two phases, we will make use of the technological resources of the Centre for Expanded Poetics and affiliated labs in Fine Arts, pursuing historically informed and politically critical transformations of the building’s formal parameters through 3D printing, laser cutting, textiles, digital textuality, or risograph printing. Thus, part of our course will involve a workshop format, through which we will learn how to deploy such equipment toward a practice of “critical poetics.” This will also require us to look at related practices in contemporary poetry.

Final projects may take the form of critical essays, text based poetic works, or three dimensional art objects. Our goal is to work at the juncture of critical theory and poetic practice toward a creative relation to modernist history immersed in the politics of form. Students in both critical and creative streams of the MA or Ph.D. program will be encouraged to experiment with new approaches to theoretical reflection and poetic making. Projects will be presented and exhibited at the end of the winter semester.
                                                                                                                                                                                602.1     AA     Mon & Wed     10:00 – 12:30          Andre Furlani        (theory)

Pedestrian Poetics

Walking now facilitates and structures, for example, political mobilization (e.g. the Sierra Club), social theory (e.g. Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Nomadology), performance art (e.g. Marina Abramovic and Ulay’s Great Wall Walk), cinema (Tsai Ming-liang’s Walker and Guido van der Werve’s nummer acht), documentary fiction (W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn), the novel (Gail Scott’s Heroine), social history (Matthew Beaumont’s Nightwalk and Andra McCartney’s Journées sonores, canale de Lachine), literary criticism (Richard Holmes’s Footsteps and Umberto Eco’s Six Walks in the Fictional Woods), photography (Richard Long’s “A Line Made by Walking” and Gary Winogrand’s Brooklyn street chronicles), interactive audio (Janet Cardiff’s Audio Walks), digital art (J.R. Carpenter’s Entre Ville), cultural journalism (Will Self’s Psychogeography and Lisa Robinson’s Occasional Work), historical fiction (E.L. Doctorow’s The March and José Saramago’s The Elephant’s Journey), literary anthropology (Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines), and lyric sequences (Seamus Heaney’s “Station Island” and Anne Carson’s “Kinds of Water”).  The course considers how and to what ends peripatetic practices come to proliferate in the literature, art, and theory of the last twenty-five years. 

Contemporary peripatetic works hone a peripatetic enunciation, performing homologies between writing and walking.  Why should bipedal locomotion organize the operations of such an otherwise diverse range of work?  As a specific yet mixed literary genre, one renegotiating generic categories, the peripatetic text has been among the most original contributions to literary form in the last quarter century.  These are works, in whole or part, of textual itinerancy through varied ambiences.  The pedestrian perspective is successive, contiguous, and limited.  Locomotion becomes an instrument of thought, and writing a form of locomotion. 

Peripatetics has not only an aesthetic but a politics—indeed, has conflicting politics.  The course will attend to the impact on contemporary peripatetics of class, which the word flânerie still preserves in the original French: both genteel sauntering and contemptible “loitering,” peregrination and vagrancy.  In this kind of art, transient assembly, rather than institutional partisan affiliation, becomes a pedestrial mode of political agility.  The politics of peregrination is especially apparent in issues of gender.  Because the peripatetic has seldom been a female, the proliferating contemporary examples instantiate an alternative politics.  Peripatetic texts reveal that the public third spaces of haptic encounter are not confined strictly to determinate sites but are fluid and situational.  They not only gressively record but also help modify space in a stealthy guerrilla urbanism that is remaking the contemporary North American city.  And in the process the artists are remaking prose conventions.

The course will take up issues in the new urbanism, ecopoetics, genre studies, race studies, comparative literary history, and continental critical theory in order to consider how and to what ends peripatetic practices come to proliferate in the literature, art, and theory of the last twenty-five years. 
                                                                                                                                                                                603.4     AA     Mon     13:15 - 15:30          Jessica Bardill

Intersectionality and Identity in Literature   (cross-listed ENGL 801)

Emerging from black feminist thought, specifically Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theorizing, intersectionality enables consideration of multiple, intersecting, and entangled identities and how they are constructed and treated in different places and systems of power.  This course will demonstrate interconnections and intersections of place, identity, form, privilege, and the constructed nature of being between literatures often seen as segregated by engaging with mixed race representations, global approaches to LGBTQ identities, regionalized ethnic identities, and the various diasporas, including how systems of power push people together, apart, and into one another.

We will examine the imaginary communities and homelands of Benedict Anderson and Salman Rushdie, turning then to Suad Amiry’s Sharon and My Mother-in-Law.  Other texts (some excerpted) will include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Cell Traffic by Heid Erdrich, and Thrall by Natasha Trethewey, Changing is Not Vanishing, Living Out Islam: Voices of LGBTQ Muslims, Persepolis, and For Today I am a Boy. We will consider the limits of our imaginations, of the cultural scripts and partitions we have accumulated as tools and work collectively to fashion new ones.

Questions the course include: How do the authors incorporate multiple identities, and how does that work help you as a critical scholar to resist cultural scripts for understanding “otherness”? Which voices emerge? How do archival and other restorative project assist in that work? What role does the novel play in presenting multiple identities or how identities intersect, including changes in time, space, and circumstance (setting)? What do other forms offer differently than the novel to presenting experiences? How does attention to diversity within groups help us understand diversity (and unity) across groups?

In the work for the course, students will interrogate their own identities and positionality and then engage in investigations into these wide ranging creative and critical texts, both fiction and non-fiction.  Not only will we work to better understand those identities with which we are less familiar, but we will also work to understand ourselves better.  In recognition that not all intersections can be covered, and in the hope of broadening our possibilities, the culminating project of the course involves primary research into a text of the student’s choosing, including critical complements and instructive presentation.
                                                                                                                                                                              

608.4     AA     Wed     18:00 – 20:15          Stephen Yeager      (period)

 Women’s Writing in Early Medieval Literature

Though it is not always remembered as such, the early medieval period was an enormously productive epoch for women’s letters in Western Europe. Authors like Hildegard of Bingen, Heloise d’Argenteuil, and Hrostvit of Gandersheim are only some of the better-known women writing in the North Atlantic before the year 1200, and their prominence in even their own time reflects the power and influence of women’s monastic houses on intellectual culture in that time and place. And so perhaps it is no wonder that this same period produced some of literature's most memorable women characters, from mythic figures like Brunhilda, Aud the Deep-minded, and Queen Medb to historical personages like Lady Godiva, Emma of Normandy, and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Be that as it may, the tendency towards anonymity among early authors has hindered a full consideration of what may productively be considered “women’s writing” in this early period, for the simple reason that critics tend to assume that anonymous works have male authors. In this class, we will begin by reading between feminist theory on gendered writing and scholarship on medieval notions of authorship, before turning to apply our findings to works with named women authors and to works from Northern Europe 500-1200 that represent female agency: these will include sagas, romances, monastic rules, advice literature, chronicles, and saints’ lives. In the final weeks we will work together as a class to apply the results of our investigations to produce a thorough and informed consideration of the anonymous poem Beowulf, in which we will investigate the evidence both supporting and undermining the hypothesis that the poem as we know it may have been written or at least copied into its manuscript by a woman.
                                                                                                                                                                                611.2     A     Wed     13:15 – 15:30          Darragh Languay        (period / theory)

“Manifold Delights”: Writing Variety

Adam counsels Eve in Book IV of Paradise Lost not to resent their one Edenic prohibition when they enjoy ”free leave so large to all things else, and choice/ Unlimited of manifold delights.”  Adam expresses, and Eve feels, ambivalence about the dangers and delights of the earthly profusion.

The nascent natural sciences of Early Modernity recognized that the multiplicity and mutability of nature defied the abridgements of inherited taxonomies and their correspondingly homogenous unitary foundations in monotheistic theology.  Although diversity belonged to Classical and Medieval world-views, variety emerges out of an Early Modern fascination with intractable heterogeneity for its own sake, unsubordinated to transcendental classificatory doctrine.  The summa begins to cede to the encyclopedia, increasingly challenged by varied, inclusive, and disparate models of selection and organization.  The emergence of empirical science promotes plethora at the expense of the traditional metaphysical modes of synthesis and unity, with marked consequences for genre, including the development of secular prose style, characterized e.g. by copiousness, accretion, digressiveness, and prolixity.  This course considers the moral, aesthetic, scientific and formal responses to the experience of variety as expressed in, and advanced by, several exemplary works of Early Modern prose. It will examine how early modern writers employed “experimental” forms in attempts to record the variety encountered in the outside world as well as the fluctuations of the inner world, the ceaseless motions of the mind that might, as Thomas Browne notes, imminently disagree with itself. Ungoverned by an oppressively unitary principle of selection, early modern prose writers gather together the particularities of the world and the self. Browne’s record of the “humour of [his] irregular self” in his Religio Medici will be studied alongside selections from Michel de Montaigne’s essays that also record in restless, unbridled divagations the mind in action and the vicissitudes of thought.   The course will attend as well to the ways early print culture fomented this style, e.g. because of the accelerated circulation of ideas and corollary economies of scale that rendered feasible otherwise intractably various omnibus editions.

William Fitzgerald (author of Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept) suggests that “our critical vocabulary is poor when it comes to speaking of the centrifugal qualities of literary works”.  Our task will be to explore how digressive, copious style of writers such as Montaigne, Browne, Burton, Cavendish, as they, imitating the principles of cabinets of curiosities, displayed the world’s strangeness and infinite variety. Indeed Greenblatt notes how Browne’s interest in cabinets of curiosities is not limited to his Musaeum Clausum but to style where “he voyaged through his mind to display in an elegant cabinet made of prose what he had found.”  Collecting errors in the Pseudodoxia Epidemica, cause and cures of melancholy in The Anatomy of Melancholy, Browne and Burton demonstrate how early print culture fosters the proliferation of knowledge of the world and the means by which to store that knowledge.

Possible Texts:
Erasmus’ “De Copia”
Selections from Michel de Montaigne’s essays (in Florio translation)
Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Religio Medici, Urn Burial, Musaeum Clausum
Selections from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy
Selections from Francis Bacon’s essays
Margaret Cavendish’s The Description of a New World Called The Blazing World
John Evelyn’s “Sylvia”
                                                                                                                                                                                625.2     AA     Tues     18:00 – 20:15          Omri Moses        (theory)

American Literature and Mental Illness

This course will look at American writers’ fascination with non-normative forms of thinking, using the topic of mental illness as a way to focus attention on historical changes to the way American culture has thought about the mind. We will be exploring literary characters and personages in fiction and poetry who represent neurodivergent traits sometimes at odds with normative cultural ideals. Because this is an enormous topic, we will pay special attention to physiological theories of behavior and nervous disorder, with units on William James and melancholia, American behaviorist psychology, radical psychiatry, and neuroscience. We will be seeking to historicize the way scientists, psychologists, and writers have viewed and theorized neuropathology and mental diversity. Will take a special interest in a disabilities studies framework that takes mental diversity for granted and advocates for it. As we consider the ways that reading and writing depend on neurological activity, we will be interested to know what these activities, in particular, can express about the unsettled mind in action. We will be exploring writers from Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Ken Kesey to Richard Powers, working our way across the twentieth century to the present.
                                                                                                                                                                                628.2     AA     Thurs     18:00 – 20:15          Stephen Ross   

Global Britain: Narratives of "The Whole" in Contemporary British Literature and Cultures

“June the 23^rd was not the moment Britain chose to step back from the world. It was the moment we chose to build a truly Global Britain.” —Theresa May, 17 Jan 2017

“[E]mancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.”

     —Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009)

On January 17, 2017, UK Prime Minister Theresa May announced her intention to push for a “hard” Brexit from the European Union, seven months after the British people voted “yes” on the EU referendum. In her speech, May outlined her vision of building a “truly Global Britain”—a counterfactual slogan worthy of Orwell—from the ashes of Brexit. May’s formulation, with its isolationist delusions of neo-imperial grandeur, disavows the “truly global” entity Britain already is and has been for a long time. In doing so, it bespeaks chronic anxieties in the UK regarding its national self-image and its relation to the world—anxieties brought into even sharper relief by the shocking success of the Labour party in the June 8^th snap-election.

This seminar takes May’s speech—and the historical rupture of Brexit more generally—as a prompt and provocation for examining the vexed concept of the “global” in contemporary British literature and culture. Through readings, weekly seminar discussion, and close attention to unfolding current events, we will work toward a historically rigorous understanding of British globality and related concepts of “the whole” such as universalism, exceptionalism, and totalitarianism. In our effort to construe “Global Britain” in geo-political and cultural terms, we will chase the “global” through space and time, moving between the worlds of the living and the dead.

Our archive will include fiction, drama, poetry, a graphic novel and an experimental documentary by the following: J.G. Ballard, Wilson Harris, John Akomfrah, Bhanu Kapil, Laura Oldfield Ford, Caroline Bergvall, J.H. Prynne, David Peace, Sarah Kane, Hanif Kureishi, and Keston Sutherland. Secondary theoretical readings will probably include: Giorgio Agamben, Guy Debord, Stuart Hall, Elaine Scarry, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, David Harvey, and Aimé Césaire. In addition to weekly attendance, assessment for this course will take the form of an in-class presentation and a final essay.

The final syllabus will resemble the following:

Weeks 1-2: J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun (1984); George Orwell, “England Your England” (1941)
Week 3: Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock (1960)
Week 4: John Akomfrah, Handsworth Songs (1986)
Week 5: Bhanu Kapil, Ban en Banlieue (2015)
Week 6: J.H Prynne, Brass (1971)
Weeks 7-8: David Peace, GB84 (2004)
Week 9: Sarah Kane, Blasted (1995)
Week 10: Hanif Kureishi, “Weddings and Beheadings” (2006); Keston Sutherland, Stress Position (2009)
Weeks 11-12: Laura Oldfield Ford, Savage Messiah (2011)
Week 13: Caroline Bergvall, Drift (2014)
                                                                                                                                                                                635.2     A     Wed     13:15 – 15:30          Patrick Leroux        (theory)

Performative dramaturgies

How does the text perform? Inversely, how does the body in performance carry, translate or channel source texts? Can texts themselves be “performative” without being performed on stage? The traditional distinctions between texts meant to be read and texts meant to be performed having been blurred in this post-dramatic (Hans-Thies Lehmann), post-Aristotelian era, how do we then reconsider not only the dramatic text, but performativity itself as it extends to literary spheres and paratopical discursive modes? Performative dramaturgies remain, in spite of the blurring of genres and modes of address, yet what theoretical and analytical tools apply to texts and performances designed to challenge and resist categorization?

This seminar will draw on performance theory (Richard Schechner, Peggy Phelan, Philip Auslander), tools for dramaturgical analysis (Patrice Pavis, Eleanore Fuchs) and discourse theory (Foucault, Dominique Maingueneau, Anderson) in exploring various strategies involved in the dramaturgy of performance as applied to literary texts, playscripts, non-theatrical texts, and hybrid or non-verbal performances that explicitly drawn from literary sources.

                                                                                                                                                                                645.2     A     Tues     10:00 – 13:00          Darren Wershler        (theory)

The Research Collection     (cross-listed ENGL 800)

Research and teaching collections preserve a wide range of objects, including (but not limited to) scientific instruments, mineral samples, art objects, chapbooks and ephemera, consumer goods, magazines, architectural models, taxidermied animals, film, tissue samples, digital files, toys and archaeological antiquities. Regardless of their role in the establishment of many disciplines, the history, structure and function of university collections (not-quite libraries, not-quite archives) remains under-theorized and poorly understood.

As David Ludwig and Cornelia Weber have described, various sorts of collections were integral to 19th-century university teaching and research across the disciplines. Over the course of the 20th century, the theoretical and institutional import of university collections gradually diminished. At the beginning of the 21st century, however, a renewed interest in the potential of university research collections is developing. This is partly in response to the growing relevance of theoretical perspectives like material media history, media archaeology and object-oriented ontology. Concerns about consumer culture, waste and sustainability also help, as does a high degree of general cultural interest in collecting, hoarding and trading practices.

This course will take two of Concordia’s university research collections as its objects of study: The Richler Room and the Residual Media Depot. While studying the course readings, students will work closely with these two collections and their objects, looking for opportunities to interrogate and add to the body of theory as much as to apply the theory to the collections. The course will also include visits from archivists, curators, and scholars who have established and worked with research collections of their own.

Core course readings will consist of a variety of texts: philosophical musings on the nature of collecting (Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library” and “The Collector”; Baudrillard’s _the System of Objects_, etc.); the existing literature on the subject of research and teaching collections (much of which originates in museum studies, art history and science and technology studies — Jules Davids Prown’s “Mind in Matter,” excerpts from Susan M. Pearce’s _Interpreting Objects and Collections_, etc.); contemporary writing on working with technological objects (Matthew Kirschenbaum et. al.’s report on _Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections_; Henry Lowood’s “The Hard Work of Software History” etc.); texts on collecting, selling and curating writers’ libraries (e.g. Richard Oram’s anthology) and so on.

Course work will consist of two short seminar presentations and a term project. In the first third of the course, students will identify a particular research project that triangulates their own interests with the core course materials and one of the two research collections. Sample projects might include the production of a paper on some aspect of the collection, but might also involve participation in database construction and design; investigation of specific problems of restoration and preservation; policy questions about space and funding; the development of policy for the growth and management of the collection; or a range of other such topics. The overall point is to instil in students a sense of themselves as active researchers as well as consumers of scholarly texts.
                                                                                                                                                                                657.2     AA     Wed     18:00 – 20:15          Mary Esteve        (period/theory)

Black and White and Raced All Over: Key Works of American Fiction in Their Racial and Critical Contexts

This seminar has two main objectives: first, to introduce students to important works of American fiction by both black and white authors from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in which race and the legacy of slavery play an important role; second, to introduce students to the wide range of critical, theoretical, and methodological approaches to literature advanced by recent as well as past critics. To this end, the seminar will examine six works of American fiction that have earned the distinction of being published as Norton critical editions. While these novels all contain themes of race and/or slavery, they constitute a highly diverse array of narrative styles and literary ambitions. The secondary criticism and critical gloss comprising these volumes will provide the basis for the seminar’s examination of: 1) the primary text’s place in literary and cultural history; 2) the shifts in critical assumptions and aesthetic values over time and the way these shifts alter interpretive practice; 3) the strengths and limitations of various contemporary theories as bases for literary interpretation. Students will be expected to conduct research in criticism and theory beyond the selections provided by the Norton volumes. TEXTS: Twain, PUDDIN’HEAD WILSON; Chesnutt, THE MARROW OF TRADITION; Johnson, AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLORED MAN; Stein, THREE LIVES; Larsen, PASSING; Faulkner, THE SOUND AND THE FURY.
                                                                                                                                                                                659.4     AA     Wed     18:00 – 20:15     Nicola Nixon

Unsettling (United) States

For all the recent emphasis on such constructs as homeland security and authentic national identity (versus the results of immigration and the fruits of illegal residents), the US has exhibited regularly and simultaneously romances of and anxieties about its internal fluidity--what both creates its success as a nation and creates its anxieties about the costs of its diversity. Of course the idea of domestic uniformity and immigration is challenged internally by the inability to integrate its own people, be they manumitted slaves, displaced rural people, and the poor who migrate. From reconstruction and the end of the nineteenth century, when Turner announced the closing of the frontier—claiming that the absence of free land would invariably affect the making of the American character—the genre of the western emerged, expressing nostalgia for the open frontier; so, too, did the celebration of hoboism, the fantasy of travelling with neither home nor destination. Along side the celebration of the cowboy and rambling man, however, came texts representing the darker, historical realities of rootlessness, homelessness, and forced migrancy, especially in the wake of the south-to-north migrations of African Americans, of the dust-bowl migrations of the 1930s, and of the forced reintegration, after WWII, of 19 million GIs returned from the front in Europe and a half million Displaced Persons granted asylum. This course examines the conjoined discourses of free-wheeling roaming and desperate displacement from the late-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth.

Possible Literary Texts:
Twain, Tramps Abroad
Wister, The Virginian
Sinclair, The Jungle
Larsen, Quicksand
Faulkner, Light in August
Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Ellison, Invisible Man
Kerouac, On the Road
O’Connor, Wise Blood
Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley
Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

Possible Critical Texts:
Benjamin on the flaneur
Serres and Derrida on the parasite/host relationship
Bourdieu on habitas
Debord on situtationism
Hartman on vagrancy
Harvey on geographies of enclosure

                                                                                                                                                                                665.2     A     Thurs     1315 – 15:30          Jill Didur     (theory)

Global Environmental Humanities       

Postcolonial studies of the environment and the non-human (Tiffin, Huggan, De Loughrey) has included some debate on the relevance of ecocriticism to readings of postcolonial writing concerned with representing nature and animals. Scholars have argued that ecocriticism and postcolonial studies must look for critical approaches that accommodate for both the textuality of literature and the extra-textual status of the more-than-human if they hope to link the ethical projects that drive both areas of scholarship (Nixon, Vital, Head, O’Brien). Ecocriticism has largely emerged out of an American studies context (Buell, Glotfelty, Slovic), resulting in a sometimes parochial view of environmental history. Postcolonial studies, on the other hand, has been seen as showing “scant interest in environmental concerns, regarding them implicitly as, at best, irrelevant and elitist, at worst, sullied by ‘green imperialism’” (Nixon). This course will attempt to address how these sometimes conflictual dynamics in postcolonial and ecocritical studies might be brought into dialogue through a ‘Green’ approach to studying postcolonial literature concerned with globalization and the environment.  Our discussions will focus on divergent approaches to reading literature in ecocritical and postcolonial studies that emphasize rootedness versus displacement, purity versus hybridity and the national versus the transnational.  We will ground these theoretical debates with discussion of literary works by writers such as Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, Nadine Gordimer, Helon Habila, Jamaica Kincaid, Barbara Kingsolver, and Arundhati Roy, Indra Sinha, and Ken Saro-Wiwa.

Sample secondary readings:
Rob Nixon Slow Violence and Environmentalism of the Poor (2013)
Ursula Heise Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008)
Amitav Ghosh The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016)
Dipesh Chakrabarty “The Climate of History: Four Theses” (2009).
Eben Kirksey Emergent Ecologies (2015)
Anthony Carrigan Postcolonial Tourism: Literature, Culture, and Environment (2011)
Elizbeth DeLoughrey and George Handley Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (2011)
                                                                                                                                                                                667.4     AA     Mon     18:00 – 20:15          Jesse Arseneault      (theory)

Abject Animals and Pestiferous Being       

Although the recent animal turn in cultural theory has infused many fields, animal life remains a niche concern in postcolonial studies. In that postcolonialism usually considers animality only insofar as humans have been animalized under colonial power, the field has earned criticism for being a primarily humanist one (Armstrong, Shukin). Whether or not postcolonial scholarship has addressed them animals nonetheless abound in much of the field’s literature and theory. Frequently, these animals do not take the figure of charismatic mammals or companion species often celebrated in Western approaches to animal advocacy and animal studies, but instead take on the form of the abject, the pestiferous, the verminous, and the wretched (Mavhunga). These latter figures often recall colonialism’s role in bestializing racialized and indigenous bodies, wherein the animal stands as a marker for subhumanity (Anderson).

Broadly speaking, this course aims to build conversations between postcolonial studies and animal studies, but specifically asks what ethical possibilities lie in turning these frameworks toward undesired animals, even pests that humans seek to eliminate. In making such figures of animality the central concern of this course, students will be asked to consider what animal studies has to say about problem animals, the status of animals in postcolonial literature as well as in multiple locations across the globe, how writers deploy animal tropes as a means for articulating modes of human oppression, how contemporary postcolonial literatures respond to colonialism’s campaigns of dehumanization, the relationship between techniques of control applied to animal bodies and those applied to humans, and the ethical problems presented by animals rendered abject or pestiferous. Through the course of weekly seminars devoted to the above topics, students will explore how these concerns illuminate ties or commonalities between the fields of postcolonial studies and animal studies.

Students will take up the above topics as they examine fiction from writers such as Boris Boubacar Diop, Lauren Beukes, J.M. Coetzee, Rawi Hage, Mohsin Hamid, Njabulo Ndebele, Kgbetli Moele, Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde, and Indra Sinha. Alongside these texts, students will consult supplementary readings drawn from animal studies, anticolonial thought, and postcolonial theory, including selections from Sarah Ahmed, Neel Ahuja, Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, Frantz Fanon, Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, and Achille Mbembe.
                                                                                                                                                                                668.4     AA     Tues     18:00 – 20:15          Marcie Frank        (theory)

Media/Genre

The category of media is granted a lot of prestige in current literary studies, while that of genre is consigned prematurely to the domain of the old fashioned. This course examines their interface, which is especially critical in literary studies. A survey of key texts in media theory and genre theory will expose some of their historical relations and explore what each can bring to the other today. Together we will highlight their intersections in 2 case studies. These studies are designed to be brief, not so much to give students historical mastery of the periods they cover as to help them to sharpen their abilities to conceptualize and develop independent projects that capitalize on media theory to advance literary scholarship.

Media theory readings will include selections from Lev Manovich, Alexander Galloway, John Guillory, and Roger Chartier. Genre theory readings will include selections from the Russian Formalists, Gerard Genette, Thomas Pavel and David Duff.

Case Study 1: Tragicomedy on stage and in print

Drama theory condemned “mongrell tragicomedy,” as Sir Philip Sidney termed it, even as the genre proliferated in the 17^th century. Examples would include Fletcher’s plays, the court masque, and “improved” Shakespeare, as well as formal split-plot tragicomedies (Dryden, Southerne). Tragicomedy arguably had a hand in shaping the new genre of the novel (it can fruitfully be applied to Paradise Lost, occasionally described as the “first novel,” as well as to some short fiction by Aphra Behn); it also paved the way for performance forms new to England at the beginning of the 18^th century such as (sung-through) opera, ballet and pantomime. The tight focus on one genre, tragicomedy, permits the intersection of media relations between print and performance and an evolving genre system to come into view so that their mutual influence can be specified and explored. Readings will focus on a tragicomic text (perhaps The Tempest) as it was “improved” and adapted across various performance as well as print formats. 

Case Study 2: Melodrama and serial narration

Melodrama’s emergence at the end of the 18^th century forced (or at least coincided with), the theorization of media in the opposition of print to performance. It thereby contributed to a concept of medium-specificity and to an (Hegelian) aesthetics in which each form of art needed to fulfill its own distinctive destiny.  Yet multi-media by nature, melodrama also prompted new modes of narration across the media and genres of print (including especially illustrated serial publication) and performance (including eventually screen media as well). Finding interpretive paradigms to capture the complex relations between media and genre in melodrama, as in serial narrative formats (some of which grew out of melodrama), is a challenge since in both instances the categories collaborate intimately but the field in which they occur demands that analysis choose one axis of interpretation or another, so that, for example, film melodrama, like stage melodrama and TV melodrama, tend each to get treated in their own medium-specific silo. Readings will trace one melodramatic narrative as it is adapted from stage-print-film-serial format (say Dickens or Blue-beard….) to see how reading across media can benefit from attention to the generic affiliations within each medium.   
                                                                                                                                                                               

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.
                                                                                                                                                                              

670.4     A     Wed     13:15-1530          Josip Novakovich

Creative Non-Fiction
                                                                                                                                                                                671.3     AA     Thurs     18:00 – 20:15          Sina Queyras

*Note: this seminar will meet biweekly across both the Fall and Winter semesters and will be cross-listed

Literary Production: Curating & Archiving the Literary Event     (cross-listed ENGL 415)

Before being able to register, you must submit a letter stating your experience and interest in the course directly to the Prof. Sina Queyras at: sina.queyras@concordia.ca

This course will introduce modes of literary production including curating a reading series, introducing readers, archiving literary recordings & ephemera, writing critically, designing and maintaining a literary blog, design proof & publication. If you enjoy Writers Read and Synapse, you might enjoy taking this course on Literary Production Curating & Archiving. We'll be designing a new reading series from the ground up as well as working on planned Writers Read events. We'll also be developing our online presence, so you'll have an opportunity to develop web-content, learn to use social networking, literary promotion etc. It will be a lot of hand-on work, both behind the scenes and at events. Students will learn to vet material, choose readers, write introductions, and deal directly with writers. It will also be a lot of fun. If you are interested in literary promotion, curation, editing, and developing a literarily community, this course is for you.
                                                                                                                                                                                672.3     A     Thurs     14:45 – 17:00          Sina Queyras

Poetry Workshop
                                                                                                                                                                                673.4     A     Mon & Wed     10:15 – 11:30          Patrick Leroux

The Solo Play     (cross-listed ENGL 416)

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. After reading and analyzing significant solo plays and writing exercises, by the end of the workshop, the student will have completed a 30 to 50 minute solo piece.                                                                                                                                                                                 674.2     A     Mon     13:15-1530          Kate Sterns

Prose Workshop

This workshop will combine writing and reading, with particular attention being paid to the element of suspense: that state of uncertainty so crucial to any successful work of fiction. Alongside your own writing, we will examine various texts (and genres), with a view to understanding the techniques by which authors keep readers reading.

A list of authors might include: Marghanita Laski, E.A Poe, Kafka, Flannery O’Connor, Susan Hill.
                                                                                                                                                                               
800.2     A     Tues     10:00 – 13:00          Darren Wershler

The Research Collection    (cross-listed ENGL 645)
                                                                                                                                                                                801.4     AA     Mon     13:15 - 15:30          Jessica Bardill

Intersectionality and Identity in Literature   (cross-listed ENGL 603)
                                                                                                                                                                                

Samuel Beckett, Playwright            May 2, 2016 – June 15, 2016

636 . 1    AA     Tue & Thurs     1000 - 1230     Andre Furlani          Summer

Although Samuel Beckett had long written prose and verse, the success of his first play En attendant Godot when he was 47 sponsored what became a vibrant dramaturgical career.  For many years his peculiarly pronounced impact was confined largely to the stage.  Not only did he translate his French plays but he began to write English ones, working increasingly closely with leading theatre companies in Paris, London, New York, Dublin, and West Berlin.  Eventually, he directed several English, French, and German productions.  The course will focus on Beckett’s dramaturgical corpus, including also British radio plays, German teleplays, and an American film starring Buster Keaton, in terms of performance theory, modern theatre practice, as well as with reference to diverse literary-critical approaches spanning the theoretical to the archival.  The course will benefit from the abundance of Beckett’s unpublished writings, from letters, journals, and commonplace books to marginalia and production notebooks that in recent years have become accessible, and which in different ways serve to demystify his art.  As Beckett’s plays have been filmed, the class will familiarize itself with several of these productions.   

The required reading is conveniently contained in the omnibus edition The Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett (Faber), available from Argo Books, 1915 rue Ste. Catherine Ouest (514 931-3442, http://argobookshop.ca).  The primary texts include Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and the shorter one-act pieces Krapp’s Last Tape, All That Fall, Happy Days, Play, Footfalls, Film, Eh Joe, Embers, Not I, Words and Music, Cascando, Catastrophe, Ohio Impromptu, Quad, Breath, and Nacht und Träume.  A range of posthumously published writings will be available on reserve.  Assessment will be based on class participation, a presentation, and a term assignment.  Familiarity with Beckett’s fiction, verse, and criticism is desirable but by no means required.

Literary Pedagogies and Processes    

600 . 2     A     Fri     1300 – 1700     Danielle Bobker      The course will be held the first 7 Fridays in the Fall semster.

This proseminar is required for PhD students.

Offered over the first half of the fall semester, this condensed course is an introduction to the teaching of literature, designed to help train MA and PhD students currently (or soon to be) working as teaching assistants as well as those interested in teaching literature elsewhere in the future. Eight to ten visiting English faculty members will discuss the methods and philosophies they have developed over the course of their careers. Theoretical angles may include classic and contemporary philosophies of education, such as critical pedagogy, as well as history and criticism of literary studies, the humanities, and the university. More practical topics will likely include teaching writing, grading, course planning, understanding student diversity, teaching close reading, and teaching difficult material. As faculty instructors make explicit the origins, evolution, and rationale of their own approaches to teaching and mentorship, students will be invited to begin to define their own pedagogical priorities and values. Course work will likely include several short presentations and an essay reflecting teaching experiences.

Copying  (theory)            cross-listed ENGL 800

602 . 2     A     Tue     1315 – 1630     Darren Wershler          Fall

This course will consider the theory and practice of copying documents in digital networked culture. The literature around copying and copies is rich and heterogeneous, ranging from philosophical treatises to piratical manifestoes, practical handbooks, plagiarisms and policy documents. We will view the subject of copying through the lens of discursive analysis, focusing on the conditions that determine what is (and is not) possible to say about copying in various contemporary contexts, such as the academy, the literary market and vernacular online discourse.

Approximately a third of the course will be philosophical in nature. After a brief introduction to discursive analysis and Actor-Network Theory, which will provide the methodological framework for the course, we will read Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” and selected contemporary responses to it, especially those in in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Michael Marrinan’s anthology Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age.  We will also read excerpts from recent full-length studies on the subject, such as Hillel Schwartz’s  The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimilies and Marcus Boon’s In Praise of Copying.

Another third of the material we discuss will come from the segment of critical cultural policy studies that discusses intellectual property. We will discuss contemporary copyright and fair dealing legislation, academic economies of citation, and modes of cultural ownership such as First Nations practices that cannot easily be reconciled with state perspectives. Readings will include essays on a range of topics from Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online, my anthology with Rosemary Coombe and Martin Zeilinger; and from Laura Murray, Tina Piper and Kirsty Robertson’s collection Putting Intellectual Property in its Place: Rights Discourses, Creative Labor, and the Everyday.

The remainder of the course material will focus on selected contemporary aesthetic practices, including literary appropriation and what I have referred to elsewhere as “everyday conceptualism” — popular acts of cultural production that cannot easily be subsumed into the world of arts and letters.  We will historicize contemporary appropriation practices in terms of avant-garde modernism (Dada, Surrealism, Italian Futurism, Cubism), but our focus will be on the limit cases of contemporary  appropriation in the recent scandals around the work of figures like Jonathan Lethem, Kathy Acker, Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Shia LaBeouf and Richard Prince. Our goal will be to map these controversies in such a way that the various stakes become more visible than they are in the heat and noise of the social media flame wars.

Blackness, Freedom, and Free Verse            (theory / period)            cross-listed ENGL 800

604 . 4    AA     Mon     1800 – 2015      Nathan Brown          Winter

Analyzing the “complicity of slavery and freedom,” Saidiya Hartman asks: “is not the free will of the individual measured precisely through the exercise of constraint and autonomy determined by the capacity to participate in relations of exchange that only fetter and bind the subject?” The key terms of this complex question — freedom, measure, constraint — bear not only upon problems of social determination, but also upon problems of poetic form. Is it possible to link social determination and poetic form, as these pertain to Black history and aesthetics, through the sort of question Hartman asks?

Taking up the bearing of this question upon contemporary American poetry, this course will focus on the relation between Blackness, freedom, and free verse. We will read complete volumes by Nathaniel Mackey, C.S. Giscombe, Erica Hunt, Ronaldo Wilson, and Claudia Rankine, leading us into investigations of how the history and experience of racial ascription is at issue in discrepant forms of free verse lyric, open field poetry, and poetic cartography. Interspersed with these volumes, we will discuss theories of Black positionality, performativity, and aesthetics articulated by Amiri Baraka, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, and Frank Wilderson.

Tentative Reading Schedule
1.   Introduction
Blackness
2.   Claudia Rankine, Citizen
3.   Amiri Baraka, Blues People
Blackness and Freedom
4.   Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”; Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection;
      Frank Wilderson, Red, White, and Black
Freedom and Free Verse
5.   Mallarmé, “Crisis in Verse”; Pound, “A Retrospect”; Olson, “Projective Verse”; Finch “The
      Ghost of Meter”
Blackness, Freedom, and Free Verse
6.   Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations; Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism (selections)
      Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagement; Moten, In the Break
Black Poetry
7.    Phyllis Wheatley; Paul Lawrence Dunbar; Jean Toomer; Amiri Baraka (selections)
8.    Nathaniel Mackey, Eroding Witness
9.    C.S. Giscombe, Here
10.  Erica Hunt, Arcade
11.  Ronaldo Wilson, Poems of the Black Object
12.  Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
13.  Concluding Discussion

Beowulf: sources, analogues, traditions, and adaptations       (period)     

605 . 2    AA     Thurs     1800 – 2015      Manish Sharma          Fall

This course aims to advance our understanding of Beowulf, one of the major accomplishments of Old English narrative verse, by situating it within its linguistic, codicological, historical, cultural, religious, scholarly, mythological, and literary matrices. Accordingly, we will read in translation selections from Old English literature (e.g. Deor, Waldere, Judith, The Wonders of the East), Anglo-Latin chronicle (e.g. Bede), Roman histories (e.g. Tacitus), Viking saga (e.g. Grettis saga, Hrólfs saga kraka), and Skaldic and Eddic poetry while exploring the broad critical trends that have animated Beowulf-scholarship since the eighteenth century. I am sensitive to the time constraints of a one-term grad course, but I still feel it is possible to offer students a gentle introduction to Old English so that a more direct engagement with Anglo-Saxon vernacularity is possible. Towards the end of the semester, we will explore Beowulf’s modern after-life, considering adaptations of the narrative that have appeared as films, novels (graphic and otherwise), and video games.

Satiric Affects     (period / theory)

615 .  4    A     Wed     1530 – 1745      Danielle Bobker          Winter

This course considers the value of twentieth- and twenty-first-century affect theory for describing the feelings fueling, represented in, and generated by Restoration and eighteenth-century satirical writing. We will take particular interest in the primary satiric affects of anger, shame/humiliation, and amusement/laughter, as well as the apparently positive emotional orientations that satirists scornfully associated with modern life, such as happiness and enthusiasm. In the first part of the semester we will familiarize ourselves with influential writings by Silvan Tomkins, Eve Sedgwick, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Sianne Ngai, Steven Shapiro, and others, in which theories of affect and emotion help to shed new light on literary, cultural, political, economic, and natural phenomena. In the second part of the semester, we will explore the merits (and limits) of contemporary affect theory as a complement to more conventional literary and historicist approaches to the emotions in key works of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century satire including Tale of a Tub, Peri Bathous, and The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting. The intentionally provocative hypothesis of the course is that eighteenth-century satirists were themselves affect theorists who exposed the contingencies and conditions of typical emotional reactions and experiences, challenged the mainstreaming of positive feeling, and deeply identified as affect aliens—that is, as people marginalized by their feelings as much as by their politics.

Romantic Bicentennials     (period)

624 . 4    A     Wed     1445 – 1700      Jonathan Sachs          Winter

The year 1816 marks the “Geneva Summer,” when a ghost story competition between Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and others resulted in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. 1817, in turn, is the year Jane Austen died and the bicentennial of the publication of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey as well as the first volume of poetry by John Keats, the Poems of 1817. Starting from Persuasion, Frankenstein, and Keats’s Poems, this course will ask what the literary field looked like two hundred years ago. We will read these more famous works alongside other lesser known writing, including poetry, novels, essays from the periodical press, scientific writing, newspapers, pamphlets, and ballads. In the course of this “field reading” we will focus on the complex interactions between literary writing and other forms of knowledge production and dissemination, sometimes, as with climate change, in ways that resonate directly with more contemporary concerns, but also, as with various scientific or aesthetic controversies, in ways that call attention to what is distinctive (and often unrecognizable to our contemporary eyes) about Romantic ways of knowing, seeing, expressing, and imagining. Possible topics include: the Elgin Marbles controversy and British visual arts field; climate change and the humanities (1816 was dubbed the “Year without a Summer”); interacting with print and Romantic periodical culture; popular political movements and the new radical press; new techniques for information visualization; scientific controversies, “Romantic life” and disputes over vitalism v. materialism; global romanticisms; and London intellectual culture. In the process of this field reading, one theoretical question we will ask is about what happens to our understanding of literature when we shrink the frame through which we understand it from the century, or era, or period to the single year. We will also ask about just what it means to celebrate a bi-centennial: is there any significance to the random passage of 200 years? 

Modernist Literary Character and Embodied Cognition     (period / theory)

626 . 2    AA     Mon     1800 – 2015      Moses, Omri          Fall

Writing invested in consciousness and mental activity is one of the defining features of twentieth-century literature, and such interest evolves in parallel to the rise of the brain sciences. This course will explore how writers contribute to neuroscientific thinking by restaging literary character in inventive ways. We will explore modernist preoccupations with the embodied and extended character of mind, connecting such embodied thinking (theoretically as well as genealogically and historically) to a controversial field of neuroscience, Embodied Cognition. Embodied Cognition is an area of study that draws in cognitive scientists, linguists, psychologists, and philosophers who assert that the body beyond the brain plays a significant role in constraining and shaping thought. We will be examining how genres of realist and experimental fiction and poetry that place special weight on the body’s sensorimotor interactions with an environment redefine personhood. Through current neuroscience, we may be in a better position to appreciate how the processes that define the self are fragmented, divided, and blind to each other’s workings, but also cooperative, “distributed,” and socially attuned. We will be familiarizing ourselves with current scientific theories, focusing especially on neuroscientific accounts of the formation of selfhood, and learning how to use unfamiliar disciplinary theories to reflect on literary study. Ultimately we will also want to know whether neuroscience has something to learn from literature and literary study.

The Fop and the Parameters of Style     (period)

635 . 4    AA     Tue     1800 – 2015      Marcie Frank          Winter

The fop emerged for the first time during the Restoration but remained a stock character in literature thereafter.  One who over-estimates his own strength, wit, mode of dress, manners, and general importance, the fop crystalized anxieties about instabilities of status, gender, and religious and political authority, but also became the vehicle through which concerns about fashion came to be marginalized. He might thus be taken as an embodiment of (failed) style.

One of the first fops was the giant Harapha of Gath, who, after taunting the captive Samson for his lack of fancy armor, refuses his challenge and stalks away in what the chorus of Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671) calls “a sultrie chafe.” Other early fops weren’t necessarily male, as can be seen in Aphra Behn’s preamble to The Fair Jilt (London, 1688) and Mary Evelyn’s Fop-Dictionary, Compiled for the use of the Fair Sex (London, 1691).  By examining the fop’s embodiment and situating him among his close relatives, the jilt, the coquette, and possibly also the dandy and the hipster, we will try to determine the modernity of the fop insofar as it can disclose the parameters of the idea of style.

Primary texts will include some Restoration and 18^th century plays, poetry and novels from among John Milton, Samson Agonistes, George Etherege, Man of Mode, Colley Cibber, Love’s Last Shift, Sir John Vanbrugh, The Relapse, Aphra Behn, The Fair Jilt, Colley Cibber, The Careless Husband, Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock, Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, Frances Burney, Evelina, Jane Austen, Emma; and later examples to be determined that feature of this comic type (maybe Ronald Firbank, P.G. Wodehouse, Brett Easton Ellis??)

Secondary texts will include two chapters from Eve K. Sedgwick’s Between Men, D.A. Miller, Jane Austen or the Secret of Style, Freud on the fetish, some essays that define style in various contexts by Oscar Wilde (“Pen, Pencil and Poison”), Susan Sontag (“Against Interpretation”), Roland Barthes, Tom Wolfe (“Radical Chic”), Norman Mailer (“The White Negro”)….

Genre and Genre Fiction     (theory)

640 . 2    AA     Mon     1800 – 2015      Kevin Pask          Fall

What is the relationship between “genre fiction” and “literary fiction”? The concept of genre fiction, encompassing the forms of popular fiction thought to rely on formulaic (“genre”) plots, is largely a creation of the twentieth century, and its strong separation from literary fiction appears to be waning in the twenty-first. What, then, were the conditions of the split between a culture of literary fiction and genre fiction? What happened to the concept of genre itself in this division of the culture of fiction? Why did the subordination of genre fiction begin to weaken in the later part of the twentieth century? These are some of the questions this course will try to answer, largely through the examination of at least some of the genres that emerged in the very fertile age of mass readership in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as the responses to those new genres, especially from the culture of literary Modernism, which was so influential in defining the parameters of literary culture in the century. The range of genres to be discussed is not meant to cover the entire range of popular fictions, but it will probably include examples from science fiction, detective/crime fiction, popular romance, and fantasy.

Readings will include a range of writers of genre fiction, possibly including A. Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Agatha Christie, H. P. Lovecraft, Dashiell Hammett, J. R. R. Tolkien, Ian Fleming, Jacqueline Susann, and Stephen King. It will also consider some of the significant theorizations of genre from the beginning of the twentieth century, especially insofar as they address the stratification of high and low genres: works by the Russian Formalists, Georg Lukács, Virginia Woolf, Northrop Frye, Tzvetan Todorov, Franco Moretti, and others.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets     (period)

650 . 2   AA     Wed     1800 – 2015      Meredith Evans          Fall

W. H. Auden (inaugural lecture at Oxford, 1956): “…the questions which interest me most when reading a poem are two. The first is technical: ‘Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work?’ The second is, in the broadest sense, moral: ‘What kind of guy inhabits this poem? What is his notion of the good life or the good place? His notion of the Evil One? What does he conceal from the reader? What does he conceal even from himself’?”

Course description:

Focused almost exclusively on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, this course offers a sustained exercise in close reading,or “practical criticism”. As such, it will be of interest not only to students of Renaissance literature but of literary production more generally; that is, to readers, writers and, even, critics of literature.

First published in 1609, Shakespeare’s Sonnets labours under strict formal constraints and historical tradition (for instance, Petrarch’s Il Canzoniere and Spenser’s Amoretti).

·        What is its relationship to established literary and historical authority?
·        How do Shakespeare’s Sonnets fit the image of Shakespeare as the king or queen of modern drama?
·        How have critics of different stripes—Formalist, Psychoanalytic, Historicist, etc.—interpreted the Sonnets?
·        How have poets variously interpreted, which is to say, re-written, this text?

Directed by the text’s own interrogation (by turns slick, awkward, triumphal and perplexed) of authority and originality, these are the main questions we will be pursuing.

Primary text:

Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth

Secondary sources include:

Petrarch (Il Canzoniere)
Spenser (Amoretti)
H. Vendler (The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets)
J. Bervin (Nets)
J. Fineman (Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye)
R. Halpern (Shakespeare’s Perfume)
D. Patterson (Reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets)
Anne D. Ferry (The ‘Inward’ Language)

The American Campus Novel, Postwar and Contemporary

656 . 2    AA     Wed     1800 – 2015      Mary Esteve         Fall

What sort of institution is the university (or liberal arts college) and why have so many novelists over the last half-century chosen to write about it? This seminar seeks to get beyond the obvious answer—that that they write what they know—and to probe the significance of novelists’ preoccupation with the status and value of this specific institutional form. We will examine a series of novels by such writers as Mary McCarthy, Randall Jarrell, Vladimir Nabokov, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Teju Cole with one eye toward their particular portrayals of an institution of higher education and another eye toward the way this institution comes to stand more generally for the idea if not ideal of modern institutionality. We will inquire into how their novelistic frames—some satirical, some tragic, some lyrical, all decidedly reflexive—shape their vision of what the university, as modern institution, looks like: is it a place hospitable to genuine discovery and learning or an enforcer of disciplinary conformity; an alternative to or a reproduction of the family/corporate regime; a vacation spot for students or a holding cell for faculty; a salad bowl for mass democracy or a fortress for the privileged elite?  Alongside the fiction we will read contemporary criticism related to the history and politics of modern institutions, higher education and the creative economy—John Guillory, Gerald Graff, Mark McGurl, Elaine Showalter, and Sarah Brouillette, among others.

Public History, Semiotics, and Identity Formation in Modern and Contemporary Canadian Writing      (theory)

662 . 4    AA     Mon     1800 – 2015      Daniel O'Leary         Winter

Drawing readings from the eighteenth century through to the present day, this course will ask students to examine Canadian writing that explores national identity, semiotics, borders and intersections of cultures, nations, races, regions, classes, genders, and historical periods.  In the course students also will be asked to consider the so-called “history/sentiment/romance axis” and the place of historical mythologies in Canadian Literature.  An important goal of the course will be to understand how these works at once articulate conceptions of Canadian identity and contribute to a cosmopolitan world literature, taking their places in the Canadian canon but also contributing to transnational literary movements, including phases and modes of Victorianism, modernism and postmodernism. An important element of the course will be consideration of Jean-François Lyotard’s critique of totalizing narratives and the epistemological problems associated with collective mythologies.

Along with discussion of authors in their literary, historical and political contexts, students also will be introduced to concepts drawn from recent theory and criticism dealing with feminism, transnationalism, post-colonialism, transatlantic studies and hermeneutics.  Readings will be suggested from Northrop Frye, Harold Adams Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Ernst Cassirer, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-François Lyotard, Hans Georg Gadamer, George Grant, Linda Colley and Gerald Friesen.

Assignments for the course will include a class presentation and a 2500 – 3500 word essay applying a theory or methodology drawn from the secondary readings to one or more of the assigned works.

Readings

Canadian Poetry from the Beginnings. Ed. Gerson and Davies.
Sara Jeanette Duncan, The Imperialist (1901).
A. M. Klein The Second Scroll (1951).
Hugh MacLennan, The Watch that Ends the Night (1959).
Rudy Wiebe, The Temptations of Big Bear (1973).
Michael Ondaatje’s, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970).
Margaret Atwood, The Journals of Susanna Moodie  (1970); and Surfacing (1971).
David Adams Richards, Lives of Short Duration (1981).
Thomas King, The History of the Indian in Canada (2005).
Rawi Hage, Cockroach (2009).

Globalization and Contemporary Indian Literature in English      (theory)

665 . 2    A     J     1315 – 1530      Jill Didur               Fall

The prominence of contemporary Indian literature in English in the global literary market, alongside a burgeoning local interest in India in popular fiction in English, suggests that writing in English from India is undergoing a major expansion in circulation and popularity. From Booker Prize winners to Harlequin romance novels, publishers are currently forecasting India to become the “the biggest English language book-buying market in the world” in the next decade (it is currently the third largest). This course will examine the effects of globalization on the production of contemporary English language literature from India and its diaspora in order to understand what this surge in English writing means for contemporary theories of globalization and culture, Indian national discourse, and postcolonial literary studies. Questions that will guide our examination of a selection of texts representative of these different strands of Indian writing in English include: How has the literary imagination of contemporary Indian writers in English been shaped by the effects of globalization? What characteristics separate the local Indian publishing market from the global publishing industry in the West?  How has the marketing of Indian literature capitalized on images of the ‘exotic East’ as well as unsettled and challenged these stereotypes about Indian culture and society? What relationship does the Indian graphic novel have to its counterpart in West? How does the pulp fiction market in India exist in tension with the more literary and cosmopolitan market?

Selected Primary Texts:

Aravind Adiga The White Tiger
Sarnath Banerjee Corridor
Chetan Bhagat One Night@ The Call Centre
Kiran Desai The Inheritance of Loss
Swati Khushal A Piece of Cake
Bharati Mukherjee Miss New India
Arundhati Roy The God of Small Things
Indra Sinha Animal’s People

Selected key secondary texts:

Ulka Anjaria A History of the India Novel in English (Cambridge UP: 2015)
Rosemary Marangoly George Indian English and the Fiction of National Literature (Cambridge UP 2013)
Liam Connell and Nicky Marsh Literature and Globalization: A Reader (Routledge 2011)
Graham Huggan The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (Routledge 2001)
Sarah Brouillette Postcolonial Writers and the Global Literary Marketplace (Palgrave2007)

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

Mixed Genre     

670 . 4     A     Thurs     1530 – 1745     Mikhail Iossel          Winter

“Do not do what someone else could do as well as you.
Do not say, do not write what someone could say,
could write as well as you. Care for nothing in
yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else 
and out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently
the most irreplaceable of beings.”
                                                    --Andre Gide

OBJECTIVE: The central objective of this course is to help you strengthen your grasp on the craft of fiction. We will try to figure out, and put to proper use, the various approaches to writing to the full extent of one’s potential. You are all at the stage where you have written, and re-written, stories before, and I will treat you – as you will no doubt treat each other – as respected peers. The primary course material for this class will be your own work. Each class we will workshop one or two of your stories – and analyze some of the stories I’ll be handing out on a regular basis -- seeking to expand our critiques and place them in a broader context of modern literary process. Please e-mail your story to your classmates and me at least two days in advance of our discussion of it. Write a one-page “letter” to the author of each piece under review; copy to me.

The process of writing – a sustained effort at artistic self-exploration in close adherence to one’s personal aesthetic criteria -- is largely an intuitive one. Continuously holding oneself true to the full rigors of one’s own judgment is no easy task. Understanding one’s own thinking process in regards with the process of writing is a lifelong endeavour. Anton Chekhov remarked once that while it almost always is readily apparent why a poorly written and ill-conceived story is “bad” -- a “good” story is never anything less than a mystery unto itself. In this class, we will attempt to resolve, or at least pointedly address, this mystery – and do so in a manner straightforward enough for you to draw direct practical benefit from our discussions. We’ll be looking closely at the various elements of a literary text through the magnifying lens of strong “writerly” intent. To that end, one day I will ask you, for instance, to bring excerpts, brief passages from some of your favorite pieces of writing – texts whose descriptive sentences or rendering of dialogue have struck you as worthy of notice – and be prepared to say a few words about them. The concrete and functional purpose of such an exercise is one of learning by proxy, through virtual apprenticeship – with the ultimate goal of helping you “match yourself” with the writing voice, the literary style most inimical to your own creative predilections. Imitation, for writers of varying levels of accomplishment, is more than flattery – it is a powerful way to master the craft. “Numerous writers – Somerset Maugham and Joan Didion come to mind – recall copying long passages verbatim from favorite writers, learning with every line,” remarks the fiction writer Stephen Koch in “The Modern Library’s Writer’s Workshop.” And consider the following statement by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in a Paris Review interview:”At the University of Bogota, I started making new friends and acquaintances, who introduced me to contemporary writers.

Curating & Archiving the Literary Event

671 . 2     AA     Tue     1800 – 2015     Sina Queyras          Fall

Before being able to register, you must submit a letter stating your experience and interest in the course directly to the Prof. Sina Queyras at: sina.queyras@concordia.ca

This course will introduce modes of literary production including curating a reading series, introducing readers, archiving literary recordings & ephemera, writing critically, designing and maintaining a literary blog, design proof & publication. If you enjoy Writers Read and Synapse, you might enjoy taking this course on Literary Production Curating & Archiving. We'll be designing a new reading series from the ground up as well as working on planned Writers Read events. We'll also be developing our online presence, so you'll have an opportunity to develop web-content, learn to use social networking, literary promotion etc. It will be a lot of hand-on work, both behind the scenes and at events. Students will learn to vet material, choose readers, write introductions, and deal directly with writers. It will also be a lot of fun. If you are interested in literary promotion, curation, editing, and developing a literarily community, this course is for you

Poetry Workshop

672 . 2     A     Tue    1315 – 1530     Mary di Michele          Fall

The creative process is one of copying, recombining and transforming. Everything goes into the mix or remix. Artful ways of such ‘stealing’ include forms such as found poetry, the cento, erasures, glosas, reboots, and free translations. Modeling on the greats is the best school for the young poet, and a continuing education for all poets. For the poet translation can be transformative; I think one of the ways mature poets steal (to paraphrase Eliot), while immature poets merely imitate. Attempts at translation, however free or ‘irreverent,’ take you to back to the source of creation. Alice Oswald describes her approach with Homer’s Illiad for her book, Memorial: “I work closely with the Greek, but instead of carrying the words over into English, I use them as openings to see what Homer was looking at. I write through the Greek, not from it – aiming for translucence rather than translation.”

In the past, the work of translation by the poet was valued as highly as more personally inspired writing. It was the Romantic cult of ‘original’ genius that relegated the art of translation to the level of scholarship and craft rather than art. But since the twentieth century and the influence of Ezra Pound, translation poetics and the tradition of poet as translator has been revitalized. Kenneth Rexroth reminds those who would cling to Romantic poetics that “inspiration isn’t always at its peak.” To be ‘inspired’ (literally meaning to breathe in, from the Latin, inspirare) through the best poetry written throughout history is more reliable.

Translation exercises can serve as a rich source of prompts. The New York School of poets used translation exercises in absurdist ways. Many poets since Pound (but really before him too) have made translation an important part of their practice: among Canadian poets: Anne Carson, Robert Bringhurst, and Erin Moure, among British and American poets: Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Alice Oswald, Robert Hass, W. S. Merwin, and Jane Hirschfield to name just a few.

These are the objectives of the course: ‘to take on the world’ and study and read poetry from many ages and cultures and through modeling and/or translation exercises (from attempts at close renderings to what Erin Moure calls transelations and I like to think of as adaptations) to develop your craft and expand your ‘horizons.’

Prose Workshop

674 . 3     A     Mon     1315 – 1530     Terence Byrnes          Fall / Winter

Through discussion of students' work and the issues it raises, we will develop a practical model of fiction writing as art and as process. There is no text other than that which is written by the class. Each member of the workshop will produce a substantial body of original prose fiction—short story, novella, novel, or any of that loose collection of forms sometimes called "experimental"—and participate in class discussions. While a background in critical theories of fiction is not expected, it is assumed that students entering this class are aware of narrative technique and that they have learned to read as writers do.

Writing fiction is both the means and the goal of this class. Students should be prepared to discuss each other's work in a thoughtful and constructive manner and to make, whenever possible, useful comparisons with published fiction or other narrative forms.

Expanded Poetics

604A . 4     A     Wed      15:30-17:45     Nathan Brown

"Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow, in effect, into another nature, in making things either better than nature brings forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature, as the heroes, demi-gods, cyclops, chimeras, furies, and such like; so as he goes hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit."
      - Sir Phillip Sydney, A Defense of Poesy (1583)

The Greek term poiesis means "an act or process of creation." In the sixteenth century, Sir Phillip Sydney insists upon the "incomparable" title of the poet as "maker" — one who does not only imitate nature but rather makes things either new or better than nature, "ranging within the zodiac of his own wit." And in the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger considers poetry "a kind of building."

These are classical and canonical definitions that still hold new resources for imagining and theorizing the constructive capacities of poetic practice. Our seminar will assemble and explore the field of "Expanded Poetics," asking how far the limits of the "poetic" can be extended beyond the writing of "poems" while still maintaining a significant relation to "poetry" and to the history of poetic form. To this end we will consider various theories of "making" within and beyond the history of poetics while attending to models of form, structure, and image and to practices of material construction in literature, art, architecture, engineering, and the physical sciences. We will host a number of guest speakers from these fields as part of the seminar. Key figures, movements, and texts will include: George Herbert, Alfred Jarry, Marcel Duchamp, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Joseph Cornell, the OuLiPo, the journal 0-9, the Toronto Research Group, Arakawa and Gins, Buckminster Fuller, Nicolas Baier, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök. Participants are encouraged to familiarize themselves with the anthology Imagining Language (ed. Rasula and McCaffery) prior to the seminar.

Vox populi: The Social Text in Late Medieval England   

605B . 2      AA     Tues      18:00-20:15     Manish Sharma             (period/theory)
 
This course proposes to examine the poetic works of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, the Pearl-poet, and John Gower in terms suggested by the political and social antagonisms animating Ricardian and early Lancastrian England and recorded in the chronicles of Thomas Walsingham and Jean Froissart. In the wake of the Black Death, a plague that killed up to half of the population, wage-labourers and servants discovered new opportunities for social advancement and improvement in their living conditions. The new mobility of the under-class was met with disapproval and trepidation on the side of the governing elite, materially evidenced by increases in taxation and unprecedented labour legislation designed to slow what was perceived as the erosion of the old order. The Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 was the most dramatic consequence: a brief but highly charged uprising prosecuted by a broad, primarily rural, coalition of those beneath the gentry rank. Accordingly, this seminar will pose the following questions: How were the desires and discontents of the governed classes registered by poets (and chroniclers) closely associated with, or even patronized by, the most powerful magnates of the realm? How did English authors wish to mediate, obscure, or suppress the voices of, in Rancière’s words, “the part who have no part”? What role did reformist Lollard discourse, harshly critical of the wealthy institutional Church, play in the organization and expression of lower-class frustrations? At the same time, what sort of subversive or even revolutionary potential inheres in works such as The Canterbury Tales, Vox Clamantis, or Piers Plowman, which seem to advertise prima facie a socially conservative agenda? Despite the obvious anachronism, I hope that our analysis of socio-political dialectics in the (pre-/proto-capitalist) middle ages can gain nuance and contemporary relevance via joint consideration of philosophers, cultural theorists, and literary critics in the Marxist tradition e.g. Rancière, Jameson, Eagleton, Williams, Badiou, and Žižek.

Jonathan Swift   

615A. 4     A     Tue     14:45-17:00     Danielle Bobker     (period)

This course is an intensive study of one of the most beloved satirists of the eighteenth century or any period. Readings will include major works, such as Gulliver’s Travels, Tale of a Tub, “Modest Proposal,” “Verses on the Death of Dr Swift,” the Drapier’s Letters, and Journal to Stella, and selections from Swift’s letters, sermons, and other writings, biographies by Irwin Ehrenpreis and Victoria Glendinning, and three centuries of Swift criticism. We will seek to understand the author’s views on key controversies of his day, such as the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, party politics, colonization, religious dissent, print commerce, and the new science, as well as his personal struggles with illness, patronage, friendship, sex, and marriage. Through collective close reading we will also try to describe the complex varieties of thought, feeling, and action inspiring and inspired by his penetrating satires.

Jane Austen: Narration across Media   

619A . 4     A     Wed      14:45-17:00     Marcie Frank     (period)

There have been more, and more successful screen adaptations of Jane Austen than any other novelist. What makes her oeuvre so translatable across media? In this course we will read Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, and examine selected televisual and film adaptations in order to explore the ways her narrative crosses the media of print and screen. We will also be interested in the translatability across media of critical accounts of her narrative achievements.  What can literary criticism of novels learn from and/or teach studies of film and TV?

Twentieth-Century Literature and the Brain Sciences   

626A . 2     AA     Wed     1800-2015     Omri Moses     (theory)

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 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 look at such fields as neuroaesthetics and neurohistory, and more particular topics such as the neurobiology of reading, the mental correlates of emotional functioning, and brain-body interactions. Because humanistic inquiry into these fields is nascent, we will spend time exploring the kinds of questions that may be fruitful as an analytic perspective on literature even as we attempt to put pressure on some of the cognitivist and functionalist assumptions that dominate neuroscientific approaches to literature and the humanities. In order to find alternatives, we will explore twentieth-century philosophies of mind, particularly of a vitalist and phenomenological orientation, as well as early twentieth-century neuroscience to contextualize the interest of writers and philosopher in such topics as memory, 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. Note: students do not need to have a scientific background to take this course (though, of course, one is helpful).

Ulysses and its Wake  

627C . 4     A     Mon     13:15-15:30     Andre Furlani     (period/theory)

On the centennial of its inception, Ulysses continues to draw a very wide wake.  James Joyce’s novel remains what it had been to T.S. Eliot in an essay from 1922, the year of its publication, “a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.”  The novel had already begun forming a wake in 1918, when Ezra Pound had been enthusiastically preparing it for serial publication.

The course will closely examine Ulysses and look back at its immediate wake, including the novel’s reception among such modernists as Pound and Eliot as well as Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, D.H. Lawrence, Djuna Barnes, Wyndham Lewis, Mina Loy, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, and Samuel Beckett.  The novel will also be examined with reference to critical schools that privileged Joyce’s work, such as formalism, archetypal criticism, psychoanalytical criticism, poststructuralism, reception theory, postcolonial criticism, and gender studies.  Joyce called Ulysses a book of the day, and the course concludes with an introduction to what he called his book of the night, Finnegans Wake.  (Participants are expected to show familiarity with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which introduces one of the principal characters of Ulysses.)

Assessment will be based on a class presentation, an annotated bibliography, an essay, and participation

The European Tale

640B . 4     AA     Tue     1800-2015     Kevin Pask    

This course examines the role of the “tale” as a form in European literature, particularly as one that does not quite fit into the rise of the novel as the dominant form of prose fiction by the nineteenth century. The tale as a form tends to highlight magic and adventure rather than the realism and character development usually associated with the European and North American novel and short story. It is also a form of world literature since much of the material for the European tale comes very directly from the One Thousand and One Nights and other non-European sources, including, indirectly, the Sanskrit Panchatantra. The course will consider some of this background, but its primary focus will be the European uptake of the tale beginning in the Middle Ages, including the impact of the more specifically European influence of folk tales. Texts will be drawn from writers such as Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Perrault, Hoffmann, Poe, Kipling, Stevenson, Leskov, Kafka, Borges, I. B. Singer, Angela Carter, and Salman Rushdie. The course will also examine the increasing assignation of the tale to children’s literature or pulp fiction over the course of the twentieth century. Critical reading will include Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller,” Vladimir Propp, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jack Zipes, Marina Warner, and Jan Ziolkowski.

Nation And Narration

646A. 2     AA     Wed     18:00-20:15     Bina Freiwald     (theory)

As literary critics we work in a field that is organized by the grid of national literatures and thus have a particular stake in interrogating the idea of the nation and the discourses that have informed it. Nation-building processes, moreover, always involve “cultural struggles to define how national societies understand themselves and their place in the wider world system” (J. Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation-State). In this course we will explore – through selected literary works as well as historical and theoretical texts – both the ways in which literary narratives have represented and taken part in nationalizing processes, and the ways the nation has been narrativized in philosophical, historical, and political discourses. In our approach to these philosophical, historical, and political discourses we will follow Mary Layoun’s suggestion that we bring to bear on them “the critical and theoretical insights of analyses of literary narratives with their considerations of narrative voice, time, and space, of emplotment, of closure and strategies of containment” (Nationalisms and Sexualities).

We will examine as case-studies an historical range of British, Canadian, and postcolonial literary works that could include: Shakespeare’s The Tempest, James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here, George Elliott Clarke’s Québécité, and Mahasweta Devi’s “Douloti the Bountiful.” These will be discussed alongside, and in the context of, discourses about nation ranging from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, through writings by Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant, Herder, and Rousseau, to 20th century debates in which theorists such as Kedourie, Gellner, Anderson, Smith, Hobsbawm, Billig, and Yuval-Davies present different approaches to such issues as: the origins and historical types of nationalism; the relation between nation and cultural production; the gendering of national communities; and the role of affect (the sentiment of belonging) in collective identifications.

Spectres of Belief: Secularism, Materialism, and Contemporary Fiction

647B. 1    AA    Mon-Wed    1300-1530     Cynthia Quarrie

“Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and — since there is no other metaphor — also the soul.”  — Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great)

“A librarian was a nun without God.”  — Lydia Millet (Oh Pure and Radiant Heart)

A defining precept of modernity is the idea that we, as a culture, must move beyond faith and belief into a truly secular and materialist understanding of ourselves, in our fiction and in our philosophy. Since 9-11 especially, as tensions between the religious and the secular have taken on a nationalist fervour (and implications for nationalisms), secularists have become less tolerant of religion and more openly antagonistic towards it, a discourse that Paul Gilroy calls “civilizationism.” However, this dualistic opposition between faith and reason tends to obscure the ways in which religious, metaphysical, and teleological thinking structures our stories, our languages, our ethics, our social imaginary. Such structures have been especially apparent in the discourse of literary criticism, from the prominent mid-twentieth-century literary critic F. R. Leavis, who habitually described “serious” literature as “religious,” to professional atheist Christopher Hitchens, who resorts in the quotation above to the metaphor of the soul in his appeal to the centrality of literature to the ethical imagination. The novel form in particular is often used as a marker of an “enlightened” culture, and is employed by critics and novelists alike as a rational defense against religious zealotry and violence. 

In this class we will examine the debate between faith and reason as it has unfolded in the spheres of literary fiction and criticism, and cultural theory. We will ask ourselves: To what extent do these thinkers still rely structurally on a metaphysical “beyond”? To what extent do they challenge the spirit-vs-reason debate? What role does the novel play in these discussions? What might the role of literature be in a truly atheist and materialist landscape? How do these novelists conceive of faith and belief in their texts? What models of subjectivity do they present, and how might these be properly understood in terms of these secular and post-secular paradigms?

Shakespeare and the Idea of the Political

650A. 2     AA     Thurs     18:00-20:15     Meredith Evans     (period/theory)

Preceding the state of Shakespeare studies – a vast industry that thrives equally on its defenders and detractors – Shakespeare interrogated the state: how it’s founded, who controls it, what holds it together as a functional political entity. This course approaches the idea of “the political” through both lenses. For example, we will read Coriolanus and Julius Caesar adjacent to contemporary investigations of state formation and political sovereignty (e.g., Jean Bodin; Machiavelli); we will look at how more recent investigations of the same have drawn on Shakespeare for inspiration (e.g., Carl Schmitt; Giorgio Agamben); along the way, we will also consider how different political investments have shaped Shakespeare studies and the critical practices that inform it.

Writing the American Economy, Postwar to the Present

656C. 4     AA     Wed     18:00-20:15     Mary Esteve    (period/theory)

Over the past six 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).

Historical, theoretical, and critical readings may include works by David Harvey, Howard Brick, Vincent Pecora, Michael Schudson, S. M. Amadae, John Rawls, Kenneth Arrow, Nancy Fraser, Bruce Robbins, Richard Godden, and Michael Clune. The selection of literary works will likely include Wise Blood (Flannery O’Connor); J R (William Gaddis); The Franchiser (Stanley Elkin); Housekeeping (Marilynne Robinson); Gain (Richard Powers) and Cosmopolis (Don DeLillo). (Other candidates include The Price of Salt [Patricia Highsmith]; American Psycho [Bret Easton Ellis]; Tropic of Orange [Karen Tei Yamashita]; and Then We Came to the End [Joshua Ferris].)       

American Gothic

657A. 2     A     Wed     15:30-17:45     Nicola Nixon

This course explores literary, cinematic, and televisual representations of, and theoretical responses to, the American gothic. We will examine both nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts through the critical lenses of psychoanalysis, historicism, and gender and cultural studies—texts that are organized around the following sites of inquiry: Possessive Individualism (ownership, possession, and property) and Gothic Geography (country, city, and suburb). Authors we will examine will probably include Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Shirley Jackson, James Dickey, Ira Levin, Stephen King, and Anne Rice.

Research Methods in Canadian Literary Print Culture and Book History

662A. 4     AA     Mon     1800-2015     Daniel O’Leary     (theory)

This course would introduce students to research methods for the study of the production, circulation, and reception of early modern and modern Canadian literature.  The course would begin with an introduction to bibliographical and biographical resources, finding aids, on-line resources, and Canadian book history and print culture; including the history of Canadian literary journals and small-press periodical publishing.  In the second phase of the course students would read selections for discussion of such issues as gendered and nationalist publishing, the print cultural mechanics of transatlantic and transnational identities, canonicity, genre, authorship, communities of print, cosmopolitanism and the marginalization of rural, regional and minority Canadian voices, and the processes involved in the compilation of influential literary anthologies of Canadian writing.  In discussing early Canadian Print Culture, students also will be invited to consider such facets of Canadian literary history as job printing of poetry and fiction, ephemeral print, Canadian serials and magazines, booksellers, colporteurs and print distribution, public and private libraries,  and literature in school texts and authorized anthologies.   Genres other than poetry and fiction that will be discussed in the class will include: memoirs and autobiographies of explorers, travellers, traders, and missionaries; the Queen’s Printer and government reports, papers, and occasional publications; early Canadian learned publishing; and print for Canadian children.

Authors whose works will provide readings for the course will include readings from Saukamapee, Catherine Parr Traill,  Susanna Moodie, Sir John Franklin, John Richardson, Thomas Chandler Haliburton, Mary Anne Shadd, Charles Sangster, Isabella Vallancey Crawford,  Charles Mair, Sara J. Duncan [Mrs Everard Coates], Emily Pauline Johnson, Archibald Lampman, Sir Charles G. D. Roberts,  Nellie McClung, Emily Murphy, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Marjorie Pickthall, F. R. Scott, Jessie Georgina Sime, and post-war and contemporary authors including Ethel Wilson, A. M. Klein, P. K. Page, Milton Acorn, Erin Moure, Mavis Gallant,  David Adams Richards, Rawi Hage, Madeleine Thien, and Anita Rau Badami, among others

Globalization and Contemporary Indian Literature in English

665A. 2     A     Tues     13:15-15:30     Jill Didur     (period/theory)

The prominence of contemporary Indian literature in English (Roy, Adiga, Sinha, Rushdie) in the global literary market, alongside a burgeoning local interest in India in popular fiction in English (Bhagat, Sankaran, Kunzru), suggests that writing in English from India is undergoing a major expansion in circulation and popularity. From Booker Prize winners to Harlequin romance novels, publishers are currently forecasting India to become the “the biggest English language book-buying market in the world” in the next decade. This course will examine the effects of globalization in shaping the production of contemporary English language literature from India and its diaspora in order to understand what this surge in English writing means for contemporary theories of globalization and culture (Appadurai), world literature (Moretti), and postcolonial literary studies. Questions that will guide our examination of a selection of texts representative of these different strands of Indian writing in English include: How has the literary imagination of contemporary Indian writers in English been shaped by the effects of globalization? What characteristics separate the local Indian publishing market from the global publishing industry in the West?  How has the marketing of Indian literature capitalized on images of the ‘exotic East’ as well as unsettled and challenged these stereotypes about Indian culture and society? How does the pulp fiction market in India exist in tension with the more literary and cosmopolitan market? In what ways might these texts reflect the ambiguous and uneven effects of globalization in the global North and South as well as within the Indian socio-cultural context? A selection of the following material will make up our reading list:

Theoretical texts: Brouillete, Sarah, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace, Connell, Liam and Nicky Marsh, Literature and Globalization, Huggan, Graham, Postcolonial Exotic, Gupta, Suman, Globalization and Literature, Stiglitz, Joseph, Globalization and its Discontents, Bhagwati, Jagdish, In Defence of Globalization, Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Kumar, Amitava. Passport Photos

Primary Texts: Arvind Adiga The White Tiger, Arundhati Roy The God of Small Things, Salman Rushdie Fury, Indra Sinha Animal’s People, Kiran Desai The Inheritance of Loss, Lavanya Sankaran The Red Carpet, Vikram Chandra Sacred Games, Chetan Bhagat One Night@Call Centre, Gautam Malkani, Londonstan, Suketa Mehta Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, Hari Kunzru Transmission, Pankaj Mishra, Butter Chicken In Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India & The Romantics, Amitava Kumar, Husband of a Fanatic.

Distant Reading and Related Methods

668C . 2     A     Thurs     1315-1530     Darren Wershler     (theory)

This course will introduce students to a range of contemporary critical and philosophical approaches whose focus is contextual and discursive rather than textual and hermeneutic. Franco Moretti’s term “distant reading” might serve a convenient shorthand for this range of approaches, though we’ll be looking at a wider range of texts than this term alone would suggest.

The course is designed to encourage students to think about culture in terms of a set of interrelated concepts: assemblages and networks, materiality, and circulation. Will Straw’s article “The Circulatory Turn” provides an accessible overview of major texts dealing with these concepts, and a convincing narrative about the necessity of considering them in concert. Many of the texts we’ll be looking at consider some or all of these concepts simultaneously, but they each have their particular strengths. The overall structure of the course, then, will itself be a survey that will provide students with enough information to pursue particular trajectories of their own devising later in their studies.

Course Objectives
1.     Expose students to key introductory texts in the intellectual trajectories that make the concept of distant reading possible (circulation theory, archaeology and discourse analysis, Actor-Network Theory, Articulation Theory, Materialities of Communication, Object-Oriented Ontology, etc.)
2.     Provide students with the opportunity to develop an effective scholarly online writing style
3.     Provide a low-risk opportunity for students to test out some of the methods of distant reading other than writing
4.     Involve students in the collaborative production of interdisciplinary knowledge
5.     Provide some basic training in textual markup and blogging practice

Creative Writing option

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

Mixed Genre

671A. 2    AA    Thurs    1800-2015     Mary di Michele

Poetry Workshop   

672C . 4    A    Tue    1315-1530     Sina Queyras

Drama Workshop  

673 . 3    A    Mon – Wed    1445-1600     Patrick Leroux

Prose Workshop

674A . 3    A    Mon     1530-1745     Josip Novakovich