Graduate Courses
2013-2014 Course Offerings | 2014-2015 Course Offerings
2013-2014 Course Offerings
6100 - Research Methods and Bibliography: Approaches to Graduate Studies
[Compulsory Pass/Fail course for all new graduate students]
6 credit hours
Professor Edith Snook
Both terms: W 6:00-9:00
An introduction to graduate study at UNB. The first term will consist of seminars on post-secondary teaching, research sources on campus (including those of the library, Internet, and the campus network), workshops on writing SSHRC applications, and strategies of dissertation research and publication (academic and creative). The second term will consist of supervised research leading to a thesis proposal. This course is taken in addition to the required 18 ch.
6004 - How Should I Read These?: Applying Recent Critical Theory
3 credit hours
Professor Jennifer Andrews
2nd term: M 2:00-5:00
As the title of the course suggests—with apologies to Helen Hoy’s How Should I Read These?: Native Women Writers in Canada—this seminar explores the practice of reading and applying critical theory to literary texts. The course offers graduate students an intense introduction to a range of critical frameworks in literary and cultural theory from 1950 onward. We will combine close readings of primary and secondary theoretical readings with hands-on application of each framework to a shared test text, which varies from year to year. This practical approach will ensure that students become well-versed in the key concepts and language of New Criticism, structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, New Historicism and cultural materialism, feminism(s), postmodernism, postcolonialism, Queer theory, and cultural studies, and can effectively employ these frameworks when analyzing texts of various genres from a wide variety of time periods and national literatures. The class will also include some contextual exploration of the pedagogical challenges of teaching literary theory to undergraduate students. In order to ensure that students have some choice when selecting a topic for their longer paper, I will provide a list of potential other test texts that can be used for the final essay.
Students are advised to read Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory (Manchester UP, 1995) before the course begins; Barry provides a useful background to various schools of theory, and is frequently used in undergraduate courses. The theoretical text for our course is the second edition of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (ed. Vincent Leitch, W.W. Norton, 2010), which includes selected writings from a wide range of literary theorists. In addition, an essay by Jacques Derrida, titled “Sign, Structure, and Play,” a section from Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture, and essays by Louis Montrose, and Alan Sinfield will be put on reserve to be used instead of the Norton excerpts for these authors; they are marked with an (R) and will be available for photocopying at the reserve desk of the Harriet Irving Library.
The methods of evaluation for this course are designed to encourage the close reading of texts, active participation, and to provide graduate students with several opportunities to develop professional skills that are useful both within and beyond the academic world. Those enrolled will have the chance to deliver a formal conference-style paper to the class and to produce an article-length, potentially publishable essay.
6038 - Medieval (Re-) Visions of Classical Antiquity
3 credit hours
Professor Christa Canitz
2nd term: Th 6:00-9:00
The course explores the politics of medieval adaptations of the literature of Classical antiquity, taking as an example medieval treatments of the Troy legend, often employed to bolster claims of a translatio imperii in the environments of various Continental and Insular rulers. Texts include Benoît de St Maure’s Anglo-Norman Roman de Troie, composed at the court of Henry II, Duke of Normandy and King of England, and Eleanor of Aquitaine; Guido delle Colonne’s internationally influential pseudo-historiographical Historia destructionis Troiae, written in multicultural Sicily, a European centre of translation and scholarship; Giovanni Boccaccio’s Italian urbanized Il Filostrato connected with the Angevin court at Naples; Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, responding to the political crisis of the mid-1380s in London; and Robert Henryson’s late fifteenth-century proto-postcolonial Testament of Cresseid, composed on the eve of Renaissance humanism in a Scotland freeing itself from English cultural and political hegemony. The implications of genre will also be explored as the medieval Troy legend is re-written as epic, courtly romance, scholarly historiography, complaint d’amour, and philosophical (Boethian) anti-romance, as well as in numerous shorter genres. The course ends with a glance at later adaptations of the Troy imagery, from Spenser and Shakespeare to Margaret Atwood. (Note: Chaucer’s and Henryson’s texts will be read in the original Middle English and Middle Scots; other texts will be read in modern English translation. Familiarity with Virgil’s Aeneid would be an advantage.)
6123 - Creative Writing: Poetry
3 credit hours
Professor Ross Leckie
1st term: T 6:00-9:00
A workshop designed to develop and improve skills with the elements of poetry, such as metaphor, rhythm, line break, syntax, the registers of diction, and sound pattern. The course will explore poetic form, ranging from free verse and narrative to structured verse such as the sonnet and glose. Attention will also be given to professional concerns, including the development of a distinctive voice and style, publication in journals, and the preparation of book manuscripts.
6143 - Creative Writing: Prose
3 credit hours
Professor Mark Jarman
2nd term: Th 6:00-9:00
A course designed to develop skills in short fiction, with room for students interested in writing novellas or novels. Taught in a workshop format, the seminar pays close attention to line-by-line editing and revision and some preparation for publication in markets such as literary quarterlies, higher circulation magazines, small presses and larger publishing houses.
6163 - Creative Writing: Playwriting
3 credit hours
Professor Len Falkenstein
1st term: M 1:00-4:00
Taught in a workshop format, this course will develop students’ skills in writing for the stage. Beginning with exercises in the scripting of dramatic action, monologues, and simple scenes, students will by the end of the class write a one act or full length play suitable for submission to an established theatre company or production at one of Canada’s many theatre festivals. Students will also learn about the market for plays in Canada and the various routes that new scripts may take towards production by either mainstream or alternative theatre companies.
6255 - The Culture of Physic: Women’s Writing and Medicine in Early Modern England
3 credit hours
Professor Edith Snook
2nd term: W 2:00-5:00
Because diagnosis of illness, the manufacture of medicines, and the prevention of disease were recognized as essential knowledge for housewives and mothers, many early modern women provided health care within the household. Others became professional, if usually unlicensed, physicians. This course will investigate how these textual and medical practices infiltrated literary forms undertaken by women—recipes, autobiography, poetry, fiction, the familiar letter, and various combinations thereof—and examine how religion, social relationships, and politics inform women’s medical knowledge. Beginning with an analysis of the current feminist critique of medical culture, as well historical study of early modern medicine, topics addressed will include pregnancy and childbirth, natural philosophy, sociability, disability, race and empire.
Primary texts include selections from Margaret Cavendish, The New World, Called the Blazing World and Other Writings, Poems and Fancies, and Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy; An Collins, Divine Songs and Meditacions; Anne Conway, The Conway Letters: The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More, and their Friends; Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man; Nicholas Culpeper, Culpepers Directory for Midwives; Thomas Elyot, The Castle of Health; Amy Eyton (and others), Collection of Cookery Recipes, with a few medical and household receipts, Wellcome Library MS 2323; Ann Fanshawe, Recipe Book of Lady Ann Fanshawe, Wellcome Library MS 7113 and The Memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, wife of Sir Richard Fanshawe, bart., 1600-72; Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent, A Choice Manual of Rare and Select Secrets in Physick and Chyrurgery; Margaret Hoby, The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby 1599-1605; Elizabeth Isham, Diary and Book of Remembrances; Hester Pulter, Selected Poetry; Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book, or The Whole Art of Midwifery Discovered; Arbella Stuart, The Letters of Lady Arbella Stuart;
6279 - Shakespeare and Ecology
3 credit hours
Professor Randall Martin
1st term: W 1:30-4:30
This seminar will explore Shakespeare’s representations of, and relationships to, early modern environmental practices and contemporary ecocriticism. This will involve distinguishing early modern ideas about the natural world, and the place of humans within it, from contemporary ones. Theoretically, these perspectives are associated with historicist and presentist approaches to Shakespeare. The former emphasises constructively the differences between ecological values and practices in Shakespeare’s time from our own. The latter uses present-day environmental discourses to contemporize Shakespeare’s original representations as ecocritical questions or problems.
Weekly readings and discussions will reflect these perspectives in at least three ways. First, they will explore human interactions with the natural world, either creative or destructive, which were characteristic of Shakespeare’s pre-industrial society.
Second, they will survey the radical changes in human knowledge about the earth and its creatures taking place in early modern England. Shakespeare was conscious of dislocations caused by land exploitation (e.g. parks and enclosures), war, and human domination of animals. His plays therefore present modern readers with moments that anticipate our own anxieties about environmental degradation and/or the proper treatment of animals (e.g. Perdita’s suspicions of flower hybridisation in The Winter’s Tale seem to presage current debates over genetic engineering, species “improvement”, and the creation of monocultures).
Third, modern critics have begun to appropriate Shakespeare’s plays to analogise contemporary problems or shifts in ecological thinking. Although there is little evidence to suggest that Shakespeare is our contemporary in terms of, say, environmental activism, recent biological and genetic discoveries have reinvested certain traditional concepts of natural order and human nature with fresh ecocritical urgency. To put this another way, ecocriticism expands the study of ecological relationships and exchanges according to modern criteria and need not be limited to green worlds or natural objects.
Our seminar will consider recent critics such as Gabriel Egan, who argues that current research about biospheres and habitats partially re-validates E.M.W. Tillyard’s unfashionable “Elizabethan World Picture” of micro- and macrocosmic correspondences (Green Shakespeare [2006]). Ulrich Beck’s theories of environmental risk (Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity [1992]) sem likewise applicable to calibrated “natural” disasters or material surpluses in several plays including Coriolanus.
Seminar assignments will consist of weekly one-page response papers, an oral presentation with a written follow-up, a research paper, and discussion participation.
Textbook: Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (2010)
Plays to be studied: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, The Merry Wives of Windsor, 2 Henry IV, Coriolanus, Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, King Lear, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest.
6488 - Learning One’s Letters: Education and Culture in Victorian Literature
3 credit hours
Professor Rimmer
2nd term: T 2:00-5:00
This course will focus on a group of related cultural debates in Victorian England, and on the way those debates were taken up by and helped to shape literary works. Middle-class education, education for women, working-class education, the franchise and concepts of class, culture, literacy and gender were all contested ground during this period. We will read several texts which reflect and are caught up in these currents of cultural change, and use a variety of print and online resources—the historical and critical works on the bibliography, Historic Hansard, and databases—to supplement the primary reading for the course.
Tentative long list of primary texts: Matthew Arnold, "Democracy" and "Literature and Science"; Charlotte Brontë, Villette; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations or Hard Times; George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss; Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters; Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure; Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's Schooldays; Thomas Huxley, "Science and Culture" and "Universities Actual and Ideal"; Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies or Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet; John Stuart Mill, Autobiography [selections]; John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University; John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies; Alfred Tennyson, The Princess; Charlotte Yonge, What Books to Lend and What to Give
6546 - Public Violence and Private Li(v)es: Collisions in Recent British Fiction
3 credit hours
Professor Diana Austin
1st term: Th 2:00-5:00
“For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected.” Virgina Woolf, Three Guineas
Many recent British novels situate their stories in the midst of a dizzying array of modern conflicts as they explore the effects of public violence on individual lives. These conflicts are sometimes large-scale struggles between nations, as seen when some course texts examine issues like identity, gender, class, and trauma against the backdrop of events such as the Second World War or more recent conflicts in areas like Serbia, Bosnia, and Afghanistan. But public violence affecting private lives also takes place within nations. Public policies can lead to personal relationships being forged and/or torn apart, as happens in a number of course texts involving situations as varied as an unusual boarding school, internal espionage during the Cold War, or the unexpected entanglement of Pol Pot's savage reconstruction of Cambodia with private lives in London. Characters’ lives can also become private battlegrounds demonstrating clashes of power and emotional betrayals that originate in the extreme rejection (or reflection) of broader cultural values.
In addition to exploring what these course representations of destructive public and private intersections reveal about both the societies and the characters depicted, we will be examining the technical strategies employed.
Proposed Texts: Doris Lessing, The Good Terrorist (1985); Margaret Drabble, The Gates of Ivory (1991); Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin (1994); Pat Barker, Double Vision (2003); David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004); Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005); Martin Amis, Lionel Asbo (2012); Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth (2012)
6683 - The Worlding of Canadian Fiction since 1967
3 credit hours
Professor John C. Ball
2nd term: Th 9:00-12:00
What kind of a world do Canadian novelists imagine? Since Canada's centennial year in 1967, Canadian literature, especially fiction, has increasingly inhabited an international field. Canadian-born authors such as Mordecai Richler and Catherine Bush explore Canadian culture and identity through the lives of expatriates; Rohinton Mistry and M.G. Vassanji win Canadian book awards for novels that have no Canadian characters or settings; and books by Joy Kogawa and Dionne Brand explore multicultural Canada through the lives of immigrant and diasporic peoples. In this course, we will perform close, theoretically inflected readings of a variety of post-1967 novels in the context of discussions of place and displacement, multiculturalism and diaspora, postcolonialism and postnationalism / transnationalism, national identity and the CanLit canon, gender and sexuality, home and mobility, and Canada's position in a globalizing world. One or two critical and/or theoretical articles will be studied each week in addition to the primary text.
Primary Texts (11 texts will be chosen from the following list and may include one or two novels published between now and then): Douglas Glover, Elle (2003); Lawrence Hill, The Book of Negroes (2007); Thomas Wharton, Salamander (2001); Timothy Findley, The Wars (1977); Joy Kogawa, Obasan (1983); M.G. Vassanji, The Book of Secrets (1994); Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night (1996); Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance (1995); Mordecai Richler, St. Urbain’s Horseman (1971); Catherine Bush, The Rules of Engagement (2000); Dionne Brand, What We All Long For (2005); Yann Martel, Life of Pi (2001); Esi Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues (2011)
6786 - African American Literature and the Sociology of Race
3 credit hours
Professor Stephen Schryer
1st term: T 9:00-12:00
This course explores the cultural impact of the most important demographic shift in twentieth-century America: the Great Migration. Between 1910 and 1970, roughly 6 million African Americans migrated from the Southern United States to urban centres throughout the Northeast, Midwest, and California. This migration provided impetus for two interrelated discourses that tried to explain its cultural impact. First, beginning with the Harlem Renaissance, African-American fiction gained a national audience for the first time since the abolitionist era. Second, beginning with the groundbreaking work of W.E.B. DuBois, U.S. social scientists developed the sociology of race, a sub-discipline focused on the problems faced by black migrants to U.S. cities. Together, African-American literature and the sociology of race established many of the metaphors that would dominate discussions of U.S. race relations until the end of the century: metaphors such as double-consciousness, invisibility, the culture of poverty, and the underclass.
Our class discussions will explore the complicated relationship between these two discourses. Some black writers, most notably Richard Wright, drew extensively on the sociology of race, imagining it to be a crucial resource for understanding the large-scale impact of the Great Migration. Others, such as Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison, oriented their fiction against this discipline, arguing that U.S. sociology is a racist discourse that perpetuates pathological representations of the black community. In this course, we will trace this rift throughout some of the most important African-American literary works of the twentieth century. We will explore whether studying literary and sociological works concerned with the Great Migration can offer us a better understanding of how this demographic shift transformed American culture. We will also explore whether, as some recent critics contend, America has become “post-racial,” or whether the racial metaphors that dominated the literature and sociology of the twentieth century still shape American culture today.
Primary Texts: Nella Larsen, Quicksand; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; George Schuyler, Black No More; Richard Wright, Native Son; Ann Petry, The Street; Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; Chester Himes, Blind Man with a Pistol; Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo; Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon; Gloria Naylor, Linden Hills; Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist
Secondary Texts: W.E.B. Du Bois, Excerpts from The Souls of Black Folk; Ernest Burgess, “The City”; Robert Park, “Marginal Man;” Gunnar Myrdal, Excerpts from An American Dilemma; E. Franklin Frazier, Excerpts from Black Bourgeoisie; Daniel P. Moynihan, “The Negro Family”'; Edward Banfield, Excerpts from The Unheavenly City; William Julius Wilson, Excerpts from The Declining Significance of Race; Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”; bell hooks, “The Chitlin Circuit: On Black Community”
6783 - 20th-Century American Women Poets
3 credit hours
Professor Demetres Tryphonopoulos
1st term: Th 9:00-12:00
The story of Ezra Pound’s profound influence upon H.D. is well-known: in 1912, in the British Museum Tea Room, Pound had "baptized" Hilda Doolittle "H.D., Imagiste" and presented her to the literary world as the foremost practitioner of Imagism, a "movement" he conceived as one that reproduced what he considered the essential Greek poetic idiom. Escaping Pound's early influence, H.D. went on to use the Hellenic legacy with a view to redefining the past by reinterpreting, modifying and updating the old texts of Homer, Stesichorus, Sappho, and the Greek lyric poets. Several of H.D.'s later long poems (for instance, Trilogy, Helen in Egypt, Hermetic Definition, and Vale Ave) are revisionist in the sense that they reinvent the past in feminine terms, employing as they do the old myths and texts in order to subvert patriarchal stereotypes. Beginning as an Imagist, a writer of epigrammatic, direct, objective poems, H.D. was able to reclaim the empowering presence of the female and remake herself into a poet of epic quests, grounded in feminist revisions of the patriarchal foundations of the Western tradition—and she did this from within, retaining many modernist conventions and techniques. Commentary on H.D.'s feminist response to masculinist modernism such as Pound's has been profuse. Much H.D. criticism since the early 1980s has concerned itself with the recovery of H.D. as a poet who had managed to cope with masculine modernism’s potentially numbing domination, producing first-rate modernist poetry that could match--in power, authority and influence--that of her male counterparts.
Beginning with H.D.’s poetry and prose, this course will negotiate the border between patriarchal culture and postpatriarchal culture. It will do so by discussing ways in which gender, poetry and poetics intersect in the work of several twentieth-century female poets and by scrutinizing cultural and social life within the language or poetry. In doing so, the course will explore discourses and modes central to poetry as both theory (aesthetics) and practice (praxis). In other words, it will attempt to consider the gender/social meanings of the poetic act as well as the forms of the poetic texts. With H.D. and other female poets, it will deal most particularly with what Barrett Watten, in The Constructionist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics, sees as moments when rupture, refusal, or resistance give rise to a “horizon of possibility.” This “horizon of possibilities,” as it is manifested in the work of six 20th-century American female writers, will be this course’s principal concern. Besides H.D., the work of Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, Sylvia Plath, Denise Levertov, Susan Howe.
Proposed texts:Poetry Collections (Selected or Collected) by ten individual poets selected from the list provided above and ten books of criticism, including Rachel Blau Duplessis’s Blue Studios: Poetry and its Cultural Works (The University of Alabama Press, 2006) and Marjorie Perloff’s 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (Blackwell, 2002).
6999 - Teaching Apprenticeship
[Compulsory Pass/Fail course for all second-year PhD students]
6 credit hours
Various
All PhD students are normally required, as one of their six courses, to complete a teaching apprenticeship under the supervision and mentorship of a full-time faculty member. During the second year of the PhD program, the apprentice is assigned to a section of ENGL 1000, a full-year, 6 ch undergraduate course taught by the faculty mentor in the fall term, during which the student will attend all classes and meet regularly with the mentor. In the meetings, the student will receive training and guidance on: course planning and curriculum design; preparing and delivering classes on literature and writing skills; preparing and grading essays, tests, and examinations; course administration; and the preparation of a teaching dossier (including a general philosophy of teaching). In the winter term the student will be employed to teach the second half of the ENGL 1000 section, including responsibility for grading. The faculty mentor will observe winter-term classes periodically in order to offer feedback, and will be available throughout the term for advice. Course credit is awarded upon successful completion of the specific course requirements as determined by the supervisor in conjunction with the student at the beginning of the fall term. Prerequisite: must have completed first year of PhD program in English.
6105 - Directed Reading Course
3 credit hours
Various
Because it is impossible for the English Department to offer its complete range of graduate courses every year, a student may propose a Directed Reading Course in an area essential to that student’s degree requirements. Such course proposals must follow these guidelines:
The student will be responsible for finding a supervisor, who will take on the reading course assignment as an overload.
Only one student will be allowed to take the same reading course at a time.
Only one course of the six courses required can be a Directed Reading Course. Such a course will consist of at least six meetings and twelve contact hours with the course supervisor.
The student will be obliged to submit a proposal for a Directed Reading Course (with bibliography) to the Graduate Committee for approval at least one month prior to the term in which the course is to be taken.
The possibility of a Directed Reading Course will be entertained only if the course is in a subject area in which no course has been or will be offered within a two-year period.
If the Directed Reading Course is interdisciplinary in nature, the supervisor will be a member of the GAU in English.
The student will write at least two substantial papers or one paper and a final examination.
6106 - Creative Writing – Studio Course
3 credit hours
Various
Studio courses in creative writing are structured like Directed Reading courses, and similarly offer the opportunity for independent work within the program. A student enrolled in the English and Creative Writing MA program may opt to perform a creative writing project in a specific genre under the supervision of a writing instructor. The project must be sufficiently substantial to warrant a 3 ch weighting, be written and revised during the period the student is enrolled in the MA program, and be entirely different from the creative writing thesis. The student and supervisor will meet regularly in editorial sessions to discuss the work in detail. Extra readings and/or exercises may be prescribed by the supervisor as background to or preparation for the writing.
Only one Studio course may be taken by an MA creative writing student.
The project must be approved by the Graduate Committee in the same way as a Directed Reading course.
It is the student’s responsibility to approach potential supervisors, who take on such courses as an overload.
Regular meetings must be arranged.
A supervisor may be selected from the literary community outside the department as long as she or he is approved by the English Department. Possible supervisors include the department’s Honorary Research Associates and Professors Emeriti.
2014-2015 Course Offerings
6100 - Research Methods and Bibliography: Approaches to Graduate Studies
[Compulsory Pass/Fail course for all new graduate students]
6 credit hours
Professor Edith Snook
An introduction to graduate study at UNB. The first term will consist of seminars on post-secondary teaching, research sources on campus (including those of the library, Internet, and the campus network), workshops on writing SSHRC applications, and strategies of dissertation research and publication (academic and creative). The second term will consist of supervised research leading to a thesis proposal. This course is taken in addition to the required 18 ch for MA students and 15 ch for PhD students.
6123 - Creative Writing: Poetry
3 credit hours
Professor Ross Leckie
A workshop designed to develop and improve skills with the elements of poetry, such as metaphor, rhythm, line break, syntax, the registers of diction, and sound pattern. The course will explore poetic form, ranging from free verse and narrative to structured verse such as the sonnet and glose. Attention will also be given to professional concerns, including the development of a distinctive voice and style, publication in journals, and the preparation of book manuscripts.
6143 - Creative Writing: Prose
3 credit hours
Professor Mark Jarman
A course designed to develop skills in short fiction, with room for students interested in writing novellas or novels. Taught in a workshop format, with close attention to line-by-line editing and revision and some preparation for publication in markets such as literary quarterlies, higher circulation magazines, small presses and larger publishing houses.
6228 - Milton on Gender and Imperialism
3 credit hours
Professor Edith Snook
The seventeenth century saw both unprecedented travel by Englishmen, to India, Africa, and the New World, and significant social conflicts on questions of gender. These two major cultural concerns are woven throughout Milton's Comus, Paradise Lost, and Samson Agonistes, and this course will ask questions about both. We will develop our understanding of seventeenth-century imperialism, not only by reading contemporary analyses of imperialism and its history, but also through examining seventeenth-century accounts of English encounters with other cultures, such as those compiled by Samuel Purchas. We will also pay particular attention to women writers who share Milton's concern with gender roles, such as Elizabeth Cary and Aemelia Lanyer, and his interest in empire, such as Aphra Behn and Margaret Cavendish. Ultimately the course will be directed towards developing our understanding of Milton's language—how it alludes not only to a rich literary tradition but also to a complex and fascinating historical moment.
Primary Texts: Aphra Behn, Oroonoko; Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam; Margaret Cavendish, "Assaulted and Pursued Chastity;" Aemelia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum; John Milton, Areopagitica, Comus: The Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, Observations Upon the Articles of Peace [selections], Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes
6268 - Shakespeare: The Pauline Plays
3 credit hours
Professor Randall Martin
This course will explore Shakespeare's representation of, and critical engagement with, various New Testament writings by Paul that touch on Western cultural problems of rhetoric, gender relations, legal equity, pacifism, universalism, citizenship, and the messianic. These philosophical and social issues have become new objects of intense and searching interest by contemporary cultural theorists and radical Jewish and Christian scholars such as Slavoj Zizek, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Paul Badiou, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Daniel Boyarin, and Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza. In addition to considering how their ideas relate to Pauline inflections in Shakespeare's plays, we shall explore how they are incipiently developed by the new historicizing turn of Renaissance scriptural scholarship that reshaped the critical outlook of educated early modern readers and writers.
Each week we shall discuss one play, which will be framed thematically by a selection of critical readings from books and journals.
Necessary texts include Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale, Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Henry IV Part One, Henry IV Part Two, Henry V, Henry V1 Part Three, MacBeath, Timon of Athens
6444 - Nineteenth-Century Autobiographical Writing
3 credit hours
Professor Mary Rimmer
This course will focus on Victorian autobiography, including works that present themselves as fiction and those that claim to be true autobiographies (though that distinction is often blurry). Because autobiography intersects with nineteenth-century discourses of individualism, religion, childhood and education, and with a number of Romantic and post-Romantic strands in Victorian literature and culture, it is a useful lens for examining the "Victorian."
Proposed texts: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre and Villette; Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh; Charles Dickens, David Copperfield and Great Expectations; John Stuart Mill, Autobiography; John Ruskin, Praeterita; Margaret Oliphant, The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant; Edmund Gosse, Father and Son.
6544 - Temporal and Technical Dislocations in Contemporary British Fiction
3 credit hours
Professor Diana Austin
Fiction in the 20th and 21st century has often demonstrated complicated (and frequently contradictory) attitudes towards time. For example, various commentators have argued that modernism was hostile to history, and obviously something similar might be said about post-modernism's frequent playing with historical contexts. Literary and cultural movements of the last few decades have encouraged a skeptical historical consciousness by raising questions about language, reality, history, and ideology, with an emphasis on gaps, slippage, and bias. Critics often disagree about novels stationed at the intersections of history and narrative: is setting a novel completely in the past or using a dialectical tacking between present and past/future a thoughtful, courageous act, one that interrogates the past and/or re-examines both past and present, or do such novels automatically re-inscribe the problems they presume to explore?
Historical perspectives are, of course, not the only quality associated with the use of time in fiction. Issues of narrative time, of individual and collective time, of the relationship between time and identity, and of memory and reality indicate only a few of the directions that fiction's interest in time can take. By looking at a number of recent British novels in which a fascination with time suggests numerous technical, theoretical, historical, and cultural questions worth exploring, this course will examine some of the ways in which temporality can function as both motivating concern and structuring technique in selected British novels from the late 20th century and our current period.
Proposed Texts: John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969); Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (1984); Doris Lessing, The Good Terrorist (1985); Pat Barker, The Ghost Road (1995); Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001); David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004); Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (2011); Martin Amis, Lionel Asbo (2012)
6658 - Life-writing by Women in Canada
3 credit hours
Professor Wendy Robbins
This graduate seminar explores Canadian women's life-writing (diaries, memoirs, blogs), set in the context of contemporary critical theory about auto/biography, identity, and representation. Our discussions will highlight such issues as the fluidity of literary boundaries, gender/genre, literature and nation, plotting women's lives, and "rescuing the self" (Helen Buss). We will consider to what extent the current trend of autobiographical writing may signal a "retreat" into "an intense individualism" (Cynthia Franklin), an expression of dissatisfaction with contemporary theory, or a way of reconnecting reason and emotion.
Primary texts may include "The Small Details of Life": Twenty Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830-1996, edited by Kathryn Carter; Afua Cooper, The Hanging of Angélique; Maria Campbell, Half-Breed; Jill Ker Conway, True North: A Memoir; Marina Nemat, Prisoner of Tehran; and Margaret Trudeau, Changing My Mind. While this course focuses mainly on texts published in the last twenty years, the tradition of women's life-writing in Canada dates back to the seventeenth century.
6744 - The Aesthetics and Politics of Poverty in American Literature
3 credit hours
Professor Stephen Schryer
A striking feature of the United States is the weakness of its welfare state. One reason for this weakness is many Americans' persistent belief that most welfare recipients fall into the category of the "undeserving poor": lower-class citizens who, for an assortment of cultural and psychological reasons, are responsible for their own poverty. In this course, we will explore a broad range of literary, social scientific, and journalistic texts that address the causes and effects of poverty and that grapple with the problem of representing it. Our readings will focus on historical moments when poverty became a central topic of public debate and government policy: the Progressive Era, the Great Depression, the Great Society, and Clinton-era Welfare Reform. In each case, apart from discussing thematic connections between literature and welfare policy, we will focus on the changing literary aesthetics of poverty: from the documentary naturalism of the 1930s to the process aesthetics of the 1960s and beyond. Throughout the course, we will ask questions such as the following: How did American writers contribute to or question conventional depictions of the poor as grotesque or abject and therefore undeserving of welfare? How did writers respond to the post-1970s emergence of workfare and prisonfare as key strategies for disciplining the poor? Were literary representations of poverty (especially ethnic and racial poverty) central to the development of literary modernism and postmodernism? How did poverty writers mediate between their impoverished subject matter and (mostly) middle class audience? How did this mediation shape their aesthetics?
Primary texts include Stephen Crane, Maggie, a Girl of the Streets; Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives; Gertrude Stein, Three Lives; Tillie Olson, Yonnondio: From the Thirties; James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; Ann Petry, The Street; Norman Mailer, The White Negro; Hugh Selby, Jr., Last Exit to Brooklyn; Chester Himes, Blind Man with a Pistol; Oscar Zeta Acosta, The Revolt of the Cockroach People; Sapphire, Push; Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina; William T. Vollmann, Poor People
Secondary texts include Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, The City; Michael Harrington, The Other America; Oscar Lewis, La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty; Hannah Arendt, On Revolution; Daniel P. Moynihan, The Negro Family; William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged; Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity; Gavin Jones, American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840-1945; Thomas Heise, Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture; Alice O'Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History; Susan Edmunds, Grotesque Relations: Modernist Domestic Fiction and the U.S. Welfare State; Carlo Rotella, October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature
6726 - "A poem including history": Reading Ezra Pound's The Cantos
3 credit hours
Professor Demetres Tryphonopoulos
While the United States were at war with Italy and the Holocaust was being perpetrated, the American poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972) made broadcasts over Rome Radio denouncing President Roosevelt, encouraging American soldiers not to fight, and raving about Jewish conspiracies and the role of banks in having started the war. In the suppressed until 1982 Italian canto 73, Pound pays homage to a young Italian girl's sacrifice of her life in leading a company of Canadian soldiers into a mine field to their deaths--as Charles Olson later said, "Here we [Americans] were listening not only to a fascist, but the ENEMY!" Indeed, there is overwhelming, and tragic, evidence for what Tim Redman has called "the frightening aspects of [Pound's] allegiances." Trying to find excuses for Pound's scandalous behaviour is indefensible; however, does it follow from this, as some critics and readers have insisted, that his work, including especially The Cantos, his magnum opus, is infected with his repugnant views to such an extent that it should be expunged from the canon altogether?
The Cantos, which Massimo Bacigalupo calls Pound's "sacred poem of the Nazi-Fascist millennium," may be viewed as an authoritarian summing up of the most abject Twentieth-Century ideologies and prejudices; yet this is also a text committed to a radical ideological openness and also the poem most responsible for the unprecedented blossoming in American literature of formally innovative, open, and open-ended poetry. This is a poetry that questions received notions of poetic form through its radically modernist, abrupt, paratactic techniques of disconnectedness and discontinuity, visual experimentation, textual heterogeneity, and undigested quality. Pound is largely responsible for making possible the innovations of successive generations of American poets, from the Projectivist group, to the Objectivists, to the language poetry of Charles Bernstein and so on. And so, this study will make the case that this poet who in 1945 was indicted for giving aid and comfort to the Kingdom of Italy and its then allies in the war against the United States is arguably also the poet who, before, during, and after his twelve and a half years forceful confinement at the St Elizabeths [sic] Hospital for the criminally insane, influenced the development of twentieth-century poetry more than any other individual.
This course offers a reading of Pound's The Cantos in view of some of Pound's troubling political, economic, and cultural views. Thus, the course deals with Pound's aesthetics, politics, and economics as these may be gleaned from a reading of The Cantos and several of his prose works.
Proposed texts include Ezra Pound, The Cantos (New Directions) and a series of ten volumes of criticism dealing with Pound's The Cantos, beginning with Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era and including my own The Celestial Tradition.
6748 - Americans Write Canada: Reconfiguring Canada in The American Literary Imagination
3 credit hours
Professor Jennifer Andrews
Since Confederation, American writers have used Canada as an imaginative space and alternative landscape from which to probe how concepts of identity, citizenship, and belonging identity, citizenship, and belonging have fundamentally shaped what it means to be 'American'—and who is part of or remains excluded from the foundational narratives of nation that have favoured a vision of America as unique or exceptional. American exceptionalism has been a critical yet shifting part of national self-definition from its birth to the present day. Having rejected monarchical and imperial rule, the U.S., born from 'the City on the Hill,' possesses its own uniquely divine (and in the case of Canada, Manifest) destiny; it has become according to Walt Whitman "the Nation of Nations," and today dominates the world, economically and militarily. While Americans historically envisaged assimilating Canada, Canadians have wrestled with living in the shadow of a global super-power with whom they continue to be intricately linked, economically, politically, and culturally.
This course examines fiction from 1900 to the present, written by Americans about Canada, in an attempt to understand why Canada is seen as such a fertile ground for American self-examination. In addition, we will consider the changing representations of Canada, through American eyes, over the past century and into the new millennium. More specifically, if, as American literary scholar, Lauren Berlant argues, "Nations provoke Fantasy" (1), what do those dominant American fantasies of exceptionalism look like? How are they reworked and transformed over time? And most importantly how do American authors employ the idea of Canada, with its close physical proximity but radically different history of creation as a country, to probe the concept of exceptionalism and how it is understood on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel?
Students are encouraged to read one or more of the primary texts before the beginning of the course. The novels to be studied in this class may include Jack London (1903), The Call of the Wild; Christina Sunley (2008), The Tricking of Freya; Willa Cather (1931), Shadows on a Rock; Wallace Stegner (1962), Wolf Willow; Ishmael Reed (1976), Flight to Canada; E. Annie Proulx (1993), The Shipping News; Philip Roth (2004), The Plot Against America; Jim Lynch (2009), Border Songs; Howard Norman (2010), What is Left the Daughter; Ben Farmer (2010), Evangeline; Richard Ford (2012), Canada; Octavia Butler (1993), Parable of the Sower. We will also read sections from A Yankee in Canada by Henry David Thoreau, and Evangeline by Henry Longfellow in its entirety to contextualize the focus of our investigation and provide a framework for nineteenth-century representations of Canada by Americans.
The methods of evaluation for this course are designed to encourage the close reading of texts, active participation, and to provide graduate students with several opportunities to develop professional skills that are useful both within and beyond the academic world. Those enrolled will have the chance to deliver a formal conference-style paper to the class (worth 30% of the final grade) and to produce an article-length, potentially publishable essay (worth 40% of the final grade). Two response papers constitute 15% of the final grade and the other 15% is given for active class participation.
6848 - Space, Place and Identity in Post Colonial Fiction
3 credit hours
Professor John C. Ball
In this study of ten novels from across the postcolonial Commonwealth, we will examine major writers from South Africa, Zimbabwe, India, Trinidad, Australia, and Britain. We will pay special attention to the ways in which their texts engage thematically with the construction and representation, the negotiation and imagination of space, place, and related concepts such as land, nation, boundary, territory, migration, exile, home, dwelling, and especially identity. Our reading will reflect not only the geographic but also the temporal variety of postcolonial writing, with a mixture of historical novels and those set in contemporary times. In order to discover some of the many ways in which notions of space and place "ground" the political and literary dimensions of narrative, we will supplement our reading of fiction with short readings in postcolonial theory and cultural geography.
Proposed texts include (likely to change somewhat) Nadine Gordimer, July's People (1981); Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (1988); Kate Grenville, The Secret River (2006); David Malouf, Remembering Babylon (1993); Tim Winton, Breath (2008); V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961); Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (1988); Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (2006); Bernardine Evaristo, Blonde Roots (2008), J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)
6999 - Teaching Apprenticeship
[Compulsory Pass/Fail course for all second-year PhD students]
6 credit hours
Various
All PhD students are normally required, as one of their six courses, to complete a teaching apprenticeship under the supervision and mentorship of a full-time faculty member. During the second year of the PhD program, the apprentice is assigned to a section of ENGL 1000, a full-year, 6 ch undergraduate course taught by the faculty mentor in the fall term, during which the student will attend all classes and meet regularly with the mentor. In the meetings, the student will receive training and guidance on: course planning and curriculum design; preparing and delivering classes on literature and writing skills; preparing and grading essays, tests, and examinations; course administration; and the preparation of a teaching dossier (including a general philosophy of teaching). In the winter term the student will be employed to teach the second half of the ENGL 1000 section, including responsibility for grading. The faculty mentor will observe winter-term classes periodically in order to offer feedback, and will be available throughout the term for advice. Course credit is awarded upon successful completion of the specific course requirements as determined by the supervisor in conjunction with the student at the beginning of the fall term. Prerequisite: must have completed first year of PhD program in English.
6105 - Directed Reading Course
3 credit hours
Various
Because it is impossible for the English Department to offer its complete range of graduate courses every year, a student may propose a Directed Reading Course in an area essential to that student's degree requirements. Such course proposals must follow these guidelines:
The student will be responsible for finding a supervisor, who will take on the reading course assignment as an overload.
Only one student will be allowed to take the same reading course at a time.
Only one course of the six courses required can be a Directed Reading Course. Such a course will consist of at least six meetings and twelve contact hours with the course supervisor.
The student will be obliged to submit a proposal for a Directed Reading Course (with bibliography) to the Graduate Committee for approval at least one month prior to the term in which the course is to be taken.
The possibility of a Directed Reading Course will be entertained only if the course is in a subject area in which no course has been or will be offered within a two-year period.
If the Directed Reading Course is interdisciplinary in nature, the supervisor will be a member of the GAU in English.
The student will be required to make a public presentation at the conclusion of a Directed Reading Course to which students and faculty will be invited. The student will write at least two substantial papers or one paper and a final examination.
6106 - Creative Writing: Studio Course
3 credit hours
Various
Studio courses in creative writing are structured like Directed Reading courses, and similarly offer the opportunity for independent work within the program. A student enrolled in the English and Creative Writing MA program may opt to perform a creative writing project in a specific genre under the supervision of a writing instructor. The project must be sufficiently substantial to warrant a 3 ch weighting, be written and revised during the period the student is enrolled in the MA program, and be entirely different from the creative writing thesis. The student and supervisor will meet regularly in editorial sessions to discuss the work in detail. Extra readings and/or exercises may be prescribed by the supervisor as background to or preparation for the writing.
Only one Studio course may be taken by an MA creative writing student.
The project must be approved by the Graduate Committee in the same way as a Directed Reading course.
It is the student's responsibility to approach potential supervisors, who take on such courses as an overload.
Regular meetings must be arranged.
A supervisor may be selected from the literary community outside the department as long as she or he is approved by the English Department. Possible supervisors include the department's Honorary Research Associates and Professors Emeriti.
