This course introduces students to critical theories that each take gender and sexuality as a starting point, focus, or outcome. It explores the role of language and discourse in literary theory and asks to what extent gender and sexuality are themselves literary concepts that rely on interpretation, representation, metaphor, and imagery. Core topics include feminisms; queer theory; transgender studies; critical race theory; Indigenous studies; disability studies; and postcolonial studies. Other topics may address affect theory; ecocriticism; masculinity studies; and performance studies, including those that feature drag. Students will deliver seminar presentations, develop a project, and write an article-length paper. Active participation is an important component of this course.

This course will dive deeply into the work of three early figures of queer theory (Foucault, Sedgwick, and Butler) and into four key features of contemporary queer theory (queer of colour theory, transgender theory, crip theory, and queer theories of space). Queer theorists are often referred to in English classes; after all, what English student hasn’t heard a quick summary of panopticism, homosociality, or performativity? Yet, it is rare that students have the chance to study these authors in a sustained way. While we will trace out the influence of Sedgwick, Butler, and Foucault on several contemporary subfields, we will also ask about the slanted process of canon formation. Are there ways in which these apparent “offshoots” were present in queer theory from its (ambiguous, complex) beginnings? How, we will ask, can today’s readers of queer theory attend to the field’s dual commitments to politics and to bodies? Students will be evaluated on seminar presentations, discussions, critical writing, and (optionally) creative or hybrid-genre responses.

Under exceptional circumstances, a student may be granted permission to take a directed reading course. The student must prepare a proposal for a directed reading course, in consultation with the proposed instructor, and submit it for approval to the Graduate Committee at least one month prior to the term in which the course is to be taken. The graduate committee may decline to approve proposals or ask for revisions. Such course proposals must follow these guidelines:

The student must find a faculty member willing to supervise the directed reading course. Faculty members will take on the directed reading course as an overload teaching assignment.

The proposal should provide the reading list and an outline of assignments, with the relative grade weighting for each. The student will write at least two substantial papers or one paper and a final examination.

The reading course must be sufficiently substantial to warrant a 3 ch weighting and be entirely different from the thesis or dissertation.

Only one student will be allowed to take the same reading course at a time.

Only one course of those required for the degree can be a directed reading course.

Such a course will consist of at least six meetings and twelve contact hours with the course supervisor.

If the directed reading course is interdisciplinary in nature, the supervisor will be a member of the GAU in English.

While students who have been accepted to the MA program are encouraged to inquire with the Director of Graduate Studies about the possibility of undertaking a directed reading course, directed reading courses will not normally be approved for students who have not yet undertaken their first term of study.

Studio courses are for the purpose of pursuing a well-defined writing project that lies beyond the writing undertaken in the creative writing workshops. The student must prepare a proposal for a studio course, in consultation with the proposed instructor, and submit it for approval to the Graduate Committee at least one month prior to the term in which the course is to be taken. The Graduate Committee may decline to approve proposals or ask for revisions. Such course proposals must follow these guidelines:

The student must find a faculty member or instructor willing to supervise the writing project. Faculty members will take on the studio course as an overload teaching assignment.

The proposal should provide the reading list and an outline of assignments, with the relative grade weighting for each assignment. The student will write one major project, in addition to other relevant smaller assignments to be determined by the student and supervisor.

The course must be sufficiently substantial to warrant a 3 ch weighting and be entirely different from the creative writing thesis.

Only one or two students will be allowed to take the same studio course at a time.

Only one course of those required for the degree can be a studio course.

Regular meetings must be arranged. The course should include at least 8 contact hours with the course supervisor.

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.

While students who have been accepted to the MA program are encouraged to inquire with the Director of Creative Writing about the possibility of undertaking a studio course, studio courses will not normally be approved for students who have not yet undertaken their first term of study.

This course is restricted to students in the PhD program in English (Creative Writing) who have already taken ENGL 6123 at the MA level. A workshop designed to develop and improve skills with the elements of poetry, such as metaphor, rhythm, line break, syntax, registers of diction, and sound pattern.  The course will explore poetic forms, ranging from free verse to structured forms, such as the sonnet, sestina and glosa.  Attention will be given to professional concerns, including publication in journals and the preparation of book manuscripts.

This course is restricted to students in the PhD program in English (Creative Writing) who have already taken ENGL 6163 at the MA level. 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.

Between 1600 and 1800, the Atlantic world--bound in the east by the Americas and in the west by Africa and Europe--is marked by biological exchange, settler colonialism, the slave trade, an ever-expanding trade in goods, and an intellectual and creative reimaging of the known world. This course will look at the literary exchanges produced by people contemplating their place within this Atlantic geography. It will be focused on England and the northeast Atlantic and give particular attention to the place of Atlantic Canada and its peoples in this cultural foment. The course will include work by Europeans, by men and women brought to North America as slaves, by Native Americans, especially Mi’kmaq people, and by Settlers. Through Travel and captivity narratives, life writing, recipes and advertisements, plays, fiction, poetry, and legal writing, the course will explore a unique textual archive, consider issues around recovering and reading the voices of colonized and marginalized peoples, and ponder the place of eastern Canada, in particular, in the early modern Atlantic world.

This course examines the work of William Blake, a radical Romantic poet-engraver, painter, and printmaker.  Blake’s mixed-media work uniquely combines both image and text, and rages against tyrannical apparatuses and static notions of form, genre, identity, gender, sexuality, history, and power-knowledge. In addition to close readings and grappling with Blake’s visionary mythology, we will deploy theoretical approaches (including feminist, psychoanalyst, queer, and deconstructive theories) all while keeping in mind Blake’s participation in major and minor histories. Students will encounter Blake’s unique process of composition and relief etching or “illuminated printing,” and try their own hand at making copper engravings and printmaking. Assignments include a presentation, weekly reading responses, a hands-on engraving project, and a final research essay.   

This course explores the important and timely claim made by Tuscarora writer Alicia Elliott that “CanLit is a Raging Dumpster Fire” (Refuse 93). Given the explosive set of debates around racism, sexism, class and regional privilege that have emerged in the past decade in studies of Canadian literature written in English, this course aims to unpack some of the key issues that have shaped CanLit’s past and led to its divisive present, while thinking about what its future holds. What significance does CanLit have as “an industry, a cultural field and an academic discipline[?]” (McGregor, Rak, and Wunker 2017). In response to this urgent query, the course examines who and what has shaped the canon of Canadian literature written in English at a post-secondary level, both at home and abroad. Students will be evaluated based on response papers, a conference presentation, a longer publishable essay, and in-class participation.

How can Indigenous epistemologies help in a world on the edge of economic, environmental, and spiritual catastrophe? This course examines how Indigenous authors use science fiction to reimagine the present and future of Indigenous communities. We explore what alternate realities authors envision and how they repurpose sci-fi conventions to reflect Indigenous knowledge and histories and to address issues such as colonization, history, land claims, and environmental destruction. The course examines a range of topics including time travel and reclaiming history, as well as dystopian visions of the city, the land, and the body.

Prerequisite: Must be a graduate student in English

This course examines representations of the body in Indigenous literature with a focus on decolonization. Over the course of North American colonial history, settlers have employed various strategies to control and regulate Indigenous bodies - the reserve system, disease, human zoos, wild west shows, residential schools, incarceration, Indian Status, blood quantum, and forced sterilization. Beginning with early colonial texts such as the Jesuit Relations as well as foundational legislative texts like the Indian Act and the White Paper, we explore how Indigenous bodies have been and continue to be viewed and regulated by settlers. From Abraham Ulrikab's 1880 writings about his experiences being exhibited in a human zoo in Europe to Joshua Whitehead's cyborg trickster poetics in Fullmetal Indigiqueer, we explore the various ways Indigenous texts reclaim and decolonize the body.

We will use disability and "crip" theories to explore the ways in which disability emerges in current fiction, poetry, comics and creative non-fiction. We will focus primarily on literary texts by writers with disabilities and will explore how these texts 1) reveal some of the problematic ways in which disability has been approached and 2) offer more accurate and just perspectives on disability.

Elizabeth Bishop suffered from occasional attacks of vertigo, but in her poetry vertiginous experiences and all forms of loss of visual perspective disembody the conversational speaking voice that suggests personal intimacy between “Elizabeth” and the reader. Vertigo represents a collapse of identity and an emptying out, even as it simultaneously wheels through a superfluity of identities. In her famous poem “In the Waiting Room,” when Bishop as a girl realizes that “I am an Elizabeth,” she finds herself in free fall, grasping at all the ways in which identity is constructed. The poem invites and has received feminist, queer, postcolonial, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, and all kinds of political readings. Identity is over determined. 

The focus of this course will be on Bishop’s lesbian identities and the ways she remained both in and out of the closet, but it will examine sexual identity as expressed in the sublime. It is in Bishop’s exploration of the sublime and she finds the loss of perspective that causes panic or anxiety that exposes endless uncertainties of identity. Some time will be spent on ideologies of private and public, and how these express themselves in the personal poet and the American “official” poet.

Primary Works:

Bishop, Elizabeth.  Elizabeth Bishop: Poems and Prose

Parts of:

Butler, Judith.  Gender Troubles

Freud, Sigmund.  On Sexuality

Foucault, Michel.  The History of Sexuality

Kristeva, Julia.  Revolution in Poetic Language

Stewart, Susan on Longing

Neoliberalism - an ideology that asserts the absolute primacy of the free market, enforced by a strong interventionist state - has shaped what we think of as politically possible since the 1980s. This course explores the emergence and consolidation of this paradigm, looking at literary texts published since the 1990s and works of political and economic theory published since the 1940s. We will trace neoliberalism's impact on contemporary fiction and ask whether certain works of fiction have, in turn, guided the evolution of neoliberalism. We will also ask whether contemporary fiction imagines alternatives to neoliberalism, or whether neoliberalism short-circuits this ability to imagine political alternatives.

Prerequisite: Must be a graduate student in English

This course explores a curious feature of post-World War II American literature: in a nation with a culturally powerful right wing, most of what counts as serious literature is written by authors who identify as liberal or left and is read by critics with similar political affiliations. As a result, the cultural and intellectual habits of many Americans are invisible in literary studies, and debates within the discipline devolve into factional disputes within a liberal-left consensus.

This course has two aims.  First, drawing on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and the work of sociologically minded critics like John Guillory, we will explore the institutional conditions that led to the literary field’s leftward turn in the 1960s.  We will discuss the “canon wars” that turn inspired in the 1980s and 1990s, as conservatives and liberals battled over the kinds of texts that should be taught to university students. As writers and critics in an English department, we will try to understand how our politics and attitudes are shaped by the institutions we inhabit. To what extent is literary leftism a manifestation of belonging to what Pierre Bourdieu calls “a dominated segment of a dominant class”?

Second, we will explore what happened to the conservative literary imagination after World War II.  We will read established writers like Saul Bellow who embraced (or were perceived to embrace) conservative political positions, as well as the work of popular writers like Ayn Rand who appeal to the American right. We will trace the contours of American conservative thought and culture, identify its internal contradictions, and explore its appeal.

Primary Texts:

Ayn Rand – Atlas Shrugged (excerpts)

Whittaker Chambers – Witness (excerpts)

Flannery O’Connor – A Good Man is Hard to Find

Robert Heinlein – Starship Troopers

Walker Percy – The Moviegoer

Saul Bellow – Mr. Sammler’s Planet

Tom Wolfe – Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins – Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days

Philip Roth – The Human Stain

Marilynne Robinson – Gilead

This course reflects the wide interest in auto/biography studies in the English-speaking world in the new millenium. Its goal is to explore a diversity of life-writing texts from colonial and postcolonial places and times, and to map some of the key theoretical and critical developments and debates within this emerging field. 

A variety of theories and critical approaches to life-writing will be explored, referencing postcolonialism, postmodernism, feminist theory, and auto/biography studies, amongst others. 

A selection of life-writing will be studied, from classic slave narratives to contemporary, accounts by human rights activists; from stories of childhood to narratives of illness and healing, and from "imposter" texts to works by or about celebrated writers. Theoretical and critical texts will also be sampled as we consider the postmodern fluidity of literary genres.