Fall 2024
ENGL 5005F: M.A. Seminar
Prof. Sarah Brouillette
Topic: Professing English: Disciplinary Debates and Horizons
What does it mean to study “English” today? What are the stakes involved in teaching it? And what, in fact, are we to study and teach, exactly? How might graduate students most effectively navigate their own research and teaching at a time when disciplinary boundaries seem more porous than ever, and when the assumptions about what constitutes sound scholarship or even effective pedagogy are by no means self-evident or mutually agreed upon by members of the profession? This course provides MA students with a primer on the tumultuous history of English Studies and a roadmap to the current state of the discipline in several key areas: disciplinary boundaries and interdisciplinarity; methodological debates; and pedagogy. In addition to considering theoretical questions raised by these issues, the course will assist students with a range of practical matters: developing graduate research strategies, grading essays, leading seminars, crafting grant proposals, and understanding employment and academic opportunities available to graduates, both inside and outside the university.
ENGL 5120F: Book Arts Workshop
Prof. Jody Mason
Topic: Small-Press Publishing in Canada
This course takes twentieth- and early twenty-first-century small-press publishing in Canada as its focus. A book arts workshop that will be conducted in the Book Arts Lab and taught with the assistance of Master Printer Larry Thompson, the course brings together the history and theory of small-press activity in Canada with experiential learning activities that will help us to think in material terms about small-press objects and their production processes.
Our experiential work will include encounters with small-press publishers; interaction with small-press texts from the university’s Archives and Special Collections; and book arts demonstrations / activities, culminating in a letterpress printing project.
The history/theory component of the course will unfold in relation to a series of small-press case studies. We’ll be theorizing small-press activity through questions such as the following:
- What is small-press publishing? How did it come to exist, and how might it be distinguished from other publishing practices?
- Does small-press publishing rely on a concept of independence, and, if so, what kind of independence does it claim (aesthetic, political, economic)? How and in what conditions are these claims made and sustained?
- What production practices, literary forms, and genres are distinct to small-press publishing and how do these relate to the practices, forms, and genres of large-scale publishing?
- Why did small-press publishing expand so dramatically in late twentieth-century Canada? What forms of state support have enabled small-press book publishing to flourish in Canada? Have these been constant? What challenges do these forms of support bring?
- What are the gender and race politics of Canada’s small-press cultures? Why has the modernist, masculinist (and very white) concept of the small press been so influential on small-press activity in Canada? How have publishers and writers of the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries contested and revised this concept?
- How might we theorize the function of the small press in the context of a contemporary global literary field dominated by a handful of media corporations?
ENGL 5402F: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature
Prof. Hugh Reid
Topic: The Nature and Uses of 18th Century Book Subscription Lists
This course aims to provide students with the context and nature of subscription lists and give students the opportunity for original research in this field. Initially students will be given a theoretical background to subscription lists and lessons on how the 18th century book trade worked: how was paper made, how was type set, how were books printed and bound, what was the role of bookseller, of publishing congers, etc. The hope is that they will then have an understanding of the trade sufficient to deal with book subscriptions. Then each shall pick a subscription list to work on. This kind of work could not have been done at Carleton in the past because the library’s holdings in antiquarian books was inadequate. Now, however, we can access almost all the books published in the 18th century by subscription (some 3,000). Students may choose any list. For example, if they are interested in female poets they might chose Mary Leapor whose work was published posthumously by subscription. In the seminar, they will report on what they have learned and what has evaded them. As each student reports we will discuss how each may progress. There are so many things which we can learn from subscription lists and very little has been done in this field in the past. Some of the topics which may be examined might include the number of female subscribers, the number of people from the mercantile class, the number of members of the aristocracy, or from academia, or the clergy, or other sub groups. How did this subscription list fit into the publishing industry in the eighteenth century?
By the end of the course, the hope is that each student will have done sufficient research (and learned how to do it) to produce a paper worthy of presentation at a conference or as an article in a journal.
ENGL 5610F: Studies in Contemporary Literature I (cross-listed with DIGH 5902F)
Prof. Brian Greenspan
Topic: Digital Dystopia
A survey of utopian and dystopian thinking around media and technology.
The enormous popularity of dystopian narratives in recent years is hardly surprising, given the daily barrage of stories about climate change, mass surveillance, pandemics, fake news, digital viruses, and AI. What is surprising is that even the most disturbing stories of technological apocalypse (both real and imagined) continue to inspire utopian hope, and to shape our identities in ways that are progressive and collective. Does literature still offer a promising enclave within the broader networks of new media? How can fiction help us to imagine a better world in a “post-truth” era that coopts the strategies of fictionality itself?
This seminar will explore the role of new media and technologies in contemporary fiction. We will read utopian and dystopian narratives alongside studies of technology, literary and social media, intentional communities, e-literature, and digital games. We will also explore new digital tools for analyzing texts, visualizing data, authoring stories and games, and building simulations in order to better evaluate the discourses (whether hopeful or apocalyptic) that have always surrounded new media.
ENGL 5804F: Studies in Canadian Literature I (cross-listed with CDNS 5201F and WGST 5902A)
Prof. Jennifer Henderson
Topic: Rereading ‘Women’s Liberation’
This course takes a materialist and intersectional approach to the ‘Women’s Liberation’ movement of the 1970s, as we look at recent scholarship on the rhetorics and affects of the movement as well as dig into its Canadian archive. Recent scholarship has been revising settled views of experience, organizing, and expression in this moment of eruption. Working with concepts of eventfulness, articulation, and ghostly trace, we question a progressivist view of history that would assume either our own relative advancement or the finishedness of this past. Grounding ourselves through discussion of the relationship between feminism and neoliberalism in the present, we then turn to archival materials and media representations from the 1970s. We ask how this historical feminism was heterogeneous in its rhetorics and positionalities, and was made public in selective, uneven ways.
Our primary materials include print ephemera—newsletters, magazines, and flyers, as well as film, autobiography, anthologies, art activism, and journalism. We read for style and emotion as well as for the arguments and analyses presented. A central preoccupation is the moment’s framing of social reproduction as a terrain of struggle and the pertinence of that struggle today. Throughout the course, we ask how feminist discourse and organizing occurs within and against regimes of race, heteronormativity, binary gender, state governance, and global capitalism. We approach Canada as a settler-colonial, racialized space, a space of Indigenous homelands and transnational flows in which ‘woman’ and ‘women’ are unstable and contested subjects. The course will be an inclusive, 2SLGBTQ-positive space.
ENGL 5900F: Selected Topic in English Studies I
Prof. Adam Barrows
Topic: Madness and Time in Twentieth-Century Fiction
This course explores the temporal experiences of madness. We examine, across a range of twentieth-century novels, characters whose deviation from accepted norms of behaviour, speech, and thought has placed them in a unique and even radical relationship with time. Literary works depicting “descents into madness” have long had pride of place in most literary canons, inspiring a great deal of literary commentary and theoretical formulation. The madness of these texts, however, has often either been poeticized in terms of a quasi-mythical Nietzschean radicalism (see Deleuze and Guattari), or else medicalized and rationalized by psychiatric models of “mental health.” Disability studies, however, and Mad studies most recently, have offered new ways of approaching this body of material, refusing both the diagnostic immiseration of the medical model as well as the romantic mystification of all-too-ableist cultural theory. Prioritizing survivor narratives, experiential auto-ethnographies, and the lived experiences of the mad, we find new ways of understanding and speaking about the times and temporalities of the existential experience of “being” or “going” mad.
ENGL 5900H: Selected Topic in English Studies I
Prof. Philip Kaisary
Topic: Ruth and Mark Phillips Professor Seminar: “Worlding Law and Literature”
When it emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, the interdisciplinary field of Law and Literature cast itself as a “movement.” This seminar takes up the stakes of that claim. First, we will pay close attention to the field’s formation, goals, situation, theoretical investments, and ideological thrust. Second, we will draw on recent debates within world literary studies and the critical tradition of cultural materialism to explore whether these offer Law and Literature a way to live up to not only the claim, but also the responsibility, of being a movement. We will consider a diverse corpus of primary materials (spanning literature, film, visual arts, case law, and constitutional law) drawn from both “peripheral” and “core” global locations (likely locations include Brazil, Canada, Congo-Brazzaville, Cuba, Great Britain, Haiti, and the United States). This seminar is open to graduate students in Cultural Mediations, Law, and English. No prior knowledge of law is required.
ENGL 6003F: Theories and Foundations
Prof. Julie Murray
Topic: What is a Book?
This course takes as its focus both the book as a material object and the field that has emerged around its study: the history of the book. The immediate context for our explorations will be the near certainty, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, that the printed book was rapidly becoming obsolete. Not only has that reality not come to pass, but in the words of two recent scholars, “[i]nstead of heralding [its] demise, the twenty-first century offers new reasons to reckon with the physical book.” We will begin with a case study: eighteenth-century novelist Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, a novel that is famously attentive to the materiality of the printed book. Our engagement with Sterne’s novel will include several sessions in the MacOdrum Library’s Book Arts Lab with Master Printer Larry Thompson. We will then survey developments in print culture and media from the late-eighteenth century to the present day, by reading a selection of foundational essays outlining these shifts. Topics will include: the bibliomania, bookishness, dark academia, books and publishing in the age of digital media, and more.
Winter 2025
ENGL 5002W: Studies in Theory I (cross-listed with CLMD 6904W)
Prof. Stuart Murray
Topic: The Perfomatives of Pleasure/Pain
While the concept of performativity may indeed be “well-worn,” as Jeffrey T. Nealon suggests in Fates of the Performative, few phenomena are as fateful and complex as pleasure and its performatives. Often relegated today to the realm of the taboo, pleasure carries a dark, atavistic undercurrent. It is suspect today for its raw corporeality, its indifference to consent, social contracts, and even conceptualization. Yet, pleasure is both performed and performative—two intertwined yet distinct processes. This course will explore the political and cultural implications of this difference, with a sustained focus on the fleshly, the carnal, and the embodied experiences of pleasure/pain.
While Judith Butler’s foundational work on gender performativity is widely known, their more recent thoughts on rhetorical invention and the “untranslatable” offer fresh avenues for understanding the performative. In Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024), Butler explores how performative language constructs new possibilities for a “liveable life,” arguing that terms like “gender” or non-binary pronouns are not merely descriptive but enact a form of desire that resists lexical capture. This course will consider the performative as a “translation” of that which exceeds language—a critical approach to understanding pleasure and pain as forces that defy containment, yet shape political, social, and cultural spaces.
To ground these theoretical inquiries, we will survey key texts on performativity, tracing their intersections with pleasure, pain, and desire. Course readings will span philosophical, psychoanalytic, and queer and feminist theory, but remain anchored in visceral, embodied experiences.
ENGL 5004W: Studies in Transnational Literatures (cross-listed with CLMD 6106W/MGDS 5001)
Prof. Sarah Casteel
Topic: Memory and Migration
This course explores the relationship between memory, migration, and aesthetic representation. We will consider the role of particular literary and artistic genres in producing, preserving, and circulating migrant memories. How do diasporic writers and visual artists negotiate between personal or familial memory and official, state memory? How do they reconstruct memories that have been disrupted, fragmented, or lost as a result of forced or voluntary migration? What is the role of creativity and the imagination in these acts of mnemonic recovery? Among the literary genres and artistic mediums we will address are memoir, graphic memoir, fiction, poetry, installation art, photographic portraiture, and photomontage.
ENGL 5303W: Studies in Early Modern Lit I
Prof. Micheline White
Topic: Tudor Queens: Sex, Power, and Writing in the Lives of Katherine Parr, Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth I
Renaissance queens have long fascinated the reading public, but their political power and literary writings have only recently become the objects of academic study. In this seminar, students will develop an in-depth understanding of three Renaissance queens who made the most of their unusual social status and made lasting contributions to English culture. In this course, we will explore early modern attitudes towards the concepts of a “queen consort,” a “queen regent,” a “queen regnant” and a “dowager queen,” and we will focus on three English queens’ textual and visual productions including speeches, published prose works, diplomatic letters, poetry, translations, and portraits. Students will be introduced to early modern paleography and book history. Those who wish can also explore digital versions of manuscript writing. We will also consider the depictions of these queens in recent films and TV programs.
Katherine Parr (1512-1548) was the final wife of Henry VIII. Although she is often depicted in popular culture as the woman who nursed Henry in his old age, she was actually a literary powerhouse and one of the most influential religious activists of the 1540s. We will examine her three published literary texts, her narrow escape from being arrested and executed, and her scandalous marriage to Thomas Seymour after Henry’s death.
Mary Tudor (1516-1558) was the daughter of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon. After acceding to the throne in 1553 as queen regnant, she restored England to Catholicism and became famous for overseeing the burning of three hundred Protestants. For centuries she has been vilified as “bloody Mary” and as an incompetent ruler, but current scholars are offering new accounts of her political skills and successes.
Elizabeth I (1533-1603) was Parr’s step-daughter and Mary’s sister, and she is one of the most famous British monarchs. As a queen regnant, Elizabeth obviously wielded extraordinary agency and yet her status as an unmarried woman was an on-going concern throughout her reign. Through an examination of her public speeches, private letters, portraits, proclamations, poems and prayers we will consider how she managed her image and how she contributed to important political, social, and literary developments. Recent movies will be addressed.
ENGL 5804W: Studies in Canadian Literature I
Prof. Sara Jamieson
Topic: Aging (Alongside) Animals
In a chapter subtitled “The Family Dog as Time Machine,” Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child: Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century develops an argument about narratives in which lateral (or “sideways”) relationships between children and dogs offer ways of being and growing that depart from a culturally dominant figuration of “growing up” as a “vertical movement upward . . . toward full stature, marriage, work, reproduction, and the loss of childishness” (2). This course also examines connections between non-human animals and normative expectations about human life stages, but in a way that asks how we might broaden the focus on “growing up” to incorporate “growing old.” You will be introduced to a range of texts including novels, short stories, poems, and a documentary film that situate human development and longevity in relation to a whole menagerie of animals: these include an old and (possibly) talking horse, a (supposedly) 300-year-old tortoise, a (suspiciously) long-lived laboratory mouse, plus elephants, cats and cat ladies, menopausal orcas, assorted birds and dogs, and a coyote. You will be invited to consider how these textual representations can help us to re-think a range of concepts at the heart of cultural understandings of aging—development and growth, maturity and wisdom, senescence and decline, disability, dependency, and care, pastness, futurity, and generational time—outside of strictly human(ist) frameworks. Our interpretations of these texts will be guided by a range of theoretical sources drawn from the fields of age studies, queer theory, animal studies, and posthumanism, all of which share a commitment to decentering the humanist conception of the individual as an autonomous, (re)productive, and implicitly youthful subject on a life trajectory ordered toward a maximum productivity to be sustained for as long as possible. In contrast to the current cultural obsession with the extension of individual human lives as a measure of what it means to age “well” (a search for longevity often extracted from the bodies of non-human animals), this course represents an opportunity to situate human aging in the context of what environmental historian Jared Farmer calls a “more-than-human timefulness” that highlights the shared vulnerability that defines our animal being.
Texts will include “Houyhnhnm” by André Alexis; Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant; The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy; Cat Ladies directed by Christie Callan-Jones; “The Animals in their Elements” by Cynthia Flood; Excerpts from Flash Count Diary by Darcey Steinke; The Tuning of Perfection” by Alistair MacLeod; Wells, by Jenna Butler; and Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper.
Theoretical readings will be drawn from works by Cary Wolfe, Donna Haraway, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Jack Halberstam, Marlene Goldman, and Alice Kuzniar.
ENGL 5900W: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with CLMD 6903W)
Prof. Barbara Leckie
Topic: Co-writing the Climate Crisis
This course offers an interdisciplinary approach to the climate crisis through the lens of co-writing. The idea of co-writing will be treated capaciously: writing through and with other voices, conversations, people, places, and things. It will envision writing as a kind of craft or making in which we think out loud together. With respect to the climate crisis, humans write on and with land and climate; this course will, accordingly, ask if co-writing can broaden our sense of what writing means.
The course will approach questions of cowriting via three interconnected categories: conversation; correspondence; and cohabitation. While each of these terms have a bearing on the larger questions of climate and the planetary that the course will address, they will also be approached, more narrowly, in relation to talking, writing, and teaching, respectively. Our discussions will be underpinned by the ways in which ideas of the co-, in general, help us to rethink the individual, the nation, and the land. Overall, we will read the work of Judith Butler, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Achille Mbembe, Anna Tsing, and Sylvia Wynter, among others, to consider more closely how disciplines in the humanities can contribute to climate action.
ENGL 5900X/4115A: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with WGST 4812B/5901D)
Prof. Jodie Medd
Topic: Queer/Feminist/Life/Writing
This course will take queer/feminist/life/writing as a broad and suggestive constellation for exploring a range of written texts, including biofiction, autobiography, memoir, creative nonfiction, the personal essay, and autotheory. Reading twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts, we’ll consider how authors have engaged with and innovated upon forms and genres for narrating feminist and queer lives; how they have blended personal writing with political, theoretical, philosophical and academic discourse; how their texts mattered to the moment of their composition; and how and why they matter now. Students will have leeway to research, write, and present on areas of interest to them, from literary form and style to socio-cultural-political content and connections. Content may include (but is not limited to) childhood; parenthood; loss and grief; Black life and the afterlife of slavery; racial capitalism; trans narratives; queer Indigeneity; illness narratives; subjectivity, representation and the writing “I;” community and care; art, academia and activism . . . and more.
ENGL 5900Y: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with CDNS5103/CLMD6105)
Prof. Orly Lael Netzer
In this course we will explore cultural studies on Turtle Island,asking what does it mean to research and practice cultural studies in socially responsible ways (responsible to whom and how)? what can cultural studies offer at times of relational crises? and how / can cultural studies make relations between communities, or rather, make relations right?
In our discussions we will attend to the state’s pivotal role in shaping Canada’s cultural industries and national identity, historicize the study of culture in/about Canada, and examine contemporary and emerging theories and approaches in cultural studies (from multiculturalism,
to critical refugee studies, Indigenous literary nationalism, black feminism, ecocriticism, ethics of care, memory, performance, and queer studies).
ENGL 6004W: Approaches to the Production of Literature
Prof. Grant Williams
Topic: The Renaissance Love Arts: Theorizing and Philosophizing Blazons in English Erotic Poetry
When we think of love today, we often think of its fatalistic spontaneity, succinctly captured by Christopher Marlowe’s memorable line “Who ever lov’d, that lov’d not at first sight?” The Renaissance love arts (1550-1700) demonstrate, however, that there was nothing natural and predetermined about loving: they involved teaching and learning, artifice and artifact, arising from Ovid’s verse in classical times, modified by courtly love and Petrarchanism, and responding to particular historical circumstances and social institutions—church, education, law, and family—circumscribed by the early modern nation state.
This course studies a rhetorical form that pervades the Renaissance love arts: the blazon praises a beloved by cataloguing and describing their body parts, whose value and desirability are compared to precious objects. (Take for example the famous parody by Shakespeare, Sonnet 130, “My Mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.”) Since the 1970s, blazons have attracted the feminist critique of the objectification of women, not unlike the subordination of the female body to the cinematic male gaze. More recently, however, queer studies has complicated the feminist discourse around Renaissance sexuality and gender identity, and cognitive studies has compelled scholars to consider the image of the body within different types of thinking, imagining, and remembering. As a result, the slippery fantasies and shifting values captured by the polymorphic eroticism of various blazons evade simplistic, totalizing ideological critique.
This course defamiliarizes modern romantic love, while interrogating its forgotten roots. Seminars will contextualize and materialize exemplary blazons within the Renaissance love arts, analyze them according to different theories of gender, sexuality, race, and class, and address philosophical questions of politics, ethics, and phenomenology. Early modern blazons find themselves as strange bed fellows with big yet problematic ideas, including but not confined to mortality, truth, God, alterity, and alienation.