The information on this page is preliminary and subject to change.
Fall 2024
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 5610F: Studies in Contemporary Literature I (cross-listed with DIGH 5902A)
Prof. Brian Greenspan
Topic: Fictionality
Fictional discourse continues to grow in prominence in our “post-truth” era, due in part to the social media, deep fakes, AIs, and conspiracy theories that threaten to undermine consensus reality. As the public sphere grows ever more hyperreal, it isn’t surprising that writers and scholars alike should shy away from the parody, relativism, and textual play that marked literature of the last century, while embracing rumours of an emergent “metamodern” affect or post-postmodern “New Sincerity.” At the same time, revitalized critical debates over the status of fictional discourse offer growing evidence that truth and authenticity are not opposed to fictionality, but dependent on it.
This seminar will survey narrative fictions in various media and genres (such as alt-history, science fiction, urban fantasy, comics, games, transmedia, Virtual and Augmented Reality, autofiction, metafiction, and hyperfiction), alongside recent theories of fictionality, narrative, and new media. We will also explore new digital tools and methods for creating or detecting fakes and fictions. Our approach will be exploratory, experimental, and collaborative; no prior programming or special computer skills are required, though you might pick up a few along the way.
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 Topic
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.
Winter 2025
ENGL 5002W: Studies in Theory I (cross-listed with CLMD 6904)
Prof. Stuart Murray
Topic: Pleasure, Pathos, Pathology
This course will explore the interdisciplinary remit of “pleasure” and its genres. How is pleasure variously aestheticized and politicized, felt (pathos) and pathologized? We’ll begin in the first weeks by staging an encounter between pathos, pathology, and politics. Introductory course texts will include those that theorize the aesthetic in relation to the political, and vice versa (e.g., Bataille, Blanchot, Barthes, Rancière), as well as theoretical texts that address pleasure as such (e.g., Freud, Foucault, as well as select texts on hedonism and libertinism). Armed with this theoretical apparatus, in later weeks the course will turn to “case studies” of texts that are ostensibly “pathographic” (e.g., fine art, literature) and some that are explicitly political and yet nonetheless aestheticized (e.g., manifestos). Addressing their own areas of research and/or creation, students will be encouraged to study the ways that aesthetic and rhetorical forms are variously pleasurable, pathological, and political.
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: The Literature of Longevity: Contemporary Fictional Perspectives on Late Life in Canada
This course is focused on textual representations of a range of issues, including care and disability, demographic change and generationalism, currently debated in Canadian culture in response to population aging and increasing longevity. Using an intersectional approach grounded in the theoretical vocabularies of the field of critical age studies, we will examine a wide range of genres including novels, short stories, poetry, drama, radio drama, and film, identifying and analyzing the formal strategies that their creators invent to address complex and contradictory ideas about what it means to age well in contemporary Canada.
ENGL 5900X/4115A (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 6004W: Approaches to the Prodcution of Lierature
Prof. Travis DeCook
Topic: Theories of Authorship, From Plato to A.I.
“What is an author?” is a perennial question, currently at the heart of debates over artificial intelligence, intellectual property, and the nature of cultural production. This seminar will explore theories of authorship articulated by Plato, Sidney, Shelley, Freud, Nietzsche, Eliot, Borges, Barthes, Foucault, and others. We will examine topics such as inspiration and its secularization; the relationship between the “death of the author” and politics; the ethics of authorship; the origins of intellectual property; notions of social authorship; the relationship between the material book and concepts of authorship; the implications of new media; contemporary “post-copyright” cultural formations; and the implications of artificial intelligence for how we understand the nature of authorship.