Summer 2024
ENGL 5101S: Historical Linguistics: English (cross-listed with LING 4802A/5802A)
Prof. Dan Siddiqi
This course deploys a wide array of theoretical linguistics techniques and skills, primarily morphological, phonological, and syntactic analysis as well as typological and diachronic analysis, in order to examine the historical development of a particular well-studied language: English. This class will study the origins of English starting with Proto-Indo-European progressing through Common Germanic and then ultimately the stages of English itself. This course is a theory-intensive course and will focus on historical linguistic topics such as the development of English from a scrambling language to a V2 language to a strict SVO language. Other topics include the phonological sound changes and phonemic inventories at different stages, the change from a fusional language to an isolating language, and the drastic changes in inflectional system of the language.
NOTE: Please be advised that this course is distinct from a History of English course. ENGL 5101S is a historical linguistics course.
ENGL 5900R/4301A: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with HIST 4101A)
Prof. Paul Nelles
Topic: Travel & Mobility in the Early Modern World
This seminar explores the experience of travel and mobility through the eyes of the Florentine merchant Francesco Carletti. In 1594, Carletti departed from Spain to make his fortune as a private merchant. He travelled to Mexico and Peru, to the Philippines and Japan, to China and India. The early modern period experienced an unprecedented level of mobility, both within Europe and globally. We follow Carletti’s journey by reading his chronicle of his travels, My Voyage Around the World. Each week of the course we study in detail some of the places Carletti travelled and the peoples he encountered. The seminar covers topics such as life at sea, slavery, food and drink, sexuality, the rise of global commerce, and natural history.
The seminar considers the social and cultural context of early modern mobility at the transnational and global levels. The seminar seeks to re-create the material and cultural world of early modern travel. We explore how linguistic and cultural difference were experienced, how travellers made sense of unfamiliar places, social customs, and cultural practices, and the ‘things’ that also moved on journeys.
ENGL 5900S/4115A: Selected Topic in English Studies I
Prof. Robin Norris
Topic: Leaves of Leaves: Plant Literacy and Literature
Plants have been important throughout human history for reasons of both survival and culture. Although plants have been central to mythologies and folklore around the globe, today our personal awareness of plants is at an all-time low. This is an experiential learning course that combines fieldwork, experiential learning, and text-based discussion to develop plant literacy and increase awareness of the plant life in our environment while redefining our understanding of literacy. Writing assignments will emphasize reflection on the experiential learning aspects of the course and will include in-class writing and a plant journal. The intersecting goals of the course are to explore the concept of literacy while expanding our ability to perceive and engage with plants, as well as considering new methods of observation and understanding by challenging fixed notions of knowledge and being.
ENGL 5900T/4609A: Selected Topic in English Studies I
Prof. Janne Cleveland
Topic: TBC
This is a seminar course intended to explore the form and function of comedy in performance.
We will examine the theories and cultural practices of comedy as a form of social commentary in dramatic literature and essays. Is the function of comedy only, as Beaumarchais (the creator of the character Figaro in The Barber of Seville) has noted, to entice laughter “in order I may not weep”? Through reading theories of comedy and its performance strategies we will look to apply these in the contemporary context. These might include (but are not limited to) stand up, social satire, political performance, as well as performance emerging from feminist, racialized, queer, ableist, and/or class perspectives. We will seek to understand how the comic is utilized as a means of making social critique in a variety of ways. From the ancient Greeks to SNL to Barbie we will consider how and why comedy and the laughter it produces are so important to us in the contemporary moment.
ENGL 5007S/4961A: Studies in Indigenous Literatures
Prof. Brenda Vellino
Topic: Re-storying Resurgence in Indigenous Popular and Multi-Media Genres
Contemporary Indigenous literary and multi-media artists from northern Turtle Island (also known as Canada) have increasingly taken up popular genres and modes such as speculative fiction, graphic novels, the horror film, stop motion animation film shorts, documentary, drama, spoken word, and performance art. These practices decolonize settler genre norms, represent complex contemporary social realities, and assert Indigenous sovereignties and resurgence. This course will enable us to consider the politics and ethics of cultural production and reception within the intersecting conditions of ongoing settler colonial impacts and Indigenous decolonisation and resurgence work. Our course methodology will feature careful attention to specific Indigenous, Inuit, and Métis cultural contexts, social realities, protocols, and priorities. Whenever possible, our discussion will centre Indigenous knowledge keepers, along with literary, performance, and cultural critics such as Greg Younging, Jo-Ann Archibald, Grace Dillon, Alicia Eliot, Warren Cariou, Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber, Daniel Heath Justice, Dorothy Christian, and Kyle Whyte. Topics may include residential schools legacies, contemporary urban or rez realities, MMIWG2S interventions, relational kinship ethics, revitalization and resurgence practices, Indigenous justice, climate change interventions, and re-embodiment and decolonial love, particularly informed by questions of gender and sexuality. We will pursue this central question: what draws Indigenous writers and artists to popular and multi-media genres and how do they revise and refashion them to decolonize, intervene, and assert cultural sovereignty and resurgence? Experiential learning through attending Indigenous cultural events or teachings in addition to class readings and viewings will be a priority.
ENGL 5708S/4709A: Studies in American Literature II
Prof. Franny Nudelman
Topic: United States Culture in the Age of Experiment: 1945-1989
This course explores the role of experimentation in the culture and politics of the US during the Cold War era. The decades following World War Two witnessed the development of new kinds of warfare; transformative movements for gender and racial equality; the advent of live television; the widespread use of hallucinogenic drugs and other techniques for altering consciousness. In the realm of culture, innovation was afoot as writers, painters, filmmakers, and musicians explored an aesthetic of spontaneity, intensity, and interiority that might adequately represent the strange conditions of modern life. We will consider significant trends in the culture of the era—including abstract expressionism, direct cinema, hard bop, and confessional poetry—as well as the social conditions that generated these new forms of expression.