Fall 2025 – Winter 2026
The information on this page is tentative and subject to change.
Fall 2025
ENGL 5002F: Studies in Theory I (cross-listed with CLMD 6904F)
Prof. Stuart Murray
Topic: The Dark Enlightenment and Neoreactionary (NRx) Thought—Critiques of Liberal Modernity
This seminar examines the Dark Enlightenment and Neoreactionary (NRx) Thought as reactionary critiques of democracy, egalitarianism, and Enlightenment rationality. Emerging from the digital peripheries of techno-capitalism, these movements—articulated by figures such as Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug), Nick Land, Thomas Carlyle, and Carl Schmitt—reject liberal modernity and propose alternative governance models ranging from monarchy to corporate rule. As these ideological formations seek to reshape contemporary power structures, how do literary and cultural texts resist, unsettle, or aesthetically disaffirm the world they envision?
Situating the Dark Enlightenment within critical theory, biopolitics, and affect studies, we will read reactionary texts alongside literary and cultural works that interrogate the seductive lure of authoritarianism, the racialized logics of techno-capitalism, and the necropolitical structuring of the future. Drawing on Foucault, Berlant, Butler, and Mbembe, among others, we will trace how reactionary modernity constructs itself through esotericism, nostalgia, and technocratic legitimacy. Throughout the course, we will engage with literary fiction, film, and speculative media that expose the fractures in this reactionary imaginary—whether through satire, dystopian critique, or aesthetic experimentation.
ENGL 5402F/4115B: 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 paper was made, how was type set, how books were printed and bound, what was the role of bookseller, of publishing congers, etc. The hope is that they will then understand 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 were 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 choose 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 subgroups. How did this subscription list fit into the publishing industry in the eighteenth century?
ENGL 5610F: Studies in Contemporary Literature I (cross-listed with CLMD 6104F)
Prof. Franny Nudelman
Topic: Culture and Crisis: Creating New Life from Old Things
In this course, we will consider contemporary writers and image-makers who use the materials of the past to grapple with the crises of our present, including pandemic, rising fascism, environmental catastrophe, and war. Taking our cue from Jared Farmer, who imagines people and ancient trees as “coauthors of survival stories,” we will explore cultural producers who use old objects—animate and inanimate—to narrate, figure, analyze and remediate present conditions. These artists take up the detritus of the past—forgotten texts, ruined buildings, fallen trees, mute relics—and infuse them with altered meanings. We will examine a range of media including photography, film, and sculpture, while focusing our inquiry on narrative nonfiction. Here are some of the questions we will pursue together: How do writers and artists use the biographies of earlier writers, theorists, and artists to structure and complicate their reflections on the present? How do they engage the natural world—plants, trees, fossils—to construct continuity between the present and the distant past and reorient our relation to time? How do they innovate in their use of narrative structure, imaging technology, or hybrid form in order to defamiliarize our relationship to both past and present? How do they reimagine traumatic events and repurpose the objects that memorialize these events?
ENGL 5804F: Studies in Canadian Literature I (cross-listed with CDNS 5201A/WGST 5902A)
Prof. Jennifer Henderson
Topic: (Re)reading ‘Women’s Liberation’
This course takes a historical materialist and intersectional approach to the ‘Women’s Liberation’ movement of the 1970s as moment of political eruption. We look at archival materials, media representations from the period, as well as recent scholarship on ambivalent relations to this complex, haunting past. Our materials include movement publications, autobiography, film, and ephemera from the period, as we work with several Canadian archives. Our central interests are rhetorics, figures, emotions, atmosphere; practices, direct actions, imaginations; concepts of ‘woman’ and ‘women’ as unstable and contested. We pay particular attention to the analysis of social reproduction as a legacy of the WLM and work to understand the movement as occurring within and against capitalism, colonialism, regimes of race, heteronormativity, and binary gender. The course will be an inclusive, 2SLGBTQ-positive space and is for anyone interested in learning how to think historically, investigate critical concepts in their moment of messy eruption, and consider political memory as a complex, embodied inheritance.
ENGL 5900F/4609A: Selected Topic in English Studies I
Prof. Janne Cleveland
Topic: Theatre of the Absurd
Theatre critic Martin Esslin coined the term Theatre of the Absurd in 1961, in a close examination of works by Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, and others. In this course we will explore the form, the context of its development, and a selection of plays that are understood to exemplify it in order to understand its extraordinary influence on 20th century theatre-making. Esslin suggested in part, that Theatre of the Absurd referenced a world that was devoid of meaning, and thus presented a struggle for finding reasons to continue. Students will sign up for a seminar presentation at the beginning of the term from a list of possible topics provided. You will be expected to consider such questions as why did this style of writing and staging emerge then, after the Second World War? In examining the context in which this style emerged, one might expect this to be a time of celebration that such a global trauma had ended. How then, does the philosophy of Existentialism contribute to the development of Theatre of the Absurd? We will consider the social and political landscape in which the style came to represent a new theatrical form that signaled the postwar era following World War II in order to think about its influence later in the 20th century. We will consider whether and how Theatre of the Absurd continues to be influential in dramatic staging in the 21st century. What can we learn from earlier practitioners of the style in terms of posing meaningful questions about the world we live in now, inundated as we are with questions of the meaning of our existence against the backdrop of war, pestilence, and plague? How does humour, with which Theatre of Absurd is associated, work to navigate such anxiously fraught scenarios? We will especially consider how the seeming contradictions contained in the form become part of the strategy for making social and political commentary about the world we inhabit now. We will look at how Theatre of the Absurd takes the position exemplified by Samuel Beckett in his famously quoted “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
ENGL 5900G/4607B: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with WGST 4812C/5901C)
Prof. Jodie Medd
Topic: Ban This Book: Censorship, Sexuality, Diversity, and Questions of “Harm”
This course will explore laws, policies, trials, and practices that have targeted books—and bookstores and libraries—for representations of 1) marginalized sexual and gender identities & desires and, more recently, 2) racialized identities and information about racist and imperial histories. The latter may include, on one end, the suppression of historical information and analyses of slavery and imperialism, and on the other, suppression or removal of “classic” literature that includes racist language.
We will research and discuss books that have been suppressed as well as the context of their legal (or not so legal) suppression, seizure, burning, or other forms of censorship. Learning about literary censorship is painful for any student of literature; we will aim to alleviate—and counter—the weight of this learning though the pleasures and value of reading and discussing powerful, impactful literature that has faced suppression. We will also learn about those who have sought freedom and social transformation through literature while actively resisting censorship.
ENGL 5900H: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with CLMD 6903F/HIST 5906F)
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 and collective action. The idea of co-writing will be treated capaciously: writing through and with other voices, conversations, people, places, and things. The course will consider writing as a kind of craft or making in which “we” think out loud together. It will also reimagine the individual—via readings and activities—in collective terms and consider how references to “we” work in both academic writing and calls for climate action. Finally, it will explore new ideas of co-writing and the collective to ask how “we” can act more effectively to address the climate crisis. Hannah Arendt, Max Liboiron, Kim Tallbear, Judith Butler, Octavia Butler and many others (but not too many!) comprise the course readings.
ENGL 6003F: Theories and Foundations in the Production of Literature
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 in the age of digital media, and more.
Winter 2026
ENGL 5004W (cross-listed with CLMD 6102W/EURR 5201B/MGDS 5002D)
Prof. Sarah Casteel
Topic: Black Europe
This seminar explores “Black Europe” as a historical phenomenon, a theoretical framework, and a set of artistic practices. We will engage with a series of creative and critical works that foreground Europe’s historical and contemporary entanglements with Africa and its diasporas. Reframing European history and culture from Black perspectives, these works challenge an understanding of Europe as a bounded, racially homogenous space.
The range of topics will include: European travel narratives by Black authors; novels of the “Windrush generation” of early postwar Caribbean immigrants to Britain; Black German activist poetics and autobiography from the 1980s onward; Black musical performers and genres in Europe from the 19th century to the present; and recent artistic and curatorial interventions that recuperate Black women muses of white European writers and painters.
The interdisciplinary design of this course is critical to its excavation of Black European cultural histories that have been occluded by more conventional disciplinary lenses. Reading across different media will help to expose the “bundles of silences” (Trouillot) surrounding the contributions of Black artists—especially Black women artists—to European literature, art history, and music.
ENGL 5120W/4115E: Book Arts Workshop
Prof. Robin Norris
This experiential learning course immerses students in the practical arts and histories of book production, with its roots in the early Middle Ages. Students will engage in a range of activities representative of the pillars of the book arts, including bookbinding, calligraphy, papermaking, decoration, and typesetting/printing. Activities may include transcription of manuscript texts, calligraphy, creating and printing linocuts, papermaking, typesetting and letterpress printing, hand sewing of paper gatherings to create pamphlets or multiple section books, and exploration of manuscripts and early printed books from Carleton’s Archives and Special Collections. The class will be held in the MacOdrum Library Book Arts Lab, where students will work collaboratively with the Master Printer, lab staff, the professor, and their classmates.
ENGL 5303W: Studies in Early Modern Literature 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 half-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 5402W/4401A: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature
Prof. Julie Murray
Topic: Jane Austen, Our Contemporary
2025 marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen in 1775, and the 30th anniversary of the 1995 “Austenmania.” Ever since Amy Heckerling’s film Clueless was released in 1995, critics and fans have talked excitedly of a “Jane Austen revival.” Thirty years later, the revival shows no sign of abating and in fact demands that we rethink the very idea that Austen needed to be “revived” in the first place. She has always been popular in the strongest sense of the word, and in this course we will explore the history of her reception beginning in the early nineteenth century and continuing up to the present moment. Topics we will consider include: early readers and critics of her novels; circulating libraries, literary societies, “Janeites,” and book clubs; biographical constructions of Austen as, variously, spinster, recluse, feminist, Regency satirist, patriotic embodiment of “Little England,” and “Aunt Jane”; the canonization and professionalization of her work in the early twentieth century by R.W. Chapman’s 1923 edition of The Novels of Jane Austen; and the perhaps surprising popularity of Austen’s novels among soldiers (the original “Janeites”) in the trenches of the First World War. We will also devote time to our own cultural moment and the Jane Austen phenomenon – that is, to Austen’s pervasive and persistent popularity in contemporary popular culture. We will explore Austen as robust global brand: the thriving literary tourism and heritage industry devoted to capitalizing on Austenmania; the love affair with Hollywood; and the seemingly infinite variety of ways in which Austen and her novels have been commodified, consumed, personified, impersonated, ventriloquized, appropriated, remediated, parodied, satirized, and embodied.
ENGL 5804W: Studies in Canadian Literature I
Prof. Jody Mason
Topic: Indigenous Resurgence and Settler Nationalisms in Late Twentieth-Century Canada
The 1960s and 70s were important decades for the pan-Indigenous political movement known as “Red Power” and the related emergence of Indigenous writing in English. Both were informed by the decolonization movements of the Third World, but Indigenous activists and writers, seeking self-government and cultural revitalization, adapted the thinking of these movements in important ways that were specific to their experiences of settler colonialism.
Contemporary with this decolonial activism and writing was the institutionalization and canonization of English Canadian and Quebecois literatures. National literatures were in both cases finding the institutional supports that were understood to be crucial to sovereign cultures. Supporting the institutionalization of these settler literatures was a rhetoric of “colonization” that was expressed very differently in anglophone and francophone contexts but that, in both cases, drew on writers’ firsthand experiences of African and other Third World decolonization movements.
What was the relation of these movements to one another? Were they cognizant of one another, antagonistic, sympathetic?
We’ll study creative texts in many genres by Jeannette Armstrong (Syilx Okanagan), An Antane Kapesh (Innu), Hubert Aquin, Margaret Atwood, Michael Kanentakeron (Kanien’kehà:ka), Margaret Laurence, Dennis Lee, Daphne Odjig (Potawatomi / English), and Joyce Weiland, as well as critical work by Harold Cardinal (Cree), Glen Sean Coutlhard (Dene), Dalie Giroux, Eva Mackey, George Manuel (Secwépemc), and Sean Mills, among others.
ENGL 5900W: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with CDNS 5301B and CLMD 6103W)
Prof. Orly Lael Netzer
This graduate seminar will contend with urgent socio-cultural challenges in Canada through contemporary approaches to the study of national culture 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 culture and its study offer at times of relational crises? and how / can cultural studies foster a site of relation making 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 feminisms, ecocriticism, ethics of care, memory, performance, and queer studies).
ENGL 6004: Approaches to the Production of Literature
Prof. Travis DeCook
Topic: Theories of Authorship, from Plato to AI
“What is an author?” is a perennial question, currently at the heart of debates over intellectual property, the nature of cultural production, and so-called “artificial intelligence.” 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.