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 5610F: Studies in Contemporary Literature I (cross-listed CLMD 6104)
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 CDNS5201/WGST5902)
Prof. Jennifer Henderson
Topic: (Re)reading ‘Women’s Liberation’
This course revisits the ‘Women’s Liberation Movement’ of the 1970s through the critical practice of ‘eventalization,’ pulling apart its apparent coherence. We look at movement writing (including newsletters, magazines, manifestos), autobiography, film, and ephemera from the period, working with several Canadian archives. Central interests are what might be called style–rhetorics, figures, emotions, atmosphere; direct actions and revolutionary imaginations; concepts of ‘woman’ and ‘women’ as unstable and contested. We think about the WLM occurring within and against capitalism, colonialism, regimes of race, heteronormativity, and binary gender. The course is 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 4812/5901)
Prof. Jodie Medd
Topic: Ban This Book: Censorship, Sexuality, Diversity, and the Question of “Harm”
This course will consider laws, policies, trials, and practices that have targeted books—and libraries—for representations of 1) marginalized sexual and gender identities and 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 analysis of slavery and imperialism, and on the other, suppression or removal of “classic” literature that includes racist language.
As a course in English literature, 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 powerful and impactful literature that has faced suppression. We will also learn about the individuals and organizations who have actively resisted forms of censorship.
The goals of the course are 1) to read and appreciate literature that has been deemed “obscene,” banned, and/or removed from libraries, and 2) learn about the histories and cultural contexts of censorship, including the recent resurgence of censorship and attacks on public and school libraries. With our focus on how censorship has targeted representations of sexual, gender, and racialized minorities and histories, we will consider how concepts of “vice” and “harm” have been mobilized in censorship activity.
Winter 2026
ENGL 5004W (cross-listed with CLMD 6102W/MGDS 5002D/EURR 5201)
Prof. Sarah Casteel
Topic: Black Europe
This course 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, thereby challenging an understanding of Europe as a bounded, racially homogenous space.
The range of topics will include:
- Black European travel writing by James Baldwin, Caryl Phillips (The European Tribe), and Johny Pitts (Afropean: Notes from Black Europe; The Afropean Podcast)
- Black German activist poetics and performance (the poetry of May Ayim, the choreography of Oxana Chi)
- Black musical performers and genres in Europe from the 18th century to the present (classical, vaudeville, jazz, rap, hip hop)
- Black women muses of European writers and painters such as Charles Baudelaire, Edward Dégas, and Ernst Kirchner as they have been recuperated through recent curatorial and artistic interventions
The interdisciplinary (or “ill-disciplined”) design of this course, which brings together literary studies, visual culture, and sound studies, 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 art, literature, 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.