Summer 2026
ENGL 5900S/4115A: Selected Topic in English Studies I
Prof. Robin Norris
Topic: Plant Literacy
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/4607A – Selected Topic in English Studies I
Prof. Adam Barrows
Topic: Madness and Time in Fiction of the 1960s
This course explores the temporal experiences of madness. Focusing on fiction of the 1960s, an era when “anti-psychiatry” movements gained traction within both institutional and mainstream cultures, we examine characters whose deviation from accepted norms of behaviour, speech, and thought places them in a unique and 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 quasi-mythical radicalism (a la Deleuze and Guattari), or else medicalized and rationalized by psychiatric models of “mental health.” Disability Studies, and Mad Studies in particular, have more recently 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 theories. Prioritizing survivor narratives, experiential auto-ethnographies, and the lived experiences of the mad, we will attempt to find new ways of understanding and speaking about the times and temporalities of the experience of being or going mad.
Required Reading
Findley, Timothy. The Last of the Crazy People.
Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Plath. Sylvia. The Bell Jar.
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-five.