{"id":19780,"date":"2021-01-07T15:08:17","date_gmt":"2021-01-07T20:08:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/english\/?p=19780"},"modified":"2025-09-22T11:23:49","modified_gmt":"2025-09-22T15:23:49","slug":"fall-2021-winter-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/english\/2021\/fall-2021-winter-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"Fall 2021 – Winter 2022"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Fall 2021 – Winter 2022\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n

FALL 2021<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

ENGL 5303F\/ENGL4301A: Studies in Early Modern Literature I <\/strong><\/a>(cross-listed with HUMS 4902)
\nProf. Micheline White<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Topic: Tudor Queens:  Sex, Power, and Writing in the Lives of Katherine Parr, Mary Tudor, Elizabeth I, and Mary Queen of Scots<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 four 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 \u201cqueen consort,\u201d a \u201cqueen regent,\u201d a \u201cqueen regnant\u201d and a \u201cdowager queen,\u201d and we will focus on the four queens\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ENGL 5402F: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature<\/strong><\/a> (cross-listed with ENGL 4115A)
\nProf. Hugh Reid<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Topic: The Nature and Uses of 18th<\/sup> Century Book Subscription Lists<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/sup> century book trade worked:  how was paper made, how was type set, how were books printed and bound, what was the role of bookseller, of publishing congers, etc.  The hope is that they will then have an understanding of 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\u2019s holdings in antiquarian books was inadequate.  Now, however, we can access almost all the books published in the 18th<\/sup> century by subscription (some 3,000).  Students may choose any list.  For example, if they are interested in female poets they might chose 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 sub groups.  How did this subscription list fit into the publishing industry in the eighteenth century?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the end of the course, the hope is that each student will have done sufficient research (and learned how to do it) to produce a paper worthy of presentation at a conference or as an article in a journal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ENGL 5610F: Studies in Contemporary Literature I <\/strong>
\nProf. Percy Walton<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Topic: Game of Thrones<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This course will focus on G.R.R. Martin\u2019s A Song of Ice and Fire <\/em>along with the HBO series, Game of Thrones.  <\/em>Placing the series in conversation with the books raises many questions, such as:  who is the author? whose ending will prevail? and, whose version will be remembered?  (among others). Tracing questions like these, classes will examine the books and the series, emphasizing their interconnectedness as well as their differences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ENGL 5610G: Studies in Contemporary Literature<\/strong> I<\/strong><\/a> (cross-listed with CLMD 6104F)
\nProf. Franny Nudelman<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Topic: Documentary and Crisis<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This course considers crisis documentary from 1945 to the present. We will study documentary filmmakers, photographers, and writers who respond to the unanticipated and often incomprehensible crises of their age and, in the process, create new forms of documentary expression. Taking an expansive view of the field, we will consider documentary texts that deal with war, forced migration, climate emergency, poverty, and a resurgent white supremacy. We will ask: How do documentarians represent what they cannot yet fully understand? What role does literary and visual culture play in making disruptive change real? How have documentarians helped to define an ethics of witnessing? How are the methods and aims of documentarians transformed by new technologies and alternative forms of collectivity? Cases may include: Lee Miller\u2019s photographs from Dachau; Spike Lee\u2019s reporting on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; Maggie Nelson\u2019s narrative account serial murder; Richard Mosse\u2019s immersive rendering of contemporary migrations; recent essays that grapple with the Covid-19 pandemic. Throughout, we will explore the power of documentary to respond to catastrophic events and uncharted social conditions as they unfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ENGL 5610H\/ENGL 4003A: Studies in Contemporary Lit. I <\/strong><\/a>(cross-listed with WGST 4812\/WGST 5901)
\nProf. Jodie Medd<\/a>
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Topic: Queer Historical Fiction & Temporal Re\/Imaginings<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This course explores how queer novels engage with historical fiction, historiographic metafiction (*definitions below), and related genres to reflect critically and creatively on history, historiography, memory, and time. We will ask how and why queer novels of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries return to, rework, (re)imagine, revise, and complicate ways of knowing, thinking, and feeling about the past, \u201chistory,\u201d and temporality (including the future!). In this context, we will consider how these novels represent and explore queerness in relation to key historical events and personages; subject formation under historical processes of colonialism, slavery, racialization, capitalism, and the biopolitical production, categorization, and regulation of bodies and conceptualizations of \u201cthe human\u201d; historical periodization; literary history; historiography; time; biography and memoir; ancestral memory and queer genealogies; and the discursive production, regulation, and proliferation of nonnormative sexualities and genders, \u201cthen,\u201d \u201cnow,\u201d and yet to come. Theoretical frames will include considerations of literary genre; queer theory considerations of time, history, and historiography; theorizing and feeling the archive; and interactions among feminist, queer, sexuality, (post)colonial and critical race studies. The course will emphasize supportive peer learning and an openness to interdisciplinary exchange. These are engaging, moving novels with a wide affective and stylistic range that I hope will be pleasurable and absorbing for us to read, discuss, and learn about together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*Queer literature: literature that addresses non-normative sexualities and genders, and\/or critically engages with issues of gender and sexuality. In this course, we\u2019ll attend to homoerotic desire and\/or cross-gender or transgender identifications, with attention to the racialization, nationalization, and colonization of gender and sexuality.
\n*Historical fiction: fiction set in the past that often relies on established ideas about a particular moment of history and the types of human subjects in that period.
\n*Historiographic meta-fiction: fiction that invokes the historical past, while self-consciously questioning how history is written and represented (historiography), and how we \u201cknow,\u201d access, and interpret the past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our novels also engage in additional relevant genres including the neo-slave narrative, neo-Victorian fiction, speculative fiction, the gothic, historical romance, and more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ENGL 5900F\/ENGL 4600A: Selected Topic in English Studies <\/strong><\/a>(cross-listed with EURR 4103)
\nProf. Dana Dragunoiu <\/a>
\n
\n<\/em>Topic: The Great Russian Novel: Dostoevsky\u2019s The Brothers Karamazov <\/em>and Tolstoy\u2019s Anna Karenina<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vladimir Nabokov coined the term \u201cTolstoevsky\u201d to refer to Tolstoy\u2019s and Dostoevsky\u2019s outsized influence on world literature and culture. Tolstoy\u2019s Anna Karenina<\/em> and Dostoevsky\u2019s The Brothers Karamazov<\/em> are generally considered their greatest achievements. For Virginia Woolf, Tolstoy was \u201cthe greatest of all novelists,\u201d and for Nabokov, Anna Karenina <\/em>was \u201cthe supreme masterpiece of nineteenth-century literature.\u201d Sigmund Freud referred to The Brothers Karamazov<\/em> as \u201cthe most magnificent novel ever written\u201d and Albert Einstein confessed that it was \u201cthe most wonderful book I have ever laid my hands on.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ENGL 6002T: Proseminar <\/strong>(doctoral; fall\/winter)
\nProf. Travis DeCook<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The general goal of this year-long course for second-year PhD candidates is to foster the pragmatic skills and knowledge necessary for succeeding as a teacher and researcher at the doctoral level. In the Fall Term, while students are preparing for their comprehensive exams, the seminar schedule will be largely focused on comprehensive examination study strategies. In the Winter Term, while students are working on their dissertation proposal, the course will focus on the scholarly practices integral to writing a proposal, as well as on other matters; these will include discussions of how to write an article geared for publication in a scholarly journal, how to write a conference paper, and how to submit and present papers to these scholarly venues. As we explore these and other practical matters related to conducting and disseminating research, the Winter Term will operate as a fortnightly workshop for the dissertation proposal itself, providing a space where students will share and provide feedback on each other\u2019s work-in-progress. Throughout both terms, under the broad category of professional matters, an examination of the history of the university English department will be a springboard to an investigation of current issues and trends within academia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ENGL 6003F: Theories and Foundations in the Production of Literature<\/a>
\n<\/strong>Prof. Grant Williams<\/a>
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We might say of the \u201cDeath of the Author\u201d what Mark Twain said of himself after reading the newspaper: \u201cthe report of [his] death is an exaggeration.\u201d This course studies issues of authorship by surveying foundational theoretical texts from an array of fields, including book history, manuscript and print cultural studies, media studies, digital humanities, philosophy, sociology, and especially cultural and literary theory. The readings will be grouped according to historical periods and thematic clusters. The course\u2019s goal will be to acquaint students with the important questions and debates that have impacted and continue to influence how writers, scholars, philosophers, and historians conceptualize what it means to author a text and be an author. Our modus operandi from week to week will leverage comparative analysis and so the recurrent question we will ask ourselves concerns the way in which one writer\u2019s views on authorship differ from another writer\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

WINTER 2022<\/h3>\n\n\n\n


\nENGL 5002W: Studies in Theory<\/a> <\/strong>(cross-listed with CLMD 6904W)
\nProf. Stuart Murray<\/a>
\n
\n<\/em>Topic: Biopolitics and the Cultures of Life and Death<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How might we read the (non)representational practices that surround death today? Aesthetic or anaesthetic, ours is a time when death is quietly cultivated and calculated by neoliberal biopolitics \u2013 deaths dismissed (or justified) as collateral damage, opportunity costs, negative externalities. This differential power is summed up by Foucault as the power to \u201cmake live and let die.\u201d Crucially, those we \u201clet die\u201d stand in relation to the lives that we \u201cmake live\u201d; dying is the bloody secret of life, even as \u201cletting die\u201d is disavowed, refused, silenced. Whether it is \u201cslow death\u201d (Berlant) wrought by austerity, fast death in the digital mediascape, or more coordinated ways of \u201cletting die,\u201d including war, systemic ethnic\/racialized violence, or pandemic policies, these deaths nevertheless speak to belie our \u201cculture of life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not<\/em> a course on memory studies or memorialization or trauma and witnessing. And this is for two reasons. First, and practically, our texts are more diverse and less disciplinary. We will read from high theory and literature to popular culture \u2013 an eclectic selection from philosophy, political theory, black studies, and cultural studies, among others, alongside select works of literature, a graphic narrative (a \u201ccomic\u201d with no comedy), social media metastases, etc. Second, and more ideologically, this course will argue that the study of (non)representational practices in the relationship between death and speech\/writing will permit an oblique but trenchant critique of identity politics, liberalism (including its \u201chuman rights\u201d guises), and the hypostatizations of possessive individualism, ego, self, interiority. To what extent are these forms of subjectivity false idols and tools of subordination, all the while packaged as freedom and rational choice? Moreover, to what extent do they foster profound complicity with the differential violence that \u201cmakes live and lets die\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A more speculative question emerges: what is the possibility for community that is not tied to identity categories and to its rituals of representation, be they memory, memorialization, witnessing, or confession? Is there community post-identity? Or, said another way, is there a form of speech\/writing that is not tethered to \u2013 sanctioned, policed, and in some cases prohibited by \u2013 our great idol, our political theology: identity?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ENGL 5004W: Studies in Transnational Literatures <\/strong><\/a>(cross-listed with MGDS 5002B and CLMD 6102W)
\nAaron Kreuter
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Diaspora literature is an incredibly wide genre of texts. Even within the smaller confines of diaspora fiction\u2014the focus of this course\u2014the range of styles, subject matters, forms, and politics is enormous. What makes a novel or a short story collection \u201cdiasporic\u201d? How does a fictional account of immigration, ethnic cleansing, home and host territories, tensions between belonging and not belonging, the possibility of return, impact the conditions of twenty-first century life? Do authors of diasporic fiction write in order to celebrate their diasporic communities, to critique them, or some mixture of both?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In order to attempt to answer these questions, in this course we will look at novels from a wide range of diasporic communities (Jewish, Black, Indian, Palestinian, Chinese, Japanese) living in diverse locales (Canada, America, Pakistan, Kuwait), read in tandem with cutting-edge theory; of particular interest will be the ways the novels under study fictionalize the relationship between diasporic, Indigenous, and national forms of collective belonging. In this course, we will unpack the radical potential of diasporic community and belonging, and map out how the fiction represents diasporic relationships to the home country and host countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ENGL 5007W: Studies in Indigenous Literatures<\/a> <\/strong>(cross-listed with ENGL 4961A)
\nProf. Brenda Vellino<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Topic: Restorying Resurgence in Indigenous Popular Genres<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contemporary Indigenous artists from territories across Turtle Island have increasingly taken up popular forms such as speculative fiction, graphic novels, the horror film, stop motion animation film shorts, television situation comedy, and spoken word poetry. These popular genres claim Indigenous spaces to decolonize cultural forms, represent complex contemporary social realities, stake political claims, and assert Indigenous cultural sovereignty and resurgence.  Whenever possible, our discussion will be informed by Indigenous literary\/cultural critics such as Daniel Heath Justice, Lindsey Nixon, Grace Dillon, and Leanne Simpson, as well as selected settler ally critics. This course will enable us to consider the politics and ethics of Indigenous cultural production and reception within the intersecting conditions of settler colonialism and decolonisation.  Our work will be highly context specific, situated by careful attention to specific Indigenous, Inuit, and M\u00e9tis cultural contexts, social realities, and priorities. Topics may include contemporary Rez life, contemporary urban realities, Indigenous cultural sovereignty, Indigenous relational ethics, Indigenous rebalancing, revitalization and resurgence movements, and the politics of embodiment and Indigenous self-representation, particularly in texts informed by questions of gender and sexuality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Experiential learning in the form of attending Indigenous cultural events or teachings outside of class will also be a priority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ENGL 5101W: Historical Linguistics: English <\/span><\/strong><\/a>(cross-listed with LING 5802\/LING 4802)
\nProf. Daniel Siddiqi<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This course applies the techniques of Historical Linguistics to examine the 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.  There will also be a focus on the change of English from being a morphologically fusional language to a morphologically isolating language and the resulting drastic changes in inflectional system of the language.  Another major topic is the phonological sound changes and the resulting phonemic inventories at different stages.  This course also has a significant sociolinguistic component, focusing on the sociological forces that drive language change, especially with regard to language contact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ENGL 5120W: Book Arts Workshop<\/a>
\n<\/strong>Prof. Jody Mason<\/a> and Larry Thompson<\/a> (Master Printer)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Topic: “Printed in Canada by Mindless Acid Freaks”: Small-Press Publishing in Canada<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 in MacOdrum Library and co-taught with 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our experiential work will include encounters with small-press publishers; interaction with small-press texts from the university\u2019s Archives and Special Collections; and book arts demonstrations \/ activities, culminating in a letterpress printing project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The history\/theory component of the course will unfold in relation to a series of small-press case studies (e.g., First Statement Press [Montreal]; tish \/ tishbooks [Vancouver]; Coach House Press [Toronto]; Sister Vision Press [Toronto]; Gaspereau Press [Kentville, NS]; and Kegedonce Press [Neyaashiinigmiing, ON]. We\u2019ll be theorizing small-press activity through questions such as the following:<\/p>\n\n\n\n