400 Level English

This course will examine the long shadow cast by the Great Irish Famine (1847-1852) over nineteenth and early twentieth-century Irish literature. Taking a materialist approach to the complex network of land ownership that preceded and presaged the catastrophe, this course will trace the many ways in which the Famine was not only predicted in Irish literary output from Maria Edgeworth and through to Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker (Dracula being among the first and most striking absentee landlords in English literature), but also organized and carefully administered by colonial and planter land-holding policies at the time. This course reads the Gothic in Ireland as an early but sustained rumination on an unsustainable system of land use and proprietorship, guided by a critical outlook that I am currently elaborating in my own study of this material and which I gather under the rubric of “Fictions of Depopulation.” Essentially, I examine the ways in which many of these stories feature a dwindling cast of characters and the ossification of the social and economic relations that conjoin them as evidence of what their authors see as the impending crisis of economic and political ruin for both the country and its catholic underclass. The gothic was, genuinely, a living, breathing, social reality in mid-century Ireland. Lastly, this course will feature a brief examination of the post-Famine gothic in early twentieth-century Irish literature as a way to think through the lingering historical effects of this cataclysmic period in Irish public, political, and economic life.

This course will offer an opportunity to explore figurations of the traumatic event and its aftermath through a range of late twentieth and early twenty-first century theoretical and literary texts that amplify the conditions and limits of bearing witness and/or depict the psychic wounds that painful histories leave behind. To outline the major issues and themes that will preoccupy us during the first third of the course, we will begin with Hayden White’s reflections in “The Modernist Event” about the challenges of representing the pathos generated by historical phenomena that overwhelm our ability to comprehend them. Our discussion will subsequently turn to Sigmund Freud’s post-World War I theses on compulsive repetition in Beyond the Pleasure Principle as the canonical departure point for the field of trauma studies that emerged in the 1990s, before we compare a few pivotal contributions to this emergence by Cathy Caruth, Laura S. Brown, Kai T. Erikson, Marianne Hirsch, Michael Rothberg, Jeffrey C. Alexander, Didier Fassin, and Lauren Berlant among others. During the following weeks, we will evaluate the lessons we have drawn from White, Freud, and recent trauma theory through our examinations of Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved, W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Eden Robinson’s Traplines, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. These texts will also provide occasions to contemplate the role of literature (and culture more generally) in bearing witness to and working through violence, suffering, and their disturbing remainders.

William Butler Yeats remains one of Ireland’s most compelling poets and historical, public figures.  Yeats was a Nobel prize winner, a leading dramatist of the day, a committed believer in the occult, a writer of horoscopes, the editor of a briefly published but successful literary journal, a self-defined Irish nationalist, a Senator in the Free State, a fascist, a proponent of eugenics, a radio enthusiast, and, through all of this, one of Ireland’s most celebrated and controversial writers.

This course will read Yeats’s compelling poetry within the context of the history that he was immersed within and which he frequently challenged.  With a goal to explicate the ways in which they helped to clarify key aspects of Yeats’ own aesthetic program and the wider ambit of Irish cultural politics in his historical moment, we will offer a thorough reading of many of Yeats’ canonical poems, like “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “Easter, 1916,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” “The Second Coming,” “Meditations in a Time of Civil War,” and “The Circus Animals Desertion.”  However, this course will also offer students the opportunity to become well-versed in less canonical but no less important poems like “The Hosting of the Sidhe,” “No Second Troy,” “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” the Crazy Jane series and the many spiritualist and occult poems that Yeats composed and published during his lifetime (and a number that remained unpublished for some 40 years after his death). While we will read selections from Yeats’s prose, the focus of this course will remain on his poetry.

Natures of various kinds (wild, urban, agricultural) are in crisis. Literary history can help us to understand how we got here, and point to different kinds of stories that might be told about our entanglements with the more-than-human world.  

In this course, students will explore pivotal moments in environmental history through influential pieces of environmental and nature writing, attending to the shifting ecological imaginaries that have led us to this particular moment of ecological crisis, reckoning, and reimagining. These pivotal – and protracted – historical events include the rise of natural history, colonization and ecological imperialism, the industrial revolution, and the birth of modern environmental movements. From Romanticism and the turn to capital-N-Nature as “mind-cure,” to theories of “The Great Derangement” and Posthumanism, to anticolonial and Indigenous ecological interventions, we will trace a pathway to (and through) the “Anthropocene” and the relationships between humans and non-human nature, and between ecology and literature, that are helping to define it. 

Our journey through (primarily) British and North-American environmental literary history will feature important landmarks in non-fiction, poetry, and fiction, from imperial and colonial natural histories that sought to catalogue life on the planet, to poems and early environmental texts that sounded alarms about industrial pollution and urban alienation from nature, to narratives that reified and problematized the idea of wilderness, and finally to Indigenous and anti-colonial imaginings of a renewed relationship to the more-than-human world.

Before his brief life ended violently in 1593, Christopher Marlowe was a relatively prolific and well respected writer. Indeed, in roughly eight years, he wrote seven plays and produced important poetic works that included translations from Latin. For his fellow writer George Peele, Marlowe was "the Muses' darling"; for the seventeenth-century clergyman Thomas Beard, on the other hand, he was "a Poet and–tellingly–"a filthy Play-maker." This class will take up Marlowe's dramatic works, perhaps in combination with a play or two by his contemporary William Shakespeare, and it will consider his bold corpus in light of, among other things, early modern political intrigue, military expansion, foreignness, gender, sexuality, and theology. Marlowe's plays are more than occasionally messy, but they are also passionate and provocative. Together, we may find that Peele and Beard were both right. Students may be asked to participate in roundtable discussions, symposium presentations, or short stagings of key scenes, but details about assignments and readings will be made available closer to the start of the semester.  

When Renee “Cash” Blackbear comes through the door into a darkened barroom at the opening of Marcie R. Rendon’s 2017 novel Murder on the Red River, it is clear that this story, set in the Red River Valley between North Dakota and Minnesota in the 1970s, begins with a refusal of stereotypes and a reversal of conventional popular representations in twentieth-century settler colonial genre fiction. An accomplished pool player and sugar truck driver in 1970s North Dakota, Cash is an independent young Ojibwe woman who appears as kind of cowboy, a social justice crime fighter, an anti-Nancy Drew in her beat-up Ranchero, and a hardboiled detective who works in this first novel in the Cash Blackbear series to solve the murder of a man from the Red Lake Band of Chippewa. Margaret Stoecklein has drawn attention to the ways in which Indigenous detective fiction “convey[s] the legacies of settler colonial criminality. From theft of natural resources, to sexual violence against women, to theft of lands,” Indigenous detective fiction of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is focused on crimes that “arise from the colonialist power structure,” its writers emphasizing those criminal legacies and “conscious in their choices to transform the detective fiction formula.” In this course, we will read a handful of novels by Indigenous women writers and featuring Indigenous women detectives alongside critical works and works that consider past and present contexts for these narratives. 

Selected Texts 

Ramona Emerson (Diné), Shutter (2022) 
Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), Mean Spirit (1990) 
Carole LaFavor (Ojibwe), Evil Dead Center (1997) 
Vanessa Lillie (Cherokee), Blood Sisters (2023) 
Marcie R. Rendon (White Earth Nation/Chippewa), Murder on the Red River (2017)

Haters and lovers alike have often given credence to John Milton’s self-fashioning as solitary, self-made poet. For Samuel Johnson, “He was naturally a thinker for himself, confident of his own abilities and disdainful of help or hindrance”; for Wordsworth, his “soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart.” This seminar on one of English literature’s most singular poets will take a wide view of Milton's oeuvre to investigate the formation of an authorial voice that loves to set itself apart even as it screams against loneliness. We will read and discuss influential responses to Milton by other poets, short works from his 1645 Poems, selections of the controversial prose (especially the divorce tracts), and of course the late great poetry of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. Assessments in this fourth-year seminar will prioritize participation, oral seminars or prolusions, and a scaffolded research paper. 

This course gives students the opportunity to engage an urgent question for literary studies, with five Shakespeare plays as our starting point: in the face of an ever-increasing global ecological crisis, how does literature help us to understand the causes of and imagine responses to the rapidly growing threat to humanity’s existence that scientists have predicted and warned about for decades? Shakespeare’s work is immensely helpful in this regard. Written on the brink of modernity, Shakespeare’s work reflects developments in Shakespeare’s lifetime that have played a role in shaping our current crisis—or rather the concatenating crises imperilling humanity and myriad other species. At the same time, Shakespeare’s work powerfully exemplifies the immense imaginative capacity that literary writers bring to the problems that humanity has created for itself, the planet’s non-human beings, and the Earth’s elements and atmosphere.

We will study A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Lear, The Tempest, and Pericles in relation to select secondary readings that help us situate the Shakespearean drama and ecological crisis in relation to historical and contemporary thinking about humanity's relationship with non-human nature.

Keeping in mind the ancient Greek root of the word “ecology,” οἶκος, which means house or dwelling, we will also ask how the Shakespearean drama helps us consider what it takes to maintain a common house or dwelling that sustains Earth’s species, human and non-human, as well as living matter, and what our current “crisis” demands by way of response to ecocidal impulses and forces.

Our secondary readings will begin with Jason Moore’s “Capitalocene, Part 1: On the nature and origins of our ecological crisis” and will include selections from:

• Jorge Bergolio (Pope Francis), Laudato Si’ (2016)
• Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (Verso Books, 2006)
• Jairus Victor Grove, Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World (Duke UP, 2019)
• Genevieve Guenther, The Language of Climate Politics (Oxford UP, 2024)
• Polly Higgins, Eradicating Ecocide (2015)
• Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Press, 2013)
• George Monbiot, Regenesis: How to Feed the World Without Devouring the Planet (Penguin, 2022)
• David Wallace Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth (2019)
• Solarities: Elemental Encounters and Refractions (Punctum Press, 2023), eds. Howe, Diamanti, Moore
• Imre Szeman, Futures of the Sun: The Struggle over Renewal Life (University of Minnesota Press, 2024)
• Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (HarperColllins, 2020)

Without subscribing to the popular narrative that a Caribbean island like Jamaica is “the most homophobic place on earth” (Time Magazine  2006), this course examines how the tyranny of heteronormativity creates conditions for the vulnerability of queer male subjects who “inhabit unconventional genders” (King). Yet, as Nikoli A. Attai has argued, we need to “interrogate how … international human rights discourse positions the Anglophone Caribbean as a place of queer impossibility, exodus, and exile” (7). How might short generic accounts (in fiction, film and the (personal) essay) narrativize queer lives at home and abroad as ones of vulnerability, but also of resistance and resilience? How might the affective tropes such as fear, shame, anxiety, among others, be an effective barometer of queer psychological vulnerabilities? Beyond, the personal, what might the representation of violent scenes of subjection expose to us about the structural and discursive barriers to queer “thriving”? Refusing to participate in the sheer enumeration of “unliving” (McKittrick 2014) that tend to anatomize and produce the quantified abstraction of black and trans deaths, this course will also turn our attention to traditions of resilience. Deploying such concepts as “erotic agency” (Sheller), “defiant bodies” (Attai), “moments of rupture and repair” (Chin), and “Queer marronage” (Cummings), this course will map the affective contours of queer trauma, as well the energizing strategies of queer survival, “aliveness” (Quashie) and resilience.

Possible Texts:

CBC Documentary, Michelle Ross: Unknown Icon
Clarke, Austin. (A selection of stories by Barbadian Canadian writer)
Evaristo, Bernadine. (Nathaniel Price), Mr Loverman BBC Series (Selected Episodes)
Glave, Thomas. Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing From the Antilles (Selected Essays)
James, Marlon. Get Millie Black (Selected episodes of TV Series)
Miller, Kei Fear of Stones (Short Story Collection by Jamaican/British/American writer)
Negrón, Luis. Mundo Cruel (Short Story Collection by Porto Rican Writer)
Niblett, Anton Sections of an Orange (Short Story Collection by Trinidadian-American writer)
Anthology of selected stories from work by (Olive Senior & Thomas Glave (Jamaican writers), Mark McWatt (Guyanese writer), Rey Andújar (Dominican Republic writer)

Early to mid-twentieth century France welcomed many African American writers, artists, and musicians who sought escape from segregation and other violent forms of anti-Black racism back home. Across the Atlantic, the historical context of Jim Crow is accompanied by the Négritude movement in France and the Algerian war of independence. While France became a second home for the Harlem Renaissance, a decidedly queer Black Modernism emerged as a movement within a movement that included gay novelists like James Baldwin and Claude McKay. The queer legacy of other proponents has been recuperated by Black critics including the writer Chester Himes, the painter Beauford Delaney, and the poet Gwendolyn Bennett. Moreover, the afterlife of the celebrated performer Josephine Baker continues in contemporary queer and trans of colour cultures. This course gives students the opportunity to examine the complexities of this particular era of Black cosmopolitanism through the critical lenses of queerness and coloniality. We will interrogate interpretative possibilities of aesthetic forms in literature, art, and performance that explore Black diasporic dislocation as well as liberation across the double hegemonic pulls of American imperialism and French colonialism. We will question how metropolitan locations like Paris and Marseille become sites of both emancipation and violence, how they are reclaimed by Black queer and trans presence, and what kind of political possibilities emerge. We will consider how expressions of homosociality and homoeroticism act as interruptive forces toward unanticipated revolutionary solidarities and anticolonial resistance even as pressures of complicity with violence against Black and other bodies of colour mounts through the twentieth century. Overall, this course revisits varied classic and recently revived cultural productions to study the radical potential of Black modernist traditions and techniques.

Primary texts you may expect to read in this course:

Notes of a Native Son (1955) by James Baldwin
Another Country (1962) by James Baldwin
“This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” (1995) by James Baldwin
The Stone Face (1963) by William Gardner Smith
Banjo (1929) by Claude McKay
Romance in Marseille (2020) by Claude McKay
My Life of Absurdity: The Later Years: The Autobiography of Chester Himes (1976) by Chester Himes
Yesterday Will Make You Cry (2025) by Chester Himes
Selection of poetry by Gwendolyn Bennett (1902-81)
Selection of art by Beauford Delaney (1901-1979)
Selection of performances by Josephine Baker (1906-1975)

Digital media destabilizes traditional truth systems, producing a fragmented epistemological landscape where belief is networked, emotional, and algorithmically amplified. ENGL 485 explores this fragmented epistemological landscape and asks whether the current “crisis in truth” is best understood as a failure of media literacy, a consequence of platform design, or a structural imperative of late capitalism’s attention economy, and perhaps, most importantly, whether or not it is still possible to imagine a shared epistemological framework in the digital age?

The course begins by revisiting classical theories of the public sphere, particularly those associated with Jürgen Habermas, in order to establish a baseline model of rational-critical discourse. Students will then interrogate the limits of this model in contemporary platform environments, where discourse is shaped less by deliberation than by virality, affect, and algorithmic sorting. From here, the course moves into postmodern and post-structural critiques of truth, drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s concept of simulation and hyperreality and Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle’ to consider how digital media blur the boundary between representation and reality, producing environments in which the distinction between “true” and “false” becomes increasingly unstable.

On the basis of these theoretical foundations, students will analyze how platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter) facilitate the rapid circulation of misleading or false content through recommendation systems, network effects, and influencer economies. Particular attention will be paid to the role of affect and identity in shaping belief: misinformation is not simply consumed as information but often functions as a form of community-building, reinforcing group identity and shared worldviews. Case studies may include conspiracy movements such as QAnon, the proliferation of extremisms, the rise of the “manosphere,” misinformation surrounding global and regional crises (e.g., public health, elections, Alberta separatism, etc.), and the emergence of “alternative expertise” in influencer culture.

By the end of the course, students will have developed a sophisticated understanding of how truth is constructed, mediated, and contested in contemporary media systems, and will be equipped to engage critically with one of the most pressing intellectual and political challenges of the digital era.