2022-23 Fall and Winter 300 Level Courses

Fall 2022

ENGL 302 A1: Topics in Literary and Critical Theories
Critical Race Theory
C. Bracken

In The New York Times on February 4, 2002, Jamelle Bouie observed that “since January 2021,” in The United States “lawmakers in 37 states have introduced dozens of bills to restrict teaching on the subject of race and racism under the guise of opposition to ‘critical race theory.’ In 14 states, restrictions have either passed into law or been imposed through either executive action or on the authority of a state education commission.” So what is “critical race theory”? And what makes people want to censor it? This course will take a literary approach to the invention of race in literature, law, and other discourses. This is a branch of the broader study of the discursive construction of reality, something students of literature are well positioned to comment on.

ENGL 303 A1: Digital Cultures
C. Miya

What is/are “data” anyway? How have stories told about and through data shaped our perception of ourselves and the world around us? In this course, we will explore the implications of the datafied subject, including the rise of dataveillance and its role in the construction and commodification of the digital self. Together, we will think-through how data have been imagined by different communities throughout history and wrestle with the contradictions and seductive potentialities of the data dys/utopia. We will look, as well, to data activism and surveillance art, which reimagine data practice as tools of counter and anti-dataveillance resistance and critique. As part of the course, students will create a capstone project, using the data literacy skills we have developed over the semester to critically engage with and close read a data set.

ENGL 339 A1: Shakespeare
C. Sale

It is challenging to study Shakespeare's dramatic work in a single-semester course — Shakespeare wrote at least 37 plays, and we have the chance to study only four. The four plays selected — As You Like It, Othello, The Tempest, and Coriolanus — give us, however, a strong sense of the generic experimentation of Shakespeare’s writing for the stage as well as a strong sense of the politics of his work. They also permit us to consider the extent to which his work may continue to speak to the political challenges of the twenty-first century, especially in regard to issues of class, race, sexuality, gender identity, colonialism, the management of natural resources, and authoritarianism. Assignments are designed to assist in the building of skills in close reading, effective argumentation, and oral presentation as students move towards their own research projects, with course work culminating in a research paper of about 2,750 words.

ENGL 393 A1: Literature and the Environment:
Environmental Change to Place in Literature
C. Scott

This course, “Environmental Change to Place in Literature,” is invested in thinking about human society and culture in relation to environmental changes as stressors become exacerbated in near-future settings—and then mapping these issues as seen through speculative fictions about the future written by various writers considering how and where humanity will choose to live. These scenarios are seen through the lens of fiction as we examine how authors speculate about the future, but also through the lenses of scientific, cultural, and other contributions from the present day that inflect the storyworlds of the impacted characters. What is lost, gained, or altered for human populations as the world that we know adapts or fails to adapt to elements like climate change, resource scarcity, ecological unknowns, pandemics, and/or evolution, etc.?

Over the semester, we will consider a variety of speculative living situations for our descendants, and perhaps even our near-future selves, alongside how writers imagine problems, changes, and adaptations that will be important. In part, some of these imaginings about the future are disturbing and, even, dystopian, but we will also consider various “Futurisms”—terms suggesting the imperative and opportunity of forward, generative, and healing cultural movements as conceived by writers speculating about more positive outcomes despite what are currently troubling urban and rural as well as local, regional, and global issues.

N.B. Content Warning: This course contains potentially distressing themes of various kinds.

ENGL 396 A1: Aesthetics and Politics:
Testimony and Literature
C. Bracken

Derrida once remarked that it is impossible to decide on “the biographical or autobiographical truthfulness of a witness” who “claims to be recording” an episode from their own life. Yet it is equally impossible to remain in this undecidability. The source of this paradox lies in the structure of testimony itself. The witness does not prove that something happened in the past but asks only to be believed; testimony therefore remains “haunted,” structurally, by “what it excludes,” namely the possibility of fiction. This course will study the undecidable boundary between testimony and literature. It will be a theory course, with readings drawn from different disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, but we will weigh theoretical texts against representative readings from literature and film. The focus of both the literary and filmic readings will be stories of witchcraft, which always involve a testimony that borders on fantasy (and which, just as importantly, remain enduringly popular with audiences).

Winter 2023

ENGL 302 A1: Topics in Literary and Critical Theories
L. Dryda

In this course, we will consider how different literary critical approaches might help us answer one question: what is Gothic? Definitions of Gothic as associated with popular (low) culture, cheap thrills and the supernatural have persisted since the emergence of Gothic literature in the eighteenth century; one thinks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who, in his review of Matthew Lewis’s novel of incest, rape, ghosts, and murder The Monk in 1797, bemoaned that “the horrible and the preternatural have seized on the popular taste, at the rise and decline of literature.” Theorizing Gothic as a group of texts based on shared tropes and themes has persisted, yet, definitions based on these commonalities can be overly simplistic or dismissive, and fail to recognize the ways in which Gothic texts defy generic conventions as often as they rely on them.

We will consider a variety of theoretical approaches in order to interrogate the haunted and unstable boundaries of Gothic, including historicism, gender and queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonialism, ecocriticsm, psychoanalysis, and posthumanism. We will weigh these approaches against readings of popular Gothic texts from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Students may expect to encounter a wide range of theoretical works, and fiction and poetry including Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), Stephen King’s The Shining (1980), and selections from Ann Radcliffe.

ENGL 308 B1: Topics in Indigenous Literature:
Kinship in Contemporary Genre Fiction
B. Kerfoot

In this course, we will study kinship with animals, plants, spirits, monsters, and other non-human beings in contemporary genre fiction that may include fantasy, horror, science fiction, gothic, and post-apocalyptic literature. We will focus especially on how genre conventions shape our perception of kinship with non-human beings.

Possible Texts:
Daniel Heath Justice, Kynship: The Way of Thorn and Thunder
Eden Robinson, Monkey Beach
Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians
Richard Van Camp, stories from the Wheetago Wars series
Selections from Rachel Qitsualik and Sean Tinsley, Ajjiit: Dark Dreams of the Ancient Arctic; Joshua Whitehead (ed.), Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction; Hope Nicholson (ed.), Love Beyond Space and Time: An Indigenous LGBT Sci-Fi Anthology

ENGL 311 B1: Topics in Postcolonial Literature
Intimacies and Communities: Postcolonial Literature and the Politics of Decolonization
T. Tomsky

This course takes up a selection of texts from the Caribbean, Canada, South Africa, India, and Pakistan, to explore the impact and consequences of colonialism on postcolonial societies. Modern colonialism, beginning in the fifteenth century was a European enterprise, focused fundamentally on exploiting the natural resources and people of the colonies. Imperial expansion infamously brought with it guns, disease, and steel, but also European fauna, flora, epistemologies, practices, and institutions that reshaped the territories and societies of the colonized, often in damaging and enduring ways. Alongside their physical incursion, European colonizers turned to cultural forms to narrate and dominate their colonies: through literary representations, the colonial territory was feminized, and colonial relationships to the land and indigenous peoples were relayed through patriarchal and heterosexual forms of colonial desire. The land, and all the people who inhabited those environments were constructed as passive objects to be explored, possessed, made known, exploited, or cast aside by colonial men. In postcolonial narratives, writers seek to reconfigure those colonial relationships, whether in relation to the land, to community, to ideas of the nation, to sexuality, and to gender. Such reconfigurations are part of the anticolonial struggle and postcolonial empowerment, providing a mode to challenge colonial legacies and expose the damage they have caused. This course examines works by postcolonial writers who reimagine the postcolonial present and set out possible futures. Through them, we will explore the representation of relationships, communities, and intimacies that defy (neo)colonialism. A particular interest will be on the literary narratives and poetry of queer writers that trace how essentialist definitions of race and gender can be resisted, and how one’s relationship to borders and environments can be rethought. We will compare the way postcolonial writers create anticolonial strategies of resistance as well as account for empire’s unresolved legacies.

Required Texts
Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Dionna Brand, In Another Place, Not Here
Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven
J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Mohsin Hamid, Exit, West

Distributed Electronically (e-class)Texts
Es’kia Mphahlele, “Mrs Plum”
Koleka Putuma, select poems from Collective Amnesia
Film and media TBD

ENGL 336 B1: Sixteenth-Century Literature
The Common and Commons in Sixteenth-Century Literature
C. Sale

In this course we will investigate the many ways in which sixteenth-century texts engaged with one of the most important political ideas of early modern English culture, the idea that ‘all things’ should be ‘held in common’. We will begin our investigations with the two humanist texts that most famously articulate the idea, Erasmus’s Adages and Thomas More’s Utopia, and then consider brief excerpts from the work of the early English legal writer Christopher St. German, before studying the most well-known of the poems by the first woman writer in England to publish a verse miscellany, Isabella Whitney (in her “Will to London,” Whitney imagines a London in which all material goods are free). We will also consider historical texts such as the commons petition issued by the ‘rebels’ of the ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’ in 1536 and the ‘articles’ issued by commoners fighting enclosing of land at Mousehold Heath in 1549 in what is known as ‘Kett’s rebellion’. The holding of land in common is, as we’ll see, an idea people were prepared to defend to the death. Our dramatic readings will include the Shakespeare play that most famously articulates the desire to hold the realm in common, Henry VI Part II, which represents the Cade rebellion of the mid-fifteenth century, as well as the anonymous play The Life and Death of Jack Straw, which represents the earlier ‘peasants’ revolt’ of 1381, led in part by the minister John Ball. Sometimes we’ll be talking about commons’ rebellions, sometimes about religious thinking, and sometimes about political ideas. Always we will want to be thinking about literature’s role in helping us imagine more just or more equitable ways of being.

The course is designed to require little research from students beyond the assigned texts. Your goal is to read, think, and synthesize the ideas in our readings as you decide which of our course texts you would like to write about in your final paper, in which I will ask you to discuss what is arguably Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, Coriolanus, in relation to what we have learned from the sixteenth-century texts. Coriolanus, written in relation to the ‘uprisings’ in the Midlands against the enclosing of common lands in 1607, stages the bringing down of the character who claims that he wishes to ‘exceed the common’.
ENGL 353 B1: Topics in Nineteenth-Century Literature

ENGL 353 B1: Topics in Nineteenth-Century Literature
Literature in England, ca. 1830–1870: Becoming the Victorians
L. Robertson

Victoria came to the throne in 1837 as a girl of 18 and reigned until her death in 1901; we will concentrate in this course on the literature and culture of the first half of her reign. The Victorian period is often remembered nostalgically as a time of unprecedented British power, prosperity and confidence, or harshly for its grotesque urban slums, shocking social injustice and poverty, and imperial arrogance. In the twentieth century, the word “Victorian” became shorthand for all things prudish and sexually repressed. In this course we will read a variety of texts, both poetry and prose, from the beginning of Victoria’s long reign (and slightly earlier) until about 1870. Who did the people of Victorian England think they were? How did they imagine their world and themselves? How did they understand and try to represent their rapidly changing and modernizing world? Through our reading and discussions, we will try to increase our understanding of this complex and fascinating period.

English 367 B1: Topics in Contemporary Literature
Country gone to town: The urban-rural divide in contemporary literature
G. Faulkner

How does where we live inform the contours of one's lived experience? And how does this play out in the tiny universes of narrative and verse? The map is not the territory, of course, but it can usher us to think about the ways environment, culture, and history combine to form a sense of place, and even a sense of authorhood. To what extent does technology, access – to opportunity, education, infrastructure – and shared history affect this calculus?

Focusing primarily on the literature of North America, we will examine representations of the cityscape, countryside, and spaces in between, exploring themes of the self, community identification and alienation, and all the ways these map onto the contemporary politics of race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic class. Occasionally, we will also look at specimens of other narrative forms, including film, balladry, and underground publications. Readings will include selections from Gayl Jones, Alice Munro, Allen Gurganus, Tommy Orange, Miriam Toews, Juan Rulfo, Jesmyn Ward, and Ada Limón.

English 391 B1: Topics in Women’s Writing
“Maiden, Mother, Crone”
L. Rasmussen

Kathleen Woodward has noted that “In every culture, age, like any other important category, is organized hierarchically.” “In the West,” she continues, “youth is the valued term, the point of reference for defining who is old” (Ageing and its Discontents, 1991). While Woodward is speaking in broad terms here, it can be said that women in western societies encounter age-related expectations throughout their lives. On this basis, members of this class will consider the ways in which a selection of contemporary authors give voice to narrators or protagonists whose experiences intersect with, and are complicated by, age-related tropes and stereotypes. While the reading list is yet to be finalized, representative texts will include works such as Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person” (youth and agency), Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s memoir The Erratics (mothers and daughters), Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s novella Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun (ageing and nation), as well as Hiromi Goto’s graphic novel Shadow Life (the fourth age).

English 397 B1: History of the Book
N. Barnholden

This course will provide a survey of the field of Book History, which focuses on the material lives of text. We'll be construing "books" widely, to include electronic texts, pamphlets, and manuscripts, through an electic set of case studies and theoretical texts. By modifying Robert Darnton's "communications circuit" of circulation between reader, author, publisher, printer, bookseller, and reader, we will be particularly attentive to the materiality of texts as they move through different societies, classes, and histories. Ultimately this course will offer the tools for a thorough examination of the way that books function as a part of material cultures.