2023-24 Fall and Winter 300 Level Courses

Winter 2024

ENGL 301 LEC B2: Topics in Genre: Love Stories
G. Kelly

ENGL 302 LEC B1: Topics in Literary and Critical Theories
C. Bracken

Writing in The New York Times on February 4, 2022, 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 why do so many people want to censor it?  According to Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, the critical race theory movement is “a collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relations among race, racism, and power.”  The movement grew up in legal studies in the 1980s and 90s as a way of rethinking conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses by putting them in a broader perspective of economics, history, social setting, group- and self-interest, the emotions, and the unconscious.  The movement quickly spread to other disciplines.  Maybe CRT is a target because it questions the foundations of the liberal order, such as the principles of equality, rationality, and legal (as well as other forms of) neutrality. Although the CRT movement grows out of the critical discussion of American law and society, it is hoped that the two major literary readings will open up a Canadian perspective.  

ENGL 303 LEC B1: Digital Culture
J. Cohn

ENGL 308 LEC B1: Topics in Indigenous Literature
C. Bracken

This course was originally inspired by an interview that Sherman Alexie gave to the New York Times in November, 2013. Asked if he would recommend any new books by Indigenous authors, Alexie says that what catches his interest today is Indigenous genre fiction: “sci-fi, horror, crime and experimental fiction.” Alexie himself has written horror and crime. Alexie’s remark recalls something Eden Robinson says in the notes to Blood Sports: “I prefer the older, bloodier versions of fairy tales.” In August, 2020, the Times published another article, ‘We’ve Already Survived an Apocalypse,’ on the enduring popularity of genre fiction among Indigenous authors (and, presumably, their readers). Horror remains a trend in Indigenous fiction. Why? Ned Blackhawk points out that “the narrative of American History” has failed to gauge “the violence that remade much of the continent before U.S. expansion.” Indigenous horror might be a literary response to this forgotten history of violence.

ENGL 315 LEC B1: South Asian Writing
L. Harrington

This course will study writing from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as diasporic and transnational authors. While the postcolonial South Asian novel in English has been embraced by the Western world, the English language holds a complex place in South Asian literary society. Therefore we will begin our conversations by tracing some key issues around language and indigenous literary traditions. Within this framework we will examine the period of India’s decolonisation from the British Empire and the creation of West and East Pakistan in 1947 in Partition literature. Our focus will then move to thematic issues informed by the methodologies of postcolonial literary practice, for example gender and the nation, representing the subaltern, migration and diaspora, and the concept of New India. The syllabus will include short stories, film, poetry, essays and some novels.

ENGL 327 LEC B1: Topics in Medieval Literature
L. Schechter

This course takes up works by Geoffrey Chaucer, one of the most well regarded and influential authors of the medieval period. Students will read Chaucer’s romance Troilus and Criseyde and several selections from The Canterbury Tales; they will also watch modern adaptations, including, likely, the raunchy black comedy The Little Hours (2017), a loose adaptation of work by Chaucer’s near contemporary (and frequent source of inspiration), Giovanni Boccaccio. 

Discussions will often focus on gendered experiences, although issues such as race, religion, economics, and sexuality will also be considered when possible. Chaucer’s writing is incredibly diverse in its topics and approaches: sometimes raucous, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes haughty, his work provides a rich variety of perspectives on late medieval English culture. While I may discuss key Middle English words in order to develop context and interpretation, class readings are all in modern English.

ENGL 339 LEC B1: Shakespeare
C. Sale

This course in Shakespeare will focus on an under-appreciated aspect of the Shakespearean drama, its class politics. Sixteenth-century English society was highly stratified, with elite political commentators attempting to justify its culture of “degree,” which ranged from the sovereign down to the lowliest agricultural labourers, by claiming that some persons were the greater beneficiaries of “nature’s light” and were therefore more “excellent” than others. As a result of their alleged superiority, the more “excellent” persons were supposedly entitled to all kinds of rights and privileges withheld from others. In our investigation of Shakespeare’s strong and abiding interest in these issues, we will study four plays that take us across the full range of Shakespeare’s career in writing for the stage, starting with the very early Comedy of Errors, in which the twin Dromios experience totally different treatment at their masters’ hands, and ending with Shakespeare’s very last tragedy, Coriolanus, set in the earliest days of the Roman republic, just after the plebeians had gained political representation in the senate. The tragic protagonist believes the plebeians are rats and dogs who deserve no such representation. We will also study Shakespeare’s most famous comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which the “Rude Mechanicals,” humble artisans, aim to have their production of “Pyramus and Thisbe” “preferred” for presentation at Duke Theseus’s court, and King Lear, that play in which two old men have to experience great deprivation before they grasp the social imperative of caring for others less well off than themselves. As we will see, the question of “class” is very hard to disentangle from the question of how women were treated in early modern English culture.

ENGL 343 LEC B1: Topics in 18th-century Literature
K. Binhammer

This course explores the historical representation of gender and sexuality in Britain through a range of literary genres from Restoration drama to domestic fiction. We will pay particular attention to the intersection between the emerging essentialist definitions of bourgeois white femininity and the rise of heteronormativity. The course will ask questions such as: How do literary texts re-imagine the difference between male and female in the period? How does the representation of sexuality shift from libertine poetry to the gothic novel? In what ways does the rise of capitalism and imperialism shape representations of gender and sexuality? Does the rise of the professional woman writer change the discourse of gender?

We will be interested in de-naturalizing our contemporary assumptions about femininity and masculinity, and hetero- and homo-sexuality, by confronting the historical otherness of early LGBTQ2+ and feminist writers. Writers to be studied include Aphra Behn, Lord Rochester, Eliza Haywood, Horace Walpole, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Topics include pornography, cross-dressing, effeminancy, social class, domesticity, marriage, same-sex desire, and sentimentalism.

Please note: course readings will include explicit depictions of sex and scenes of sexual violence that some students may find offensive and/or traumatizing. The class aims to provide an open space for the critical exchange of ideas in an atmosphere of mutual respect and sensitivity.

Texts:
Broadview Custom Course Pack
Frances Burney, Evelina (Oxford)
Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary or The Wrongs of Woman (Oxford)

ENGL 353 LEC B1: Topics in 19th-c Literature:
Surveying the 19th-Century Gothic in Literature and Retrospective Film Adaptations
S. Sucur

This course will focus largely on the Gothic subgenre, both as a popular extension of the Romantic Movement of the early 19th century and as a type of writing that gave inspiration to several retrospective film adaptations of the 1960s, such as those of Hammer Film Productions, American International Pictures, and Galatea-Jolly Film. Topics to be considered in class will include theories of the picturesque and the sublime, Romantic Irony, the philosophical underpinnings and parameters of Romanticism, as well as broader motifs and characteristics of the Gothic. 

Artists, authors and film directors to be focused on in the course will include Henry Fuseli, Caspar David Friedrich, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, V.F. Odoevsky, Mario Bava, Roger Corman, Gordon Hessler, and others. Representative artworks, texts and movies will be shared via the class syllabus.

ENGL 376 LEC B1: Topics in Canadian Literature
J. Rak

ENGL 380 LEC B1: Writing from Here
S. Krotz

ENGL 385 LEC B1: Topics in Popular Culture:
Sun, Sea and Sex: Caribbean Poetry & Erotic Politics
M. Bucknor

As a travel destination, the Caribbean islands have traditionally been conceived as a sexualized landscape. Indeed, from as early as the colonial period, the Caribbean has been both feminized and eroticized as part of the progressive narrative of conquest (Anne McClintock 1995; Greg Thomas 2007). The hetero-patriarchal and imperialist agenda of racial capitalism framed the resources of these lands as available for penetration, extraction and control. As Mimi Sheller has reminded us, “the Caribbean has been repeatedly imagined and narrated as a tropical paradise in which the land, plants, resources, bodies, and cultures of its inhabitants are open to be invaded, occupied, bought, moved, used, viewed, and consumed in various ways” (Consuming the Caribbean 1). At the same time, “the sexual imperative of the imperial exercise, as Robert Aldrich has shown, made empire’s outposts a “homosexual playground” (Colonialism and Homosexuality 2-5). 

This course will consider the political significance of the erotic in Caribbean poetry. Exploring the issues of colonialism, gender, race, class, sexuality, the environment, history and capitalism, we will give extended attention to the motif of the erotic as an index of decolonial politics. An anthology of selected poems from the Anglophone Caribbean, in addition to at least 4 small poetry collections by Andre Bagoo, Dionne Brand, Kei Miller and Tanya Shirley will provide the texts for the course.

ENGL 388 LEC B1: Children's Literature
R. Prusko

ENGL 391 LEC B1: Topics in Women's Writing:
Women with Guts”: Women and Horror Fiction in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
L. Rasmussen

In this course—the title of which is credited to Rue Morgue Magazine #10—participants will study a sampling of women’s horror fiction. As Lisa Kröger and Melanie Anderson point out, women writers often excel with this “transgressive genre” because they “are used to stepping outside of the carefully drawn boundaries that society has set for them” (Monster She Wrote). The course will argue that horror writers such as Tananarive Due, Shirley Jackson, Mariana Enriquez, Jessica Johns, and Carmen Maria Machado are called to transgress boundaries in at least two related ways.

First, as writers of genre fiction who clearly work to engage with complex subjects, they must navigate horror’s complicated relationship with the so-called literary world. By extension, when working to represent female protagonists, these authors must take the risks associated with working in a genre that contains many misogynistic tropes. As we consider this tension, we will also make space for some work by male writers Stephen Graham Jones and Stephen King respectively, each of whom has written best-selling works of horror centered on female protagonists.

ENGL 398 LEC B1: Histories of Reading
D. Fuller

What is the history of reading? What is the difference between an ‘ideal’ reader and an actual reader? How is the history of print reading part of the history of colonization? What does it mean to be a reader in the twenty-first century? This course is an introduction to the history of reading in North America and Western Europe. It is not a traditional literary text-based course since it engages with scholarship and methods from reading studies, cultural studies and book history, but no prior knowledge of these fields is required. We will use a variety of historical and contemporary case studies, artifacts, online resources and secondary texts (historical and theoretical) to explore the different ways that readers have acted in different geographical places and at different times in history. The aim of the course is to provide students not only with some knowledge of the history of readers and reading, but also with a vocabulary and with conceptual frameworks that they can use to think and write critically about different cultures and practices of reading.

The course consists of four sections: Unit 1: What is the history of reading?; Unit 2: Theories of Readers and Reading: From ‘Ideal’ readers to Fans; Unit 3: Exploring the Reading Experience and Evidence of Reading: Communities of readers and Individual readers; Unit 4: Making Readers in the 21st century.

Classes will combine a range of teaching and learning activities including mini-lectures and lectures, “labs”; small group work, and plenary discussions. Students will prepare by reading a selection of secondary material some of which will be historical, at other times, theoretical. There will also be some hands-on ‘field work’ tasks often during the “labs” (e.g. experimenting with the Reading Experience Database; recording your own reading history).

Readings will include:-
Selections from: Shafquat Towheed, Rosalind Crone, Katherine Halsey (eds.) The History of Reading: A Reader. (2010)

Online Resources to be consulted and used may include:-
The Reading Experience Database (Open U, UK)
The Decolonizing Description Project (UoA Libraries)
WHAT MIDDLETOWN READ project (www.bsu.edu/libraries/wmr) (USA)
Memories of Fiction Project (UK)

Fall 2023

ENGL 300 LEC A1:Social and Cultural History of the English Language

ENGL 302 LEC A1: Topics in Literary and Critical Theories
B. Bucknell

ENGL 305 LEC A1: Topics in Literature and Religion
C. Harol

ENGL 306 LEC A1: Life Writing
J. Rak

ENGL 337 LEC A1: Topics in Early Modern Literature
L. Schechter

This course will focus on revenge tragedies written by William Shakespeare’s peers and competitors. At times preposterous and always bloody, revenge tragedies provide a glimpse into early modern thoughts on order and chaos, justice and vengeance, and ritual and spectacle, not to mention thoughts on the state and the domestic. Students will watch Titus, Julie Taymor’s 1999 adaptation of Shakespeare’s play Titus Andronicus, to get a sense of Shakespeare’s work in this fast-paced and violent dramatic genre, but the focus of the course will be on other playwrights who mattered just as much to early modern playgoers and readers.

All students will be required to stage a scene from a selected revenge tragedy, but students may be able to show their participation in this graded assignment through work that is not based on staged performance. Students may be able to offer an initial exposition of the staging, write an adaptation for group performance, or provide theatre tech help, for example. Each student may also be required to present on a class text, but formal graded assignments will be confirmed closer to the start of the semester.

ENGL 343 A1 Topics in 18th-Century Literature
Women’s Writing in the Eighteenth Century
L. Robertson

This course will concentrate on British women’s writing during the eighteenth century. The disruption and chaos of civil war and political and social turmoil in the seventeenth century opened up cultural space for new voices, new ideas, new stories, new freedoms, and new anxieties. Writing of the early part of this period, in particular, is characterised by a willingness to experiment and take risks. But, of course, the risks for women were rather different, and often more serious, than they were for men. We will consider women’s understanding of their position in the world during this period––as women, as members of communities, as readers, and as writers; their hopes, anxieties, and frustrations with marriage, motherhood, and domestic life; their wrestling with love and sexual desire; their engagement with politics and public life; their relationship to their bodies through experience of disease, pregnancy, and aging; and, through it all, their willingness to experiment with form and to participate fully in the world and in the literary culture of their time.

ENGL 358 LEC A1: American Texts to 1900
M. Simpson

What do we mean when we speak of “American literature”? In what ways and to what ends does literature, broadly understood, illuminate subjectivity and belonging in the American instance? Our focus, in addressing these questions, will involve literary cultures and practices from the long nineteenth century, which we will approach by way of six interrelated rubrics: possession, publicity, faith, liberty, mobility, and dissent.

These rubrics encompass a number of issues relevant to the period under study: revolution, republicanism, and nationalism; Native American dislocation and resistance; religious authority and controversy; the emergent contours of capitalism; territorial expansion and imperial desire; slavery and its afterlives; struggles over suffrage; the politics of social class; protest, discord, and fracture; the conditions of literary-cultural production. In undertaking to explore such issues, we will confront questions of labor and value—literary, but also economic, social, and political—so as to examine the often volatile dynamics of representation at work in American writing before 1900. Our study will cover a range of genres, including autobiography, political tract, travelogue, essay, poetry, and fiction.

ENGL 367 LEC A1: Topics in Contemporary Literature:
The Surveillance Society: Security and Spectacle in Contemporary Fiction
T. Tomsky

This course explores representations of the so-called “surveillance society” in literature, popular culture, film, and critical theory. We will explore the themes of privacy, control, in/security, and citizenship as they intersect with subjectivity, gender, race, and sexuality. In particular we will be focused on what literature and visual culture reveal about public anxieties in response to surveillance cultures, as represented by the state, social media, and other kinds of new technologies.

Texts we will examine include:
George Orwell, 1984
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Alan Moore and David Lloyd, V for Vendetta
Dave Eggers, The Circle
Claudia Rankine, Citizen
Black Mirror TV series

ENGL 373 LEC A1: Colonialism and Canadian Literature
K. Smitka

ENGL 373: ‘Colonialism and Canadian Literature' investigates the ways in which literature, and acts of representation more broadly, have contributed to the colonization of what is now Canada. The course is divided into four units: 1) ‘Open Space,’ examines the prevalence of images of unoccupied land within Canadian visual arts and literature; 2) ‘Ethnographic Encounters’ investigates the settler impulse to document and preserve Indigenous cultures because of a belief that these cultures were disappearing; 3) ‘Technological Nationalism’ looks at the role of technology, including communications technology, in the Canadian nation-building project; and 4) ‘Calls for Decolonization’ observes Indigenous responses to Canada’s colonial history.

ENGL 385 LEC A1: Topics in Popular Culture
Strips, Books, Novels—the Forms of American Comics
N. Barnholden

Despite the name, comics are not a genre—and in American culture, they have generally appeared as three major forms: short form comic strips, the comic book periodical, and the often-complete graphic novel. What does it mean for comics stories to be told in different forms? This course will introduce students to a very wide and eclectic set of fictions told as comics in order to give context and specific history to a consideration of form, which will be applicable to other literary forms. We will consider the daily comic strip, the anthology comic book, the serialized graphic novel, and everything in between. Attention will be paid to the texts’ material construction and circulation. Genres will vary wildly from magic-realist pseudo-memoir to slapstick humour, from gritty crime to superhero drama.

ENGL 392 LEC B1: Queer and Trans Studies

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