4000-Level Course Descriptions

FALL 2023 | WINTER 2024

ENGL-4281-001 | Victorian Lit and Culture | C. Manfredi 
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

The “discovery” of the Pacific Islands by European explorers amplified the qualities of mystery and exoticism already associated with “foreign” islands. Their “savage” peoples, their geographical isolation, and their sheer beauty fascinated British visitors across the long nineteenth century. This course focuses on the textual representation of islands – real and imaginary – during the Victorian period (1832-1901), and beyond, and examines how British theories of imperialism, colonialism, and identity overlapped with the field of biology, science fiction, the Gothic, and realism. We will read excerpts from Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (published in 1839) and On the Origin of Species (1859) in conjunction with Alfred Russel Wallace’s Island Life (1880). We will then trace the influence of scientific discourse about island biology, natural selection, and geography to fictional works such as H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, R. L. Stevenson’s South Sea Tales, and William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies. Our final novel will be Kurt Vonnegut’s 1985 Galápagos (the title is a tribute to Darwin’s Beagle voyage to the Galápagos Islands) which toys with the merits of human evolution from a Darwinian perspective.

ENGL-4403-001 | Author Genre Form | K. Ready
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

The focus of this section (subtitled “Adapting Jane Austen in the New Media Age: Cyborgs and Sensibility?”) is Jane Austen. Of general interest will be Austen’s reception history and the establishment of Austen studies in the twentieth century, as well as the emergence of a devoted fan culture that has produced a significant body of fan fiction and regularly scheduled fan events around the world. Of special interest will be the global circulation of Austen and the innumerable adaptations and continuations of her novels, not only in print, but also in television, film, and new media. In addition to Austen’s novels, we will look at a selection of adaptations and continuations in various media in order to determine exactly how Austen has been and continues to be adapted today, paying attention to the impact of shifting gender, sexual, class, race, and other politics). As a theoretical framework we will draw from the overlapping fields of “adaptation studies,” “game studies,” and “new media studies” in order to understand the effect and implications of the transposition of original texts into other media forms.

ENGL-4730-001 | Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures: Writing the Environment| H. Snell
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course explores works by three different writers hailing from three different countries: Patricia Grace (New Zealand), Tim Winton (Australia), and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Canada). These writers have been selected for their innovative literary engagements with the environment and attentiveness to colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, ecocide, and climate change. All three writers privilege specificities of place and examine how their own social, cultural, and political position shapes their views of place. Attending to specificities of place has become urgent in the context of climate change, which impacts places differently. When one considers global inequities, an even greater argument can be made for thinking about specificities of place. Students examine writings of place closely and in conversation with relevant historical, theoretical, cultural, and critical works that help to provide context. Selections of readings for each writer include autobiographical as well as fictional works, providing a rich opportunity to study how the writers themselves reflect on writing the environment in relation to place-specific histories, contemporary structures of oppression, and multiple registers of identity. Texts covered include Patricia Grace's From the Centre: A Writer's Life and Potiki; Tim Winton's Island Home and Dirt Music; and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's A Short History of the Blockade and a selection of individual and co-authored stories, songs, and essays.

ENGL-4901-001 | Gender, Lit and Culture | C. Lypka
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

How are emotions, feelings, and moods expressed in literature? What relation is there between literary feeling and human emotion? Why are these sensory and embodied experiences important to our reading of literature? In this seminar, we will collectively explore the theory of affect—its nature, meanings, presence, mood, and force—to consider its narrative possibilities within contemporary women’s writing. Selected readings offer students an examination of the affective forces expressed in the voices of women writers of the late-20th and 21st century to consider how their words explore the diversity and commonality of female experience and expression in texts. This course will focus predominantly on affect theory as it emerged from queer, feminist, and racialized minoritarian discourses to contemplate the ways that theories of affect, feeling, sensation, embodiment, and emotion open up literary and cultural texts.

It is important to note that some of the selected texts for this course include material that can be quite difficult to read (in terms of trauma and violence), but the course is not designed around a damage-centred approach to those topics/themes.

WINTER 2024

ENGL-4903-001 | Critical Race Studies| I. Adeniyi
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

In this seminar course, we consider Afrofuturism as an intellectual framework, a cultural expression and movement, and a philosophical concept that articulate the histories and cultures of anti-Black racism, colonialism, and the racialization of science/technology vis-à-vis the past, present, and future of the modern world. We will consider Afrofuturism beyond the predominant focus on African American Blackness in the United States by examining the multiple evolving forms of Afrofuturism from different geographical, cultural, political, and identarian contexts. We will be examining some important works of different Afrofuturist artists/writers/scholars since the twentieth century with a focus on the intersections of Afrofuturist works and thoughts with science fiction, postcolonialism, feminism, eco-criticism, and posthumanism.

ENGL-4211-001 | Romanticism | P. Melville
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course focuses on British literature from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, otherwise known as the English Romantic period. Although Romanticism is most commonly associated with poetry, this section of the course will spend at least half of the semester covering a sample of influential novels written during the period. We will also cover a variety of Romantic poetry and nonfiction prose, but primary texts (to purchase, new or used) will include William Godwin’s The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813).

ENGL-4251-001 | Early Modern Lit and Cult: Performing Gender in Early Modern Comedy | B. Christopher
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

In a series of historically and theoretically informed seminar discussions and presentations, we will read and discuss five comic plays written between 1600 and 1668, paying attention to the interest and investment that the overwhelmingly male-dominated theatrical industry in Shakespeare’s time had in defining what it means to be a woman.

PLAYS:
William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, or, What You Will
Ben Jonson, Epicœne, or, The Silent Lady
Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, The Roaring Girl
John Fletcher, The Woman’s Prize, or, The Tamer Tamed
Margaret Cavendish, The Convent of Pleasure