Courses

Situating literary research methods in the context of those of other disciplines, this course is designed to introduce new graduate students in English department to conceptual and methodological frameworks which characterize literary scholarship; how to perform literature reviews; specialized research and writing resources; critical methods for interrogating those resources; and relevant, emerging issues in scholarly communication.

Cross-listed in English, Humanities, and Translation Studies, this seminar introduces students to the conditions of emergence and development of the discipline of Comparative Literature from its beginnings in nineteenth-century Europe to its most recent global iteration of World Literature. Students will experience how expanded understandings of cultural translation and textuality have radically altered and expanded the Eurocentric character of the discipline. Questions for investigation include: How have the aesthetics and politics of Comparative Literature changed over the past two hundred years? What factors have influenced those changes? How is World Literature related to Comparative Literature? How do both relate to colonial, post-colonial, diasporic, cultural and translation studies and digital humanities?

Cross-listed in English, Humanities, and Translation Studies, this seminar introduces students to the conditions of emergence and development of the discipline of Comparative Literature from its beginnings in nineteenth-century Europe to its most recent global iteration of World Literature. Students will experience how expanded understandings of cultural translation and textuality have radically altered and expanded the Eurocentric character of the discipline. Questions for investigation include: How have the aesthetics and politics of Comparative Literature changed over the past two hundred years? What factors have influenced those changes? How is World Literature related to Comparative Literature? How do both relate to colonial, post-colonial, diasporic, cultural and translation studies and digital humanities?

This course examines the relationship between land, labour, and poetry from the classical origins of the georgic mode to the present day. Special focus is given to the relationship between georgic, transatlantic slavery, and settler colonialism in the long eighteenth century and beyond.

The Tradition of Pastoral in Literature, Theory, Film: From Edenic Myth to Lacanian Imaginary.

This course examines the writings of the Brontës alongside the literary rewritings, film adaptations, and Gothic mash-ups that their works and lives have inspired.

Examines the literary, musical, and visual cultures of modernism to create better understanding of the forms, meanings, and significance of interdisciplinary art practices.

This seminar takes a historical, theoretical, and interdisciplinary approach to sexuality, labor, and blackness in the genocidal territory known as the United States. We will engage in black feminist, trans, and queer methodologies of selected literature, film, and artwork while we also consider the limits of labor as a conceptual apparatus.

This course will consider the history, mythology, land, and peoples of the American west as they have been represented in films, fictions, and testimonies that shape our understandings of the contemporary west and America.

This course examines twenty-first century fictions to engage questions about love and its affective, ethical, social and political valences. It follows a critical practice that attends both to the contexts informing their writing and reading and their formal dimensions and properties.

Focuses on contemporary black Canadian writing in English, investigating both the literature and theoretical frameworks for locating its concerns and impact.

A survey of avant-garde poetry, prose, and drama in an international context.

An overview of multimodal writing and associated techniques for creative writers working in an expanded field, including methods of reading and critiquing multimodal works, from visual poetry to digital media. We will develop a shared vocabulary across mediums, and consider the applications and effects of artistic choices, implications for the field(s), and workshop individual pieces and projects.

What exactly is realism in fiction? How is it challenged by other ways of telling? Where is the border between factual and fictional narrative? How do we engage creatively with a world in crisis? Readings will be drawn from a range of contemporary fiction and criticism, spanning regions and genres. Students will write fiction and a short critical paper.

What exactly is realism in fiction? How is it challenged by other ways of telling? Where is the border between factual and fictional narrative? How do we engage creatively with a world in crisis? Readings will be drawn from a range of contemporary fiction and criticism, spanning regions and genres. Students will write fiction and a short critical paper.

This course traces the history of utopian and dystopian literature from the Renaissance to the present, studying how changing perspectives on the nature of the ideal or nightmarish society have been shaped by historical, cultural, intellectual, and literary developments.

Through an intersectional feminist lens, this course considers how contemporary writers and theorists explore refusal as a personal and political tactic.

This course focuses on current matters of concern and debate in contemporary literary and cultural theory. Issues will vary with Faculty expertise and contemporary developments. Students will acquire knowledge of the field and how it is variously transformed in practice.

This writing workshop analyses the components of the dissertation proposal, discusses appropriate writing strategies, and provides a faculty-member-facilitated, peer-review setting for students to develop their dissertation topics and draft their proposals according to Faculty of Graduate Studies' guidelines.

This writing workshop analyses the components of the dissertation proposal, discusses appropriate writing strategies, and provides a faculty-member-facilitated, peer-review setting for students to develop their dissertation topics and draft their proposals according to Faculty of Graduate Studies' guidelines.