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?

This course focuses on texts and theories of world literature. The content and method change from year to year, depending on the instructor.

Examines Shakespeare in relationship to women and female theatricality, addressing Shakespeare’s female characters, women actors and playwrights in Shakespeare’s England, and feminist responses to Shakespeare and his legacy.

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.

In the British 18th Century, descriptions of art insist over and over again that it presents things as they really are - a critical demand which masks deeply felt desires, for certainty, for an ideal image of moral nature, including moral feeling, and for objectivity. Art furthers social consensus to the degree that it creates the conditions for an ideally impartial, and therefore shareable, judgment of history, justice, truth and morality.

This course examines the nature and history of reading from an interdisciplinary perspective. What does reading mean?What have books meant to readers from antiquity to the present day? The course addresses these questions by focussing on the dynamic between the tangible objects that carry words into the world — manuscripts, printed books, digital media— and the intangible verbal text.

Examines Victorian representations of sexual pleasure and anxiety in a range of theoretical, historical, scientific, and literary texts.

This course examines theatrical responses to the attacks on September 11th, 2001 in the United States. We investigate the socio-political and cultural ramifications of the War on Terror, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We study media responses, theoretical texts, as well as a range of public interventions by playwrights and performative artists.

How should the technical innovations and visual rhetorics of Impressionist paintings be correlated with the experimental narrative practices of Pater, James, Conrad, Ford, and Woolf? We will examine these interdisciplinary relations and consider if and why literary impressionism is “the incipient moment of literary modernism

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.

Examines literary fictions in English written in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and follows a critical practice that attends both to the contexts informing their writing and reading and their formal dimensions and properties.

A survey of African American poetry with an emphasis on its concern with the representation of black vernacular, colloquial forms and music. Focus on Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, and Sonia Sanchez.

This course considers the traditions of hard-boiled and noir literatures, focusing on its depictions of urban life and representations of gender, crime, labor, and race, its various functions as social critique and stricture, and investigating considerations of style, problems of genre and popular culture, and the economics of the film and publishing industries.

This course examines Canadian poetry produced between 1920 and 1960, incorporating an overview of Modernist trends in Canadian poetry alongside a consideration of longer collections by significant poets.

Along with matters of craft, this workshop course considers questions that confront poets: how to make poetry relevant in today's society, what forms of attention does poetry allow, what relationship to poetic tradition is most effective, what is an effective relationship towards formal tradition and innovation, etc. All students will write both poetry and academic papers (critical and/or theoretical engagements with elements of contemporary poetry and poetics). Students taking the course as part of the GDiP in Creative Writing will be evaluated primarily on their poetry; other students will be evaluated on the basis of their academic work.

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.

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.