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ENG1002HF
Introduction to Old English II: Beowulf
A. Walton 

Course Description: (Revised December 2020)
This course is devoted to a collaborative reading and analysis of the Old English poem Beowulf: its language, its cultural and historical backgrounds, and its style. The work of our class will rely on close and informed attention to the poem's language and rhetorical strategies. In addition, we'll begin to explore some of the more technical aspects of studying Old English verse: possible topics include metrical analysis, paleography, and/or the problems of dating and authorship.

Completion of Old English I or its equivalent is desirable, but not a prerequisite.

Course Reading List:
TBA.

Course Method of Evaluation and Requirements:
TBA 

Term: F-Term Summer (MAY & JUNE 2021)
Time/Date: Mondays and Wednesdays / 11:00 am to 1:00 pm (Start date May 3; last date June 14. Class cancelled on Victoria Day, May 24.)
Location: Delivery TBA (NB: the summer 2021 graduate courses will be ONLINE DELIVERY (SYNCHRONOUS), via teleconferencing. Link to be sent to students directly by the instructor.) 

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ENG5006HF
Modernism and the Politics of Form
A. Hammond

Course Description
In recent years, critics working under the loose banner of “new formalism” have brought renewed attention to the social uses of literary form. Pushing back against conceptions of formalist criticism as ahistorical, totalizing, and tending to ideological mystification, these critics adopt a historical approach to form, showing how styles and genres emerge out of political contexts and in turn shape possibilities for thought, expression, and action in a given historical moment. This course tests the claims of new formalism through an investigation of modernism, among the most formally inventive and formally self-conscious of literary periods. Reading modernist writers like Virginia Woolf, Jane Bowles, and Jean Toomer alongside modernist critics such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Erich Auerbach, and Walter Benjamin, we will assess the impact of particular styles in light of specific political intents and historical circumstances, paying particular attention to the possibility of a modernist “democratic aesthetic.” Reading modernism through the new formalist approaches of contemporary critics like Caroline Levine and C. Namwali Serpell, and alongside democratic theory by Jacques Rancière and Chantal Mouffe, we will ask how much in new formalism is truly “new,” and how much a return to the concerns of modernists.

Course Reading List
Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Berolt Brecht, and Georg Lukács, Aesthetics and Politics (selections)
Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (selections)
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”
Jane Bowles, Two Serious Ladies
Henry Green, Living
Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time
Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin
Caroline Levine, Forms (selections)
Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?”
Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible
Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark
C. Namwali Serpell, Seven Modes of Uncertainty (selections)
Jean Toomer, Cane
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” “Poetry, Fiction, and the Future,” “The Leaning Tower”
Andrei Zhdanov et al., Problems of Soviet Literature: Reports and Speeches at the First Soviet Writers’ Congress.
(This reading list is subject to revision)

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements
Annotated Bibliography (10%)
Seminar Presentation and Position Paper (25%)
Research Essay Proposal (5%)
Research Essay (40%)
Participation (20%)

Term: F-Term Summer (MAY & JUNE 2021)
Time/Date: Mondays and Wednesdays / 11:00 am to 1:00 pm (Start date May 3; last date June 14. Class cancelled on Victoria Day, May 24.)
Location: Delivery TBA (NB: the summer 2021 graduate courses will be ONLINE DELIVERY (SYNCHRONOUS), via teleconferencing. Link to be sent to students directly by the instructor) 

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Course Description:
This course will focus on Canadian ecopoetry, beginning with selections of twentieth-century poetry that is not consciously “environmental” but nevertheless evokes various forms of ecological interrelatedness. We will then consider contemporary works that self-consciously investigate the role of poetry in responding to current environmental issues. We will read this body of work in light of ongoing critical debates surrounding ecopoetry’s relationship to the adjacent, but distinct field known as “ecopoetics.” While “Ecopoetry” can be used to designate any poetry that deals with environmental concerns, it often refers specifically to poetry that engages with politicized forms of environmentalism. Meanwhile, “ecopoetics” refers to a theory of poetry that investigates how poems might enact the dynamism of ecological systems on the written page; “ecopoetics” thus invokes a formal experimentalism that can seeminaccessible and therefore incompatible with grass roots environmentalism. We will explore the tensions between “ecopoetry” and “ecopoetics” by considering the diversity of approaches that Canadian ecopoetry encompasses, from the activist “poethics” of Rita Wong and Stephen Collis, to the formal experimentalism of Erin Mouré, Lisa Robertson, and Phil Hall, to the scientifically inspired poetics of Don McKay and Adam Dickinson.

Course Reading List:
Daphne Marlatt, Steveston; Dennis Lee, Civil Elegies; Di Brandt, Now You Care; Erin Moure, Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person; Phil Hall, Killdeer; Don MacKay, Strike/Slip; Adam Dickinson, The Polymers; Lisa Robertson, XEclogue; Rita Wong, Undercurrent; Carey Toane, The Crystal Palace; Stephen Collis, Once in Blockadia; Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott, Decomp; A. Rawlings and Chris Turnbull, The Great Canadian; Brenda Ijima (ed), eco language reader *Texts are subject to change based on availability. *Plus a selection of critical essays and chapters by Charles Olson, Jonathan Bate, Laura-Gray Street and Ann Fisher-Wirth, J. Scott Bryson, Evelyn Reilly, Heather Milne, Rita Wong, Adam Dickinson, Don McKay, Lyn Keller, and Pauline Butling.

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
Class Preparation and Participation 10%; Seminar Presentation & Report 20%; Conference Abstract 5%; Conference Presentation 20%; Research paper 45%.

Term: F-Term Summer (MAY & JUNE 2021)
Time/Date: Tuesdays and Thursdays / 11:00 am to 1:00 pm (Start date May 4; last date June 10.)
Location: Delivery TBA (NB: the summer 2021 graduate courses will be ONLINE DELIVERY (SYNCHRONOUS), via teleconferencing. Link to be sent to students directly by the instructor) 

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Course Description:
Joyce's biographer, Richard Ellmann, once remarked "we are still learning to be Joyce's contemporaries."  In Ulysses, Joyce turned to the well-known myth of a previous time in an effort to give shape to the much less obvious myths of his own time. Our primary question in this seminar will be: what did Joyce think he was doing in writing these stories and novels, how did that affect the way that he wrote them, and why did those narrative innovations become such a primary influence on the aesthetic of modernism? Joyce went out of his way, time and time again, to present himself as someone on a mission, someone who must not be stopped or Irish culture in particular, and World culture in general, would suffer. As we look at Joyce’s fiction through the lenses of major theoretical approaches to in this seminar (psychoanalytic, feminist, post-colonial, Marxist, modernist—to name the most prominent), we will also maintain, throughout the course of the seminar, a keen interest in "the reality of experience" as Joyce would have witnessed it—the rise of advertising and commodity culture, as well as the birth of a new Art form: cinema.

Course Reading List:
Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a young Man, and Ulysses
A packet will be prepared with selections gleaned from the bibliography below:
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. MODERNITY
Berman, Marshall. All that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity (1987)
Charney, Leo. Cinema and the invention of modern life
Felski, Rita. The gender of modernity
Fornäs, Johan. Consuming media: communication, shopping and everyday life (2007)
Gillespie, Michael Allen. The theological origins of modernity
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1995)
Jameson, Fredric. A singular modernity: essay on the ontology of the present (2002)
Misa, Thomas J. Modernity and Technology
Smart, Barry. Facing modernity: ambivalence, reflexivity and morality (1999)
II. JAMES JOYCE
Attridge, Derek. The Cambridge companion to James Joyce
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce (Oxford University Press, 1959)
Herr, Cheryl. Joyce's Anatomy of Culture
Joyce, Stanislaus. My Brother's Keeper: James Joyce's Early Years
Kershner, R.B. Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder
Leonard, Garry. Advertising and commodity culture in Joyce. Reading Dubliners again: a Lacanian perspective
North, Michael. Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern
III. MODERNISM:
Armstrong, Tim. Modernism: a cultural history
Caws, Mary Ann. Manifesto: a century of isms
Caughie, Pamela L. Disciplining Modernism.
Kolocoroni, Vassiliki. Modernism: an anthology of sources and documents
Levenson, Michael Harry. The Cambridge companion to modernism
Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: a literary guide
Whitworth, Michael H. Modernism.

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
10% Participation (weekly two-page position papers); 20% twenty-minute presentations followed by student-led discussion; 70% final essay (20 pages).

Term: F-Term Summer (MAY & JUNE 2021)
Time/Date: Tuesdays and Thursdays / 11:00 am to 1:00 pm (Start date May 4; last date June 10.)
Location: Delivery TBA (NB: the summer 2021 graduate courses will be ONLINE DELIVERY (SYNCHRONOUS), via teleconferencing. Link to be sent to students directly by the instructor) 

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