2021 Summer Graduate Course Timetable (TBA) & Course Descriptions
*Please note: Course Timetable, scheduled times, descriptions, reading lists, and/or locations are TBA and may be subject to change.
NOTE: Unless otherwise indicated, most Graduate English courses will be held in the Jackman Humanities Building (i.e., JHB), 170 St. George Street.
2021 Summer Graduate Course Descriptions
ENG1002HS
Old English II: Beowulf
A. Walton
Course Description:
This course is devoted to a reading of Beowulf, within the context of the English heroic age. The heroic concepts and values which inform the poem will be analyzed primarily through the poet's linguistic choices and rhetorical strategies: the poetic compounds he coins or appropriates, his appositions, variations, and digressions. Language will be used as a tool to explore cultural questions such as the manipulation of kindred and ethnic affinities and the constructions of legitimate and illegitimate violence. In addition, we will be concerned with questions of dating, of meter, of the authority of the manuscript, of the poem in its manuscript context, and, finally, of the evidence of archaeology.
Completion of Old English I or its equivalent is desirable, but not a prerequisite.
Course Reading List:
Klaeber's Beowulf, 4th ed. (U of T Press, 2008) Other Required and Recommended Texts: available on the course website.
Course Method of Evaluation and Requirements:
TBA
Term: F-Term Summer (MAY & JUNE 2021)
Time/Date: TBA
Location: TBA
Return to 2020-2021 Graduate Course Timetable.
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: TBA
Location: TBA
Return to 2020-2021 Graduate Course Timetable.
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: TBA
Location: TBA
Return to 2020-2021 Graduate Course Timetable.
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: TBA
Location: TBA
Return to 2020-2021 Graduate Course Timetable.
