2024 Summer Courses

Important information regarding Graduate English Summer Enrolment: 

Summer Course Timetable, scheduled times, delivery method, descriptions, reading lists, and/or locations may be subject to change.

IMPORTANT NOTE:  Department of English ACORN Enrolment for Summer F courses: Thank you for your patience. The technical problem with course enrolment has been fixed.

The 2024 Graduate English summer course enrolment previously scheduled to open on Monday, April 1, will now open starting at 6:00 a.m. on WEDNESDAY, APRIL 3. 

Our sincere apologies for any inconvenience. 

• There isn't an ACORN waitlist for summer courses. Summer enrolment is on a first-come, first-served basis.
• The School of Graduate Studies final date to enrol in May-to-June (F) or May-to-August (Y) summer session courses is 13 May (English offers Graduate English courses during the summer F-Term session, from May to June).  
• The School of Graduate Studies final date to drop May-to-June F session courses without academic penalty is 3 June.

NB: Monday, May 20 Victoria Day - no classes on the Holiday.

ENG1582HF L0101 - CANCELLED FOR SUMMER 2024 (24 Oct. 2023)

Piers Plowman

Gaston, K.

ENG5284HF L0101

Canadian Animal Stories: Ethics and Aesthetics

Aguila-Way, T.

Course Description:

This course will explore intersections between Canadian literary studies and the interrelated fields of critical animal studies and animal narratology. Anchored in seminal readings by Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Cary Wolfe, Donna Haraway, and J.M. Coetzee, the first half of the course will introduce some of the key ethical and representational questions that inform the interrelated fields of critical animal studies and animal narratology: What role does language play in mediating the boundary between humans and non-human animals? What power does literature have to imagine animals without erasing their "significant otherness" (Haraway)? Are certain literary forms more suited to this challenge than others? The second half of the course will take the lessons we have gleaned from our readings in critical animal studies and animal narratology to query the role of animals within the Canadian literary imagination. What is at stake in declaring, as Charles G.D. Roberts once did, that the animal story is a distinctly “Canadian genre”? In what ways has the Canadian literary imagination instrumentalized animals to bolster the English Canadian projects of “white civility” (Coleman) and settler-colonialism? And how have Canadian writers used literary aesthetics to imagine more ethical ways of being with animals?

Course Reading List:

Theoretical Texts: Martin Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics; Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am; Cary Wolfe, “In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion”; Donna Haraway, When Species Meet; David Herman, Narratology Beyond the Human; Mario Ortiz-Robles, Literature and Animal Studies; Lori Gruen, Entangled Empathy; Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital; J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals; Ursula Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Animals.

Literary Texts: Charles G.D. Roberts, The Kindred of the Wild Grey Owl, Pilgrims of the Wild; Barbara Gowdy, The White Bone; Marian Engel, Bear; Margaret Atwood, Surfacing; Don McKay, Birding, or Desire; Adam Dickinson, Kingdom, Phylum; Alyssa York, Fauna; Thomas King, The Back of the Turtle; Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, A Short History of the Blockade.

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements

• Class Preparation and Participation - 15%
• Seminar Presentation & Report - 30%    
• Seminar Response & Report - 15%    
• Research paper - 40%

Scheduling

Term: SUMMER F-TERM (May 2024 and June 2024)
Date/Time:  3 hours, Mondays/Wednesdays, 1pm – 4pm (First class: May 6, 2024 / No class VICTORIA DAY, May 20, 2024 Holiday / Last class: June 17, 2024 MAKE-UP CLASS ADDED: Wednesday 19 June 1-4pm Room 718) 
Location: Room JHB 616, St. George Campus (Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George Street) 
Delivery: In-Person

ENG6188HF L0101 

Land, Myth and Translation in a Time of Crisis (INSTRUCTOR CHANGED COURSE - July 2023)

Most, A.

Course Description

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer re-tells the Turtle Island and Garden of Eden creation stories, and imagines the fateful conversation that ensued when the two met. In this course, students will engage with Genesis 1-3 through the lens of the conversation Kimmerer proposes, asking how a reparative reading of this foundational cultural narrative might offer a strategy for meeting environmental crisis. By comparing different English versions of the Bible, students will explore how translation progressively stripped the language of Genesis 1-3 of its animacy and the story of its deep connection to land, enabling the myth to become a justification for colonization and environmental degradation. Then, utilizing apocryphal stories, Near Eastern mythology, ancient and medieval commentary from the Jewish and Christian traditions as well as ecocritical and translation theory, we will listen for echoes of an animate land-based cosmology present within the Biblical text. In addition to conventional seminar sessions, the course will include a number of experiential workshops on different storytelling modes, in which students will enact “re-story-ation,” drawing the re-animated biblical myth into conversation with the land itself.

Course Reading List

Readings will include texts such as:
Martin Shaw, Scatterlings and Smoke Hole (selections)
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement
Richard Powers, “A Little More Than Kin,” Emergence Oct 2021
Genesis 1-3 (in three translations: KJV, JPS, and Everett Fox)
Ancient Near Eastern Myths; Gilgamesh, Inanna, Tiamat (translations TBD)
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (selected essays)
Thomas King, The Truth About Stories
Leanne Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back (selected essays)
Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (selections)
Mary Jane Rubenstein, Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (selected chapters)
Rachel Havrelock, “The Mother of Life and the Infertility of Eden,” in Eve: The Unbearable Flaming Fire.  and “Home at Last: The Local Domain and Female Power,” in The Bible and Feminism: Remapping the Field.  
Stephen Greenblatt, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve (Chapters 1-3)

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements 

• Weekly Council Contributions  20%
• Class Participation 20%
• Final Project Written Component 40%
• Final Project Presentation Component 20%

Term: SUMMER F-TERM (May 2024 and June 2024)
Date/Time: 2 hours, Tuesdays/Thursdays, 1pm – 3pm (First class: May 7, 2024 / Last class: June 13, 2024)
Location: Room CHANGED (21 May 2024) to UC F204 (University College, 15 King's College Circle, University of Toronto)

*Please see the note below about continuing restricted access to University College.

• We have been made aware that the building is currently on restricted access protocol.  This means entry to the building for you and your attendees will be accommodated through the east side door at Hart House Circle.  All the other doors to the building will be set to fob access only.
• As part of that access, you may be requested to show your T-Card and/or verify the course and location.  Your cooperation will be appreciated to ensure a smooth access to the building.
• This protocol is subject to change depending on the circumstances.

Delivery: In-Person

ENG6532HF* L0101 - CANCELLED FOR SUMMER & MOVED TO FALL 2023 TERM

Writing More-than-Human Lives

Ackerman, A.

ENG6560HF L0101 

Visual Media and Human Rights Work 

Suzack, C.

Course Description:

Visual media plays an important role in advancing human rights work. From its recognition as a site that directs the spectator’s gaze to themes conveyed by human rights struggles and failures, to its pedagogical aims of providing viewers with a framework from which to act on behalf of others, documentary film participates in dramatizing and making proximate the future work that remains to be done to secure the protection of human rights. In this course, we will explore how visual media in the form of documentary film participates in these practices. We will screen films associated with literary texts to ask how visual media widens the scope of representation associated with human rights narratives and assess the degree to which film, like literature, disrupts settler-colonial nation- states representational practices that project a “fantasy of victims in the image of perpetrators” in order to justify “retrospectively what perpetrators have done” (Moore “Film After Atrocity”). Course readings and class discussions will focus on literature, film, and legal cases to explore how these texts overlap and diverge and assignments will provide opportunities to explore the aesthetic features of film and theoretical arguments associated with human rights.

Course Reading List

Texts:

Sophia A McClennen and Alexandra Schultheis Moore, Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights (2015) (selections); Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (2007); Sonia M. Tascón, Human Rights Film Festivals: Activism in Context (2014); Richard Wagamese, Indian Horse: A Novel (2012); Richard Van Camp, The Lesser Blessed (1996); Katherena Vermette, The Break (2016); Richard, K. Sherwin. “Visual Jurisprudence.” 57 NYL Sch. L. Rev. 11 (2012-2013); Kathleen Mahoney, “The Untold Story: How Indigenous Legal Principles Informed the Largest Settlement in Canadian Legal History,” 69 UNBJL 14 198 (2018); Mayo Moran, “The Problem of the Past: How Wrongs Became Legal Problems.” UTLJ 69.4 (2019): 421-472; Victor Li, “Documentaries are shaping public opinion and influencing cases.” ABA Journal, August 1, 2020; Bonaparte v. Canada, (2003) 30 CPC (5th) 59; Baxter v. Canada (Attorney General), (2006) 83 O.R. (3d) 481; Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost; Susan McKary, Bear in Mind These Dead. 

Films:

The Boys of St. Vincent. NFB, 1992; Indian Horse. Dir. Stephen S. Campanelli, 2018; Nostalgia for the Light. Dir. Patricio Guzmán, 2010; The Lesser Blessed. Christina Piovesan, 2013; Finding Dawn. Dir. Christine Welsh, 2006. 

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements 

• Participation:  20%;
• two short essays (15% each): 30%;
• research essay: 50%. 

Term: SUMMER F-TERM (May 2024 and June 2024)
Date/Time: 2 hours, Tuesdays/Thursdays, 3pm – 5pm (First class: May 7, 2024 / Last class: June 13, 2024)
Location: Room JHB 616, St. George Campus (Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George Street) 
Delivery: In-Person