Summer 2024 Course Descriptions & Timetable

*Please note:

• Summer Course Timetable, scheduled times, delivery method, descriptions, reading lists, and/or locations are TBA and are subject to change.
• Department of English ACORN Enrolment for Summer F courses: TBA
• Monday, May 20 Victoria Day - no classes on the Holiday

ENG1582HF* L0101

Piers Plowman

Gaston, K.

Course Description:

A study of Piers Plowman, the fourteenth-century alliterative dream vision famously described as “a commentary on an unknown text.” This course will focus on the B-text of the poem with excursions into the A and C texts, giving special attention to issues including economic and social justice, poverty and perfection, legal and literary representation, learning and study, and the relationship between Latin and the vernacular. Throughout, we will investigate the way that Piers uses literary form to express and analyze ethical and spiritual dilemmas. We will also survey major literary critical approaches to the poem and its late fourteenth century context.

Course Reading List:

• The Vision of Piers Plowman: B-Text, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (if available)
• Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text, ed. Derek Pearsall
• Emily Steiner, Reading Piers Plowman (Cambridge, 2013)

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:

• Final paper 35%;
• Midterm paper 25%;
• In-class presentation and response 20%;
• Class participation 20%.

Scheduling

Term: SUMMER F-TERM (May 2024 and June 2024)
Date/Time: TBA 2 hours
Location: Room TBA  
Delivery: In-Person

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

• Seminar presentation & report (20%);
• seminar participation (15%);
• conference presentation (25%);
• final research paper (40%)

Scheduling

Term: SUMMER F-TERM (May 2024 and June 2024)
Date/Time: TBA 3 hours
Location: Room TBA  
Delivery: In-Person

ENG5580HF* L0101 

American Pastoral

Most, A.

Course Description:

In this course, we will both experience and critique the broad environmental implications of the urban "use" of nature -- whether for art, criticism, or personal rejuvenation -- by engaging with pastoral texts while physically enacting the movement from urban to rural and back again. We will read and discuss canonical American environmental and agricultural literature as well as key works of eco-criticism in light of twenty-first century environmental realities, analyzing the relationship between narrative, environment, and material experience in order to build a compelling set of literary and theoretical approaches equal to the urgent challenges of our contemporary moment. This is an experimental course designed to unite theory and practice by engaging in graduate-level study both on the St. George campus of U of T and on Bela Farm in Hillsburgh, Ontario.  Students are encouraged therefore to think creatively not only about the pastoral form, its expressions, and its applications but also about the impact and potential of land-based experiential learning as a way of exploring these questions.

Course Reading List

Primary texts such as: Genesis (King James Bible); Shakespeare, As You Like It; Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (selections), Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History;" Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass; Henry D. Thoreau, selections from Walden and "Walking"; Willa Cather, My Antonia; Rachel Carson, Silent Spring; Wendell Berry, Essays from The Art of the Commonplace and selected poetry; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Barry Lopez, The Rediscovery of North America, Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma; plus additional selected poems and short essays.

Secondary Texts: Selections from the work of Raymond Williams, William Cronon, Carolyn Merchant, Annette Kolodny, Cate Sandilands, Stacey Alaimo, Ursula Heise, bell hooks, J. Drew Lanham and others to be determined.

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements

• Class Participation 20%,
• Presentation 30%,
• Final Project 50%.

Pedagogy:  The environmental humanities asks us to look not only at texts, but also at our relationship to nature, language, our own bodies, and the world around us through new lenses and using a variety of different senses and media. To that end, each student will create an experiential presentation on the farm which engages in a rigorous, sophisticated and creative way with both the texts and the land itself. The location on the farm, the weather, the plant and animal life, the sounds and smells can all be a part of the argument. While presentations certainly involve speaking, I ask students to think imaginatively about the multiple ways one might develop and express rigorous interpretations of texts through embodied and land- based experiences such as going for a walk, cooking or eating together, farm work, or exploring plant and animal life.

Schedule: The course begins with two class meetings on campus in mid-May. Students then have three weeks to do the reading and prepare presentations. In mid-June, we head to Bela Farm for five nights and six days. At the farm, we have formal class sessions as well as experiential modules designed to connect the readings to the life of the farm (such as beekeeping, foraging walks, vegetable gardening, and workshops on pastoral poetry or landscape painting). In Week Six, students return to the city to reflect on their farm experience and prepare their final projects. Week Six culminates with a full-day mini-conference.

Farm Location: Bela Farm is a beautiful 100-acre centre for creative responses to global environmental crisis located about an hour northwest of Toronto in Hillsburgh, ON. The farm has toilet and shower facilities, an indoor / outdoor kitchen (with fridge and running water) designed for immersive educational retreats, and a variety of indoor/outdoor classroom spaces. Students will spend the week studying, camping and cooking meals together.

Scheduling

Term: SUMMER F-TERM (May 2024 and June 2024)
Date/Time: TBA classes vary in length and schedule; some at the farm, and some at St. George, Jackman Humanities Building
Location: Room TBA  
Delivery: In-Person

ENG6532HF* L0101

Writing More-than-Human Lives

Ackerman, A.

Course Description:

“You’d think that biologists, of all people, would have words for life,” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer. Forms of life writing have evolved, as environmental crisis prompts new ways of thinking about both writing and life. This course focuses on works that push the envelope of self-expression, nature writing, and literary form, blending biology and autobiography—with an emphasis on bio—including Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, Thoreau’s Walden, Diana Beresford Kroeger’s To Speak for the Trees, and Sumana Roy’s How I Became a Tree. Boundary-pushing poets, naturalists, and foresters (e.g., Walt Whitman, Wangari Maathai, Aldo Leopold, Suzanne Simard) situate themselves and their work in a more-than-human world, which they imagine as interconnected, porous, or “transcorporeal.” This seminar introduces students to ecocriticism, autobiographical theory, and new perspectives in botany and forestry, which show that plants have languages of their own. Like legal scholar Christopher Stone and historian Roderick Nash, we consider whether “Nature” has rights and what constitutes personhood. Most of the class will take place outdoors. Assignments will include creative projects that encourage students to rethink the boundaries of literary criticism and self-expression. Following Howard Nemerov’s “Learning the Trees,” we consider how books cooperate and/or compete with experience.

Course Reading List

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants; Henry David Thoreau, Walden & selections from Journals; Diana Beresford Kroeger, To Speak for the Trees: My Life's Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest; Sumana Roy, How I Became a Tree; Joy Harjo, selections from Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings & How We Became Human: New And Selected Poems 1975 To 2001; Ralph Waldo Emerson, selections from Nature & Journals; Walt Whitman, selections from Leaves of Grass; Wangari Maathai, Unbowed: A Memoir; Howard Nemerov, “Learning the Trees;” Stacy Alaimo, selections from Bodily Natures; Sidonie Smith, selections from Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body & Human Rights and Narrated Lives; Smith & Julia Watson, selections from Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives & Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader; Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement; Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World; Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What they Feel, How they Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World; Roderick Nash, The Rights of Nature; Christopher Stone, Do Trees Have Standing?; Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination; Ralph H. Lutts, The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science and Sentiment; William Cronon, ed. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature; Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human; Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism; David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors; Martin Buber, I and Thou

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:

• Informed class participation (20%)
• Tree Diary or Environmental Journal (30%)
• Presentations (20%)
• Final project: Research essay or creative project (short story, collection of poems, memoir, podcast, video, etc.) (30%)

Scheduling

Term: SUMMER F-TERM (May 2024 and June 2024)
Date/Time: TBA 2 hours
Location: Room TBA  
Delivery: In-Person