ENG5047HF L0101
Class, Culture, and American Realism
Dolan, Neal
Course Description:
Sociological inclusiveness – serious mimetic attention to the middle and lower classes – is one of the hallmarks of modern realist literature. But what is social class as a subject of literary representation? What, in particular, is social class in modern industrial-commercial liberal-democratic society as opposed to its agrarian feudal-aristocratic predecessor? Is class a form of collective self-identification or just an academic descriptor? Is a class akin to a culture? How, if at all, do different classes interrelate? How has the nature and experience of social class changed over time? And what are the motivations and the special difficulties involved when the highly literate members of the educated classes attempt to sympathetically represent the less literate members of less educated classes? Why do issues of “culture” come up so frequently in such works?
This course attempts to address such questions in relation to a selection of major works of American literary realism. In the first three weeks we will establish a set of shared conceptual reference points by recourse to some of the major sociological theorists of class, from Marx to Bourdieu. In all subsequent weeks the discussion will focus on a primary work of literature.
Reading List:
TBA
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- One seminar presentation (20%);
- participation in seminar discussion (20%);
- one term paper (15-20 pp.) (60%) due at end of term.
Term: F-TERM (September 2023 to December 2023)
Date/Time: Friday / 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm (3 hours)
Location: Rm: See ACORN or QUERCUS
Delivery: In-Person
ENG5078HF L0101
Postcolonial Ecocriticism
Azubuko-Udah, C.
Course Description:
In this course, we will examine the intersections of ecocriticism and postcoloniality across the Global South. With an emphasis on postcolonial methods and approaches, this course will be structured as a global and comparative study of texts from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Through these materials topics of discussion will include colonialism, neoimperialism and globalization, urbanity, indigeneity, the politics of storytelling, climate change, environmental degradation, and the narrative challenges posed by a combination of these and other factors.
Course Overview and Objectives:
This seminar examines the intersections of postcolonialism and ecocriticism as well as the tensions between these conceptual nodes, with readings drawn from across the global South. Topics of discussion include colonialism, ecological degradation, resource extraction, globalization, decolonial epistemologies, futurity, the challenges of narrativization, and structural and slow violence. The course is concerned with varieties of environmentalism and environmental consciousness, and the narrative strategies affording the illumination of these ideas. The course prepares students to respond to key issues in postcolonial ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, analyze the work of the major thinkers in the fields, and examine literary texts and other cultural productions from a postcolonial perspective
Course Reading List:
Required Full Texts
Books:
Jamaica Kincaid - A Small Place.
Mayra Montero - In the Palm of Darkness.
Imbolo Mbue - How Beautiful We Were.
Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide.
Tade Thompson - Rosewater.
- All other course materials will be available through the Library List on Quercus
Films:
Sandy Cioffi - Sweet Crude
Jon Shenk - Island President
Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
Course participants have the option of selecting from a variety of final projects: -Students can craft an original essay that analyzes a primary text from a postcolonial and/or ecocritical perspective. Such work should aim at producing new insight on a theoretical concept and/or the cultural text. -Students can produce a more creative project of their own design that takes up some of the challenges of narrativization that we will encounter in the course of the semester.
Grade Breakdown:
Conference paper (6-8 pages) - 30%
Second paper (6-8 pages) - 30%
Weekly Summary, Synthesis, and Questions - 30%
In-class participation - 10%
Term: F-TERM (September 2023 to December 2023)
Date/Time: Monday / 11:00 am to 1:00 pm (2 hours)
Location: Rm: See ACORN or QUERCUS
Delivery: In-Person
ENG5080HS L0101
Assembling the Afro-Métis Syllabus
Clarke, G. E.
Course Description:
This course reads a representative sample of texts by African-Canadian writers who may be regarded as “Black and Indigenous” and/or “Afro-Métis” and/or who explore this intersectional identity that has been long-obscured, often disputed, and yet indisputably present. Indeed, as more and more Black Canadians claim or name this identity, so will it be necessary to attend to their writing out of a dual-racial, or biracial, experience of oppression, protesting both notions of “race purity” and government definitions of who is or can be “status” Indigenous, Inuit, or Métis. For an introduction to the controversies and conundrums around this Black-and-Indigenous self-concept, see George Elliott Clarke, “Assembling the Afro-Métis Syllabus: Some Preliminary Reading,” Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien, 42 (2022), pp. 10-41.
Course Reading List:
Atkinson, Ricky. The Hard Times and Life Crimes of Ricky Atkinson. Burle-Bailey, Troy. The Pierre Bonga Loops. Coulthard, Glen. Red Skin, White Masks. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Jones, El. Abolitionist Intimacies. Proctor-Mills, Dorothy. Chameleon & “Born Again Indian” (2012). Thomas, Kai. In the Upper Country. Willis, Vivian. Mom Suse: Matriarch of the Preston Area Black Communities.
Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Seminar (or Review) presentations: 30%
- Research paper: 50%
- Participation: 20%
Term: S-TERM (January 2024 to April 2024)
Date/Time: Tuesday / 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm (2 hours)
Location: Rm: See ACORN or QUERCUS
Delivery: In-Person
ENG5088HS L0101
Kind of Like: Difference, Similarity, Comparison
Thomas, A.
Course Description:
How do literary and cultural studies approach the question of similarity without collapsing into sameness? And how do we consider and write through the consequences of comparison? This course takes as its premise the unevenness inherent in any act of comparison across geography, history, group. Rather than treating the incommensurate but proximate as an impasse, this course investigates what methodologies can ethically bring intertwined and/or disparate histories into view, and explores how to productively read literatures that arise from contexts of oppression. Reading will focus in Black and Postcolonial Studies, but students are encouraged to do comparative work in their research paper within or beyond these fields.
Course Reading List:
Readings may include: Michel Foucault The Order of Things, Yogita Goyal Runaway Genres, Brent Hayes Edwards The Practice of Diaspora, Samantha Pinto Difficult Diasporas, W.E.B. Du Bois Dark Princess, Richard Wright The Color Curtain, Tiffany Lethabo King The Black Shoals, Lisa Lowe, The Intimacy of Four Continents.
Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Participation: 20%
- Seminar Facilitation: 20%
- Final Paper: 50%
- Final Reflection: 10%
Term: S-TERM (January 2024 to April 2024)
Date/Time: Wednesday / 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm (2 hours)
Location: Rm: See ACORN or QUERCUS
Delivery: In-Person
ENG5101HF L0101
Graham Greene: The Problem of Elsewhere
Greene, R.
Course Description
Graham Greene’s works often depict the decay of empire: The Heart of the Matter (1948) depicts Sierra Leone under British possession; The Quiet American (1955) depicts CIA activity as the French and Vietminh fought for control of Vietnam in the early 1950s. His works also depict revolutionary struggles against repressive regimes, as in Our Man in Havana (1958), set in Cuba in the years immediately before the accession of Fidel Castro; The Comedians (1966) set in the “nightmare republic” of Haiti under Papa Doc Duvalier; and The Honorary Consul (1973) set on the border of Argentina and Paraguay in the approach to the “Dirty War.” This course would look at Greene’s attempt, imaginatively, to break out of the East-West dualism of the Cold War and turn his attention as a novelist to the Global South. Critics often refer to his sense of place as “Greeneland” – a territory of political uncertainty, poverty, and vulnerability, which he defined partly by pure observation, as he was an outstanding international journalist, but also by preoccupations with theology and psychoanalysis. His work repeatedly establishes imaginative elsewheres, and this course would seek to probe his accomplishments.
Course Reading List:
- The Heart of the Matter (1948)
- The Quiet American (1955)
- Our Man in Havana (1958)
- The Comedians (1966)
- The Honorary Consul (1973)
- The Human Factor (1976)
Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- 60%: Term Paper
- 20%: Seminar Presentation
- 20%: Participation
Term: F-TERM (September 2023 to December 2023)
Date/Time: Wednesday / 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm (2 hours)
Location: Rm: See ACORN or QUERCUS
Delivery: In-Person
ENG5115HF L0101
The Satanic Verses and the Public Life of Books
Boyagoda, R.
Course Description:
Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses is a paradigmatic text for considering the public life of books -- the geopolitical and cultural consequences of a novel's publication and reception in a series of both distinct and connected sites. This seminar will read Rushdie's novel in three contexts: first, in and of itself; second, in the context of Rushdie's autobiographical writing and related reflections and interrogations of the book and its standing and impact; third, in the ongoing context of the "Rushdie Affair" associated with the Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 Fatwa, through to the 2022 attack on the author. These readings will be informed by our consideration of contemporaneous reviews, before and after the Fatwa; of Rushdie scholarship and current public writing about Rushdie; and of classic and more recent studies of the novel and politics ranging from the likes of Debjani Ganguly, Terry Eagleton, Aijaz Ahmad, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Irving Howe, among others.
Course Reading List:
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses" (1988). Rushdie, Joseph Anton (2012). Rushdie, non-fiction, 1988-2021 (selections). Debjani Ganguli, This Thing called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (2016). Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God (2014). Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak, Reading 'The Satanic Verse' (1989). Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel (1957).
Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Participation, All term - 10 %
- Two Short Seminar Presentations, Determined by sign-up -10%
- Research Proposal and Annotated Bibliography, Nov 21 -10%
- Major Research Paper, Dec 11 - 50%
- Oral Examination, Determined by sign-up - 20%
Term: F-TERM (September 2023 to December 2023)
Date/Time: Tuesday / 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm (2 hours)
Location: Rm. JHB 616* (Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George Street) * NB: On October 17, this course is relocated to room JHB 718 for the one class meeting only.
Delivery: In-Person
ENG5712HS L0101
Cinema of Refusal: Inuit Modernity and Visual Sovereignty
Kamboureli, S.
New Course Description:
This course will focus on how Inuit cinematography refuses settler colonialism by affirming and demanding recognition of Inuit agency. Employing narratives (oral and written) but focusing primarily on films (feature and documentaries) by Isuma and Arnait (Women’s Video Collective), both based in Igloolik, Nunavut, we will engage with what constitutes these Inuit production companies’ cinema of refusal: from its critical engagement with a range of ethnographic and other archival material to its decolonizing documentary ethos; from its simultaneous appropriation and critique of western modernity to its assertion of Inuit modernity and self-determination; from its tactical refusal of subtitles to its community-based production. To better appreciate how the Inuit cinema of refusal can be understood as an enactment of Inuit “visual sovereignty” (Michelle Raheja) in relation to land, we will study these films in dialogue with a small selection of oral and written Inuit stories that directly address Inuit modernity. Our discussions will situate these visual and verbal texts in the context of Indigenous methodologies, specifically Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (Inuit traditional knowledge and ways of knowing), and related film and critical studies.
Course Reading List:
Isuma films: The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk Arnait films: Tia and Piujuk, Uvanga Verbal texts (tentative): Knud Rasmussen, Across Arctic America Germaine Arnaktauyok, My Name is Arnaktauyok: The Life and Art of Germaine Arnaktauyok, Norma dunning, selections from Tainna and Annie Muktuk Selections of oral narratives from Art and Cold Cash and Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women Selections of critical material (TBA)
New Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Viewing/Reading Journal (2x10%) 20%
- Seminar Report: 20%
- Informed participation: 20%
- Research paper: 40%
Term: S-TERM (January 2024 to April 2024)
Date/Time: Thursday / 10:00 am to 1:00 pm (3 hours)
Location: Rm: See ACORN or QUERCUS
Delivery: In-Person
ENG5802HS L0101
Global Protest Cultures
Mehta, R.
Course Description:
This course studies cultural forms that participate in movements of liberation. It focuses on the commitment to future revolutionary possibilities in anticolonial, antiracist, and feminist thought and praxis, especially on the reinvention of literary and media codes and canons that unfold in such struggles. We will analyze subversive fiction, political essays/manifestos, prison memoirs, resistance poetry, documentary and narrative cinema, and photographic and televisual texts to address urgent questions about political existence in the long twentieth century of decolonization.
Course Reading List:
Readings from Angela Davis, BR Ambedkar, Akhtar Baluch, CLR James, Frantz Fanon, Sara Ahmed, Ghassan Kanafani, Saidiya Hartman, Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga, Anand Patwardhan, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, and others.
Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- 20% Participation
- 20% Presentation
- 20% Midterm Paper
- 40% Final Paper
Term: S-TERM (January 2024 to April 2024)
Date/Time: Thursday / 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm (2 hours)
Location: Rm: See ACORN or QUERCUS
Delivery: In-Person