2025 Summer Courses

*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 TBA Victoria Day - no classes on the Holiday

ENG5204HF L0101

Topics in Early Modern Literature: 

Early Modern Romance

Walkden, A.    

Course Description:

The narrative form known as romance was both old and new for sixteenth-century readers. Stories of knight errantry, supernatural marvels, and sexual temptations were familiar from the medieval chivalric tradition, while the vernacular publication of the Greek romances, especially Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, had introduced new practices of ethnographical and suspenseful reading. Our seminar investigates how early modern English writers, responding both to the long and diverse histories of romance and to its more recent reconfiguring of readerly tastes, worked their own transformations on this most self-conscious and persistently popular of literary forms. Our purpose in this course will be twofold: to articulate the implicit narrative theories informing works that are famously dilatory, digressive, and apparently capable of infinite expansion; and to consider romance’s affinity with other modes and genres, epic and lyric, but also the period’s experiments with romance drama, its engagements with ethnographic and natural history, and its anticipations of contemporary fanfiction. As we explore these affinities, we will also be considering how the alternative environments and epistemologies of early modern romance work to frame the religious and racialized geographies of the Mediterranean basin, the African continent, the British islands, and the Atlantic world.

Course Reading List:

Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, selections from Sidney’s New Arcadia; Spenser’s Faerie Queene, books 3 and 4 with selections from books 2 and 5; selections from Mary Wroth’s Urania; Jonson’s Masque of Blacknesse; John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess; Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale; and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. Critical and conceptual readings by Joseph Campana, Terence Cave, Jeff Dolven, Rachel Eisendrath, Kim F. Hall, Noémie Ndiaye, Patricia Parker, Melissa Sanchez, Chi-ming Yang, and others

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements [NB: SGS requires that participation grade must not exceed 20% of total grade]

Informal discussion posts (15%), participation, including a workshop and short presentation (15%), short experimental essay (25%), final research essay (45%).

Term: SUMMER F-TERM (May 2025 and June 2025)
Date/Time:  TBA
Location: Room TBA
Delivery: In-Person

ENG5503HF L0101    

Topics in Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Literature:    

James Joyce: Modernism, Modernity, Mythology 

Leonard, G.        

Course Description:

Joyce's biographer, Richard Ellmann, once remarked "we are still learning to be Joyce's contemporaries." It's an observation Joyce might well have been pleased to hear if we judge from this note he sent to his publisher in an effort to get his first work, Dubliners, published: "I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by, preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass." A character in Ulysses remarks, "Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance". In a similar manner, Joyce's fiction has been the happy hunting ground of literary critics and theorists seeking to maintain their balance. No literary theory of the past 50 years has failed to touch down at some point on Joyce's work. As a result it is sometimes difficult to approach the fiction as something other than a paradigm of any number of methodologies. This seminar will not entirely avoid that fate, and student seminar presentations/discussions will be designed to interrogate the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches, and yet our primary question will be what did Joyce think he was doing in writing these stories and novels, and what does he appear to have accomplished in doing so? Orienting one's reading of a text through authorial intention has always been a problematic approach to say the least, and yet Joyce went out of his way, time and time again, to present himself as someone on a mission, someone who must not be stopped unless we seek "to retard the course of civilization". His character Stephen Dedalus is no less messianic: "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." Youthful hubris? Probably. But, given what Joyce accomplished, also pretty much on the mark. Accordingly, while we will encounter and review all the major approaches in this seminar, we will also maintain an interest throughout in "the reality of experience" Stephen set out to encounter, especially as it pertains to the formation of an aesthetic that would become modernism --an aesthetic forged, in large part, in the "smithy" of what we now call modernity. More specifically, this "smithy" included the rise of advertising and commodity culture, the birth of a new Art form (cinema), and the corresponding explosion of form and content in futurism, dadaism surrealism, and impressionism. 

Course Reading List:

TBA

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:

[NB: SGS requires that participation grade must not exceed 20% of total grade]

TBA

Term: SUMMER F-TERM (May 2025 and June 2025)
Date/Time:  TBA
Location: Room TBA
Delivery: In-Person

ENG9101HF  L0101

Topics in Theory:    

Old and New Materialisms

Blake, L.

Course Description:

In this course we will explore how “new” the contemporary philosophies of “new materialism” – currently circulating in literary studies as well as in other disciplines – really are. The thesis of the course is that we can enrich our new materialisms by exploring older materialisms as well. To do so we will first need to tease apart the relationship between these new materialists speculating about the nature of matter, on the one hand, and the (ancient and modern) philosophical tradition of materialism on the other. We will read works of ancient and early modern philosophy about matter and the material world, paired with modern and contemporary works by the self-proclaimed new materialists. The modern and contemporary new materialists turn largely to contemporary philosophy and science; Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway partakes of contemporary physics, for example, and Jane Bennett’s Vital Matter draws on twentieth-century ideas of vitalism. But what does it do to our discussions of new materialisms to fold in older philosophies of matter and materialisms as well? We will focus our discussions of these theoretical questions through both philosophical and literary texts, many taken from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (when philosophies of matter abounded). 

Course Reading List:

Literature and philosophy by Lucretius, Margaret Cavendish, Louis Althusser, Herman Melville, René Descartes, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ann Leckie, Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, John George Berkeley, Jorge Luis Borges, and John Milton; secondary readings by Jane Bennett, Coole and Frost, Karen Barad, and other “new materialists.”

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:  

Class participation (20%), class presentation (15%), final paper proposal (5%), annotated bibliography and outline (10%), final paper (50%)

Term: SUMMER F-TERM (May 2025 and June 2025)
Date/Time:  TBA
Location: Room TBA
Delivery: In-Person

ENG9102HF L01010

Topics in Theory:  

Cripping Theatrical Representation

K. Williams

Course Description:

This course brings together disability theory and dramatic literature to investigate embodied constraint in the theatrical domain. Working with concepts of disability drawn from crip theory, we will consider the rubrics of access, mobility, capacity, and design within the physical environment of the theater, paying special attention to the construction of disability in dramatic representation. Theatrical practice transforms material limitation—from actor’s body to stage space to prop closet—into formal innovation. This course asks how theatrical affordances might shape our understanding of disability and uses theatrical renderings of disabling environments—from the figure of wounded withdrawal in Greek drama, to the early modern theater’s stark delineation of the matter of embodied constraint, to contemporary dramas of interdependence and care—to consider mimetic and prosthetic possibility in dramatic texts.

Course Reading List:

Readings from the course reflect recent work in crip theory/critical disability studies by Michael Davidson, Sara Hendren, Alison Kafer, Robert McRuer, Carrie Sandahl, Sami Schalk, Tobin Siebers, LaMarr Jurelle Bruce, and others. Dramatic texts range across periods and likely include Sophocles, Philoctetes; William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus; Ben Jonson, Epicoene; Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Cupid’s Revenge; Martina Majok, The Cost of Living; Annie Baker, Infinite Life.

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements: [NB: SGS requires that participation grade must not exceed 20% of total grade]

• Perfect attendance and engaged participation in seminar discussions, 20%;
• Short responses, 30%;
• Final research paper (c. 6,000 words), 50%

Term: SUMMER F-TERM (May 2025 and June 2025)
Date/Time:  TBA
Location: Room TBA
Delivery: In-Person