2027 Summer Courses

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

Important Dates for Summer 2027

• TBA

ENG2100H Topics in American Literature

John Ashbery and the Visual Arts

Dubois, A.

Term: Summer F-TERM (May – June 2027)
Date/Time: TBA
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person

Course Description

The American poet John Ashbery (1927-2017) wanted to be a painter, but he felt that he lacked enough talent; his poetry and that of his friends was advertised as of the “New York School” in an analogy with abstract expressionism; he supplemented his living for decades by writing art criticism; and among his vast body of work are numerous poems about and inspired by the visual arts, including what is doubtless one of the quintessential long poems of postmodernity, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” This course will explore Ashbery’s relationship to the visual arts. We will look at his own aesthetic predilections and taste; delve deeply into the history of the genre of ekphrasis and some of its attendant criticism; consider how writing and painting and sculpture and cinema are (and are not) commensurate; and read poems by Ashbery’s predecessors and peers that also take up the visual arts. In addition to exploring some seven decades worth of poetry from Ashbery himself, we will read work by Agha Shahid Ali, W.H. Auden, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Elizabeth Bishop, Joe Brainard, Jorie Graham, Barbara Guest, John Keats, Yusef Komunyakaa, Mina Loy, Frank O’Hara, Percy Shelley, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, et al. Lots of paintings will also be looked at.   

Course Reading List

Primary Texts (John Ahsbery):

• Collected Poems 1956-1987
• Girls on the Run
• Something Close to Music

Ashbery poems to be read will include (but not be limited to):

• “Some Trees”
• “The Painter”
• “Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers”
• “The Tennis Court Oath”
• “‘They Dream Only of America’”
• “These Lacustrine Cities”
• “The Skaters”
• “The Double Dream of Spring”
• “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape”
• “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”
• “Pyrography”
• “Daffy Duck in Hollywood”
• “Houseboat Days”
• “The Lonedale Operator”
• “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name”   

Poems by other poets will include:

• Agha Shahid Ali, “At the Museum”
• W.H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”
• Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, “Hello, the Roses,”“Texas”
• Elizabeth Bishop, “The Map,” “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” “The Monument,” “Large Bad Picture”
• Joe Brainard, selections from I Remember and The Nancy Book
• Jorie Graham, “San Sepolchro”
• Barbara Guest, “Roses,” “An Emphasis Falls on Reality”
• John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
• Yusef Komunyakaa, “Facing It”
• Mina Loy, “Brancusi’s Golden Bird”
• Frank O’Hara, “Digression on Number 1, 1948,” “On Seeing Larry Rivers’ 'Washington Crossing the Delaware' at the Museum of Modern Art,” “Ave Maria,” “Lana Turner Has Collapsed,” “To the Film Industry in Crisis,” “Why I Am Not a Painter”
• Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias”
• Gertrude Stein, from Tender Buttons, “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso,” “Picasso”
• Wallace Stevens, “Anecdote of the Jar,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “The Man with the Blue Guitar.”

Criticism by:

• Yves-Alain Bois
• Cleanth Brooks
• T.J. Clark
• Bonnie Costello
• Michael Fried
• Clement Greenberg
• Jean Hagstrum
• Rosalind Krauss
• Murray Krieger
• Gotthold Lessing
• Marjorie Perloff
• Amy Knight Powell
• Giorgio Vasari
• Helen Vendler.

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements

• Participation - 20%
• In-class presentation - 20%
• Short essay (5-6 pages) - 20%
• Long essay (15-20 pages) - 40% 

ENG5501H Topics in Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Literature

James Joyce: Modernism, Modernity, Mythology

Leonard, G.

Term: Summer F-TERM (May – June 2027)
Date/Time: TBA
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person

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." 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

Course Reading List:

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. 
• Jameson, Fredric. A singular modernity: essay on the ontology of the present, 2002. 
• Leonard, Garry. “He's Got Bette Davis Eyes: James Joyce and Melodrama,” Joyce studies annual (Fordham University Press), 2008-01, Vol. 2008.
  • "Our Father Who Art Not in Heaven”: Joyce's Pathetic Phallacy and Capitalist discourse in ‘Wandering Rocks’,” Joyce studies annual (Fordham University Press), 2023-24, Vol. 2023.
  • “Hystericising Modernism: Modernity in Joyce,” Cultural Studies of James Joyce, 2003, Vol.15 (15), p.167-188
• Misa, Thomas J. Modernity and Technology. 
• Smart, Barry. Facing modernity: ambivalence, reflexivity and morality, 1999 

II.    THE FICTION OF JAMES JOYCE 

• Attridge, Derek. The Cambridge companion to James Joyce. 
• Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce (New York: 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 
• Leonard, Garry. “The City, Modernism, and Aesthetic Theory in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,"  Novel : a forum on fiction, 1995, Vol.29 (1), p.79-99.
  • “Soul Survivor: Stephen Dedalus as the Priest of the Eternal Imagination,” Joyce studies annual (Fordham University Press), 2015-01, p.3-27.
• Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: a literary guide 
• Stasi, Paul. “The Forms of Irish Modernism,” Modern fiction studies, 2022-01, Vol.68 (1), p.64-87.

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements

• Participation (6 weekly position papers, 500 words each) - 20%
• Twenty-minute presentation, followed by student-led discussion - 20%
• Final essay (20 pages, approximately) - 60%

ENG7102H Topics in Interdisciplinary Methods

Literature and Medicine: Corpus, Theory, Praxis

Charise, A.

Term: Summer F-TERM (May – June 2027)
Date/Time: TBA
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person

Course Description

This seminar is a critical introduction to the interdisciplinary field of literature and medicine: its key texts and issues, current conceptual frameworks, and contemporary scenes of practice. We will consider the basics of illness narratives (including thematics like pain, ethics, and the medical encounter), alongside distinctive formal conventions and genres (like memoir and creative nonfiction, physician writing, lyric, speculative fiction). We will also consider the implications of the past two decades' enthusiastic uptake of literary concepts by the health professions—“narrative" and "close reading" especially—for the purposes of enhancing clinical competencies like compassion, empathy, and the "humanizing" of medicine. How might we, as scholars of literary studies, better theorize the emergence of literary sensibilities in the twenty-first century clinic? Why would the deployment of literary concepts, tools, and methods constitute such a fraught moment in the historical debate regarding the value of the humanities?

This seminar's deliberate interweaving of literary writings with theoretical texts is intended to complement our ongoing consideration of praxis as it regards literature and medicine. To this end, students will also be provided the opportunity to develop transferable skills in "narrative medicine," a workshop-based, practical methodology that expands the purview—or pushes the limits—of contemporary literary studies. Although our readings will focus on contemporary Anglophone/North American writing, this course is also intended to serve as a more general introduction to literary “medical” or “health” humanities. Seminar participants are encouraged to make use of readings to further their own projects and field interests.

Course Reading List

• Jay Baruch, Fourteen Stories: Doctors, Patients, and Other Strangers (Kent State)
• Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 2nd Ed. (Chicago)
• Rita Charon, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (Oxford)
• Porochista Khakpour, Sick: A Memoir (Harper)
• Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Duke)
• Mimi Khuc, Dear Elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss (Duke)

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements

• Fixed Evaluation (participation [10%], seminar presentation [20%], short essay [20%]) - 50%
• Variable Evaluation (teaching portfolio OR narrative medicine pilot program OR research essay) - 50%