Undergraduate courses

Instructor: Maria Zytaruk

Why do the old books in Special Collections look and feel (and smell) the way they do? Why does their paper seem remarkably strong when compared to the wood pulp paper of today's paperbacks? If Gutenberg's Bible is supposed to represent the modern invention of printing with moveable type, why do its pages look more like medieval manuscripts? This course explores the book arts -- papermaking, letterpress printing, relief and intaglio illustration, and bookbinding -- as they were practiced during the hand-press period (1500-1800). Grounded in recent scholarship on the material histories of the book, this course will make use of experiential and object-centred modes of inquiry. Some of our sessions will be held in the Department of English Book Arts Lab.

Instructor: Anna Veprinska 

This course analyzes the relationship between poetry and empathy through the reading and writing of poems. What can poetry teach us about empathy? In what ways does poetry, particularly poetry after crisis, invite empathy? While there is often a social push for empathy as an ethical relation, we will read theorists who argue empathy’s appropriative and transgressive qualities. How does poetry respond to empathy’s unethical possibilities? Can poetry offer an alternative ethics of relation?

Our focus will be on reading the work of poets and theorists, discussing the intersection between poetry and empathy, and writing and workshopping each other’s poems on a weekly basis. The course assignments will include a critical presentation and the production of a chapbook.

Instructor: Jim Ellis 

Queer ecology is a recent approach that brings together queer theory and environmental studies, along with posthumanist and materialist theories, to challenge normative conceptions of nature (e.g. Morton, Haraway, Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson).  This is a fruitful approach to bring to early modern texts, where the nature of nature is frequently in question and often surprisingly queer.  Older conceptions of nature are being challenged in the period not just by the new science, but by materialist conceptions of the universe most associated with the newly rediscovered ideas of Lucretius, which are themselves often associated with Epicureanism and atheism.  While early modern literature has been scrutinized for some time now using both ecological and queer lenses, only in the last couple of years have we seen new queer ecological approaches emerging (e.g. Swarbick, Nardizzi). While posthumanist approaches to the early modern period have yielded valuable insights about the strangeness or the queerness of the past, they have also helped to open up new questions about the constructedness of the present. By exploring alternative ways of being and knowing the past, queer ecology in particular promises to open up new avenues of thought in our current environment crisis.

This course will explore representations and theorizations of queer nature (including plants, animals, humans, natural and garden spaces) in four key examples of early modern English writing: Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, with its perverse and seductive garden spaces, and its demonized hybrid characters; Amelia Lanyer’s all-female, ‘Adam-less Eden’ in The Description of Cooke-ham; Andrew Marvell’s queer garden spaces and  vegetal sexuality in “Upon Appleton House” and the Mower poems; and Milton’s Paradise Lost, where critics have devoted significant attention lately to the wound to earth caused by original sin. One through-line in these works is the way that each of them uses Eden, the paradigmatic perfect place in the Christian tradition, to explore our relations with non-human others and ideal ways of being. 

Students in the graduate course will contribute a 15-20 minute presentation on a theoretical text or approach; a 20-30 minute presentation that explores course concerns in conjunction with a literary text; a 5 minute response to another student’s presentation; and submit a 20-25 page final essay.

Instructor: Anna Veprinska

Responding to the question, Is listening to audiobooks really reading? this critical-creative, multi-genre course explores audiobooks as companion to, at odds with, and alternative form of reading. Listening to contemporary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry audiobooks, we will consider such topics as intermedial translation, close listening, listening practices, performance, voice, eco-audiobooks, born-audio books, podiobooks, audiobook guilt, and the rising trend of AI-narrated audiobooks. We will also discuss the equitable possibilities of audiobooks, including accessibility and reading preferences. As we listen, we will critically think about the medium of audiobooks and their potential to reshape our literary and cultural reading practices.

The course will include workshops, an audio recording session at the library, a critical presentation, and the creation of our own mini audiobooks.

Instructor: Derritt Mason

The Bildungsroman, a centuries-old genre that recounts the moral and physical development of young protagonists, spawned themes and conventions that persist in several contemporary forms. Today, we tend to translate Bildungsroman as the “coming-of-age” story, which is itself typically associated with a wildly popular contemporary genre: young adult literature (YA). As YA explodes in popularity, quintessential Bildungsroman themes and characters have continued to surface in a range of media, including—and most recently—video games. In a 2015 New Yorker essay entitled “Coming of Age with Video Games,” Simon Parkin suggests that “kids who grew up playing early computer games are now old enough to consider, from middle age, how the medium shaped their lives.” A consequence, it appears, is that we are witnessing not only a burgeoning proliferation of criticism, fiction, and memoir that use video games to narrate coming-of-age, but also video games that are themselves interested in revisiting adolescence.

As game scholar Bernard Perron points out, however, video game studies has been generally (and surprisingly) uninterested in questions of genre, preferring instead to focus its inquiries on what Ian Bogost calls “procedural rhetoric”—how games signify through interactive processes. As coming-of-age games and YA novels about coming-of-age alongside video games continue to surface, literary studies might offer useful tools for assessing how and to what end Bildungsroman conventions shape these texts and produce meaning. Compellingly, video games as interactive texts offer audiences opportunities to play with conventional coming-of-age themes: identity, death, trauma, sexuality, power, morality, and agency, among others. Moreover, as Katherine Isbister and Jesper Juul argue, video games operate in a different affective register than print literature; can games also make us feel differently as we engage with these enduring themes?

This class puts contemporary scholarship on the Bildungsroman into conversation with video game theory, history, and literature—as well as games themselves—to determine what, in this context, video game studies might learn from literary studies and vice versa.

Instructor: Suzette Mayr 

This course is intended to offer the advanced writing student an opportunity to work intensively on a long prose project. Students at this level must be thoroughly familiar with the various elements and theories of narrative intervention or the development of a sustained investigation, and should be prepared to work creatively and imaginatively in applying those theories to their own writing as well as to their colleagues’ work. 

This course requires students to work toward completion of a polished, creative prose project of approximately 60-70 pages. Students who have been given permission to register in this class will already have a clear sense of the parameters of the project they wish to undertake, and they will bring to the class a description of their project. This project might consist of a series of unconnected stories, a novella, a series of interconnected tales, a prose-poem, or a work of creative non-fiction. Genre is not a rigid consideration, but the object of this course is to enable each student to realize that project in its greatest possible configuration within the limit of the term. Students are also expected to read widely as part of their background work, and to engage with literary events. This course requires critical acumen, editorial focus, and steady writing and reading. 

The class will be conducted primarily as a creative writing workshop. Each week, students will come to class prepared to discuss the published creative writing text or critical essay or chapter assigned, and/or the student writing to be workshopped that class. Workshopping at this advanced level is intensive and complicated, and students must become good editors as well as writers to complete this course. We accomplish this, in part, by critiquing others’ writing as we would published material, giving the text critical attention that will place it within a context of writing and genres. As well, these workshops should help the author to determine the project’s inherent direction, possibilities, and flaws, by providing advantageous editorial commentary.

Instructor: Jacqueline Jenkins

In the introduction to Public Scholarship in Literary Studies, Rachel Arteaga observes that “Public scholarship can be best understood as an ambitious and capacious approach to academic research, writing and teaching. It indicates an expansive view of the impact that scholarly work in the humanities can have on society” (4).  This hybrid critical / experiential learning seminar will be divided into two parts: critical reading in a range of issues relating to public scholarship in the humanities, and hands-on workshopping of individual public scholarship projects. For instance, through a selection of recent work in the field, students will have the opportunity to think through the questions of what makes scholarship ‘public;’ what the benefits for both critical scholars and public audiences may be; how we might understand notions of ‘public good,’ especially in the current social and political contexts; what the urgent implications are for graduate programs, especially those in the humanities.  We will also address the very real risks of doing public scholarship in an increasingly politically fraught environment, with special attention to the threats of online harassment and racism, transphobia, homophobia, and misogyny. Alongside this theoretical framing, students will develop a public scholarship project from their own recent or ongoing research, and will use the seminar environment to identify questions, refine their approach, and engage in peer-review in order to complete a work of public scholarship (writing, podcast, literary journalism, presentation, video, etc) as their final assignment in the course. Assignments will include reflections on the critical readings, collaborative work in the seminar towards the public scholarship project, and the completed project.

Instructor: Anthony Camara  

In the fields of critical theory and philosophy, the past decade saw a profusion of interest in speculative modes of thought. This new turn in theory reached its crescendo with the movement known as “Speculative Realism,” which has since dissipated as a coherent school in philosophy but left an indelible mark on contemporary thought that extends into literary criticism, especially work on popular genres such as horror and science fiction. The objective of this class is to familiarize students with these resurgent speculative philosophies and to interrogate how they inform, and are informed by, contemporary popular genre literature. The class will trace the speculative impulse more widely through the return to metaphysics and ontology seen in Feminist New Materialisms (Jane Bennett on vibrant materiality; Karen Barad on quantum ontology; Rosi Braidotti’s “nomadic” thought, etc.) and contemporary speculative posthumanisms. Of particular importance to the course will be comprehending the utility of these speculative theories in understanding speculative fictions, but also the recognition that such theories, by virtue of their speculative natures, are also fundamentally fictions themselves that turn on the creative dynamics of literature, hence the prevalence of hybrid theory-fictions amongst the work of Speculative Realists and associated thinkers. Upon completion of this course, students will not only be able to deploy current speculative philosophy as a literary-critical tool but also understand how literature affords a crucial creative impetus to the construction of disciplinary philosophies in the continental tradition.

Instructor: Clara A.B. Joseph

This course examines how colonial encounters were represented in historical narratives and how those narratives have been interpreted in postcolonial and decolonial theory. Through close reading of early modern and eighteenth-century texts from Europe and South Asia, students will explore how empire, religion, and cultural encounter were narrated and contested. The course introduces students to major theoretical debates about colonial discourse while emphasizing careful analysis of primary texts.

Instructor: Karen Bourrier 

Instructor: Bart Beaty

This course draws on the work undertaken for the twice SSHRC-funded What Were Comics? Projects by asking students to pay close attention to the formal elements that have shaped the aesthetics of the American comic book since the mid-1930s. By addressing the historical evolution of items often conceived by scholars as of little consequence (panel shape, word density, and so on) we will be able to chart the development of aesthetics over a relatively timespan. While all literary forms change (often over centuries), the relatively brief lifespan of the American comic book (ninety years) magnifies the scope of change because of its rapidity and its attention to the demands of the market. From this standpoint, the study of the American comic book throws the study of other forms into stark relief, allowing shifts in other forms to be highlighted in contrast.

This course will be built around a series of hands-on exercises. Drawing on the work of Jessica Abel and Matt Madden, exercises will be practical and include such skills as pencilling, inking, and lettering comics pages, as well as workshopping story structure, characterization, page layout/design and comics production. The major project for the term will be the production of a full-length comic book and the presentation of that material to the class as a whole.

Readings for the class will include excerpts from some of the major textbooks in the field (Abel and Madden; McCloud; Barry; Brunetti), theoretical texts in comics studies (Groensteen; Karasik and Newgarden; Pedri; Postema), and works on the history of American comic book (Williams; Chute; Gabilliet). Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, will be read in its entirety as the touchstone illustrative series, and each week will introduce short works or excerpts of major comics that will be discussed for their formal elements.