Undergraduate courses

Instructor: Christian Olbey

Description: This course offers the opportunity to critically engage with K-Drama, a popular cultural form that, like it's siblings (K-Pop, and K-Film) have acheived global popularity over the last decade.  Students in this course will critically read and engage a selection of these dramas through a series of questions such as: what characteristics define the form as a whole; how do such texts offer critical engagements with important social issues politics, environment, war, gender, national and personal identity, work, disability, social change and so on) and what are the reasons for its popularity both nationally and internationally.  Students should be prepared for an entertaining and instructive journey into the world of K-Drama.  No previous experience with the genre is necessary. 

Instructor: Uchechukwu Umezurike

Description: In this course, students will examine the composite novel, otherwise known as the novel-in-stories or the short story cycle. We will examine the techniques of this genre while exploring how theme, place, or characters serve as a unifying structure for this novel. At the end of the course, students will have developed a work-in-progress between 50 and 60 pages or 15,000 words. The class will be structured as follows: 1) focus on studying certain elements of fiction (i.e., narrative structure, characters, point of view, setting/place) in the four texts; 2) workshop presentations; and 3) in-class or at-home writing aimed at producing the draft of the work-in-progress. 

Instructor: Rebecca Sullivan 

Description: This course explores the enduring popularity of the works of L. M. Montgomery, continued fascination with her life, and how aspects of her biography are interwoven into her beloved girl heroines. Excerpts from her memoir The Alpine Path, selections from such series as Anne, Emily, and Pat, as well as one-offs including The Blue Castle may be assigned. Adaptations from television, graphic novels, live theatre and other media will also be included. The course will have an experiential learning component involving the university’s special collection of rare and first edition printings of Montgomery’s books. 

Instructor: Christian Olbey

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Instructor: Uchechukwu  Umezurike 

Description: The seminar course pivots around questions of home and belonging in Canada by focusing on how Black Canadian writers and filmmakers construct or even contest notions of home in their works and what these constructions or contestations illuminate about the social vectors, contradictions, and complexities of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nationality in Canada.

Instructor: Faye Halpern

Description: What are the hidden structures of stories that narrative theory can reveal? How can we use narrative theory to better understand the emotional, ethical, and ideological effects of fiction? This course will introduce key concepts in contemporary narrative theory to help answer these and other questions about what narratives are and how they work. We will explore concepts including storyworld, time, audience, progression, unreliable narration, and sympathy. After collecting and analyzing a set of personal anecdotes, we will read a range of short fiction and theoretical works by narrative theorists such as Gérard Genette, James Phelan, David Herman, Erin James, and Suzanne Keene. However, our main text, one that we’ll re-visit throughout the term, is Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. 

Assignments are aimed at introducing students to the different genres of academic life and will include blog posts, class facilitation, a teaching essay or analysis of a scholarly journal, and a conference paper and abstract.  

Instructor: Clara A. B. Joseph

Description: This course is designed to introduce students to advanced techniques in writing nonfiction prose for diverse contexts. By engaging in readings, discussions, and writing assignments, students will hone their writing skills and explore the various forms and styles of nonfiction prose. The curriculum will cover essential aspects of research and fact-checking, as well as the principles of narrative structure, style, and voice.

Creative nonfiction seeks to infuse factual or research-based content with literary tools and techniques, resulting in writing that captivates and delights readers aesthetically. It aims to create engaging narratives by adding drama and artistry to nonfiction writing. Throughout the course, students will receive valuable feedback from both the instructor and their peers, providing them with the opportunity to revise and refine their work. By the course’s conclusion, students will have gained a solid foundation in the principles and practices of nonfiction prose writing, equipping them for success in various writing contexts.

Instructor: Pamela Banting

Description: In this course we will study critical animal studies, plant studies and mineral studies (the latter variously and loosely conceived). Topics addressed across the spectrum of these theoretical innovations involve rethinking animacy and what constitutes being alive, agency, communication (including 'the wood-wide web' among trees and fungi, for instance), transformations and metamorphoses, the nature/culture ‘divide,’ subjects and objects, new materialism and the agency of objects, and many more. Can we learn to think with more-than-human animals, mothering trees, stone, soil and water rather than only about them as exploitable objects of our gaze? Have print and digital culture caused the world to vanish into books and the digital ether? How do we think about what Timothy Morton refers to as the 'hyperobject' of climate change? How can we as readers “change the (humanist) subject” to one more attuned to and respectful of the world that precedes, exceeds and sustains us? Do more-than-human creatures have a right to their lives? To what extent do we owe an ethical debt to the oceanic plankton that create half of the oxygen we breathe? Is intellect a marker of human superiority to other forms of life, or is photosynthesis more important? How can we alter our critical practices to take into account new scientific discoveries? What is the purpose of theory? Is theory by definition foreign? Do literary texts also constitute or spawn theory?

Instructor: Stefania Forlini

Description: Technological changes have altered everyday and more specialized scholarly practices of reading. The ways in which we access, search, analyze, and even curate texts and collections are also changing. In addition to examining “countermodels” to close reading (such as distant reading, surface reading, and reparative reading), this course explores assumptions embedded in practices of digitization, digital display, and new approaches to critical digital editions and archives. Exploring perspectives from book history, reception studies, literary studies, humanistic interface design, feminist data visualization, and human computer interaction (HCI), we will focus on how literary scholars can participate in decisions about—and design processes involved in—remediating and engaging with cultural materials.

Instructor: Michael Tavel Clarke

Description: A wave of pro-democracy movements has swept the world in recent decades, including the Arab Spring, Tajamuka in Zimbabwe, Movimiento 15-M in Spain, the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, Occupy Wall Street in the US, and campaigns in Burma, Sudan, and Belarus, to name a few, and these movements join longstanding campaigns like the pro-democracy movement in China. Meanwhile, we have seen the renewal of far-right activism, fascism, and totalitarianism in various parts of the world. Powerful global economic institutions operating outside the control of democratic governments are also putting pressure on democratic governance, and the widespread political prioritization of security and terrorism within ostensibly democratic nations often curtails both citizens’ and non-citizens’ rights, undermining the individual liberty that has long been an integral component of democratic politics. Finally, feminist, anti-colonial, and race studies scholarship continues to challenge many of the supposedly liberatory premises of Western democratic theory.

This context has encouraged a new wave of art and theory on the possibilities, challenges, and contradictions of democracy. This course situates the current outpouring of theoretical reflection in the long history of democratic theory and reads a range of literary texts in relation to such work and as theory in its own right.

Instructor: Pamela Banting 

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Instructor: Karen Bourrier

Description: This course will focus on a single novel, George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871). A 2015 poll of book critics conducted by the BBC named Middlemarch the greatest British novel of all time by a landslide. The novel continues to speak to a twenty-first century audience through timely themes ranging from epidemics and extraction ecologies to the rise of the middle class and women’s ambitions in a patriarchal society. Middlemarch was originally published in eight parts of around 110 pages each; the University of Calgary’s Archives and Special Collections holds the original eight parts, both bound and unbound, and the first edition of Middlemarch in volume form. Students in this course will pursue a close reading of Eliot’s novel alongside the earliest printed editions of this work. We will consider primary sources ranging from the original paper publication in parts, the contemporary scientific and poetic archives that influenced Eliot’s work, and digital archives that enable new readings and new access to this classic text.

Instructor: Jacqueline Jenkins

Description: In this course, students will encounter the English Middle Ages from a transcultural perspective. With a focus on globalism, the course seeks to de-centre medieval England by bringing western medieval studies, specifically the study of medieval English literature and culture, into conversation with critical work in the fields of globalization and global literature, postmodernity, and race and ethnicity studies, among others. Beginning with a focus on medieval map-making, the histories of travel and pilgrimage, and even the ubiquity and movement of the plague known as the Black Death, we will consider the ways medieval English literature represents encounters with the world outside its national and social boundaries. We will also consider the transcultural movement of literature itself through consideration of select texts, specifically romances, whose analogues and ‘afterlives’ speak to the permeability of linguistic, national and cultural borders. Readings will include literary and non-literary texts, and though the focus will be on Middle English texts, students will also read works from languages other than English (in Modern English translations) as well as a wide range of contemporary critical work. The course will also focus on the ways ideas of ‘the medieval’ continue to pervade national discourses and have been leveraged, for instance, to support the formation of white nationalist identities. Readings for this section will be drawn from ongoing scholarly discussions, for instance in online forums such as The Public Medievalist (https://www.publicmedievalist.com/) and In the Medieval Middle (http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/).

Note: Pre-session study required for this class. 

Instructor: Jenny McKenney

Description: Dark Academia is an online subculture and an aesthetic predicated on bookishness and a nostalgia for an imagined academic life. As the numbers of Dark Academia books proliferate, this course will take a look at the origins of this trend in the longer history of academic fiction and consider how current Dark Academia writers have both reproduced and reframed the campus novel. 

Instructor: Joshua Whitehead

Description: In this course we will survey a breadth of fictional texts that align themselves with, or hybridize, in the formulations of “auto” and “literary” realist fiction to create our own novellas of fiction (be them in either form). In North America, and most evidently, Canada, autofiction has become one of the most popular forms (or genres if we may call it that) of publicized fiction. Seen in the likes of Sheila Heti, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Ocean Vuong, or Justin Torres, autofiction has taken center stage from both the “Big Three” (Penguin Random House Canada [PRHC], HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster) and indie publishing houses (Arsenal Pulp Press, House of Anansi, Coach House, Douglas & McIntyre). Much of this comes from, perhaps, the rise of BIPOC and/or queer authors being published, celebrated, and winning major literary awards. Meanwhile, autofiction has also began to question the more respected form of capital “L” literary realism which has often been associated with heterosexual, cisgendered, whiteness as the elite form of fictional endeavours as seen in the award categories of the PEN, Faulkner, and Nobel.