Graduate Courses 2025-2026

Instructor: Dr. 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. 

Here we will ask: what skills, techniques, and/or modalities of writing can we adapt from autofiction? What are the differences of auto and literary realist fiction? What are the ethics of adapting our lives for fiction? How do we approach fiction outside of our identity categories as a guest? How might allegory, motif, and/or intertextuality taken from literary fiction aid our stories now? What are the contours of our fictions in the aftermath of global trauma, genocide, and/or apocalypse? How do we write pain? What role do cultural epistemologies play in how we interrogate and categorize fiction? How do we interrogate the canon for fictional enhancement regarding voice, dialogue, and point of view? 

Here we will survey celebrated fictional texts, contemporary and historical, to discuss technique and style while also actively workshopping and practicing editorial skills for others and ourselves in the creation of a fictional novella. Possible readings may include: William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Michelle Good, Han Kang, Justin Torres, Ocean Vuong, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Jente Posthuma, Toni Morrison, Anthony Olivera, Omar El Akkad, and/or Samantha Harvey. Students will be required to complete 75-100 double-spaced pages of publishable fiction either as an excerpt from a longer work or a full-length novella. Other assignments will include: an in-class presentation, a mock literary festival interview/panel, weekly discussions, and rigorous workshopping throughout the course. 

Instructor: Dr. Uchechukwu Umezurike

Description

The graduate seminar 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: Dr. Anna Veprinska 

Description

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: Dr. 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.

Students will choose some of the readings for the course. Additional course readings will be selected from among such primary works as:

• Balzac’s The Chouans (1829)
• Whitman’s Song of Myself (1855)
• Mahfouz’s Cairo Modern (1945)
• Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952)
• Vieux-Chauvet’s Love, Anger, Madness (1968)
• Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008)
• Kimmerer’s “Allegiance to Gratitude” (2013)
• Guo’s I Am China (2014)
• Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)
• Han’s Human Acts (2014)

Secondary readings will be selected from among such works as:

• Graeber and Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything (2021)
• Dahl’s Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought (2018)
• Hardt and Negri’s Assembly (2017)
• essays by Agamben, Badiou, Bourdieu, Butler, Žižek and others in What Is a People? (2016) and Democracy in What State? (2012)
• Brown’s Undoing the Demos (2015)
• Fraser’s Transnationalizing the Public Sphere (2014)
• Chatterjee’s Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy (2011)
• Rancière’s Hatred of Democracy (2009)
• Rosanvallon’s Democracy Past and Future (2006)
• Derrida’s Rogues (2005)
• Olson’s Abolition of White Democracy (2004)
• Mouffe’s The Democratic Paradox (2000)
• Young’s Inclusion and Democracy (2000

Instructor: Dr. Clara 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: Dr. 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. 

Learning Outcomes: 

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to: 

1. Read texts with creative and critical discernment; 
2. Acquire a concrete understanding of elements of style work in different genres;
3. Engage in meaningful critique about writing with their peers; 
4. Make use of critiques received and witnessed to improve their own work;
5. Write original prose and develop a work-in-progress.

Required texts and reading:

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

Enchanted Night by Steven Milhauser

This House is not for Sale by EC Osondu

An Aroma of Coffee by Dany Laferrriere

Recommended text:

Elements of Fiction by Walter Mosley

Instructor: Dr. 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: Dr. 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/).

Proposed texts:

At this point I imagine using the following texts; however, given the evolving scholarship in this field, I will adjust as necessary as more current, or more accessible, readings become available. Please wait until the approved outline is available before purchasing textbooks. At the time of posting this description, all of the texts and readings are available either through the library via online access or through free online access or will be uploaded to D2L (copyright compliant). 

• Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past. Eds. A. Albin, M. Erler, T. O’Donnell, N. Paul, N. Rowe. Fordham UP, 2019. 
• Geraldine Heng. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Geraldine Heng. Cambridge UP, 2018. 
• Geraldine Heng. The Global Middle Ages: An Introduction. Cambridge Elements: Cambridge UP, 2021.
• Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant. The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval 
• Medieval Travel and Travelers. Ed. John Romano, U Toronto P, 2020.
• The Intolerant Middle Ages: A Reader. Ed. Eugene Smelyansky. U Toronto Press, 2020.
• Cord J. Whitaker. Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking. U Pennsylvania P, 2019.

Instructor: Dr. 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.