Past graduate courses

Instructor: Michael Ullyot

Description

Shakespeare has long been a stalwart of the literary canon. But no amount of historical prestige will earn him our future respect. We can read historical texts in two ways: as historicists, situating their values and methods firmly in the early modern period of their origins; and as presentists, viewing them through the lens of our reception. This course does the latter, asking a question vital of all canonical texts: what value to they offer to readers now? Shakespeare can earn our attention by addressing our urgent projects of decolonization, racial reconciliation, queer equality, and patriarchy’s reckoning — and by reframing contemporary social forces from surveillance capitalism to climate change to political polarization.

This course tests Ben Jonson’s claim in the First Folio that Shakespeare was “not of an age, but for all time.” By reading his texts through the lens of the present, we will test not just his relevance but his worth. We will pair his texts with adaptations and commentary in these fields: selected sonnets with decolonization (L’Abbé); Titus Andronicus with racial justice (Loomba); As You Like It with gender fluidity (Sanchez, Stockton); Hamlet with surveillance (Schalkwyk); The Tempest with imperialism (Singh); The Taming of the Shrew with toxic masculinity (Schwarz). Some primary texts we will read, and others we will watch in performances that address these contemporary resonances — including the 2019 virtual reality adaptation Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit (YouTube VR), and film adaptations (Franco Zeffirelli’s 1967 Taming of the Shrew; Julie Taymor’s 2010 Tempest).

Instructor: Joshua Whitehead

Description

Our class will track 2SQ (Two-Spirit, queer) Indigeneity in ways that allow us to write, think, and read against the colonial and lateral violences that displace their bodies, sexualities, histories, and identities through a variety of cultural texts that are heterogeneous and intersectional. Through such a reading we can begin the necessary work to help rightfully reconcile not only settler C/Kanadians and FNMI (First Nation, Métis, Inuit) peoples, but also do the much needed work of native-to-native reconciliation by historicizing 2SQ Indigeneity and contributing to its survivance in the now amidst waves of intergenerational trauma. 

This course will highlight important questions pertaining to Indigenous sexualities, genders, and sexes outside of, beyond, and sometimes aligned with Western conceptions of LGBTQ+ and queer studies. Students will develop a critical and decolonial understanding of queer and trans Indigeneity within its current colonized state as well as build a vocabulary of terminologies, both literary and linguistic, to use as lenses of analyses for the texts we will undertake. This class will take upon a breadth of texts that disrupt borders, time periods, and genres from a variety of peoplehoods such as: the Cree (incl. Plains and Driftpile), Cherokee, Lumbee, Osage, Inuk, Kumeyaay, Métis, Anishinaabe, and non-Indigenous

Instructor: Suzette Mayr

Description

This course is intended to offer the advanced writing student an opportunity to work intensively on prose fiction in a popular genre, although the understanding of “popular genre” will not be considered a fixed or rigid category in this course.

Students at this level must be thoroughly familiar with the various elements and theories of narrative intervention, and should be prepared to work creatively and imaginatively in applying those theories to their own writing, as well as to their colleagues’ writing.

Application Requirements:

To be considered for a place in this course, students must email an application form to smayr@ucalgary.ca by July 1, 2022.

IMPORTANT: Please put "English 694.3 Application Portfolio" in the subject line of the email.

How to Apply: Download application form

Instructor: Shaobo Xie

Description

This course explores the idea of minoritarian writing as variously named and practiced in contemporary theory and literature. A minor literature, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is not literature written in a minor language; “it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language.”

Its three defining characteristics are:

• the deterritorialization of language
• the connection of the individual to a political immediacy
• the collective assemblage of enunciation

The seminar discussions will center around the following questions:

• What are the central concerns shared among various forms of contemporary minoritarian writing?
• In what sense is minoritarian writing a revolutionary force?
• Why is it that a minor literature always opens up a new way of imagining or experiencing aesthetic, cultural, and epistemological otherness?
• To what extent might a minor literature deterritorialize dominant language and social imaginaries in a way that is really heterogeneous or external to the rule of neoliberal capitalism?
• What role can minoritarian writing play in transforming the English classroom into a vibrant space of production of creative energies and ideas?

Instructor: Kit Dobson

Description 

This course is designed as an inquiry into the poetics of posthumanism in the place currently known as Canada. Working through theories of post-humanism, and especially post-human ecologies, this course brings students to encounters with the environment in contemporary poetry produced in Canada. It does so in the service of creating a dynamic textual encounter with the flows between the human and the more-than-human worlds that students and poets alike inhabit.

Students will seeks to engage the scholarship of research-creation in order to enable an expanded range for both scholarship and assessment: students in this course will have the capacity not merely to engage with poetic and artistic texts that challenge and blur the (post)human, but they will also have the opportunity to begin to take on the task of research-creation efforts in their own assessments for the course.

Contemporary texts by poets in Canada who take seriously questions of environment, land, and the unstable boundary between the human and the non-human will be studied 

Instructor: Michael 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: Morgan Vanek

Description

In 1720, London witnessed its first major financial crash. The South Sea Bubble burst, the stock market plummeted, and the public sphere exploded with new writing – from periodical essays and plays to legislation – that aimed to expose and curtail the corruption, self-interest, and stock-jobbing many blamed for the crash. In this course, we’ll examine both the new literary genres and the many forms of economic and financial writing that flourished in the years just before and after this crash (1710-1725), with a focus on how these genres – from satire to the realistic novel to, as Mary Poovey has argued, money itself – taught their readers to think about the nature of the risks associated with credit, debt, and speculation. Keeping an eye on what the precarious economic conditions of the present have inherited from this moment when finance was new, we’ll trace both these forms and the wide range of metaphors for risk that the South Sea Bubble generated from its expansion through its collapse and afterlife – and then we’ll look forward, taking up the central questions of an emerging body of writing about the relationship between the Anthropocene and the logic of capital. If, as Jason Moore argues, the present climate crisis represents an “epochal…breakdown of the strategies and relations that have sustained capital accumulation through the past five centuries,” the forms of writing that produced and were produced by the South Sea Bubble represent a newly important archive, not just for what they reveal of the structures of thought underpinning the “strategies and relations” Moore describes here, but for the alternatives they represent. Of all the threats that this literature of the South Sea Bubble sought to expose and contain, we’ll ask, are there any we might want to awaken now?

Instructor: Rain Prud'homme Cranford

Description

In the age of social media, where racial, sexual, ecological, and economic social justice is often denoted through hashtags: #BlackLivesMatter, #ThisIsIndianLand, #SexualSovereignty, #EffYourBeautyStandards etc, the legacy of rhetorical agency as it manifests in creative production connects social media expressions with a history of on the ground  grassroots movements. From early colonial writers such as Phyllis Wheatly and Samson Occom, to musicians such as Buffy Saint Marie and Lizzo to modern writers such as Jesmyn Ward and Taté Walker, traditions of Red, Black, and Red/Black (or Blindian) rhetorics exist both in relation and contention to one another. Like the many peoples who result of survivals and alliances of Red and Black bodies, whose existences are historically in alliance and in contestation, so we must recognize that these relationships and resistances share histories of subjugation, complexities of oppressions, and borrowed resistance tactics from oppressors in efforts to subvert dominant discourses while blending with both Red/Black inherently rhetorical communal strategies, forging rich histories of resistance rhetorics that are decidedly Black, Native, Afro-Indian or Red/Black. This graduate course is designed to introduce students to themes, forms, histories, epistemologies, rhetorical strategies, and content in works by Black, Indigenous, and Blindian (African-Native), cultural perspectives from the colonial period to the common era. Students will be introduced to concepts, histories, authors, and major themes around race/racism, gender/sexuality, ecology/environmentalism, and body (aesthetics, health, disAbility) at the intersections of Black, Indigenous, and Blindian peoples towards social justice and equity in Canada, the US, and Latinidad/Caribbean

Instructor: Stefania Forlini

This course is designed to offer students new to graduate studies or new to the Department of English at the University of Calgary an introduction to a variety of scholarly and professional skills. The aim is to ensure that you have the training to help you succeed academically and professionally, particularly in your program here. To this end, guests with a range of expertise will meet with us most weeks to present their area of research or their research methodologies, to help you develop specific skills (grant writing for example, or advanced library research), or guide you through useful practices (such as proposal writing, conference presenting, career preparation, etc.). This course is required for all MA and PhD students.

Instructor: Aritha van Herk

Description:

The Creative Nonfiction genre has gained considerable traction as a form investigating substantial intellectual questions in contemporary times. Although focused on narrative, it is less a genre in and of itself than a text instigated by voice and research, strong description, evocative images, and powerful revelations. While it relies on the author’s ability to recount or to springboard from actual events, it relies also on imagination and craft to relay important ideas: stories of experience, loss, coincidence, accident, and yes, events. Most of all, the successful work of nonfiction incites reflection on a crucial moment of recognition that the writer can offer the reader.  

This course will examine several contemporary works of creative non-fiction, including examples of autobiography, memoir, travel narrative, literary journalism and ficto-criticism as models to inspire and inform students’ own writing of a work of creative non-fiction. The aim of the course is to enable students to research and develop a powerful piece of writing that is both creative and critical, whether a lyric essay, a meditation, or a well-researched dive into an historical or place-based subject.

The students will be expected to produce, by the end of the course, a 75 page work of Creative Nonfiction.

Application Requirements:

By August 1^st, 2021, prospective students should submit a proposal of the long project they wish to undertake, and 20 pages of writing relevant to that project to vanherk@ucalgary.ca.  Admission to this course is determined by portfolio and is granted by departmental permission.

How to apply: Download application form

Instructor: Jim Ellis

Description:

Why does allegory seem so alien to our contemporary mindset? There have been no major allegories written in English since the seventeenth century, and this may have something to do with the emergence of forms of subjectivity associated with Cartesian individualism, and the attendant rise of psychological realism in literature. We can no longer accept that we are not fully autonomous beings, and that our meaning might come from elsewhere. Recent schools of theory grouped together under the label of posthumanism, including most centrally versions of ecocriticism, have challenged the way that Cartesian thinking denies our connection to bodies, animals, plants and things. Scholars of early modern literature have enthusiastically taken up these theories to explore the transitional zones of thinking where competing notions of embodiment, animism and vitality were in play. In this course, we will explore posthumanist theories in conjunction with Edmund Spenser’s allegorical romance epic, The Faerie Queene. Spenser’s epic is famous for its hybrid nature, a mix of epic, romance and allegory that make any straightforward readings of its characters, actors, objects and actants difficult. The poem teaches the reader to deploy multiple strategies to make sense of any particular episode, in the overall project of refashioning the reader. Using contemporary theory and theoretically-informed criticism we will explore the strange terrain of Faery Land, and the hybrid beings that inhabit it. We will look at such topics as Lucretian atomism, human/animal relations, talking plants, metal beings, vibrant matter, agent networks, and at the kinds of non-Cartesian thinking that allegory demands.

Instructor: Derritt Mason

Description

The Bildungsroman, a centuries-old genre that recounts the moral and physical development of young protagonists, spawned themes and conventions that persist in a number of 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. 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 coming-of-age games and YA novels about coming-of-age alongside video games continue to surface, however, 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: Larissa Lai

Description:

This is an advanced course in creative writing, designed to offer student with strong and longstanding poetry writing practice the opportunity to work on a book length project. Students are expected to already have a regular writing practice. This course will help deepen that practice. Students will receive instruction in the various ways that a coherent and cohesive poetry book can be assembled. Early in the course we will discuss both thematic and formal possibilities in relation to project you have proposed in your application. You will be given advice and guidance to refine these, and then you will produce the book you have mapped out— with plenty of room for deviation and reinvention, but with the goal of a complete manuscript by the end of the course. Since the course is for just one semester, students may bring a project-in-progress or a selection of  5-15 finished/well-drafted poems to use as the basis for their book if they wish. Project thematics are wide open. Form is also wide open: narrative poetry, lyric poetry, sound poetry, concrete poetry, interventionist poetry, language-based poetry, conceptual poetry or digital writing. Students are also invited to invent forms and will be given guidance in how to do so.

Application Requirements: To be considered for a place in this course, students must email an application form to larissa.lai@ucalgary.ca   by December 1, 2021.

IMPORTANT: Please put "English 593/693 Application Portfolio" in the subject line of the email. I receive a lot of email, and this is the only way I can be sure I'll be able to find your application when I'm looking for it.

How to Apply: Download application form

Instructor: Dr. Pamela Banting

Climate change presents a profound historical rupture and threatens our very presumption of our own survival as individuals and possibly our continuation as a species. In this course we will analyze how the Anthropocene is represented in contemporary texts. How might studying such representations advance our thinking about how to live on in this rapidly unfolding epoch? Should we call it the Anthropocene, Capitalocene (Moore, Klein), Chthulucene (Haraway), Plasticene, the Great Derangement (Ghosh), the Long Emergency (Kunstler), climate change or “everything change” (Atwood)? What role can those of us in the Arts play in helping our fellow citizens comprehend it, forestall widespread misery and catastrophe and envision non-fossil-fueled social formations? When, collectively, humans – especially those of First World, capitalist nations – become agents of geological change, what happens to notions of agency and subjectivity? What does human agency mean in light of the fact that we owe every second breath we take to plankton, tiny creatures that are having difficulty forming their shells in the acidified ocean? Will the future be settled or nomadic? Will we be vaulted into extreme precarity, a semblance of the homestead era or dystopias of the kind we read about in speculative fiction?

Theoretical readings will pertain to terminology (as above); survival; connections between decarbonization and decolonization; concepts of matter and materiality; bodies, corporeality, life; subjects, objects and agency; energy; food security; extirpation / extinction; systems and infrastructure; pollution and toxicity; plastic; social and environmental justice; elemental ecocriticism; resilience, action and activism.

Literary texts will include (but not be restricted to) Richard Powers, The Overstory (novel) and Adam Dickinson, Anatomic (poetry).

Instructor: Dr. David Sigler

In this seminar, we will see how a number of important women writers in the British Romantic period—historians, cultural critics, novelists, and poets—began to describe themselves as “future historians,” an oxymoron that suggests a strange relationship between gender and temporality. As male cultural commentators were predicting calamity in the face of permanent war and likely revolution, these women, including Britain’s first openly female historian Catherine Macaulay, the feminists Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays, the poets Hannah Cowley, Anna Barbauld, and Charlotte Smith, and the science fiction pioneer Mary Shelley, were writing in fractured temporalities as if they were benevolent visitors from the future, able already to offer the benefit of hindsight. By describing current events from outrageously impossible perspectives, these women were challenging the very meaning of being contemporary, developing a line of argument that put women and gender at the forefront of history. As writing from the future became an available discourse to Romantic-era women writers, it enabled those who would otherwise have been marginalized in political debates to challenge many of Great Britain’s most hegemonic institutions, such as imperialism, capitalism, the slave trade, the monarchy, and conjugal heterosexuality. 

This course is designed to offer students new to graduate studies or new to the University of Calgary an introduction to a variety of scholarly and professional skills. The aim is to ensure you have the training to help you succeed academically and professionally. To this end, guest with a range of expertise will meet with us each week to present their areas of research or their research methodologies, to help you develop specific skills (grant writing for example, or advanced library research), or guide you through useful practices such as proposal writing and conference presentation).

This is a half-year, pass/fail course, not included in GPA.

Instructor: Aritha van Herk

This Graduate Creative Writing course seeks to enable students to work from interest, experience, and research toward the writing of an effective and compelling narrative. Creative Non-fiction’s impetus is to use the techniques of literary craft within a factual or research-based framework to write in a compelling, dramatic, and aesthetically interesting manner. While the focus is on post-academic writing (unhampered by references or theoretical framing, although not exclusive of that background and influence), the research and revision required contributes to writerly acumen and eloquence.

Application Requirements:

In order to be considered for a place in this course, potential students must submit the following via e-mail by August 10, 2020 to vanherk@ucalgary.ca .Download application form.

Instructor: Dr. Jacqueline Jenkins

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 end with a consideration of the ways notions 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 concluding 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/).

Instructor: Dr. Michael Clarke

Pro-democracy movements have swept the world in recent decades, including the Arab Spring, Tajamuka in Zimbabwe, Movimiento 15-M in Spain, the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, and campaigns in Myanmar and Sudan, to name a few, and these movements join longstanding crusades 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.

This context has encouraged a new wave of art and theory on the possibilities and challenges 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.

Course readings will be selected from among such works as Crèvecœur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782), Balzac’s The Chouans (1829), Whitman’s Song of Myself (1855 edition), Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869), Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008), Xiaolu Guo’s I Am China (2014), Hardt and Negri’s Assembly (2017) and Multitude (2005), 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), Nancy’s The Truth of Democracy (2010), Rancière’s Hatred of Democracy (2009), Derrida’s Rogues (2005), Mouffe’s The Democratic Paradox (2000), Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), Mill’s On Liberty (1859), de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835/1840), and Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762).