Past graduate courses

Instructor: Dr. Kit Dobson

Description

How do literatures produced in Canada relate to global crises? How, for instance, do displacement and forced migration shape how stories are told in this place? How do ongoing forms of (neo-)colonialism shape literature? How might literary works in Canada respond to ongoing environmental dislocations? This course is an inquiry into the ways in which what is variously called globalization, transnationalism, or globality impact, shape, and are reworked by literatures produced in the place currently known as Canada. It focuses upon literary works produced in Canada since 2010, while bringing a longer view largely through theoretical and critical engagements. It works across genres (fiction, poetry, and drama) in order to examine texts, writers, and literary movements that respond to global politics. In texts that engage the fraught politics of the contemporary moment, audiences can witness a range of approaches that include dystopic writing, documentary poetics, searing addresses to injustice, and more. This course engages and builds upon what students may already know about Canadian literary traditions and opens up that sensibility, enacting a pedagogy that is no longer invested in notions of “CanLit” and that, instead, how do literatures produced in Canada relate to contemporary global crises? How, for instance, do displacement and forced migration shape the ways in which stories are told in this place? How do ongoing forms of (neo-)colonialism shape literary possibilities? What does the rise of the alt-right mean in the context of literary works that seek to provide justice, solace, or recourse for marginalized bodies? How might literary works in Canada respond to the ongoing environmental and social dislocations of global capitalism? This course is designed as an inquiry into the ongoing ways in which the structures of what is variously called globalization, transnationalism, or globality impact, shape, and are reworked by literatures produced in the place currently known as Canada. Building upon theories of globalization / transnationalism, this course brings students to encounters with literary works produced in Canada mostly written since 2010. It does so in the service of creating a dynamic engagement with the fraught politics of the contemporary moment.

This course works across genres (fiction, poetry, and drama) in order to examine texts, writers, and literary movements that respond to the politics of globality. As writers in the twenty-first century engage the fraught politics of the contemporary moment, audiences can witness a range of possible approaches that include dystopic writing, forms of documentary poetics, searing addresses to historical injustices, and more. This course endeavours to engage and build upon what students may already know about Canadian literary traditions and radically open up that sensibility, enacting a pedagogy that is no longer invested in notions of “CanLit” and that, instead, opens up to the plethora of possibilities embedded within literatures in Canada.

Instructor: Dr. Jim Ellis

Description

Recent schools of theory grouped together under the label of posthumanism, including ecocriticism, animal studies, and actant theories, 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 theories of embodiment, animism and vitality were in play.

This course will explore post-humanist theories in conjunction with Edmund Spenser’s allegorical romance epic, The Faerie Queene, as well as some of his earlier writings.  Spenser’s work is full of engagements with obsolete knowledge systems and Spenser’s epic is famous for its hybrid nature: a mix of epic, romance and allegory that makes 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 its 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 in the Garden of Adonis; human/animal relations; talking plants and the tripartite soul; metal men, vibrant matter, networks, and the kinds of non-Cartesian thinking that allegory demands.

Instructor: Dr. Faye Halpern

Description

This course will begin by introducing an approach to literary texts called “narrative ethics,” which grows out of narrative theory more generally. We’ll spend the rest of the course focusing on a kind of narrative that presents a particularly rich field for this approach: unreliable narration. We’ll explore how unreliability works both in general and in particular texts. What kind of ethical relationships do these unreliable narratives establish between authors, narrators, characters, and readers? How does unreliability enable or limit an author’s ability to engage its audience in thinking about issues like class, gender, race, and historical trauma? Does filmic unreliability present different ethical possibilities and challenges than literary unreliability? Along with the primary texts, we’ll read both literary theory and critical articles that analyze the particular texts we’ll be reading. We’ll use this theory and criticism not just as vehicles for particular views but as models for our own academic writing. Assignments will include discussion board posts, a teaching essay or analysis of a scholarly journal, and a conference paper; everyone will also have the chance to lead the class in an active learning activity.

Instructor: Dr. Clara A.B. Joseph

Description

This course is designed to introduce students to advanced techniques in writing nonfiction prose for diverse contexts, embracing both creative and academic writing. 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. In the creative writing component of this course, students will explore various forms of creative nonfiction, including personal essays, memoirs, and literary journalism. They will study the works of successful creative nonfiction writers and practice crafting their own pieces in diverse styles.

The academic writing component will teach students how to write research papers and other scholarly documents, emphasizing referencing and argumentation in a way that appeals to a broader readership by incorporating appropriate elements of creative nonfiction prose.

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. David Sigler

Description

The British Romantic period is often considered the "Age of Revolution," a time in which established systems of meaning (political, economic, literary, gender, class, race) were openly challenged and up for grabs. Yet a surprising number of the period's writers were also meditating upon rules, sometimes even with a certain zeal. Authors studied may include: Mary Wollstonecraft, Anonymous, Elizabeth Meeke, William Blake, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Felicia Hemans, Hannah More.

Instructor: Dr. Michael Ullyot

Description

Since the Middle Ages, English literary texts have been adapted for other media, from manuscript illustrations to video games. This course addresses the history and theory of literary adaptations into other media, which introduce what Lisa Gitelman (2008) calls alternate protocols — rules and conditions — of use. To establish a prehistorical foundation, we begin with early modern adaptations across formal divisions: historical chronicles and Chaucer’s poems to Shakespeare’s plays. Then we chart the history of adaptation theories from the 16th and 17th centuries (Richard Hooker, John Dryden) to contemporary theories of originality, fidelity, modernization, and novelty (Linda Hutcheon, 2006; Kamilla Elliott, 2020). We’ll address debates about the politics of appropriation and the aesthetics of adaptation in present social, technological, and economic contexts. Case studies will be in three categories: text to screen (e.g. The English Patient; Clueless; The Hollow Crown); text to stage (e.g. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time; Wolf Hall; Hamnet); and text to radio (e.g. Orson Welles’ The Mercury Theatre on the Air series). These will provoke questions about the place of fidelity; the bankability of canonical texts and authors; and the protocols (Gitelman) evident from comparing adaptations across media.

Instructor: Dr. Anna Veprinska 

Description

The Belarussian-American poet Valzhyna Mort, among others, argues that a poet’s role is to witness. Interrogating this notion, our course considers how we might engage with poetry as an act of witnessing. Reading widely across contemporary poetry of witness, including poetry in response to genocide, war, violence, oppression, personal and communal pain, and ecological crisis, we will write our own way into witnessing, probing what it means to not avert one’s eyes.

Our questions will include the following: What are the ethics and responsibilities of witnessing through poetry? How might we use language to approach the “unspeakable”? And what are the roles and possibilities of form and content in poetic witnessing?

Our focus will be on reading the work of published poets, discussing poetry of witness, and writing and workshopping poems. This course will also include a guest speaker. The cumulative assignment will be the production of a chapbook.

Instructor: Dr. Joshua Whitehead

Description

This course will focus on the colonial imperatives inherent within Western forms of publishing. We will ask: if we are to be decolonial on the land and not recognize the colonial borders of nation, province, and territories in lieu of Indigenous sovereign nationhoods--how do we simultaneously enact this methodology on the "page" as well. How do we become good guests to oratory? Often, Indigenous literatures are registered in two tenors: as fantastical parables or as anthropoligic trauma narratives. The Western paradigms of categorizing literatures are debilitating to Indigenous forms of storytelling as they teach us to autopsy narrative for the sake of identification and ask us to apply ideologies of "literary realism" in ways that disfigure Indigenous stories. This course will explore how genre and form (if we may even call them that) are recontextualized through Indigenous epistemologies that consider the non-human (and non-corporeal) as "real". Do we call stories of star people speculative fiction? Are stories of wendigo really horror? How does autofiction contribute to literary voyeurism into community? Is the frontier of the west yet "wild" without characters? How have residential school narratives made for a gluttonous reading public? This course will survey Indigenous writers from across temporal zones, peoplehoods (including global Indigenous narratives from Gadigal/Dharug of Australia and the Maori of Aotearoa), and intersectional Indigenous identities that center Indigenous women and Two-Spirit, queer, and/or trans Indigenous writers. Though Indigenous stories may have instances of pain, they are wildly engendered with genre, form, experimentation, and radical politics of not just reconciliation, but emancipation. From the publication of Maria Campbell's Half-Breed as fiction (instead of its original account of non-fiction) in 1973 through to the rise of Indigenous futurisms, perhaps most popularized by Daniel Heath Justice's notion of "wonderworks," we will consider how Indigenous stories are all genre and no-genre simultaneously. 

Instructor: Professor 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. 

Assignments will combine historical work in the university’s special collections and digitization /digital reading. Students will complete one short research paper and a larger digital project, as well as a seminar presentation.

Instructor: Professor Stefania Forlini

Description

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: Professor Rain Prud’Homme-Cranford

Description

Living within the settler constructed confines of Calgary, many of us have heard and learned the traditional names for this land relative where the “Bow meets the Elbow river” : Mohkínsstsisi (Sisika / Blackfoot) and Wîchîspa Oyade or Wenchi Ispase, (Stoney / Nakoda). For an overwhelming majority of us living and working at U of C–we are, in truth, “uninvited guests” (a problematic phrase) on Treaty 7 homelands. To be non objective-we are squatters. As scholars, educators, academics, even activist– we have become familiar with the landbase acknowledgement. But what does this acknowledgement do? How might this problematic practice invite us to interrogate the very system that offers language up as performance to “acknowledge” (not act/react to) the physicality of racism and genocide and the legacy of living racism and genocide through written / intellectual legal and political policies of inaction? From #LandBack to #NoBansOnStolenLands– what role do the stories FNMI communities create about place / space / land relation do to erase and challenge settler sociopolitical lines of dominance, while insisting that land has agency and can be heard rising up, speaking back, to assert an autonomy and relationality? What does it mean to declare an ecological / environmental PLACE sovereign?  

As a class we will travel from pre-contact to the colonial period from 19^th to 21^stcenturies and from Treaty 7 to Oklahoma and Louisiana, from the Pacific Islands to Sámpi, and from Caribbean to Latin America and Australia to ask in what ways has privatization, eco-colonialism and extractivism, and legal / political policies of settler governments sought to maintain arbitrary boundaries while simultaneously seeking to silence the very stories that these lands themselves speak? From Mohkínsstsisi (Sisika / Blackfoot) and Wîchîspa Oyade to the Choctaw in Missippii and Louisiana traditional towns: Okla Hannali (Six Towns), Ahi Apet Okla (Potato Eating People) and Okla Falaya (Long River People); to the Sámi  in Sámpi:  The Coastal / Sea Sámi and Mountain / Fell Sámi. Indigenous peoples have located and inscribed relation to land through naming and claiming and in return being claimed by the land itself. This graduate class asked us to intervene in conversations around Indigenization and decolonization, specifically as it intersects landbase, ecological kinship, sovereignty, autonomy and agency, and creative, critical, and political praxis by and with Indigenous peoples locally and globally. How do the stories, media, literatures, and arts that Indigenous bodies and communities create foster conversations and reciprocity with their landbases. How do this thinker-artist-activists chart, map, uncover, and reclaim a geographic narrative of place as active, sovereign, and sentient? Moreover, how do stories, theories, and our artistic practises challenge settler constructed geographic and cartographic praxis that has long sought to sever active and holistic relationships embodied through the Indigenous corpus and extending to the embodiment of landbase? 

We will read, listen, and view multimodal texts from a variety of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholar-creative-thinker-artist-activists such as and/or  including (but not limited to): Leroy Little Bear, Mishuana Goeman, Elle-Maija Tailfeathers, Rosalyn R. LaPier, Deondre Smiles, Vivian Faith Prescott, Katherena Vermette, Leanne Howe, Joshua Whitehead, Craig Perez, Chadwick Allen, Dylan Robinson, Shari M. Huhndorf, Hi'iaka, kuʻualoha hoʻomanawanui, Margery Fee, Natchee Blu Barnd. 

Instructor: Professor 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. 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, 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. The latter portion of this block week class will be structured as a “game jam,” during which students will work on combining the tools of literary analysis and storytelling with game design in order to create a short game (individually, in pairs, or in small groups) using free, user-friendly game-maker software (e.g. Twine, Bitsy). Throughout the week, thanks to developing partnerships with Edmonton’s Inflexion Software and the University of Calgary’s Video Game Development program (housed in Computer Science), students will have the opportunity to interact with game design specialists from both the university and the game industry itself.

Instructor: Professor Suzette Mayr

Description:

English 694 is a graduate course in Creative Writing, intended to offer the advanced writing student an opportunity to work intensively on a long prose piece. 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’ writing.

Participants are also expected to read widely as part of their background work, and to engage with literary events. This course requires students to work toward completion of a polished prose manuscript of approximately 100 pages. Students who have been given permission to register in this class will already have a clear sense 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 prose 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. This course requires critical acumen, editorial focus, and steady writing and reading.

The class will be conducted primarily as a manuscript workshop. Each week, students will come to class prepared to discuss either the published creative writing text or critical essay or chapter assigned, and 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 text’s inherent direction, possibilities, and flaws, by providing advantageous editorial commentary.

By November 1st, 2023, prospective students should submit a 250 word proposal of the project they wish to undertake and 8 - 10 pages of writing relevant to that project to Suzette Mayr at smayr@ucalgary.ca. Admission to this course is determined by portfolio and is granted by departmental permission.

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.