Graduate courses 2017-2018

Jane Austen’s period saw an explosion of fiction written by women across a variety of genres, encompassing the historical novel and the philosophical tale, as well as the better known romantic, gothic, and comic forms. These works were also hugely popular with readers and critics: from the Bildungsroman of Frances Burney and the female Gothic of Ann Radcliffe to the fictional examination of sexual politics by Mary Hays and the regional tales of Maria Edgeworth, women were at the creative forefront of fiction writing. Today it can be hard to recall this context, not only due to changes in the novelistic canon which saw large swaths of women’s writing forgotten and neglected, but also because of the very power of Austen’s artistic achievement, which seems to set her above the novelists, male and female, who wrote before her. Austen seems, like Shakespeare, to be a type of natural genius, and through the various film adaptations of her novels, even our contemporary. Yet, of course, Austen was no less responsive to the literature of her age, and its problems and possibilities, than was Shakespeare himself. In this course, we will read the major works of Jane Austen with an eye to the literary background of her novels, drawing especially on women’s fiction of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a context for understanding her artistic achievement.

In 1998, Joe Lockhard estimated that as little as 10% of nineteenth-century African American literary production had been located. In the almost twenty years following Lockhard’s claim, our understanding of nineteenth-century African American literature has shifted significantly as once forgotten texts have been identified, republished, and engaged. Whereas previously male-authored slave narratives, abolitionist writing, and late-century realist texts were presented as definitive, we now have access to a more diverse roster of authors and writings, including newspaper journalism, magazines, novels, and more. At the same time, such recoveries have not been without controversy or confusion, as is evident in the cases of Hannah Crafts and James Williams. This course looks at canonical writings as well as recuperated ones with an eye to considering how amorphous the African American canon has been, and what role print culture, availability, and political movements might have played in the recuperations which continue to reshape it.

This course is dedicated to the problems of analyzing narrative. By reading a range of works on narrative theory and narrative analysis next to selected short stories, novels and films, we will seek to gain a sophisticated sense of how narrative works and how it can be effectively dissected. The literary and cinematic narratives studied cover a range from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, ensuring students learn to appreciate the historical development of kinds of narrative over time. The narrative theories covered include the classic Formalist studies of the 1920s; French structuralist narratology; and Marxist, psychoanalytic and feminist approaches to the study of narrative.

This course is designed to acquaint students with basic concepts and information about globalization and international communication. Students will have the opportunity: to explore the roots of globalization in the West and East and its rapid growth in the second half of the 20^th century; read about the history and theories of global communication; assess the role that global English, technology, and the media have played in this; and consider the implications of this development with regards to consumption, culture, and professional communication in the 21^st century.

Over the course of four centuries and through performances in every corner of the globe, Shakespeare’s plays have been understood in so many ways that Jorge Luis Borges famously suggested that Shakespeare was everyone and no one. He has been the poet of universal human nature, the exemplar of negative capability, the patriarchal bard, and the representative of empire and cultural hegemony. We might say, in the same vein, that he has been everywhere and nowhere. Without ever leaving his book, he has been, like As You Like It’s Jaques, a traveller. By studying significant adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, this class will consider how different ages and cultures have facilitated those travels by rewriting, reproducing, revising, repositioning, reinventing, and remaking (to use only the re- verbs from some recent titles) Shakespeare. Independent research projects will allow students to study Shakespeare’s presence in their own fields of interest.

Together we will read the major poetry of G.M. Hopkins: its hermeneutics (the meaning), prosody (the rhythm and sound patterns), and poetics (how different elements produce certain effects). Some attention will be paid to his letters and journals.

American pulp magazines were made possible by a convergence of technological advances in print and transportation, which made it possible to sell and ship magazines to mass readerships. Although they are widely collected and enjoy a huge fan following, very little scholarship exists about pulps and their readers. In this course we will work collectively toward a better understanding of pulp magazines, their authors, and their readers. We will focus on a few select titles that represent a cross-section of pulp genres. In addition to reading select pulp magazines themselves, we will study critical and theoretical readings, including theories of popular culture and readerships, theories of literary value and recovery, and recent scholarship on the pulp magazine field. As well, we will experiment with digital technologies such as Google maps and online census data to plot and analyze popular readerships, and learn more about the people who wrote for the pulps. Pulp titles to be covered may include, depending on availability, Argosy, Adventure, Love Story Magazine, Ranch Romance, Western Story, The Black Mask, Detective Story Magazine, Weird Tales.

This course looks at writing by medical personnel in war zones to examine how individuals translate such an extreme experience, often considered beyond language, into a narrative form. While much work has been done on combatant writing, this course differs in concentrating on the letters, diaries and memoirs and blogs of those whose work focuses entirely around caring for the wounded and dead. It begins with fragmented modernist representation of a nurse’s experience on the Western Front in the First World War, Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone, and with Vera Brittain’s less mediated wartime diary. It continues with memoirs and diaries by doctors and nurses from the Second World War, particularly Brendan Phibbs’s The Other Side of Time. It then looks at women’s memoirs and poetry of the Vietnam War, such as Lynda Van Devanter’s Home before Morning (the first account to claim non-combatant war experience as traumatic) and poetry from the collection Visions of War, Dreams of Peace. It will conclude with writings from the current war in Iraq, particularly Dave Hnida’s Paradise General and Richard Jadick’s On Call in Hell.

This course will examine the modern rhetorical antecedents of the discourses of dissent emerging from contemporary social justice movements, including those associated with racism, classism, homophobia, and nationalism in Canada and the United States. From the American Indian Movement to Idle No More, from Black Liberation to Black Lives Matter, from socialist labour to the New Left, from Stonewall to Queer Liberation, from the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to Quebec’s Values Charter Legislation, from nationalist rhetorics of the Cold War to contemporary debates on immigration, this course will provide students with grounding in contemporary theories of dissenting discourse as well as with opportunities to explore the rhetorical practice of dissent within a variety of social movements.

We will study the way your mind makes and responds to the linguistic configurations called rhetorical figures. You make and respond to metaphors the way you do because your mind is tuned to analogy; you make and respond to metonymies the way you do because your mind is tuned to correlation; you make and respond to antitheses the way you do because your mind is tuned to opposition; you make and respond to ... well, you get the picture. Why? Because you're really good at recognizing, predicting, and completing patterns (in this case, the linguistic configuration known as repotia). Why? Because you're a human, with a human mind, and your mind is a style machine. You are a style machine.

Achieving native-speaker or near-native competence in another language has traditionally been viewed as the ultimate goal in language education, and native speakers are widely considered ideal language teachers. In the past few years, however, the ideal of the native speaker has begun to be deconstructed. Recent critiques of “native-speakerism” (Holliday) call into question the very notion of the (monolingual) native speaker, arguing that the idealization of the native speaker is based on outdated language ideologies, is inappropriate in a multilingual world, and can have negative effects. Instead, they propose alternative goals and ideals that are more appropriate for multilingual environments.

Introducing students to key concepts of method in digital media analysis and digital design, the course primarily takes workshop format. Students examine methods and apply design strategies to the conception, design, and production of a research paper or digital project. The course engages several forms of research methods including textual analysis, ethnography, design charrette, games, and peer review. Students read texts and address objects from different disciplinary orientations such as Actor-Network Theory, experimental interface/HCI, and Internet of Things, as well as work with professional media-design tools. The goal of the course is to ground students in methodological approaches to digital media studies, critical theory, and designed objects. The course does not require any background in media theory or design. Strongly recommended for XDM students.

Each session of this class introduces a particular Freudian or Lacanian theory such as the uncanny, voyeurism, fetishism, the death drive, melancholia, masochism, the Imaginary, Symbolic, and the Real. Each concept is examined in the light of how it has been adapted in visual, sexuality, feminist, and literary studies. The goal is to insure sufficient familiarity with these theories so that students are at ease in deploying them richly in their own readings of literary and visual texts. Focus will be on how psychoanalysis itself is a reading practice. Readings by Freud include "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," "Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria," "The Uncanny," "Morning and Melancholia," "On Female Sexuality," and "A Child is Being Beaten." We chall also read excerpts form Jacques Lacan, Jessica Benjamin, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Judith Butler.

Technical communication is treated in this course as both professional practice and as a site for scholarly investigation. Students will learn about the history and theory of technical communication across several disciplines and scholarly traditions. The activities and practices that constitute “technical communication” are theorized as rhetorical activities, and texts are analyzed using rhetorical genre theory, although we will read more broadly in the field to consider other perspectives. Students will also learn empirical approaches to the study of technical communication genres, including content analysis, interviewing subject-matter experts (SMEs), as well as ethical considerations in qualitative research design. Students in the course will be encouraged to identify their interests early on as major course projects will be tailored to their particular interests and research or professional goals.

This course focuses on the artistic, cultural, political and disciplinary histories of African American rhetoric. Students will study various genealogies of African American rhetoric through primary texts, e.g., dialogues, essays, folklore, music, song lyrics, dance, interviews, news stories, raps, videos, and speeches by African Americans. These texts, broadly construed, speak directly to the economic, gendered, and social conditions of African Americans from the enslavement period in North America to the present, as well as to the Black Diaspora.

The book is the single most important communication form used in human societies from ancient times to the present. This course will survey that history, from the invention of the codex in ancient Rome, through the invention of printing and the development of mass print culture to digital books of the 21^st century, with three central questions in mind: One, what are the material and technological foundations and effects of particular forms of the book? Two, what modalities of communication does each form foster? Three, how do particular forms of the book interact with class, race, gender, and other structures of power and privilege in society?