Future graduate courses

The systematic study of effective composition, argument, and persuasion-€”the art of rhetoric-€”dates back at least to the epics of Homer and flourishes today in countless academic disciplines and spheres of social life. In fact, the historical “empire” of rhetoric is so vast that it “digests regimes, religions, and civilizations” (Roland Barthes). This seminar seeks to introduce students to some of the essential concepts, issues, and controversies in the history and theory of rhetoric by analyzing selections from key texts from antiquity and the twentieth century. In addition to demonstrating the relevance of rhetorical theory and criticism to a variety of social, intellectual, and cultural fields (politics, feminism, critical race theory, etc.), the seminar also explores emerging forms of rhetorical practice made possible by new media technologies, such as digital advertising and information warfare. Ideally, students will leave the seminar with a firm grasp of basic concepts of rhetorical theory and a deeper appreciation for rhetoric as an inventive, critical, and multidisciplinary enterprise.

This course is designed to provide graduate students with an introduction to critical digital research methods with a focus on critical internet and social media studies. In order to do good research one must 
first have a solid understanding of what kind of research is even possible to do This course aims to provide a foundational understanding of how to critically study “born digital” and online phenomena. 
Seminar readings on specific research methods will contribute to the formulation of a research project proposal to be carried out during the semester. Recent literature on the theoretical and ethical aspects of these methods will also be considered in the
context of these projects.

Blake is known for his exaltation of the “Human Form Divine”. However, his works abound with other living things -- plants, insects, animals, angels, devils, various mythological beings -- all endowed with kinds and degrees of agency in creation and destruction, connection to and alienation from the divine. This course will explore the diversity of beings in Blake’s visual and verbal productions, focusing on selected Illuminated Books. We will consider in tandem Blake’s radical reimaginings of the relations of human and non-human and of image and text where (for example) vines become letters, and a Dragon-Man, a Viper, an Eagle, fiery Lions, and Unnam’d forms are all workers in the Printing house in Hell.

In this research seminar we will take an innovative approach to the rhetorical canon of delivery and its significance for literary studies. We will also take an innovative approach to literary representations of delivery, and their significance for rhetorical studies. To accomplish these two goals, we will examine both cutting-edge of ideas about effective communication in the late eighteenth century and explore the reactions of poets and novelists to them.

Although some dissenters still view Shakespeare as the high priest of a secular theatre, the last three decades of criticism have made a strong case for placing religious concerns near the center of Shakespeare’s historical and fictional worlds. Considerable disagreement remains, however, about the meaning and significance of the plays’ religious dimension. In this course we’ll explore the presence of religion in a wide range of Shakespeare’s plays and consider a variety of critical responses to that presence.

This course is designed to provide graduate students with an introduction to critical digital research methods with a focus on critical internet and social media studies. In order to do good research one must 
first have a solid understanding of what kind of research is even possible to do This course aims to provide a foundational understanding of how to critically study “born digital” and online phenomena. 
Seminar readings on specific research methods will contribute to the formulation of a research project proposal to be carried out during the semester. Recent literature on the theoretical and ethical aspects of these methods will also be considered in the
context of these projects.

This course will explore how contemporary Black memoirs and works of Black Studies exist in tension, where texts in each genre make use of elements of the other. That is, works of Black Studies often depend on moments of memoir and Black memoirs produce deeply theoretical insights. Furthermore, the course will consider the pre-history of this contemporary phenomenon by examining the same tension in 19th Century slave narratives. Our exploration of this twinning of memoir and theory will be done through two clusters of three texts. The first will bring together Frederick Douglass’s Narrative (1845), Kiese Laymon’s recent memoir Heavy (2018), and Rinaldo Walcott’s The Long Emancipation: Moving toward Black Freedom (2021). The second cluster will consider Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick and Other Essays (2019) alongside Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016). 

This local and experiential course combines three elements: practical skill-building in creative writing techniques in poetry and prose in various genres; the supervision of a student-driven creative writing project and an accompanying methodological essay; and discussion of the ways in which creative writing can function both as a mode of research and as a pedagogy in today’s academy. Students will consider how creative writing can communicate the results of historical research, function as philosophical thought experiment, engage in autofiction or life-writing related to critical practice and scholarly identity, and create disruptive objects-to-think-with. Three contemporary creative writers from Kitchener-Waterloo, each with an academic or journalistic background, will be available to consult in this course on their books, which will be on the reading list. These will include one among four possible books in different genres written by the instructor, Sarah Tolmie, plus Tanis MacDonald’s memoir Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female (2020) and Emily Urquhart’s creative non-fiction collection Ordinary Wonder Tales (2022). English department members Aimee Morrison and Marcel O’Gorman will share expertise in scholarly autofiction and graphical thinking and in research-creation, respectively, and object texts will be supported by a variety of other critical readings.

This course is an introduction to research methods used in rhetoric, communication design, and writing studies. Emphasis is placed on research ethics, the fit of method to research design, the interdisciplinary scope of research methods, the emergence of new research methods, and the development of research proposals. Students will become familiar with a range of methods, including methods in technical and professional communication, mixed methods, and rhetorical field methods, among others. This course suggests method as a practice as well as an object of study, connecting well-known traditional methods in rhetoric, communication design, and writing studies to those that are emergent, new, and mixed. This course allows students to map a variety of methods while understanding the reciprocal relationship between practices (methods) and theoretical frameworks (methodologies), allowing students to imagine and pair research questions and methods for their own projects.

Many of the popular fiction and television genres we know today, from romances to police procedurals, developed in American pulp fiction magazines. Flourishing throughout the early 20th century, the pulps were made possible by social and technological developments that created both cheap magazines (made from “pulp” paper) and the readers to support them.

The advent of cheap fiction magazines was perceived as threatening by cultural elites, who feared its potential negative influence on the morals and work ethic of the people who read them. Produced primarily for pleasure and in quantity, the pulps violated literary ideals such as originality and complexity. Denigrated and ephemeral, pulps were threatened with extinction until digital technology made it easier than ever to recover, study, and preserve pulps.

Rather than dismiss pulp as “trash,” a central concern of this course is to develop appropriate methodologies for preserving and studying pulps in ways that take seriously their contexts, producers, and readers. You will also have an opportunity to make your own contribution to pulp preservation by “rescuing” and digitizing a pulp magazine issue.

This course focuses on exemplar texts and events within the theme of social change, advocacy, and activism in a number of public spheres. We will examine the roles literature and writers can play in contemporary social justice movements; survey a range of rhetorical and representational tools used by social actors in petition, protest, and actions of dissent; and explore rhetorics of advocacy and activism.

This course will examine the concept of atmosphere in the gothic tradition: that is, the gothic’s simultaneous interest in deep psychology and in shallow surfaces; and in externalized feelings or moods often dubbed “atmospheric.” We’ll begin with novels Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, and Emily Brontë, and will then work our way through more recent approaches including ecocriticism and the “ecogothic;” the sonic environment and ecoacoustics; and locative media that reformulates the gothic as “ambient literature.”

Semiotics is a richly varied, transdisciplinary study of systems of meaning and their associated signifying practices. This course begins by introducing students to the classic thinkers of the semiotic tradition (e.g., Peirce, Saussure, Greimas, Sebeok) then turns to a contemporary strand of semiotic theory that—drawing on the fields of functional grammar, critical linguistics, rhetoric, and design, as well as theories of power, discourse, literacy, and social change—emphasizes the social construction of signs and their value as resources for meaning-making. Some of the thinkers we’ll consider in this respect are Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Guenther Kress, and Theo van Leeweun. Case studies will be drawn from a wide-range of signifying practices including music, advertising, architecture, film, and literature. Students interested in rhetoric, critical discourse analysis, literary theory, communication design, and media studies may find this course useful.

In this course we will explore recent writings about the Anthropocene—€” the era in which “humans act as a main determinant of the environment of the planet” (Dipesh Chakrabarty)—€”in conjunction with texts and concepts drawn from critical race theory and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School (Max Horkheimer, Th. W. Adorno, and Walter Benjamin). Theorists of the Anthropocene and eco-critical thinkers have especially taken note of the Frankfurt School’s critique of “instrumental reason” and modernity, with its notions of development and techniques of domination over both nature and parts of humanity. These and other features of Frankfurt School Critical Theory have also become increasingly relevant in recent critical Black studies, where scholars reflect on the relation between modernity and the slave trade, and the concomitant development of notions of Blackness that continue to mark our present. We will look at this critical juncture between three important theory formations in the wider context of theories of decoloniality and non-domination. Some literary texts will serve as test cases, while students are invited to propose additional works for examination in these theoretical contexts for their final project.

This course takes up a single central question: how are individuals and groups persuaded to participate in, tolerate, or stand by for judicial and/or extrajudicial violence? This term we will focus our inquiry on the rhetoric of political violence, paying particular attention to genocidal and white supremacist discourses and their relationship to the contemporary rise of authoritarianism. We will examine an interdisciplinary body of research emerging from critical rhetoric, genocide studies, critical race theory, narrative inquiry, memory studies, history, and peace and conflict studies. 

This course examines Peter Jackson’s recent film adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. We will begin the course by studying the full Tolkien trilogy as well as numerous related publications by Tolkien (such as The Silmarillion) and his son Christopher (The History of Middle-Earth), in order to understand the material available to Jackson as he designed and produced the films. We will then turn to the films to examine specific scenes and sequences in order to determine the range of modification and alteration within the context of representation.

At one point or another, we all end up feeling like like technofailures. This course looks at the speculative concept of technofailure from multiple perspectives and applies queer, anti-racist, and feminist theories to critique contemporary technocapitalism through discourse and design. Themes covered in the course include the following:

This course will focus on the nature of things as examined in 20^th-century American literature, and in philosophy and theory, keeping in mind that “things pose a significant challenge to rhetoric in its current forms” (Barnett and Boyle). On one hand, things may participate in the making of an ethos, a human world in which to dwell; on the other, things may stubbornly “refuse,” as Maurice Blanchot put it, to come into such a world. Accordingly, the course will navigate the methodological gap between the thinking that claims for 20^th-century poetry an ontological continuity with things, and the scholarship, mostly on the novel, informed by sociology, anthropology, and material culture studies generally, that considers things in their suasive, economic, and socially participatory or rhetorical dimensions.