Graduate courses

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The course explores black writing and cultural production in what is now Canada in national and transnational, hemispheric, and diasporic black Atlantic perspectives. Offering a survey of this important corpus, the course will also investigate how black Canadian texts and art appeal to their audience, how contemporary black Canadian artists use past texts and dimensions to engage audiences in the present, and what these works might mean for Canadian, diasporic, and North American literary and cultural debates. Both theoretical and literary texts and some films and other works of art will be studied to open up these questions. We will also look at some of the classic slave narratives, memoirs, newspapers, and other black texts produced earlier in what it now Canada. Against this background, we will study contemporary black Canadian authors and artists including Lorena Gale, Lawrence Hill, Mairuth Sarsfield, Dionne Brand, Wayde Compton, George Elliott Clarke, Esi Edugyan, Sylvia Hamilton, and Camille Turner. The final term work can include a digital or visual component.

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R. W. Emerson writes that “language is fossil poetry,” continuing a tradition of thought that would have the origins of language rooted in poetic expression. Mirroring this idea, poetry has long been interested in the historical dimension of the language it employs, even as knowledge about the nature, origins, and development of language (and our language) have undergone periods of radical revision. Though the “truth” of etymology (which means, etymologically, “a discourse about true meanings”) may hold little sway over contemporary thinking about language, poetry since Saussure has continued to find value in truths, myths, and fables that make up the life stories of words. In this course we will read a selection of poems and essays that have been animated by a historical sense of the language, along with recent theory and criticism addressing this topic.

This course offers an introduction to literature and science studies, with a particular focus on how “the experiment” becomes a structuring principle of the arts and sciences in the enlightenment’s wake. Originally connoting direct, first-hand experience, the “experimental” comes to signal, among other things, methods for producing objective or replicable knowledge; the domain of feeling or introspection, with echoes in the literature of sentiment and sensibility; or a trial or test with an uncertain outcome (ranging from laboratory practices to poetic innovation and political revolution). We will begin with a brief introduction to the emergence of an experimental culture of science. We will then examine how literary writers engage, adapt, and influence the idea of the experiment, above all in poems and novels that push the formal and conceptual limits of their genres. In addition to primary readings by canonical, previously canonical, and recently recovered writers, we will read widely in the history and philosophy of science and recent critical approaches to experimentalism.

The concept of the frontier has been a powerful signifier of American identity since the colonial period. This course will survey representations of the frontier in American literature and culture, including text, film and television, and videogames. We will pay close attention to the textual representation of race and its intersections with sex and gender, the representation of nation and national identity, the ways in which literary texts construct and deconstruct notions of territorial entitlement, and key terms in American frontier discourse including the concepts of “civilization” and “savagery.”

The potential of digital activism to facilitate social change has been widely touted by ideologues across the political spectrum. Too frequently, however, digital activism succeeds better at providing exits from accountability than at making accountability actionable. How can digital activists cultivate relationships across lines of difference, build affiliative alliances, support intersectional activism and, hence, enact inter-movement solidarities? In this project-based course, students will develop conceptual and methodological frameworks for digital activism, and enact these in digital activist projects, extensively workshopped in class.

This course views the act of eating as a biological necessity that requires the confrontation of one’s relationship with others and with the environment. Eating and the process of digestion establishes that the boundaries between inside and outside, between self and other are porous. As such, as much as to be the eater is to be empowered, to be the eater is also to encounter one’s vulnerabilities and dependencies. Furthermore, it is to acknowledge how edible matter acts upon and in fact forms the body. Focussing largely on texts that render monstrous our appetites and our bodies abject/grotesque, this course asks what do we fear when we fear eating and/or being eaten. To explore these ideas, our course will combine a study of critical scholarship regarding such fields as Food Studies, the Body, and Race/Culture with a study of literary and other object texts (including television shows, advertisements, and awareness campaigns). Possible themes of study include capitalist consumption of bodies (transatlantic slave trade), the abject body, survival cannibalism, hunger strikes, eating disorders, and famine.

The idea of cultural politics has been bandied about for decades and there have been attempts to advance and enlarge political projects through cultural initiatives for centuries. This course examines cultural politics by studying the strategies through which it has been pursued: avant-gardism; infiltrating mass culture; establishing countercultures and subcultures; demonstrations with cultural intent; subversion and parody; realism and reportage. Although the readings are largely theoretical, presentations and essays will focus on specific historical cases, which may include examples drawn from the socialist and labour movements, feminism, gay and gender politics, the New Right and Christian conservatism, the civil rights movement, student movements, the punk subculture, and alternative forms of life (created and traditional).

Coming soon

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