Graduate Courses 2009-2010

English 700 has the task of compressing two and a half millennia of rhetorical theory and criticism into a single academic term, committing gross injustices not only to that theory and criticism but to culture, ethics, literature, politics, cognition, and digital media along the way. The objectives of the course, however, are noble, and you will learn a great deal whether or not you have studied rhetorical theory before. The English department at Waterloo is unique and vibrant, if we do say so ourselves, and 700 aims to (1) introduce you to its best aspects, and (2) prepare you to make the most of them.

The Shakespeare Revolution, as J.L. Styan dubbed it, produced a radical shift in the criticism, staging, and evaluation of Shakespeare in the 20th century. The bard, considered by generations of scholars to be the greatest English poet, was rediscovered as a writer who "did his thinking in theatres" and "knew his business as a playwright." While this course examines the written texts of Shakespeare's plays, its focus is on ways of relating the play script to the unwritten texts of staged and filmed performances. Doing so will require some historical work on the theatre practices and social scene of Shakespeare's own time, which work should help to provide a comparative ground against which contemporary producers' goals, the systems of patronage, the selection and adaptation of the scripts, the design of the playhouses, sets, and costumes, the constitution of the company, the training of actors, the shaping of audience reception by marketing, the manufacture of celebrity, and the engagement with various aspects of social context play their parts in the production of Shakespeare in performance and, hence, of "Shakespeare."

During his lifetime, Milton was best known for defending a number of radical positions, including the legality of divorce on the grounds of incompatibility, freedom from pre-publication censorship, and the people's right, generally, to choose their leaders and, specifically, to execute Charles I. Milton's position as the most politically involved of major pre-modern poets has made his oeuvre an ideal place to think about the historical involvement of imaginative literature, so it is not surprising that the reinvigoration of historical criticism in the last two or three decades has gone hand in hand with important developments in Milton studies. Miltonist have contributed to recent debates about the history of print growth of religious toleration, and the spread of early modern republicanism and liberalism. In view of these developments, this class will undertake an historical reading of Milton's major prose and poetry.

Since 1973, when Raymond Williams held the division of country and city to be definitive of capitalist modernity in the eighteenth-century, scholars have been engaged in refining and debating his thesis. This course is designed to examine the way eighteenth-century satirists understood this divide. The eighteenth-century enthusiasm for satire in both neo-classical and experimental forms intersected with new ways of understanding urban spaces. We will examine satirical writing about London as an index of eighteenth-century conceptions of class, mercantilism, urban capitalism, gendered space, and the relationship between genre and places or landscapes - eg. satire, comedy, and the city; pastoral and the country. We will interrogate the urbanity or vice and the sentimentalizing of the country, addressing the psychology of a genre that seems almost to have grown up with and inside London.

Literary recovery refers to research that seeks to bring to light important but neglected literary works. It has been a significant trend in American literary scholarship since 1980s, with Henry Louis Gates' influential recovery of black writers, and critique of the dominant American canon by scholars such as Jane Tompkins (Sensational Designs, 1986) and Paul Lauter (Canons and Contexts, 1991). With this reopening of the American canon, more and more researchers turned their attention to the recovery of literary texts that had been excluded from American literary scholarship, anthologies, and university curricula. This course will survey important examples of, and theories and methods associated with, American literary recovery. Making use of digital archives such as The American Periodicals Series, Students will be complete a major project in which they make a case for the recovery of a literary text currently excluded from American literary scholarship, anthologies, and curricula.

This seminar will investigate a new and rapidly evolving field of rhetorical theory and practice: information warfare. In recent decades the emergence of a global information infrastructure (GII) linked by satellites and wireless networks has lowered the cost communication, democratized access to knowledge, and fostered the growth of a global civil society. At the same, however, the advent of global media networks has also opened up a vast new field of military power and given rise to new doctrines of warfare that use digitized information to target the "soft: battlespace of ideas, beliefs, and values - the traditional domain of rhetoric. This rhetorical war for hearts, minds, and nervous systems is "declared by no one, never ceases, in waged covertly, and knows no borders in space and time" (United States Department of Defense). Drawing on primary texts from across the United States military and key essays by media historians and theorists like Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Paul Virilio, and Friedrich Kittler, this seminar will;

• Provide an overview of media warfare in the twentieth-century
• Explore the rhetorical dimensions of information warfare and its variants ("wetwar," "grayware," "softwar," "perception-space war," etc.)
• Develop a set of practical tools for analyzing military media campaigns at the tactical, strategic and operational levels.

As we shall see over the course of the semester, convince, influence, and persuade - at the center of a "new vision" or "new paradigm" of warcraft and statecraft alike (Defense Science Board).

On March 8, 2005, Kevin Klerck posted a suicide note to his LiveJournal, engaged in a few last lines of chat conversation, and shot himself in the head with a shotgun. Such events are not uncommon, as evidenced in the recent rash of Japanese multi-cybercides that have fascinated the new media. Timothy Leary, the infamous Harvard professor and champion of psychedelia, presaged such events by putting forth the notion of "designer dying," a concept that he hooped to enact by webcasting his own death. Such tragic and heroic events--tragedy and heroism being the operative words here--encapsulate the metaphysics of computer culture that we will explore in this course. This is a metaphysics rooted in two basic components of the human condition, two sides of the same coin:

• The need to be acknowledged and recognized as an individual,
• The inevitability of death.

Both elements may be summed up tritely as the human "quest for immortality," which has been altered radically by new technologies that both facilitate and exacerbate our tendency toward death-denial. Today, dreams of immortality come not only in cryogenics and genetic engineering, but also in personal web sites, home movies, mass mediated celebrity worship, and in an endless stream of fashionable gadgets that offer this situation by investigating technology's material instantiation in warfare--our death-denying gadgets are either the direct result of military research, or they are immediately repurposed for military endeavours, all for the sake of human destruction.

Building first of all on the theories of psychologist and philosopher Ernest Becker, this course will introduce students to a new field of study that I have called "necromedia theory," which aims to provide a universal, psychosocial analysis of contemporary digital culture. Besides Ernest Becker, the "necromedia theorists" studied in this course include Friedrich Kittler, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Katherine Hayles, Martin Heidegger, and Avital Ronell, among others. Besides written assignments, students will undertake a "dead media project," which will require them to demonstrate their knowledge of necromedia theory in an artifact created with an antiquated media device.

Provisional reading list:
Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death.
Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death.
Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man.
Hayles, Katherine. How We Become Posthuman.
Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology.
Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.
Ronell, Avital. Finitude's Score.
Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema.

This course will focus on identifying areas of strain or conflict in public health and everyday life in relation to medical, literary, philosophical and media images of health and sickness. It will examine contested representations of the relations of health and life, healing and cure, pleasure and pain, self-governance and negligence, body and mind, and policy and polity. Core texts will span a wide variety of fields, eras and authors (e.g., Plato, Descartes, Freud, Simmel, Parsons, Foucault, Gadamer, Agamben, Zizek, Baudrillard, and Jaques Lacan).

In the print culture of early modern England (1500-1700), the title-page performed much the same function as the cover of a modern book - it invited the interested audience to buy and read, it established the ethos of the work's author, it helped the reader predict and remember the contents, and it established relationships between individual books and between particular disciplines. In this course we will study decorated title-pages in their material, intellectual, and cultural contexts. The course will introduce students to the fundamental features of print culture in early modern period, and to a range of primary and secondary research resources useful for the study of title-pages. Students will write a research paper about a title-page in its historical context, using theoretical resources appropriate to the study of works that combine text and image.

"You are men upon the eve of a great domestic charge, for you are now in the eve of a great foreign outbreak. England never recieved any change from the steady influence of its own people...I ell you that before you are six months older you will see such a revolution all over France and the Continent of Europe, as this world will never witnessed before. It is from that, that liberty will come to England." Geargus O'Connor, speech in Nottingham, July 1847.

Echoing O'Connor, but with a very different political outlook, de Tocqueville said in 1848: "We are sleeping on a volcano...Do you not see that the earth trembles anew? A wind of revolution blows, the storm is on the horizon." The storm of revolution did blow through Europe in 1848, France, Bavaria, Berlin, Vienna, Hungary, and Milan all participating in the ferment. Almost as quickly, the storm blew itself out. Nevertheless, the agitation leading up to 1848 -- including the Chartist movement in England -- and the consequences arising from it, had a formative effect on nineteeth-century Europe.
This course will focus on the representation of work, of the labouring classes, and of radicalism in texts clustered around 1848. Although we will only read works published in English, we will to some degree analyse these central concerns within the broader European context. We will begin by reading some of the key texts leading up to and including 1848 (by Carlyle, Engels, Marx), and then explore the work and radicalism in five major novels published from 1847-1849: Wurthering Heights, Vanity Fair, Shirley, Mary Barton, and David Copperfield.

Autobiography studies is a relatively young but rapidly expanding field of research, drawing the interest of scholars from different disciplines and from a range of national locations. Although, according to leading autobiography scholar Gillian Whitlock, "Autobiography writing and criticism is now sharp and exciting, and as it happens much of the best is also Canadian," very few scholars focus their attention on Canadian autobiographical texts. In this course, we will focus exclusively on Canadian examples of life writing (an umbrella term that could include, for example, book-form autobiography, memoir or digital texts). Our interest is primarily in contemporary texts, but we will situate those texts in relation to the history of life writing in Canada. This is a literature course; life writing, however, has always pushed boundaries of what is "literary" and whether or not such terms are useful or even meaningful. Our study of specific examples of life writing will be guided by our reading of key theoretical works in the field.

A personal blog is like a diary; YouTube is like TV; email is like a business memo, or maybe like a personal letter; an online journal is like print-based peer-reviewed scholarship. Much of the way we make sense of what have been called 'new media' is by relating these new cultural forms to prior print and broadcast forms. The term 'new media' itself is fundamentally comparative -- in any case, if we begin by always already yoking native-digital media to sometimes only tangentially related IRL (in real life) antecedents, we risk never addressing the thing itself, on its own terms. This course takes a long historical view, a broad theoretical perspective, and a tight grasp on the rhetorical study of genre to try to move away from a scholarship of 'is like' toward one of 'is', trying to see digital media as something other than poor cousins to--or major improvements on--prior art.

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 class examines current debates in animal studies within the wider critical movement of posthumanism in order to interrogate the rhetoric of where the boundaries lie between the human and nonhuman animal. Readings include Derrida on the "ani(mot)," Deleuze on becoming animal, Agambenm on "the Open" and creatureliness, Levinas on "the Name of a Dog," Heidegger on the condition of animals being "weltarm" (poor in the world), Benjamin on the silence of animals, Nagel on "what it is like to be a bat," and Haraway on "becoming companion species in technoculture." The literary and visual texts to be examined alongside these theoretical ones include works by Kafka, Coetzee, Rebecca Brown, and Sue Coe. The last third of the semester will be devoted to readings that students propose based on their own interests and therefore presentations and discussions are led by students. The terms of investigation can be broadened here to involve other aspects of the posthuman, including the Disneyfication/designification of the animal, queering the non human, the cyborg and the prosthetic body, and other interfaces of the so-called human with its others.

This course investigates the increasingly critical role of writing as knowledge work especially in the context of changes in writing practices that result from emerging technologies. Beginning with a brief history of writing, the course shifts to current research that questions the ways we understand and conceptualize writing. The course concludes with an investigation of the pedagogical implications of teaching writing in a digital environment. This course is aimed at graduate students interested in issues related to the teaching of writing at various levels from secondary school through university to professional organizations.

The course looks at Black writing in a wider North American comparative perspective but ultimately concentrates on Black writing in Canada and Quebec. Both theoretical and literary texts will be studied to explore this field, which has some crucial to literary cultural studies in the United States for quite some time but is only now emerging as a major preoccupation in Canadian literary discussion. The course will begin with narratives produced by ex-slaves and other Blacks who settled in Canada after leaving the United States. We will then look at Du Bois' classic The souls of Black Folk to learn of the predicaments of blacks after the Unisted States Civil War. Du Bois also played a role in the Harlem Renaissance, and a brief look at that chapter of cultural history will serve as introduction to contemporary Black Canadian texts that reference this period. The second half of the course will be dedicated to other contemporary Black writing in Canada and Quebec, including texts by Mairuth Sarsfield, Lorena Gale, Dionne Brand, Wayde Compton, Lawrence Hill, and George Elliott Clarke.

This course will address the really rather agonizing problems of being a literary author -- chiefly, a poet -- in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, focusing initially on the Ricardian greats Chaucer, Langland and Gower and then thier fifteenth century inheritors such as Hoccleve, Henryson, Lydgate, and Usk. We will explore their problems of professional nomenclature (poeta, makar, vates, laureate, auctir, translateur), identity and voice;the claims of vernacular language versus Latinity and its place in orthodoxy; and the complex culture of patronage, dissemination and bureaucratic literacy. Our goal will be to appreciate and sustain an intelligible role for the vernacular poet in English society. Poets of whom the achievements of Renaissance poets like Wyatt, Skelton, and Spenser would have been impossible.

This course will explore debates about politics and form, social change and the uses of art that took place in the United States, mostly in the 20th-century. Two concepts will guide our discussion: art and rhetoric. For much of the 20th century "rhetorical" was a term of disparagement in literary and aesthetic culture. A dominant strain in modern aesthetics was epitomised in statements like "A poem should not be mean, but be." But the situation is complex. The poet John Ashbery has said that he admires music because it has "an ability of being convincing, of carrying an argument through successfully to the finish, though the terms of its activist, behaves in a suasory manner, whether to compel its reader, viewer, or listener to assent to a work's specific aesthetic force, to adjust his mind or feelings, or to impel action however indirectly. Art does things to people. Art "argues." Emphasizing literature but giving some attention to music and visual art, this course will investigate the ways in which art behaves rhetorically through readings in art theory and rhetoric, and a series of cases from Whitman forward.

This course will examine the intersecting discourses of memory and the passions as they appear in Canadian writing from the late nineteenth century to the World War II. This discourses enabled new questions to be asked "about the nature of consciousness and cognition... and about the limits of self-knowledge and the will" (Taylor and Shuttleworth xiv). Thie course will explore how these discourses were taken up by Confederation and early modernist literature in Canada and the ways in which they combined to complicate the ideas of stable subjectivity and sexuatlity. Some attention will be devooted to debates especially relevant to the course focus, like the one that raged over Louis Riel's mental condition before the 1885 Uprising. Critical readings on memory and the passions will complement a selection of prose and poetry that will include works such as Lucy Maud Montgomery's A Tangled Web, Amelia Fytche's Kerchiefs to Hunt Souls, William Kirby's The Golden Dog, Susie Frances Harrison's Crowded Out! And Other Sketches and Songs of Love and Labour, and Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese.

Metonymy is a broad, persuasive, and subtle phenomenon, one that reveals how deeply linguistic style and cognition interpenetrate. We will look to literature, ordinary language, popular culture, and public discourse to investigate metonymy as constitutive of thought, belief and knowledge, relying on established and emerging theories of cognitive rhetoric and cognitive poetics. Students will refine their bibliographic, analytic, and data-gathering research skills; will participate in the public thinking of a seminar course; will develop their research essays interactively, through proposals, editorial discussions, and the collaborative invention of the classroom; and will present the results of their scholarship to an audience of their peers.

This course examines a selection of the following genres in the technical communication field: Help Screens, Balloon Help, White Papers, Program update guides, Product Brochures, Spec sheets, Product walk-throughs, Interface analysis reports (including Usability reports), Magazine reviews, Magazine product roundups, Reviewers' guides, Web content, specific product, Web content services, Web information - consumer, Web information, enterprise, Sales and service proposals, Detailed technical explanations, Printed manuals.

Theoretical discussions from the literature in the technical communication field from the basis of our explorations of the genres. Readings will include one anthology of technical communication articles (/Central Works in Technical Communication/) as well as readings from journals such as /The Journal of Technical Writing and Communication/. /Technical Communication/, /Technical Communication Quarterly/, and the /IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication/. Still, the primary purpose of the course is the production of a substantial technical communication portfolio by each student. By the end of the course, students will have produced, individually and in teams, a solid range of the genres listed above, using an equally solid range of software to do so. Students need not be experienced in the software and advanced features of already-known software is essential.

This course aims to introduce students to the interdisciplinary field of sonic interaction design. Sonic Interaction Design studies the use of sound as one of the primary means of conveying information meaning, and aesthetic and emotional qualities in an interactive context. It encompasses a range of technical and theoretical topics and concepts from a wide variety of disciplines. The course will introduce students to the use of interactive sound in a variety of media forms from a range of theoretical perspectives, and include a series of techniques and methods for sonic interaction design.