Graduate Courses 2010-2011

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.

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.

The idea of America as a frontiering nation is a central one in American culture and most of the representative literary texts of the American frontier are from the 19th century, when the United States’ boundaries were still in flux. Nationalists based claims to “American Exceptionalism” on America’s unique history as a nation of explorer-pioneers, which saved it from the usual fate of civilizations: overcrowding, social decay, and corruption. In literature, the frontier served as a uniquely “American” setting that differentiated American culture from its European antecedents and became the proving ground for the American frontier hero. In this course we will survey a broad range of 19th century texts (mostly novels) about the American frontier, focusing on the diverse points of view that are represented in the literary record. These include novels by Euro-American men and women such as James Fenimore Cooper and Catherine Maria Sedgwick, the Latina author Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Native American novelist Mourning Dove (Salish), and African-American autobiographer Nat Love. We will examine how these and other authors were positioned in relation to both American western expansion and American print culture, and how these various positionalities inflect their representations of the frontier.

In this seminar the question of the good of poetry will be investigated via poets’ prose and poetry as well as philosophical writings in ethics and recent literary theory on ethics and literature. Using these texts we will explore questions about the nature of poetic art, the nature of the good, and the relationship between these. Taking the twentieth century as our primary focus, we will test poems against the ideals promoted in them and in the poet’s prose, taking note of the different and differing ways in which poetry and prose can think philosophically. Some questions we will explore include: Is there a relationship between truth and art? Between truth and ethics? What might valuing literary ethics mean for literary politics, and for politics tout court? Can there be an analogy between artistic and political representation? How might generic or formal considerations impact on particular configurations of ethics? What value if any can we place on something as contingent as a rhyme, as unpredictable as aesthetic pleasure? While keeping the long intellectual history in mind, focusing on the twentieth-century will require us to consider these questions in light of recent reprises of Plato’s attack on poetry, including Emmanuel Levinas’s seeming rejection of the possibility of ethical poetic art, and Theodor Adorno’s dictum on the barbarity of writing poetry after Auschwitz.

It has been argued that the development of print culture in the early modern period led to the suppression or denigration of visually-presented information. As a broad statement, this is probably true, but what it ignores is the continuing importance of visual rhetoric in the age of print, and what it elides is the contribution that visual ways of understanding made to the development of verbal means of expression during the period. This course will examine modes of visual persuasion in printed works of the era, and their relationship to verbal modes. Examples will be drawn from all areas of printed materials, including literary, scientific, pedagogical, and statistical, and students will gain experience in locating and using these resources. Secondary reading will include work on the period and on information design and visual rhetoric.

This course will examine the birth of globalization (and capitalism) as a cause and theme of romantic writing. From the preface of Lyrical Ballads to the poetry of John Clare, romantic authors worked in a dialectical relationship with the socio-economic realities of the age. Building on work by Katie Trumpener, Paul Gilroy, and others on romantic nationalism and imperialism, this course will trace the impact of economic modernization on early nineteenth-century poetry, novels, and non-fictional prose. Of central concern will be the ways in which romantic authors not only conceptualized new forms of social experience and personal identity under capitalism and globalization, but also resisted those forms (by reactivating pre-capitalist literary modes such as the ballad to explore different social identities, by developing new literary forms such as the gothic to explore the recesses of personal anomie, and by other means that we will consider). After a brief introduction to the work of Adam Smith, the eighteenth-century theorist of capitalism, we will turn to a focused selection of writings drawn from such authors as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Edgeworth, Equiano, Mahomet, Austen, and Clare.

Ruskin is among the two or three geniuses of prose writing in the Victorian period. We will study the progress of his work by reading selections from his theories on art in Modern Painters and in PreRaphaelitism, on architecture in The Stones of Venice and The Seven Lamps of Architecture, and on economics in Unto This Last and The Political Economy of Art. Of special interest will be his study of the paintings of JMW Turner, his analysis of Gothic architecture, and his denunciation of greed as the deadly principle guiding English life, promoted by "the pseudo-science of J.S. Mill and Ricardo."

Piero Boitani argues, in The Shadow of Ulysses, his study of the Greek Odysseus and his later Latin and global doubles, that in the massive intertextual tradition inaugurated by the epic the hero is always a liminal or threshold figure who straddles two epochs, the one coming to an end and the one beginning. The multiple Odysseus-Ulysses figures, he further argues, are always both the most archaic and the edge of modernity itself. We will use these insights, especially as they relate to literature and language, as our opening clue to reading or navigating the parallel textual labyrinths of Homer’s The Odyssey and its much later Latin and Irish double James Joyce’s Ulysses. We will primarily be concerned with the multiple and labyrinthine forms of language use in both texts, especially in relation to language that is, like Odysseus-Ulysses, always in transition through the polyphonic paths of both texts.

Ecocriticism, now in its second decade, began as an attempt to read literature for its connections to the physical world. The “classic” ecocritical canon consisted of works such as Walden, anything by Wendell Berry, and The Prelude, all of which were prized for their palpable and heartfelt natural realism. In effect, the goal of ecocritics was to remind mainstream critics that the inclusion of natural settings, animals, and plants in texts wasn’t accidental: some authors were actually interested in nature qua nature, not simply “nature” as a metaphor for aesthetic or social concerns. In recent years, ecocritics have sharpened the critique, perhaps in tandem with the imminence of global environmental catastrophe, and ecocriticism has moved away from its exclusive fixation on nature writing and fellow-traveling literary modes. Second-wave ecocritical approaches (drawing on feminism, post-structuralism, rhetoric, Marxism, and systems theory) instead seek more comprehensive understandings of the literature-environment dynamic; indeed, some ecocritics boldly aspire to detect “environmentality” in almost any piece of literature. Moreover, this growing theorization has inspired ecocriticism to extend its reach to other areas of cultural endeavor: art, film, new media, political discourse, and so on. This course will provide students of literature and rhetoric with an advanced introduction to this field. Among the critical works we will read are Cheryl Glotfelty’s and Harold Fromm’s The Ecocriticism Reader, Glenn Love’s Practical Ecocriticism, and Lawrence Buell’sWriting for and Endangered World. Tutor texts will be drawn from North American poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and film. Students final ecocritical project may take traditional (written article) or digital (video, visual essay) form.

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 news 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 hoped 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: a) the need to be acknowledged and recognized as an individual, and; b) 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 pre-programmed identities to their users. We will explore the insidious irony of 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 endeavors, 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.

In their introduction to the 2003 collection Understanding African American Rhetorics, Ronald L. Jackson and Elaine B. Richardson critique those who might hold that “Europe and European American culturally generic paradigms are fully sufficient tools for examining culturally specific phenomena and artifacts,” claiming there must be “intellectual spaces for culture-centered rhetorical critics and criticism.” This course takes up the challenge of foregrounding cultural frameworks in the study of African American rhetorics, from Africanist concepts of Nommo to the role of the DJ in Hip Hop. At the same time, central to our study is the contention that historically African American rhetoric emerged in defiance of those who deemed it undesirable and this liable to censure - a censure that at specific moments in time might include death. This is crucial to understanding various characteristic African American linguistic and rhetorical modes which evolved in response to such lived realities. Over the course of the term we will read key academic writings which explore these modes, as well as listen to a variety of speeches, spoken word performances, and musical performances as a means of tracing the tradition through multiple forms of creative expression.

This course will explore the literary and critical terrain that theories of gender and sexuality share with postcolonial studies. Topics to be addressed will include colonial representations of and control over sexuality, the gendering of nationalism, masculinity and race, the body as colonial text and postcolonial space of performance, and queer postcolonialism. We will engage with such contested and complicated concepts through a wide range of postcolonial travel narratives. Texts may include Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather, articles by Jacqui Alexander, Kobena Mercer, Chandra Mohanty and others, and creative texts such as Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang, J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance, Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, Shyam Selvadurai’s Cinnamon Gardens, and M. Nourbese Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks.

Simply, this course will examine the ways that bodies are represented and the ways that bodies represent. Specifically, we will focus on the ways that bodily norms structure rhetorical expression, paying attention to the matrix of ability and disability.
In the class, we will examine cultural and theoretical texts to investigate the construction of normalcy, the creation and “use” of abnormal bodies, and the ways that norms have been challenged and refigured.
Though this course offers a broad overview of rhetorical and critical theory about bodies, we will also devote our attention to contemporary cultural and media depictions of the body. We will seek to better understand the complex intersections between disability, class, race, gender and sexuality. We will also look for overlaps between critical, literary, creative and rhetorical approaches.

This course aims to introduce students to the interdsciplinary 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 theorectical 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 theorectical perspectives, and include a series of techniques and methods for sonic interaction design.