Graduate Courses 2014-2015

Fall 2014

700: Rhetorical Studies (RCD) McDonald

The systematic study of effective communication—the art of rhetoric—dates back at least to the epics of Homer and flourishes today in countless academic disciplines and fields of business. In fact, the “empire” of rhetoric is so vast and enduring that it “digests regimes, religions, and civilizations” (Roland Barthes). Nevertheless, English 700 sets out to compress two and a half millennia of rhetorical theory and criticism into a single semester. More specifically, this introductory seminar aims to provide students with the grounding in rhetorical theory necessary for advanced study in rhetoric, communication design, digital media, and literary studies. To accomplish this goal, the seminar will introduce essential concepts, frameworks, and debates in rhetorical theory by analyzing key selections from foundational texts, both ancient and contemporary. The seminar will also demonstrate the relevance of rhetorical theory and criticism to a variety of social, intellectual, and cultural fields: law, politics, science, philosophy, etc. Finally, the seminar will investigate, with the help of guest lecturers, emerging forms of rhetorical theory and practice made possible by new media technologies: digital design, information warfare, computational gaming, and others. Students will leave the seminar with a firm grasp of basic concepts, an ability to analyze rhetorical artifacts, and a deeper sense of rhetoric as an inventive, critical, multimodal, and richly interdisciplinary enterprise—what Quintilian calls an “encompassing art” (ars circumcurrens).

705: The Progress of Love: A History of Love Poetry c. 1100-1600 (LIT/XDM/RCD) Tolmie

In this course we will read a wide selection of lyric and elegiac poetry, from the Latin love poems of Catullus and Ovid to Old English elegies like The Wanderer, concentrating mainly on the poetry of fin amor or courtly love in Occitan, French, Middle English and Early Modern English, and tracing out the transition between epic and romance forms of subjectivity. The premise of the course is that this evolving body of material constitutes the most powerful and lasting technology of the self in the western tradition. Middle and Early Modern English texts will be read in the original; the rest in facing-page translations. Poems by Arnaut Daniel, Petrarch, Cavalcanti, Machaut, Charles d’Orléans, Wyatt, Shakespeare and others, plus anonymous lyrics, will be supplemented by critical readings in the history of subjectivity, poetics and cognition. The pedagogical technique of imitation will also be intrinsic to the course: students will be experimenting formally with a variety of fixed lyric forms and extrapolating from them, while doing some critical reading on imitatio. For students in the XDM stream, and any others who prefer this option, these formal experiments may be conducted by making a digital object that engages both with the poetics taught in the course and with contemporary media theory. Critics of literary subjectivity drawn upon in the course will include Lee Patterson, Antony Hasley, Robert Meyer-Lee, Sarah Kay, Joel Fineman, Michael Schonfeldt, Julian Yates and Georges Bataille. Students undertaking the digital project will be required do additional brief readings from Willard McCarty, Ray Siemens and other scholars of premodern literature who have become digital humanists.

710: Shakespeare and rhetoric (LIT/RCD) Graham

In the Age of Shakespeare, rhetorical training formed the core of the educational curriculum, and rhetorical practice lay at the heart of law, politics, and literature. For the aspiring poet and dramatist, “rhetoric” meant not just a nice turn of phrase, or even “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.” In addition, rhetoric provided writers like Shakespeare with a multi-faceted toolkit that included a mode of intellectual inquiry, a technique of emotional identification, a means of character creation, a source of stylistic variety and richness, a thematics of political control or, alternatively, of political engagement, and above all a method for inventing and structuring exploratory fictions. In this class we will investigate Shakespeare’s relationship to the traditions and culture of rhetoric, and consider a number of prominent critical approaches to that relationship. Works to be studied include Othello, Coriolanus, Troilus and Cressida, The Rape of Lucrece, Cymbeline, Antony and Cleopatra, Richard III, and Henry V. Critics will include Joel Altman, Patricia Parker, David Norbrook, Lynne Magnusson, and David Schalkwyk.

720: Tragic Aesthetics: Tragedy and Philosophies of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (LIT) Tierney-Hynes

This course examines new modes of tragedy and the critical discussions they provoked in the Restoration and early eighteenth century. We will assess the way emotional responses to tragedy make their way into larger critical and philosophical debates about emotion and cognition in the period. Our reading will range from the “she-tragedies” of the early eighteenth century, through such key critical assessments of tragedy as Dryden’s and Dennis’s, to Edmund Burke’s mid-century aesthetics and the tragic sublime. We will investigate eighteenth-century ideas about audience response side-by-side with treatises on acting, examining theories of emotional expression both on and off the stage.

Readings may include:

Plays:

Dryden, All for Love
Rowe, Fair Penitent and Jane Shore
Tate, The History of King Lear
Southerne, Oroonoko
Otway, Venice Preserv’d
Congreve, The Mourning Bride
Addison, Cato
Lillo, The London Merchant

Criticism and Philosophy:

Aristotle, from Poetics
Longinus, On the Sublime
Dryden, from Dramatick Poesy
Dennis, Usefulness of the Stage
Addison, from The Spectator, selections from Pleasures of the Imagination
Hogarth, from The Analysis of Beauty
Hutcheson, from An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections
Hume, Of Tragedy and Of the Standard of Taste
Hill, Essay on the Art of Acting
Foote, from A Treatise on the Passions, So Far as They Regard the Stage
Gerard, from Essay on Taste
Burke, from Philosophical Enquiry
Smith, from Theory of Moral Sentiments

735: Seamus Heaney (LIT) Williams

The course will be a comprehensive author study of Seamus Heaney. We will take for object texts his poetry, translations, dramas, and prose, in order to think about his poetics, including how it was shaped by, and how it itself has shaped, the surrounding social, political, cultural, and literary landscape. We will consider Heaney's place within the Irish and English literary culture of the twentieth century, attending to influential predecessors as well as Heaney's influence on subsequent generations of poets.

780: Life-writing, War, and Medicine (LIT) Acton

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.

785: Becoming Animal (LIT) Kuzniar

The goal of this class is to familiarize students with current debates in animal studies within the wider critical movements of posthumanism and ecocriticism. Among the questions to be raised in the course of the semester are: What qualities do we share with animal life, mindful of the dangers of anthropomorphization? Specifically, to what extent can we speak of animal agency, mortality, vulnerability, its gaze, and, in the Levinasian sense, its face? How de we deconstruct the role the animal has appointed in the Western philosophical tradition in order to define what is human? How do the disavowal and absence of mourning operate in contemporary society with regards to animal loss? How does our visual culture fetishize and distance the animal and how is this distance and yet yearning for closeness reflected upon in postmodern art? Finally, how in Donna Haraway's words are we today "companion species in technoculture"? REadings include Derrida, Agamben, Deleuze, and Heidegger.

793: Body/Culture/Nature(RCD) Dolmage

In this course we will interrogate the rhetorical relationship between body, culture, and nature. In the class, we will examine literary, cultural and theoretical texts to investigate the rhetorical co-construction of all three fields, with a focus on the sedimentation of bodily, cultural, and natural norms. This class will offer grounding in disability studies theory, as well as an exploration of possible overlaps with eco-feminism, medical rhetoric, and other related fields.

Though this course offers a broad overview of rhetorical and critical theory about body/culture/nature, we will also devote our attention to contemporary cultural and media depictions of this interrelation. We will seek to better understand the complex accents of disability, class, race, gender and sexuality. We will also look for overlaps between critical, literary, creative and rhetorical approaches.

794: Digital Design Methods (XDM) Coleman

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.

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Winter 2015

705: The Canterbury Tales and the Making of the Christian Imagination (LIT) Klassen

Chaucer, like Dostoevsky, is a poet of freedom. One of the main issues that concerns him in The Canterbury Tales, voiced from the very beginning of the first tale, is political tyranny. The Canterbury Tales represent his best and most mature thinking about what it looks like for society to overcome it. This great poem also embodies what fiction must look like for the author who sees him- or herself in a god-like role, where the God being imitated is a God of freedom. The following description, written of Dostoevsky, applies equally well to Chaucer: “The fiction is like the world itself – proposed for acceptance and understanding but unable to compel them, since compulsion would make it impossible for the creator to appear as the creator of freedom.” As we shall see, the political and the authorial meet in language. This seminar offers an in-depth study of The Canterbury Tales in terms of the making of the Christian imagination. It encourages participants to read the work with an existential dimension in a sustained exercise of their own imagination, as if they were a Christian.

730: Radical Fiction and Violence (LIT) Lawson

This course examines the intersection of radical social and political thought with violence in five novels of the 1840s and 50s. Catherine Gallagher argues that mid-Victorian industrial novels respond to contemporary controversies about “the nature and possibility of human freedom,” “the sources of social cohesion,” and “the nature of representation” itself as “facts” are transformed into “values” (The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction). In this course we will examine how acts of violence create crises in all three domains—of freedom, community and representation.

The course will begin with key texts by Carlyle, Engels, Marx, and Mill before turning to three novels—Shirley, Mary Barton, and North and South—that depict violent action by radical working-class groups: Luddites, Chartists, and trade unionists. We will then read Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights as a novel of class and social violence, and end with Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, a novel that is fundamentally concerned with the relationship between violence and social and historical transformation.

730: Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins: Three Long Poems (LIT) North

Definition to come soon.

755:American Literary Recovery (LIT) Lamont

This course examines the recent recovery of marginalized American literatures of the 19th and early-20th centuries, critical paradigms that have been significant in this recovery, and examples of recovered texts. For your major project, you will “recover” a work of American fiction that is currently unknown to scholarship, putting into practice some of the methodologies and approaches studied in class.

760:Adaptation Theory and American Narrative/Film (LIT/RCD) Slethaug

Until the 1980s, most film and literary critics were reluctant to take up film adaptation. Film studies and adaptation were too non-literary for most English departments, and adaptation studies too literary for film departments, so that, while Bluestone, Richardson, and Corrigan began to historicize and theorize film adaptation beginning in the ’50s, few joined the party. Those that did mainly talked about faithfulness and fidelity to texts. The last three decades, however, have seen a considerable interest in the wide variety of adaptations and adaptation theory, and film adaptation is now one of the fastest growing areas in the academy. While my own preferences are postmodern in narrative, film, and theory, this by no means represents the field, and we will look at various theories of adaptation as they relate to mainly-American narratives, films, and directors. Among others, titles (narrative or film) will include Age of Innocence, The Great Gatsby, Six Degrees of Separation, Do the Right Thing, Smoke, Brokeback Mountain, Blue Jasmine, and Calvary.

775: Postcolonial Americas (LIT) Siemerling

The course will explore implications of national, hemispheric, and postcolonial studies and consider relevant theoretical and fictional texts from various parts of the Americas. Besides theoretical work, texts under study include narratives of discovery, Native voices, the U.S. Declaration of Independence, slave narratives and other black nineteenth century texts from Canada, the United States, and the Caribbean, and novellas or novels from Cuba, Colombia, Canada/Quebec, and the United States, by Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel Garcìa Màrquez, Margaret Atwood, Jacques Poulin, Thomas King, and Toni Morrison.

785: Stories and Theories (RCD) Hirschkop

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.

789: Composition Theory and Pedagogy (RCD) Condon

bell hooks writes in Black Looks: Race and Representation: “Since I knew as a child that the dominating power adults exercised over me and my gaze was never so absolute that I did not dare to look, to sneak a peep, to stare dangerously, I knew that the slaves had looked. That all attempts to repress our/black peoples’ right to gaze had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze. By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: 'Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality.’ Even in the worst circumstances of domination, the ability to manipulate one’s gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency.” (hooks 116). Relatedly, in his book, Life as We Know it, Michael Berube writes about his son, who has Down Syndrome, not only with the hope that his work will help his readers imagine his son, but also with the hope of helping his readers to imagine his son evaluating their ability to imagine him.

During this term, we will read the work of composition theorists dedicated to turning the oppositional gaze of Othered identities toward the foundational prior texts of mainstream composition studies. We will study the ways and degrees to which oppositional readings trouble or complicate what is effectively the composition theory canon, and contest, overturn or transform the dominant theoretical (and pedagogical) trajectories of the mainstream field of composition.

One of our objectives in this course will be to become familiar with a disciplinary canon and, more importantly—as Burke suggests— to learn the field by joining the conversation. We will work to understand how canons of theory form and function within a scholarly discipline. But our primary objective will be to understand the role of critique (the oppositional gaze or the Other evaluating the ability of the dominant to imagine them) in the production of new knowledge that is the work of scholarship within a field like composition studies.

794:Digital Photography the Self (RCD/XDM) Morrison

This course considers the “rhetoric of the image” in the age of digital photography, particularly in its uses as a biographical and auto/biographical technology. We will situate digital photographic forms historically, in terms of prior print and analog technologies and practices. We will also situate them theoretically, in terms of auto/biography studies, photography studies, and new media studies. We will consider genres such as the the family album, the photo booth strip, the social media selfie, and the portrait. Primary texts will include photography sites such as Noah K Everyday, Dear Photograph, images grouped under the hashtags #feministselfie and #ifTheyGunnedMeDown, and services such as Instagram and Snapchat, as well as students’ own film and digital photographs.

799: Digital Abstinence (XDM) O'Gorman

The Canadian Digital Media Network (CDMN) has proclaimed Waterloo Region as the "tech capital of Canada," based largely on economic activity generated by Blackberry, a culture of tech startups, and tech-oriented research and education based at local universities. Whether or not this claim is accurate, it points to a glaring irony: Waterloo Region is also the "Old Order Mennonite capital of Canada," and the tech hub of Kitchener/Waterloo is surrounded by communities that rigorously limit the use of technology in their homes. Why would an individual--or a whole community for that matter-- abstain from the use of advanced technologies? This question, which is central to this course, is posed not just in the context of Old Order Mennonites, but applies equally to contemporary trends in "unplugging," from Digital Detox retreats in California to the recent movement by French unions to ban e-mail communication for tech workers after 6:00 p.m. For some, the growing ubiquity of digital media represents a great achievement in human history, or even a turning point in human evolution. But there exists a persistent desire to unplug from our wired world, especially in response to information overload, the spectre of surveillance, or even as a form of resistance to what might be called the relentless tyranny of social media.

In this course, students will seek to understand why and how digital abstinence is observed in the Western World. We will begin by evaluating the attempts of various individuals and communities to observe digital abstinence, and we will tally their successes and failures. We will conduct our own experiments in digital abstinence, and ultimate create digital projects that (perhaps ironically) engage with digital abstinence for the sake of promoting the concepts of ritual, mindfulness, privacy, contemplation, community, and presence, among others.

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Spring 2015

710: The Play’s the Thing (LIT) Roberts-Smith

This course interrogates the role of performance - as an object of study, a conceptual context, and a research methodology - in the editing and criticism of Elizabethan play texts. After an orientation to the working concepts of theatricality and performativity as they relate to theatrical texts, and a summary of the ongoing performance/literature debate in Shakespeare studies, we will spend the first two-thirds of the term exploring major trends in current performance-oriented scholarship and editorial practice. With that background as context, we will attend an international conference at McMaster University (June 23-25) focusing on the methodological problem of performance as an epistemology (a way of knowing in itself) in the context of traditional scholarly research, documentation, and dissemination. The course will run concurrently with an undergraduate Drama performance course staging a research-oriented production of Henry VI Part 1 that will be presented at Mac; collaboration between the two courses will be encouraged. We will conclude with final archival, theoretical, editorial, and/or performance projects responding to the McMaster proceedings through the lens of the two plays under scrutiny at Mac: The Three Ladies of London (possibly performed by the Queen’s Men); and Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 1. Students will be invited to submit final papers, editorial projects, and/or performance project documentation to the Mac conference’s print and online publications.

725: The Science of Poetry (LIT) Savarese

This course asks what the discipline of reading poetry can teach us about the history of the disciplines. In the Romantic era, poetry came to stand in for a form of “undisciplined” thinking that opposed the specialized knowledge of the sciences. At the same time, English literature was becoming a branch of study in its own right, with specialized strategies of reading and (for the first time) a home in the university curriculum. Paradoxically, then, writers increasingly sought an empirical basis for studying things like metrical form, critical judgment, or reader response. For some, poetry came to offer a privileged kind of evidence about the senses and the passions (as in Wordsworth’s assertion that poetry was a “history or science of feelings”), or even the structural organization of the human mind. The course will examine these developments in poems by writers like Joanna Baillie, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and John Keats, as well as in the period’s critical, medical, and natural philosophical writing. Because this course offers a long history of methods and tensions that remain quite active, it will also offer a critical introduction to a variety of more recent “scientific approaches” to literature, including the history and philosophy of science; the history of the disciplines; the study of affect and emotion; and various approaches to the “cognitive turn” in studies of literature and culture.

735: Ted and Sylvia (LIT) McArthur

In 1998, Ted Hughes finally broke his silence about his marriage to Sylvia Plath. In that year of his death from cancer, he published Birthday Letters, an 88 poem lyric-narrative cycle about their seven years together, which became an international best seller, and Howls and Whispers, an eleven poem cycle limited to 110 copies. In this course, we will focus on Hughes' and Plath's literary partnership, on the journals, fiction, essays, and poetry they created during the forging of their literary mandates together from 1956 to 1963. We will read Plath's Journals, her first two volumes of poetry, The Colossus and Other Poems, and especially Ariel in The Restored Edition, and The Bell Jar, and we will read Hughes' first two volumes, Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal, and his later essays about poetic mandates. All of this will be in the context of the lyric-narrative cycles of 1998, which we will locate within the literary history of such cycles like Sidney's Astrophil and Stella or Shakespeare's Sonnets.

760: Sound and Voice (LIT) McGuirk

“[A]a song doesn’t exist to convey the meaning of the words; rather, the words exist to convey the meaning of the song.” The music critic Simon Frith here captures a peculiar truth: that meaning in art is something other than semiotic clarity, is not about communication per se. Art proposes, moreover, that if “understanding the sound of not understanding,” in Jed Rasula’s words, defines aesthetic experience, it is crucial to experience more generally. Sound, then, at once material phenomenon and semiotic resource, offers an interesting ground for reflection about relations among phenomenal experience, meaning-making, and art. The new discipline of Sound Studies has some relevance to this course, but our emphasis will be on the particular ways in which literary art, from song to the novel, produces, reflects, and examines sound experience. In literature, sound questions often emerge in connection with the phenomenon of “voice,” which we will consider as material presence (the singer’s voice), as discourse effect (the writer’s “voice”), and as metaphysical assertion (“the bearer of some unfathomable originary meaning” – Mladen Dolar). Our discussion will range widely enough to take in John Cage’s anti-metaphysical project (“Let sounds be sounds”), Emily Dickinson’s lucubrations on sound and the precarity of self, the “bass culture” of Linton Kwesi Johnson, and some “noisy” novels of the 20th century where sound figures as a threat to symbolic orders.

770: Research Methods and Early Commonwealth Writing (LIT) Hulan

The millennial rise of regional and global indigenous literary criticism has generated active interrogations of the research methods used during the last fifty years to define and examine English-language writing, particularly writing from the British Empire’s last stages and the early Commonwealth (c. 1875-1930), when authors who came from diverse linguistic and geographical backgrounds engaged an international audience through the medium of the English language. How have Western scholars been reading and researching this multi-ethnic, multi-placed writing, if we have been doing either? How have we understood, or misunderstood, the English language as a medium for this communication and this art?

In this course we consider several of the most established approaches to the study of late imperial writing around the former empire. The emergence of this international literary field has prompted new debates about the ways in which methodological choices shape the object of study. The class will read canonical and non-canonical literary theory from the past half-century and ask what research questions and procedures for inquiry these methods rule in, which ones they rule out, and how they inform our understanding of late imperial writing. The questions we will raise include:

  • Is there an “arrogance of conscience” in the research methodologies that originate in Euro-settler communities?
  • Is Foucault indispensable?
  • Can researchers dismiss the question of authorial intention?

We will also experiment with developing new research methodologies of our own and look at the pros and cons of doing so.

A tentative reading list for the course may be found on my office door, Hagey Hall Rm. 255 or by emailing me: shulan@uwaterloo.ca.

788: Rhetorics of Decline and Collapse (LIT/RCD) McMurry

This course is an exploration of the rhetorical dimensions of the planetary emergency, particularly the tropological and metaphoric blockages (caused by, among other things, willful blindness, Pollyanism, knee-jerk optimism, allegiance to linear history,
progressivism, “hopeism,” protective cognition) to timely and effective action on the various fronts that constitute our global environmental predicament. In short, the course investigates our frogmarch toward collapse using the tools and touchstones of literary and cultural analysis.
I describe the approach of the course as “rhetorical” because rhetoric is the name of the field that attempts to describe and understand the motivated use of language in human societies, whether that language is embodied in a novel, a film, or a policy document. In all instances our focus will be on the way symbolic action works as part of a Terror Management System to reduce, allay, or elide what by rights should be our absolute horror at what we have put in motion on this planet: a growth machine into whose massive gears has now slipped the soiled hem of humankind's brocaded robe.

794: Game Studies (XDM/RCD) Randall

Description forthcoming.