Graduate Courses 2015-2016

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."

American pulp magazines were made possible by a convergence of technological advances in print and transportation, which made it possible to sell and ship magazines to mass readerships. Although they are widely collected and enjoy a huge fan following, very little scholarship exists about pulps and their readers. In this course we will work collectively toward a better understanding of pulp magazines, their authors, and their readers. We will focus on a few select titles that represent a cross-section of pulp genres. In addition to reading select pulp magazines themselves, we will study critical and theoretical readings, including theories of popular culture and readerships, theories of literary value and recovery, and recent scholarship on the pulp magazine field. As well, we will experiment with digital technologies such as Google maps and online census data to plot and analyze popular readerships, and learn more about the people who wrote for the pulps. Pulp titles to be covered may include, depending on availability, Argosy, Adventure, Love Story Magazine, Ranch Romance, Western Story, The Black Mask, Detective Story Magazine, Weird Tales.

This course investigates the points of interconnection between social justice movements and the sphere of literary studies, using contemporary Canadian literature as a context for this exploration. The critical approach will be shaped primarily through critical race studies, critical ethnic studies, and gender analysis. While the diverse selection of primary texts will be explored from a number of directions, students will also be asked to consider the writers' modes of addressing the role of representation in the creation of "racializing assemblages" (Weheliye) and the representational strategies available for resistance and critique. Students will be asked further to consider a continuum of social justice praxis for Canadian writers' activities, from direct-action petitioning and protesting to more traditionally literary work. The course will explore the impact of social justice movement and coalition organization on literary culture in Canada, and will invite students to consider the evolving role of authorship, including collaborative writing.

Technical communication is treated in this course as both professional practice and as a site for scholarly investigation. Students will learn about the history and theory of technical communication across several disciplines and scholarly traditions. The activities and practices that constitute “technical communication” are theorized as rhetorical activities, and texts are analyzed using rhetorical genre theory, although we will read more broadly in the field to consider other perspectives. Students will also learn empirical approaches to the study of technical communication genres, including content analysis, interviewing subject-matter experts (SMEs), as well as ethical considerations in qualitative research design. Students in the course will be encouraged to identify their interests early on as major course projects will be tailored to their particular interests and research or professional goals.

This course will provide students with a graduate-level introduction to the theories, methods, and materials of critical discourse analysis. CDA takes the view that most discourses reproduce and recirculate dominant social and political formations, that, in essence, everyday language practices and hegemonic ideology are deeply interwoven. Drawing on tools from grammar, linguistics, semiotics, Marxism, and social theory, CDA pries open otherwise opaque texts and practices to reveal that they are profoundly shaped by dynamic social forces and structures that are themselves realized in discourse. Power relations, in particular, come in for special examination: power becomes observable as the subject ventriloquizes the discourses that have in fact ventriloquized the subject. Social and discursive resistance is not impossible but submission is much more attractive. The aim of CDA is unapologetically old-fashioned: to contest oppressive social relations and practices by exposing them to the light of critical scrutiny. Case studies in this course will be derived from contemporary business and environmental discourses. Among the primary readings are texts by Marx, Bahktin, Jakobson, Austin, Bourdieu, Foucault, Althusser, Norman Fairclough, Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, Teun Van Dijk, Gunther Kress, Stuart Hall, and Ruth Wodak.

Jane Austen’s period saw an explosion of fiction written by women across a variety of genres, encompassing the historical novel and the philosophical tale, as well as the better known romantic, gothic, and comic forms. These works were also hugely popular with readers and critics: from the Bildungsroman of Frances Burney and the female Gothic of Ann Radcliffe to the fictional examination of sexual politics by Mary Hays and the regional tales of Maria Edgeworth, women were at the creative forefront of fiction writing. Today it can be hard to recall this context, not only due to changes in the novelistic canon which saw large swaths of women’s writing forgotten and neglected, but also because of the very power of Austen’s artistic achievement, which seems to set her above the novelists, male and female, who wrote before her. Austen seems, like Shakespeare, to be a type of natural genius, and through the various film adaptations of her novels, even our contemporary. Yet, of course, Austen was no less responsive to the literature of her age, and its problems and possibilities, than was Shakespeare himself. In this course, we will read the major works of Jane Austen with an eye to the literary background of her novels, drawing especially on women’s fiction of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a context for understanding her artistic achievement.

The course explores black writing 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 appeal to their audience, how contemporary black Canadian writers use past texts and dimensions to engage readers in the present, and what these texts might mean for Canadian, diasporic, and North American literary debates. Both theoretical and literary texts will be studied to open up these questions. We will 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 including Lorena Gale, Lawrence Hill, Mairuth Sarsfield, Dionne Brand, Wayde Compton, George Elliott Clarke. and Esi Edugyan.

Competing theories of what counts as “literacy” have shaped debates about education and citizenship as far back as Socrates or the Kashinawa. In this class, we will trace and enter these debates, but with a focus on how literacy has been used to sort societies according to class, ability, gender, and ethnicity norms and biases.

This will be an interdisciplinary study of literacy, yet grounded in rhetorical theory, focused on literacy as a historical, theoretical, and problematic framework for understanding communication and community.

Utilizing the affordances of the Gaukel space, students will perform localized inquiry and need-assessment projects to develop small-scale community literacy initiatives, and they will perform scholarly research to develop arguments and proposals. I will partner with the Working Center, the KW Multi-Cultural Center, Kitchener Public Library, and other local organizations to facilitate these initiatives.

Much of what we think of modernist in art and literature is distinguished by a peculiarly self-conscious and self-reflexive attitude towards language, expressed in style, in orthography, and in graphic inventiveness. But it is also the case that the modernist period reinvented the very idea of language, investing this object with new powers and a universalist mission. In this course we explore the complicated relationship between modernism and language, through the reading and analysis of modernist tracts on language, modernist literary texts, and avant-garde manifestoes and pictorial works. We’ll think about the new attitude to the word displayed by poets and fiction writers, about the rise of universalist projects like Esperanto and Basic English, and about the emergence of new philosophies of language.

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.

This course employs affect theory to consider the most central, persistent “figure” of Asian American and Asian Canadian literature: the model minority. Coined in the mid-1960s, the term has, in subsequent decades, come to describe how Asian ethnic groups in North America achieve economic and social “success” despite experiencing deep racial and historical discrimination. The model minority thesis or myth explains this success through Asian “cultural” traits such as strong work ethic, educational drive, family values, and conformist disposition. It thus constructs a certain (stereo)type of “Asian” subject, one that scholars, artists, and activists have continually grappled with in their intellectual, cultural, and political output.

This course covers comedy from the Restoration of Charles II to the Licensing Act of 1737, which greatly restricted new dramatic productions and shut down the hotbeds of theatrical innovation that had dominated the literary scene in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century London. We’ll be talking about the peculiarly fertile environment for drama in this period, and the conditions of its production, as well as about its content. Our reading of the primary texts will be balanced by an examination of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theories of comedy and laughter, ranging from the paratexts of the dramatists themselves as they address their audiences in prefaces, prologues, and epilogues, to the more abstract theoretical treatments of such figures as Addison and Steele in their periodical essays and Hutcheson in his philosophical essays. I hope we will discover the ways in which eighteenth-century comedy theorizes laughter as central to the human psyche, and examine the social, as well as the literary purposes it is understood to serve. We’ll also interrogate the ways in which comedy might be essential to the development of new models of emotion in the eighteenth century, and their consequent impact on the modern self.

This course will examine the formal and imaginative innovations the “Oriental tale” afforded Romantic writers and readers, from William Beckford’s scandalous novel Vathek to the rise of the “metrical romance,” which quickly became the one of the era’s most popular poetic genres. Romantic writers took Orientalist caricatures as an occasion to proffer their readers indulgent fantasies, but also used the genre to think through the problems attendant upon the British empire’s increasingly global colonial efforts. Often the collaboration between literary and political aspects of Orientalism was more overt. Byron’s “Turkish” tales, for example, can be read as the wildly popular poems that made him famous, but Byron’s death in the Greek wars of independence, while preparing an attack on an Ottoman stronghold, is a different kind of text altogether. We will conclude with Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, a novel that imagines humanity’s future extinction as a direct outcome of European interventionist wars in Turkey. In addition to novels by Beckford and Shelley and tales in verse by Byron, Moore, Southey, and Landon, we will examine issues and questions in postcolonial theory, the history of religion, and the theory of the secular.

When it was published in 1922, The Waste Land became, with Ulysses, published in its complete form in the same year, an immediate international sensation and one of the primary texts of literary Modernism. This course proposes to examine the significance of these events through exploring the making of this poem in its genetic phases and its intertextual networks. All of Eliot's early work from before and during his crucial postgraduate year in Paris in 1910-11, published in 1996 as Inventions of the March Hare, to his collaboration on his first two volumes of poetry with Ezra Pound (published in 1917 and 1920), through to the manuscripts of the poem itself, published with all the evidence of Pound's extensive editing in 1971, constitute the local phases of the genesis of the poem. Multiple texts, from The Odyssey to The Tempest, from The Golden Bough to From Ritual to Romance, and beyond, constitute the wider networks of its intertextuality. These networks can be accessed through the evidence of his reading in this period, those essays he wrote in the years of the genesis of the poem, especially "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) and "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921). And there is Eliot's own life story during these years. Our course will focus on these many strands converging in and emanating from our central focus, the making of the poem itself in 1921 and early 1922.

We will study American literature and critical culture from the 1930s to the 1960s.This is a period characterized by the consolidation of certain highly pointed ideas about the distinctive quality and force of Art developed by modernist writers; the establishment of “criticism” as the proper activity of university teaching and scholarship in English; and by a lively critical and political culture in which Literature occupied a privileged position. Why “art and persuasion”? In some respects, these terms define the disputed territory described by our readings, where conceptions of art as “autotelic” (an end in itself, and thus non-persuasive) and art as fulfilling an ethical or political responsibility (thus highly rhetorical) were at odds in interesting ways. They also constitute an analytic distinction useful for reading the period, and they will provide a general framework for our discussions. Readings may include work by Kenneth Burke, Wayne Booth, Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsburg, Ralph Ellison, Lionel Trilling, Robert Lowell.

The course will focus on the oeuvre of Sara Jeannette Duncan (1861-1922). Canadian-born novelist and women of letters. From her earliest days as a journalist employed by several Canadian and American newspapers, Duncan roamed the world, eventually settling in Calcutta after marrying Indian Daily News editor Everard Cotes. Like most members of the Raj, the couple divided their time between India and Britain, and Duncan also returned regularly to Ontario, where she set The Imperialist (1904), one of Canadian literature's most enduring canonical texts. Her other novels range in setting from Paris and London to Chicago, Calcutta, and Shimla, the Raj summer headquarters in the Himalayas; one follows its protagonists on a trip around the world. The class will read Duncan's novels and novellas in relation to the issues that arise in them, including but not limited to subaltern mutiny, transnational and hybrid identities, the problems of imperial womanhood, and outside/ insider dynamics in the late British Empire, where from several vantage points Duncan bore witness to the tectonic shifts of imperial power between England and the United States. Lime many writers during the transitional period of English-language letters (c. 1880-1920), Duncan's style anticipates the modernism of a later generation while adhering to the generic conventions of the late Victorian and Edwardian novel. Some of the critical readings (e.g. by Carole Gerson) with which the novels will be paired will address this particular aesthetic moment, while others will focus on the challenges of archival research on women writers (Kathleen Garay and Christyl Verduyn). Because many of Duncan's works offer representations of different indigenous populations, the class will also apply postcolonial and indigenizing theories to her work (Len Findlay).

Scientists are rhetors. They sway and are swayed. They appeal to various audiences, from hard-nosed empiricist colleagues to granting agencies to the general public, and they respond to various symbolic inducements, from the general public to granting agencies to hard-assed empiricist colleagues. That’s how they make and propagate knowledge. We will study the fabric of suasions that comprise science.