Graduate Courses 2023-2024

The systematic study of effective composition, argument, and persuasion-€”the art of rhetoric-€”dates back at least to the epics of Homer and flourishes today in countless academic disciplines and spheres of social life. In fact, the historical “empire” of rhetoric is so vast that it “digests regimes, religions, and civilizations” (Roland Barthes). This seminar seeks to introduce students to some of the essential concepts, issues, and controversies in the history and theory of rhetoric by analyzing selections from key texts from antiquity and the twentieth century. In addition to demonstrating the relevance of rhetorical theory and criticism to a variety of social, intellectual, and cultural fields (politics, feminism, critical race theory, etc.), the seminar also explores emerging forms of rhetorical practice made possible by new media technologies, such as digital advertising and information warfare. Ideally, students will leave the seminar with a firm grasp of basic concepts of rhetorical theory and a deeper appreciation for rhetoric as an inventive, critical, and multidisciplinary enterprise.

This course is an introduction to research methods used in rhetoric, communication design, and writing studies. Emphasis is placed on research ethics, the fit of method to research design, the interdisciplinary scope of research methods, the emergence of new research methods, and the development of research proposals. Students will become familiar with a range of methods, including methods in technical and professional communication, mixed methods, and rhetorical field methods, among others. This course suggests method as a practice as well as an object of study, connecting well-known traditional methods in rhetoric, communication design, and writing studies to those that are emergent, new, and mixed. This course allows students to map a variety of methods while understanding the reciprocal relationship between practices (methods) and theoretical frameworks (methodologies), allowing students to imagine and pair research questions and methods for their own projects. 

In this course we will explore the production of public space in light of some of the issues raised by Black Lives Matter. We will look at two related questions. First, how do monuments, street names, and other markers segment time and produce public space, and what is at stake in the debates that ask for the removal of statues and the changing of names, or alternatively for the public contextualization of their racist legacies? And second, how do black literary texts and works of art seek to produce different kinds of public geographies, and counter the dominant parceling out of time and space that results from imperial and colonial histories? 

We will begin by examining focal points in a number of cities, including North American examples and cities crucial for the European slave trade such as Bristol and Liverpool in England and Bordeaux and Nantes in France. We will then concentrate on spaces closer to home and look at related issues in cities including Toronto (Dundas Street, Baby Point, Russell Street), Montreal (Old Montreal, Saint Henri), Halifax (Africville), and Vancouver (Hogan’s Alley). In the second part of the course, we will explore a number of black Canadian writings that can help us to reflect on the production of (black) Canadian space and the city. The course lends itself to LIT, RCD, and XDM perspectives, and students are invited to propose additional works and spaces for examination in their final project

One of the remarkable things to happen in the global cultural scene, especially beginning from the mid-twentieth Century, has been the explosion of literary and cultural productivity from the former colonies of European empires in Africa, the West Indies, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and settler colonies such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other such places touched by imperial conquests. These growing constellations of writing have now come to be known globally as postcolonial literatures. This literature, often politically inclined, re-examines and problematizes the history of European colonization as it also reflects on its spiraling aftermath. The primary agenda of Postcolonial literatures, Ato Quayson (2000) argues, involves ‘‘the representation of experiences of various kinds including those of slavery, migration, oppression and resistance, difference, race, gender, space and place, and the responses to the discourse of imperial Europe’’(Cambridge History of Postcolonial Lit. 06). This course thus examines the history, poetics, and politics of this genre of world literature in English from the postcolonies by examining the key writers, thinkers, texts, aesthetic trends, and discourses associated with postcolonialism, both as an intellectual project and activist cultural endeavor. More specifically, the seminar seeks to interrogate how the writers within this global literary tradition challenge and unmask the asymmetries of power in the theatre of cruelty now called globalization, thus inaugurating a global literary and cultural movement marked by what Auritro Majumder calls “insurgent imaginations

Blake is known for his exaltation of the “Human Form Divine”. However, his works abound with other living things - plants, animals, angels, devils, various mythological beings -€“ all endowed with kinds and degrees of agency in creation and destruction, connection to and alienation from the divine. This course will explore the diversity of beings in Blake’s visual and verbal productions, focusing on selected Illuminated Books. We will consider in tandem Blake’s radical reimaginings of the relations of human and non-human and of image and text where (for example) vines become letters, and a Dragon-Man, a Viper, an Eagle, fiery Lions, and Unnam’d forms are all workers in the Printing house in Hell.

It is difficult to underestimate the importance of Alice Walker 's 1975 essay “Looking for Zora,” documenting her rediscovery of the work of Zora Neale Hurston and search for the author’s grave. Walker’s excavation of the life and career of forgotten literary giant of the Harlem Renaissance inspired a generation of scholars to turn to the archive, in search of a lost literary history. The works of authors from Harriet Jacobs (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl) to Harriet Wilson (Our Nig) have been researched, republished, and recirculated. From the Schomburg Series of African American Women’s Writing to the University of Virginia’s Regenerations Series, presses have invested time and resources in making lost texts and forgotten authors available to the public. This has not been without hiccups: white authors have been misidentified as black authors; black authors whose works did not survive have been exempt from such considerations. Scholars have staked their careers on competing claims to have discovered “the first” African American novel. Complicating this is the fact that works that have recirculated with the most success are more likely to reflect our current literary, theoretical, and/or political preoccupations. Market forces also shape what gets republished and by whom. If the aim of recuperation is to enhance our understanding of past literary and print cultures, what happens when we selectively embrace particular texts?

In this course we will explore recent writings about the Anthropocene—€” the era in which “humans act as a main determinant of the environment of the planet” (Dipesh Chakrabarty)—€”in conjunction with texts and concepts drawn from critical race theory and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School (Max Horkheimer, Th. W. Adorno, and Walter Benjamin). Theorists of the Anthropocene and eco-critical thinkers have especially taken note of the Frankfurt School’s critique of “instrumental reason” and modernity, with its notions of development and techniques of domination over both nature and parts of humanity. These and other features of Frankfurt School Critical Theory have also become increasingly relevant in recent critical black studies, where scholars reflect on the relation between modernity and the slave trade, and the concomitant development of notions of blackness that continue to mark our present. We will look at this critical juncture between three important theory formations in the wider context of theories of postcoloniality and non-domination. Some literary texts will serve as test cases, while students are invited to propose additional works for examination in these theoretical contexts for their final project.

In Teaching Queer, Stacey Waite1 writes about the need to make her queer identity part of her pedagogical practice -€“ to blend her personal and professional identities into a unified persona in order to better connect with her students. This directed reading course will explore the
concept of the professional persona by considering the ways we perform “self” and create academic personas within the classroom, professional writing, and online self-presentation to answer the question of whether (and how) the personal can be professional.

This course topic is best approached from an interdisciplinary perspective; to that end, readings will be drawn from the fields of rhetoric, auto/biography studies, and social psychology in order to explore the ways in which we manifest and write from our particular academic
personas. Key terms that animate this course include autotheory, automediality, persona, ethos, and the narrating “I.”

Returning to her teaching job just days after bilateral mastectomy surgery, Anne Boyer2 writes that she’s “expected to be bravely visible as a breast cancer survivor while my students have no idea what has been done to me or how much I hurt” (157). The aim of this directed
course is, as Boyer struggles with in The Undying, to find a middle ground between being always “bravely visible” and simultaneously invisible in the individual lived experiences that inform how we interact with the academy and perform academic work.

A novel makes no noise as it sits in your hands. But the figuration of sound in fiction is crucial to the construction of phenomenal worlds, social realities, ethical subjects. Sight is our dominant sense. Held at a distance, the world is stabilized for the gaze. We might expect that sound, which surrounds and penetrates, will constitute worlds and subjects differently. Ethos, a term of rhetoric that takes in both “world-view” and “character,” notions central to the study of the novel, will guide our inquiry into this difference as it is explored in fictional representations and in narrative style - where the ethos of both author and character is bodied forth in prosody and pacing, modality and diction.

One of the controlling questions in the early days of Game Studies (i.e. about a quarter-century ago) was whether or not games tell, or indeed could tell, stories. On the one hand, this is a silly question, since anyone who has played even a card game such as Euchre can usually craft a story about how one or more hands were played. But because of the desire at the time to cast games in the media focus given to film, television, and even novels and short stories, it was probably inevitable that narrative become a studied element of how games function. English 794 examines the constantly growing body of scholarship devoted to the idea of story in games, drawing together strands ranging from the design of game content through the design of game mechanics. A central question guiding this course will be if we can identify a narratology of games; we will focus on digital games but address several boardgames as well.