Graduate Courses 2012-2013

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 form 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 garsp of basic concepts, an ability to analyze rhetorical artifacts, and deeper sense of rhetoric as an incentive, critical, multimodal, and richly interdisciplinary enterprise - what Quintilian calls and "encompassing are" (ars circumcurrens).

Ten years and counting after 9/11, religion sits securely at the center of contemporary Shakespeare studies. Part of the religious turn in early modern studies, the study of Shakespeare and religion has followed primarily the historical methods that have guided the study of Renaissance literature fir the last two decades. Historicist critics have read Shakespeare in relation to a nostalgic Catholicism (e.g. Greenblatt), an aggressively reformist Protestantism (Diehl), and inclusive religious pluralism (Knapp), a clash between world religions (Vitkus), and an emergent secularism (Dawson). Recently, however, the religious turn in Shakespeare studies and the religious turn in theory have been brought together by a group of critics more likely to read Shakespeare's religion through Derrida and Badiou than through Luther and Calvin. Like Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti's 2011 collection Shakespeare and Religion, then, this class will consider both early modern and postmodern perspectives on the subject.

The para-medical phenomenon of Mesmerism named after the innovative physician (or quack doctor) Franz Mesmer (1734-1815) resurfaced in Britain in the 1940s, becoming something of a cultural sensation. As Alison Winter remarks, "a large proportion of Victorians knew of mesmerism and its claimed effects and [...] a great many people had witnessed it at first hand" (Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain). Poised as it was between the nascent psychology of the nineteenth century and investigations of the paranormal and the occult, Mesmerism was often used is literature as a vehicle for exploring unaccountable mental processes and effects. While it typically was presented as uncanny or preternatural, the mesmeric nexus often functioned as a figure for the seemingly imponderable dimensions of intersubjectivity. Mesmeric phenomena also enabled Victorian thinkers to speculate about the dynamic unconscious mind, and led some psychologists to reflect on the multiplicity of human personality. This course will explore a range of nineteenth-century literary representations of Mesmerism and its attendant phenomena (trance or somnambulism, double consciousness, clairvoyance, telepathy, prescience) as well as associated phenomena like spiritualism and mediumship. One of the central themes of this course will be the analogies and connections between mesmeric phenomena and imagination (or more precisely the experiences of literary creation and of reading).

In this course we will examine how this process of westward expansion was envisioned in American fiction. We will begin by reading major critical works on the significance of the frontier in American history and culture. Then, we will look at influential depictions of the American frontier during the period of Indian Removal, when indigenous people living within the United States were forces to migrate westward, across the Mississippi river, in order to make room for the United States' expanding Anglo-American population. After examining how certain narratives of expansion were popularized in the dime novel press at mid-century, we will now turn to the next major period of expansion into territories claimed by the United States after its 1858 war with Mexico. Then we will move on to texts produced during the period of frontier closure, when the prospect of no more "free" land created a crisis of identity in America and created a demand for narratives that celebrated and memorialized the "disappearing: frontier. We will study texts that represent a range of perspectives, from members of the dominant, Anglo-American settler-class, to the perspectives of marginalized African, Mexican, and Native American authors.

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 of sexuality, the challenges that racialization and colonialism pose to mainstream feminist theory, the gendering of nationalism, masculinity and race, the body as colonial text and postcolonial space of performance, and queer postcolonialism.

While the relationship between literature and environment has always been central to the creation and production of texts, ecocriticism did not emerge as an intellectual movement until the 1990s. Initially, many ecocritics simply want to see "nature writing" recognized as an important genre within scholarly communities that had marginalized or overlooked the significance of place in literary studies. Now, with a revised sense of critical vigor, ecocritics are interpreting environments using spatial theory and are constructing place-oriented methodologies in conversation with cultural geographers, urban planners, cartographers and public artists. As we trace past and present variations of environmental criticism, we will take out own excursions into texts and places while working on seminar papers. At the same time, we will read an eclectic selection of critical essays and Lawrence Buell's The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005), Alan Braddock and Christoph Irmscher's A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (2004) and Thomas Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty and Karla Armbruster's The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place (2012).xpandable text.

The popular expression and song, "Hit the road, Jack," is as much a part of American Culture and slang as Jack Kerouac's On the Road, the best-selling narrative of his adolescent life on the American highway. North Americans have been on the road since the first settlements, pushing towards the West Coast, moving around the country in pursuit of the American Dream , or just driving along the highways to escape the harshness and dullness of urban life. This restlessness and the ease with which large segments of the population move and resettle characterizes many aspects of US life, turning the road into one of the most powerful symbols in American history and culture. In the 20th century, the road has been identified with modern youth culture, but it encompasses the past and present and all segments of society-old and young, rich and poor, white and people of colours, male and female. Through an analysis of various discourse forms, including fiction, documentaries, film, and the Internet, this course will consider the road in America as reality and icon, extending it to the emergence of the Internet and the "information highway."

The Greek lyric poet Simonides (566-468 BC) is famous for recalling the name and location of each guest crushed in the rubble of the dining hall of Scopas. His mnemotechnic has a lasting impression on the art of rhetoric, but it will impress Themistocles, who commented as follows: "I would rather a technique of forgetting, for I remember what I would rather not remember and cannot forget what I would rather forget." Themistocles' clever rejoinder is especially apt at a time when mnemotechnologies serve both to externalize memory and shape human identity, leading Viktor Mayer-Schonberger to praise "the virtue of forgetting in the digital age." This course is about memory and its externalization through technics. This is also a course about understanding the human as a technical animal, and animal that strives constantly to externalize itself. If memory, the capacity to archive, is what distinguishes us from other species, what happens when we become forgetful, either by virtue of cognitive impairment or thanks to digital archives that remember for us?

Using the magisterial recent works of Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought and The Book of Memory, as well as Michelle Karnes' Imagination, Meditation and Cognition in the Middle Ages and some of the broad range of theory on the medieval body, this course will focus on the ways in which the self resides in the world in medieval literature. We will use the rich conspectus of philosophical, rhetorical and medical works presented by Carruthers to read Chaucer's House of Fame, Langland's Piers Plowman and Thomas Hoccleve's Series, three central works of the Middle English canon, all of which concentrate on human phenomenological experience and theory of mind. The complexity of interaction between mind, body and environment imagined in the medieval period - and the dense materiality of all of these - is unrivalled until the advent of twentieth century neuroscience, making cognitive critical approaches natural in this course.

Although humanism was closely associated with the rediscovery of key manuscripts of ancient rhetoric, including Quintilian's Institutio oratoria and Cecero's De oratore, Renaissance theorists did not merely exhume the corpse of rhetoriic that had lain buried since antiquity: they also reshaped and transformed classical (and medieval) rhetorical theory for their own purposes. The plays of William Shakespeare offer us a striking example of transfiguration of ancient rhetoric at work. Analyzing the plays alongside seminal works of Renaissance rhetorical theory, this seminar will examine how Shakespeare "figured" and "disfigured" the models and principles of classic rhetoric drubbed into him (in all likelihood) as a "breeching scholar" at the King's New School in Stratford on Avon. At the "forge" and "working house" (Henry V 2) of his imagination, fashioning a new kind of vernacular English eloquence that differs starkly from the Latinate sophistry of gasbags line Polonius. At the level of theory, we will examine how Shakespeare dramatizes the ethical, political, and philosophical "problems and rhetoric raised for his culture" (Kastan). Transmuting rhetorical theory into theatrical practice, the plays interrogate the myths and mystifications of Tudor rhetorical culture, especially the humanist ideal of civilizing power of eloquent wisdom-in Shakespeare, rhetoric, too, is "perilous stuff." Over the course of the semester we shall see that Shakespeare's critique of sophistry and rhetorical illusion serves a persuasive purpose of its own: it conceals the status of the play-world itself as a sophistic artifice. A play is not a "mirror held up to nature," as Hamlet suggests, but a phantasm or distorted image that conjures a virtual world or "living drollery" (Tempest) on the stage.

In the print culture of early modern England (1500-1700), the title-page performed mush 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 book 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 printed visual imagery from the early modern period.
This course is primarily an opportunity to develop your knowledge if early modern culture, your research skills, and your ability to articulate the impact of visual design on the meaning or power or appeal of a work. We will move from close reading, to contextual understanding, to theoretically-inflected interpretation. Each student will have their own project, and we will work together to develop those in the course of the term.

Core texts will include works by Elizabeth Eisenstein, Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen, and Margery Corbett and R.W. Lightbrown, and may include works by Peter Berek, Stephem Orgel, Michael Saenger, Noel Malcolm, Karl Holtgen, Tiffany Stern, Thomas Corns, Diane Jakacki and others. Research skills development will include using Early English Books Online and reference works, Theoretical approaches considered will be appropriate to the material.

This course will examine the birth of globalization (and capitalization) 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 the work by Katie Trumpener, Paul Gilroy, and others on romantic nationalism and imperialism, this course will trace the impact of economic and 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 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.

Historian Jonathan Parry argues that England's stability in the wake of the 1848 revolutions across Europe "encouraged in retrospect the myth that it had been blessed with a unique degree of political harmony and stability, owing to a combination of its liberal constitution and the nature of the English character" (The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, national identity and Europe 1830-1886, 172). The decade that followed, the 1850s has often been understood as a prosperous and peaceable "Age of Equipoise" (W.L. Burn) in which Britain's social and political conflicts has been resolved; this rosy picture endured even in the face of the Crimean War (1854-56) and the Indian "Mutiny" (1857-59).

This course analyses four major novels of the 1850s (Villette, North and South, Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities) in conjunction with two seminal works of non-fiction, Mill's On Liberty and Darwin's Origin of Species. We will examine figures of "harmony and stability," disruption and struggle, and radical instability in these works; the course will consider the extent to which the period's "equipoise" is a precarious balance, and look for evidence of an on-going disquiet with Britain's social, political, economic and cultural settlement.

Tennyson, Poet Laureate from Wordsworth's death in 1850 until his own in 1892, is perhaps the most popular, most translated, and most widely read poet during his own lifetime in the history of English Literature. Why? Few other poets approach the intimacy of his lyric poetry, or so wide-ranging in subject and technique. After the publication if In Memoriam he often went in disguise to avoid being mobbed, and was said to be one of the three greatest people in his society, along with Queen Victoria and Prime Minister Gladstone. T.S. Eliot has described him as the greatest prosodist in the history of England. We will study the thematic issues which were the pulse of the nation and will also consider the power of his poetic techniques.

Life writing is an umbrella term for various kinds of text in which personal stories are narrated. At the centre of our concern in this course will be textualized representations of subjectivity. Human subjectivity is neither transparent nor stable, and works of life writing reveal the intricate complexities and ambivalences of self-representation, including how we remember and construct our own personal experiences, as well as those of others. In this course, we will link theoretical debates about discourses of human subjectivity with issues that have particular resonance in Canadian history and culture. These might include the following: the politics of identity, memory, and the nation, self and community, self and other, serial selves, relational selves, vulnerable shelves. We will also consider works of life writing in terms of generic innovation and experimentation. Works to be studied may include the following: Erika Gottieb's Becoming My Mother's Daughter, WayneJohnston's Baltimore's Mansion, Warren Cariou's Lake of the Prairies, Fred Wah's Diamonds Grill, Ruby Cress's (Edna Staebler, ed.) Haven't Any News: Ruby's Letters From the 50's, Bernice Eisenstein's I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors, and Seth's Bancock, Beans, and Black Tea.

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 a print-based peer-reviewed scholarship. Mush 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 already yoking native-digital media to sometimes only tangentially related IRL antecedents, we risk never addressing the thing itself, on its own terms. This course takes a long historical view, a broad theoretical perspective, a sensitivity to the materiality of media, and the 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 looks at the theory, history, and practices of new media to understand how one constructs narratives in a network society. How does one engage compelling stories across media forms such as book, film, television, internet, games, and mobile? How does one construct such narratives? At the core of this course is the concept of transmedia narrative and design, where we critique the modalities of communication-specifically narrative construction-in relation to the ubiquitous presence of networked media as well as case studies of transmedia design. Additionally, we design transmedia narrative, exploring formats such as ARGs (alternative reality games), AR (augmented reality), and other forms of narrative. The course for Winter 2013 will focus on the thematic of City as Platform, investigating the concepts of public, civic, and poetic engagement in urban space. The seminar will be held at the consortium with a media arts course at Goldsmiths College, London. No media design experience is required for the course.

As the drama gave way to the novel over the course of the eighteenth century, England's dominant popular literature was increasingly 'disembodied.' The novel, not integrated with the physiologies and interpretive activities of actors and directors, is divorced from the living body. We will ask, in this course, how the novel represents the physical body in ways that both participate in theatrical discourses of gesture and visuality, and diverge sharply from these discourses. We will examine satirical bodies and physical and psychological responses to them; tragic bodies and marks of suffering; aestheticized bodies and their implications for redefinition of aesthetics in this period; gendered bodies and their place in new eighteenth-century systems of sex and gender; racialized bodies and their implication in new discourses of race and colonialism.

The texts from James Joyce present an unusual surplus in the usual generative relations between language and narration. From his first short story in 1904 to the final revisions of Finnegans Wake in 1938, Joyce continuously deployed the fundamentals of language as self-referential devices for the production of his narratives. At each stage, the forms and functions of language generate the structure of the narrative at all levels and open a continual surplus in the possibilities of the reader's reception, a surplus as available in the early stages as in the later seemingly more difficult stages. In this course, we will be concerned with the first three of these stages: the three years of development of the free indirect discourse and naturalistic narration of Dubliners (1904-1907); the seven years of the evolution of the narrated monologue and the narrative symmetries of A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1907-1914); the seven years of the emergence of the interior monologue of the early chapters and the polyphony of the later chapters of Ulysses (1914-1922). This third stage will be our primary focus, and we will use both intensive close readings of Ulysses and secondary and theoretical texts to explore the internal stages of its evolution.

We will study sound, noise, and silence in and around American writing, considering our subject in philosophical, social, and formal terms-as both material phenomena and thematic object. Topics may include: words and music, gender and sound, the epistemology of sound, avant-garde noise, the idea of the "voice," the aeshetics of silence. Primary readings will come from a variety of sources, including Whitman, Stevens, Cage, Jack Kerouac, Anne Carson, and Linton Kwesi Johnson. We will also read work on sound from a variety of disciplines including writings by Jaques Attali, Simon Frith, Susan Sontag, Steve McCaffery, Theo Van Leeuwen, and Garrett Stewart.

A new preoccupation with research methods-with the principles that govern inquiry into a given subject and the practices that logically flow from them-has emerged in contemporary Canadian criticism and literature. Research methodologies can be controversial for obvious reasons, since the questions with which researchers begin influence the answers they find. In this course students will become familiar with contemporary discourse on research method. Taking a historical approach, we will examine several research methodologies (some from Canadian scholars, like Heather Murray and Len Findlay, and some from international writers who have exerted a strong influence on Canadian research, like Michel Foucault and Gayatri Spivak) and the arguments for and against them. Some of the questions with which we will engage are:

• Is it possible to dispense with close reading as a staple of literary criticism?
• What is meant by "context"?
• How relevant is intertextuality in the age of the internet?
• Is there an "arrogance of conscience" in the research methodologies that originate in Euro-settler communities?

The class will also examine the increase in literary treatments of the researcher in works by Canadian writers who may include Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, Bernice Morgan, and Jeanette Armstrong.

This is an interdisciplinary graduate level course in Arts that will examine how leaders who are experiencing crisis communicate to repair their image. This course will emphasize the special rhetorical characteristics and constraints of crisis communication and the leadership demands, especially the damage-repair strategies, necessary to restore image and corporate identity in the heat of chaos. Critical frameworks on rhetoric, leadership and crisis from classical and contemporary rhetorical theory will be the focus in week one. A case study approach to leaders crafting response to crisis will dominate week two.
This course operates differently by design from the traditional graduate offerings at Grebel and Waterloo. Here are some of it's unique features:

1. It meets everyday for three hours over the course of two weeks! So, daily attendance is mandatory
2. It carries the same amount of academic credit as a regular full-term course.

This graduate course is designed to highlight existing theoretical relationships between rhetoric and composition, and to focus on the locations and vocations of composition theory and pedagogy within English Studies and universities more broadly. We will survey the major movements in writing theory and research, from current-traditionalism to expressivism to cultural studies to multimodality.
We will develop a focus on Canadian composition history and the current landscape of writing and rhetoric in this country. In addition to a series of essential readings, the class will gather and analyze historical artifacts from the history of Canadian rhetoric and composition.
Students will also be given opportunities to pursue disciplinary overlaps, to engage in focused and self-directed inquiry into sub-fields, and to redefine and reshape relationships between rhetoric and composition. Students will be expected to develop an independent research agenda, utilizing a range of relevant research methods, accessing ongoing conversations, and intervening to add their own perspectives in meaningful ways.

Rhetorical figures are not decorations. They are epitomes of reasoning. This claim is obvious to the point of banality for some figures, like simile, which epitomizes analogy, and metonymy, which epitomizes the argument from examples. But we will push this for other figures as well.

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.

This course studies J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings from the standpoint of adaptation theory, exploring in detail the three-part film adaptation by Peter Jackson and at least two game adaptations, one of which will be Turbine's The Lord of the Rings Online.