Graduate Courses 2011-2012

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.

This course will focus on one important strand of consolatory and experimental writing in the medieval period: namely that produced by the incarcerated. We will begin with Boethius' early Christian/late Stoic Consolation of Philosophy and Chaucer's literary remake of it in The Knight's Tale, and then continue through the works of the jailed Scots King James I (The Kingis Quair) and the French nobleman Charles d'Orleans, both of whom spent more than a decade in prison under Lancastrians, as well as Adam Usk's bizarre allegorical memoir The Testament of Love, produced as he was awaiting execution for getting mixed up in municipal politics in London during the reign of Richard II. Moving into the sixteenth-century, we will conclude with a brief look at Thomas Wyatt's Penitential Psalms and the lyrics attributed to Queen Elizabeth during her improvement in the light of this medieval tradition.
We will consider the complex generic location of these works, straddling divides between religious meditation, political complaint, autobiography, allegory, romance and lyric. We will try to assess their value to their original writers-therapeutic, justificatory, aesthetic-and their value to us as twenty-first century readers, whether this be as specimens of Middle English literary culture, diachronically part of the confluence of the English canon, or, synchronically, as specimens of prison writing that might be compared to modern works such as Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago or Breytecnbach's True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist. Texts will be read in Middle English: skills and traditional philology and close reading will be cultivated, as well the use of contemporary theory to interpret premodern texts.

According to an influential strand of social theory stretching from Max Weber to Michel Foucault, the early modern period saw a fundamental shift in the goals and procedures of social discipline. One catalyst for this change was the Reformation, which, as Weber argued a century ago, pushed discipline out of the monasteries and into the general population. Protestants did this consciously, sparking major controversy about church discipline and, in England, earning their radical fringe the nickname-half admiring, half contemptuous - "the Disciplinarians" (it was later replaced by the equally ambivalent term "Puritans"). This class will examine the significance of these historical developments for English poetry for these historical developments. Poets like George Herbert and John Milton are not only among our greatest religious poets, they were deeply concerned with, and wrote at length about, church discipline. Against the background of early modern and modern understandings of discipline, we will study the relationship between poetic and disciplinary practices from the sixteenth-century metrical psalters to Paradise Lost, asking how it changes, and why.

Literary recovery refers to research that seeks to bring to light important but neglected literary scholarship since the 1980s, with Henry Louis Gates' influential recovery of black writers, and critique of the dominant American canon by scholars such as Jane Tompkins (Sensational Designs, 1986) and Paul Lauter (Canons and Contexts, 1991). With this reopening of the American canon, more and more researchers turned their attention to the recovery of literary texts that has been excluded from American literary scholarship, anthologies, and university curricula. This course will survey important examples of, and theories and methods associated with, American literary recovery. Making use of digital archives such as The American Periodicals Series, Students will be complete a major project in which they make a case for the recovery of a literary text currently excluded from American literary scholarship, anthologies, and curricula.

The course looks at Black writing in a wider North American comparative perspective but ultimately concentrates on Black writing in Canada and Quebec. Both Theoretical and literary texts will be studies to explore this field, which has become crucial to literary culture studies in the United States for the quite some time but is only now emerging as a major preoccupation in Canadian literary discussion. The course will begin with texts by Lorena Gale and Lawrence Hill that evoke slavery in Canada, then look at narratives produced by ex-slaves and other Blacks who settled in Canada after leaving the United States. We will briefly explore Du Bois' classic The Souls of Black Folk to learn of the predicaments of blacks after the U.S. Civil War. Du Bois also played a role in the Harlem Renaissance, and a brief look at that chapter of cultural history will serve as introduction to contemporary Black Canadian texts that reference this period. The second half of the course will be dedicated to other contemporary Black writing in Canada and Quebec, including texts by Mairuth Sarsfield, Dionne Brand, Wayde Compton, and George Elliott Clarke.

Each session of this class introduces a particular Freudian or Lacanian theory such as the uncanny, voyeurism, fetishism, the death drive, melancholia, masochism, the Imaginary, Symbolic, and the Real. Each concept is examined in the light of how it has been adapted in visual, sexuality, feminist, and literary studies. The goal is to insure sufficient familiarity with these theories so that students are at ease in deploying them richly in their own readings of literary and visual texts. Focus will be on how psychoanalysis itself is a reading practice. Readings by Freud include "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," "Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria," "The Uncanny," "Morning and Melancholia," "On Female Sexuality," and "A Child is Being Beaten." We chall also read excerpts form Jacques Lacan, Jessica Benjamin, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Judith Butler.

In this course we will learn to see cities and urban space more generally as structures filled with meaning. The premise of the course is that cities are not merely built but meaningful world for the urban dweller. Meaningful, but not unambiguous: there are many different kinds of people in cities, who live in different places and interpret the city in different ways. Much of our attention will be directed towards conflicting interpretations of elements of the city, and to struggles over the shape and meaning of city space. As will become clear through the course, these struggles are conducted not only through writing on the city, but also via battles over the fates of neighbourhoods, over the shaping and decorating of the urban environment, over the development and use of space, and even over how one walks (or drives, or rides a bicycle).
Ideally, we would spend a great deal of time actually wandering through cities, given that our concern will be not only with texts on urban existence but with everyday acts of interpreting the city. Unfortunately, a hands-on approach would prove unwieldy and perhaps expensive, so in the main we will content ourselves with different kinds of writing on the modern city: essays, novels, texts by architects, sociologists, and urban theorists. Much of the most significant writing on cities concerns places we may not have ever visited, such as Paris, Rome, New York, Berlin or Los Angeles. It’s hard to think about interpretaing a city we experience only through writing, so the fiction on the course focuses on a city relatively close to home: Toronto. By examining writing on Canada’s largest city (we’ll watch a film on Winninpeg as well, so it isn’t just Toronto) we’ll ensure a point of reference beyond the fiction.

John Milton produced the most powerful epic poem of the modern world, and political, religious, and social arguments that still have impact today. This course will survey Milton's unequalled poetry and sample his powerful prose. Poems will include Paradise Lost, “Lycidas,” “L'Allegro,” “Il Penseroso,” “Nativity Ode,” and selected sonnets; prose will include “Areopagitica” and "Reason of Church Government." Readings will also include critical, biographical, and contextual works about Milton's oeuvre, his times, and his reputation during and after his lifetime.

This course will be almost entirely concerned with the major poetry of G.M. Hopkins. As we read the poetry some little attention will be given to the traditions leading up to and away from his work, and we will on occasion refer to his letters and journals. Attention will be paid to the way in which he achieves the effects of his poetry: his world view, his poetics, his prosody.

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 poem itself.

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.

This course is designed to acquaint students with basic concepts and information about globalization and global communications. Students will have the opportunity to explore the roots of the rapid growth of globalization in the second half of the 20th century, assess the role that English language, media, intercultural, and internet communications have played in this, and consider the implications of this development for culture, identity, and consumption.

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.