Graduate Courses 2014-2015

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Definition to come soon.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Description forthcoming.