ENG 7376
Feminist Bibliography and Recent Conversations in Early Modern Book History
Professor Victoria Burke
This course takes as its central question: what would a feminist approach to the history of the book look like? We will begin by reading some of the classic works in the field of book history, including articles by D.F. Mackenzie, Robert Darnton, Roger Chartier, Jerome McGann, and Pierre Bourdieu. We will then consider some recent scholarship that looks at the field using the tools of feminist theory and methodology. Scholars are also interrogating the history of the book from the perspective of critical race studies, and we will engage with some of those debates. Readings will include recent articles addressing Black bibliography and Indigenous book history. We will consider the historical period 1500-1700 in particular (for example, by reading some of Valerie Wayne’s edited collection Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (2020) and the work of Margaret Ezell in relation to how book history has or has not made enough space for manuscript studies, a mode of circulation especially important to women writers). We will also discuss issues arising from the digital turn, and we will explore two important recent online editions of the poetry of Margaret Cavendish and Hester Pulter, who both wrote in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. Though much of our primary material will be taken from the early modern period in Britain, many of the critical readings stretch beyond those parameters, and students will have the option of doing a final essay or project on an aspect of feminist, Black, or Indigenous book studies, from any historical and/or national period (subject to the approval of the professor).
ENG 7331
Fiction in the Age of Social Media
Professor Lauren Gillingham
The prevalence of seriality and hypercurrency in twenty-first-century fiction is one material sign of literature’s transformation in our social media age. Literature’s intersection with digital culture has produced some notable formal innovations: writers have tweeted instalments of short fiction over successive days; some have adapted their narrative form to reproduce social media’s epigrammatic structure and disparate focus; others have reimagined the lyric sequence on the model of a digital network of loosely-connected threads. These developments have prompted some critics to decry the state of the novel and the debasing influence of social media, but as journalist Laurie Penny observes in an article on the internet novel, “What is happening is not extinction, but evolution.”
In this course, we will examine contemporary fiction’s encounter with digital technology and especially social networking, microblogging, and the internet. We will explore the formal and aesthetic possibilities that this cultural collision has engendered and the broad social and historical questions it raises. We will analyze the relationship between the conventional publishing industry and online platforms like Wattpad and BookTok, self-publishing imprints like Amazon’s, and fanfiction sites like Archive of Our Own. We will also address the fact that ours is not the first moment in which authors have immersed themselves in new media to sync their fiction to the immediate present: we will historicize contemporary fiction by looking to important precedents in the nineteenth century, an era in which stereotype printing and serialization enabled authors to give form to the felt experience of unprecedented social, technological, and political change. Using scholarship on seriality, digital media, and platform capitalism to ground our analyses, and exploring media crossovers between print culture and TV, we will aim to set the phenomenon of social media fiction in a larger literary, social, and historical context.
Texts:
Michaela Coel, I May Destroy You (TV series)
Jennifer Egan, The Candy House
Patricia Lockwood, Nobody Is Talking About This
Maggie Nelson, Bluets
Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts
Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
Plus: additional readings in short fiction and theory posted on Brightspace
ENG 7321
Contemporary Indigenous Drama in Canada
Professor Cynthia Sugars
With the 1986 production of Cree playwright Tomson Highway’s ground-breaking play, The Rez Sisters, Indigenous theatre was brought to public consciousness in Canada. The play initially sparked controversy. Canadian audiences rejected the idea of a “rez” play on the basis that it would be too depressing, but Highway’s unprecedented and provocative hilarity took theatre-goers by storm. For Indigenous dramatists, there was no turning back. Many contemporary Indigenous authors have noted the seminal impact that Highway’s play had on their work. Our course will begin with The Rez Sisters and another 1980s play, The Book of Jessica (co-written play by Linda Griffiths and Métis author Maria Campbell), a play that tackles the perils of cultural appropriation head on. From there, we will study the work of a range of contemporary Indigenous playwrights, from the late 1980s to the present. Our discussions will focus on the ways these playwrights engage with what Leanne Simpson refers to as “the destructive logics of the settler colonial state.” Some of these concerns include Indigenous sovereignty and “survivance” (Vizenor); cultural appropriation; violence against women; white supremacy; heteropatriarchy; land-based pedagogies; orality; and the strategic use of humour. Of particular interest are the ways these authors write back to the legacies of colonialism and the colonial state, as well as the ways their writings demand the recognition of Indigenous knowledges and self-governance. We will also attend one theatrical production/performance in Ottawa as part of the Indigenous theatre stream of the NAC; one of the course requirements will be to attend this theatre production and write a review of the performance.
Tomson Highway, The Rez Sisters (Fifth House)
Maria Campbell and Linda Griffiths, The Book of Jessica (Playwrights Canada)
Daniel David Moses, Brébeuf’s Ghost (Playwrights Canada)
Waawaate Fobister, Agokwe, in the collection Two-Spirit Acts (Playwrights Canada)
Drew Hayden Taylor, Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion (Talonbooks)
Marie Clements, Copper Thunderbird (Talonbooks)
Frances Koncan, Women of the Fur Trade (Playwrights Canada)
Kevin Loring, Where the Blood Mixes (Talonbooks)
Yvette Nolan, The Unplugging (Playwrights Canada)
Cliff Cardinal, Huff (Playwrights Canada)
Secondary works will include:
Rob Appleford, Aboriginal Theatre and Drama (Playwrights Canada)
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done (U Minnesota P)
Yvette Nolan, Medicine Shows: Indigenous Performing Culture (Playwrights Canada)
Yvetter Nolan and Ric Knowles, Performing Indigeneity (Playwrights Canada)
ENG 7320
Archives of Resistance: Canadian Activist History in Documents and Film
Professor Jennifer Blair
This course will introduce students to the archival turn in studies of activist writing and history in Canada. We will consider how stories of particular movements get told through a variety of documents, including memoirs, pamphlets, ephemera, graphics, news coverage, film and social media posts. The texts and events studied in this course span a long period of Canadian history, with a focus on four movements: Black activism prior to the abolition of slavery (including John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and related organizing by Black freedom seekers in Canada West, and petitions and related mobilizing by Black Loyalist organizers in Nova Scotia); the feminist movement in the mid-twentieth century (including the establishment of feminist presses, The Women’s Liberation Book Mobile, the Feminist Caucus of the League of Canadian Poets, the Lesbian Mothers’ Defence Fund, and other organizations—the current Women Against Imperialism exhibit at the Archives and Special Collections at the University of Ottawa archives gives some shape to this collection); the student movement in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (specifically, the 1969 “George Williams Affair” at what is now Concordia University and the 2012 “Maple Spring”), and Idle No More. At least two classes will be devoted to familiarizing students with archival methods, with visits to Library and Archives Canada (to see the Shadd family fonds, including meeting notes from The Provincial Union) and the University of Ottawa Archives and Special Collections (to see first edition publications of Black Loyalist authors Boston King and David George, and multiple fonds in the Canadian Women’s Movement Archives collection). However, the anchor for the vast majority of our classes will be stand-alone representations of activism (i.e. the types of texts more commonly taught in English classes) including two feature length documentary films, a graphic narrative, and two published memoirs. Assignments will include a written formal proposal for an archival project (presented to the class) and a final paper (this can be either the archival project realized, or a research essay on one of the stand-alone texts).
*Books and Films: (only 4 are for purchase)
Black Loyalist Organizing in Nova Scotia and Canada West:
Boston King, Memoirs of the Life of Boston King (serialized in The Methodist Magazine in 1798; we will view original in the University of Ottawa archives and study online version)
CDC Black Loyalist Digital Collections: https://blackloyalist.com/cdc/
Osborne Perry Anderson, A Voice from Harper’s Ferry (1861, will read online edition)
Colored Conventions Project Digital Records, https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/
Nneka D. Dennie, Mary Ann Shadd Cary: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth-Century Black
Radical Feminist (Oxford UP, 2023)
20th-century Canadian Women’s Movement:
University of Ottawa Library Archives and Special Collections, Women Against Imperialism, https://new.express.adobe.com/webpage/10Ab937EyYDQd
*more texts TBA, but the focus for this topic will be the collections at our archives
Student Movement:
Ronald Cummings, Nalini Mohabir, editors, The Fire That Time: Transnational Black Radicalism
and the Sir George Williams Occupation (Black Rose Books, 2021)
Mina Shum (director), Ninth Floor (NFB 2014)
Sophie Yanow, War of Streets and Houses (Uncivilized, 2014)
Brian Massumi, Darin Barney, and Cayley Sorochan, editors, “Theorizing the printemps érable,”
Theory and Event, volume 15, Issue 3, 2012 (supplement) (will be posted on Brightspace)
Idle No More:
Tim Fontaine and Rick Harp (directors), The Power Was With Us: Idle No More (2020)
The Kino-nda-niimi Collective, The Winter We Danced: Voices from the Past, the Future, and the
Idle No More Movement (ARP, 2014)
*A selection of critical materials will be posted on Brightspace for required reading
ENG 7310
Modernism and the More-Than-Human
Professor Anne Raine
This seminar will examine U.S. modernist literature from the perspective of the climate and biodiversity crisis and the struggle for multispecies environmental justice. Peter Adkins has recently argued that British modernist novelists can be read as “theorists of the Anthropocene,” drawing attention to the entanglement of human life with more-than-human agencies and responding critically and creatively to a profoundly altered understanding of humanity’s role in planetary history. Our seminar will explore how this claim might apply to U.S. modernist fiction, poetry, and experimental prose.
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, environmental humanities scholars, activists, artists, and writers have sought to develop new forms of writing, scholarship, and pedagogy that explore the uncertainties and anxieties of living in the so-called Anthropocene: how to turn the “slow violence” of catastrophes like climate change, toxic contamination, and species extinction into cultural forms dramatic enough to motivate people to action; how to develop cultural forms that help us think beyond the face-to-face scale of our everyday interactions with the world and apprehend the much larger scales of human, evolutionary, and geological history; and how to rethink twentieth-century assumptions about human and nonhuman nature, modernity, agency, selfhood, freedom, and progress. Our seminar will review some of this work, and will then revisit some influential works of U.S. literary modernism to see how they anticipate, or differ from, twenty-first-century responses to the climate emergency. Can we find in modernist texts a critical sensibility that has something in common with that of contemporary environmental thinkers, activists, artists, and writers? Or do we see a decisive break between the humanistic politics and aesthetic strategies of the modernist texts and the attempts of twentiy-first-century writers, artists, and activists to articulate more sustainable and ethical relations between humans, nonhumans, and the earth?
*Course texts will include a selection of work by authors such as Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, and William Attaway.
ENG 6380: Oscar Wilde In and Out of Context
Professor James Brooke-Smith
Oscar Wilde was a product of his time. His works were provocations against the bourgeois morality of the day. His celebrity was forged in the nineteenth-century media ecology of lecture tours, West End theatre productions, and the popular press. His downfall came at the hands of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which expanded anti-sodomy laws, and moral panic among the British ruling class. But Oscar Wilde was also a philosophical idealist, a believer in the transcendent value of Truth and Beauty, who saw in the work of art a pure space of free imaginative play that reached beyond its historical and social context. In De Profundis, written from his cell in Reading Gaol, he espoused the universal human values embodied in the life of Christ. As an opponent of all critical programs that sought to tether art to utilitarian or moralistic concerns, Oscar Wilde refused to be a product of his time.
In this class we will study Wilde’s work in relation to its philosophical influences and its afterlives in recent literary works. Some of the topics we will consider include: philosophical aesthetics; decadence and the fin-de-siecle; queer desire and identity; humanism and secular ethics; modern celebrity culture; female dandyism; connoisseurship and collecting; orality and the art of conversation. We will also read biographical and critical studies of Wilde and his legacy.
ENG 6320
Eating Books: Taste, Food, and the Pre-Modern Aesthetic
Professor Geoff Rector
In his 2015 monograph Gusto– translated into English in 2017 as Taste– Giorgio Agamben cites Isidore of Seville’s 7th-century Etymologies to situate the very old association of wisdom, study, and aesthetic pleasure with food. Drawing upon a by then long-established etymology, Isidore writes that the word “‘wise’ [sapiens] comes from ‘flavour’ [sapor],” for just as taste [gustus] is suited to distinguishing the flavour of food, so the wise man is suited to the determining things and causes…. His opposite is the fool [insipiens], because he lacks taste [sapor], nor does he have any discernment or sense” (Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum librum XX, X.240). Although “taste” is conventionally associated with the post-medieval aesthetics of Kant and Hume, the medieval and early modern periods – looking back to classical accounts – had a distinctive and well-articulated aesthetic of taste that shaped theories of the sensory, affective, social, and intellectual experiences of beauty and literature. Sweetness, for example, was widely invoked to describe, not only aesthetic pleasure, but also the delights experienced through contact with the divine, whether through reading, contemplation, or vision. So too was reading conceived in terms of eating and consumption, giving rise both to common book forms (the Digest, the Florilegium) and to some of the most famous pre-modern accounts of the methods, practices, and effects of reading. The metaphors of food, consumption, and taste shaping pre-modern aesthetic theory in turn inform literary representations of food and eating, which represent a crucial location for the study of the ways that forces shaping the pre- modern social order – the distribution of cultural capital and power– intersect with the raw biological facts of hunger, want, and the needs of the human body.
This course will start with a close reading of Agamben’s Taste and a deep dive into its many loose ends and unexplored doorways: originally written as an encyclopedia entry and then expanded into a 90-page meditation, it retains much of the allusiveness of its original form. To Agamben’s Taste we will append significant excerpts from Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, where Bourdieu binds ideas of taste to theories of cultural capital and social organization, and Agamben’s later Homo Sacer, where he contemplates the intersection of the “bare life” of the human body with culture, affect, and mannerism. These texts will be supplemented with a broad reading of critical and historical works on taste, consumption, food, and eating in pre-modern European culture and literature before we turn our attention to representations of food – of gluttony and want, feasting and food production, disgust and pleasure, eucharistic consumption and cannibalism – in high medieval and early modern literature.
*Texts:
– Giorgio Agamben, Taste
– Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, excerpts
– Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, excerpts
– Petronius, Satyricon
– Beowulf
– Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval (Conte du Graal)
– Amis e Amilun
– William Langland, Piers Plowman, Btext, Passus V-VI, Gluttony and the Seven Deadly Sins
– Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, excerpts.
– John Taylor, varia, including The Great Eater– or Part of the Admirable Teeth and Stomacks Exploits of Nicholas Woods, His Excessive Manner of Eating without Manners, in Strange and True Manner Described.
ENG 6310
Medieval Manuscript Studies
Professor Andrew Taylor
How do you read an old manuscript? How do you find your way through an archive? This course will provide some preliminary answers, introducing you to the experience of working with a range of medieval and early modern books and documents. We will consider how works were composed, copied, and annotated, how they have been and can be transcribed and edited, the challenges they present, at a material level, to modern scholars, and their shifting institutional context, from the medieval monastery or college library to the renaissance library to the modern library to the internet.
The focus this year, outside individual projects, will be on Harley 2253, a trilingual (French, English, and Latin) miscellany now in the British Library, and on William Shakespeare’s King Lear, in its various forms. A series of practical exercises will introduce the rudiments of paleography (reading old handwriting), codicology (understanding a book’s physical makeup), and physical bibliography (understanding how books are printed). The major paper will then draw on these abilities to explore a medieval or early modern source in detail. We will visit Archives and Special Collections (ARCS) in Morisset Library and I will provide some introduction to the collection, and especially to the manuscript we have recently acquired (our third), the Passion selon Gamaliel, a French translation of the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus.
The major paper or project will be an exploration of a specific original source. This is usually a specific manuscript (e.g., British Library MS Harley 978, as opposed to the works in that manuscript, which include the lais and fables of Marie de France). The project could also be on a very early printed edition or on some of the contents of an archival collection. Your job will be to a) describe the source and b) explain what we can learn from consulting the source. What do we learn by consulting Harley 978 which we don’t learn by consulting modern printed editions of the works in Harley 978? Your final paper should be a cross between an introduction to a modern critical edition (“Here is a detailed description of the source and an explanation of why it is important.”) and a grant proposal (“Here are all the exciting things I might be able to find out about the source if I could just get into the British Library.”) Ideally your source will be one that has been studied a little but has not been studied to death, is in a language you can read, and is available on-line. If there is a good modern critical edition, the work may be too well-known; if there is no edition at all and no good catalogue description, the work may not be well enough known. It may take several individual consultations to find a suitable project.
*Course Texts
William Shakespeare, The History of King Lear, Oxford World's Classics, ed. Stanley Wells, 2000. Please order a copy. We will turn to it in November. You will need this edition.
Other material will be posted on Brightspace.