Learn more about PH.D. programs and our three MA program streams, including our innovative MA with Co-Op option, here.
Overview of Graduate Courses 2023-2024
ENG 6320 Geoff Rector, “Eating Books: Taste, Food, and the Pre-Modern Aesthetic”
ENG 6341 Irene Makyryk, “Shakespeare and War”
ENG 6360 Sara Landreth, “18th-Century Bodies in Motion”
ENG 6370 Lauren Gillingham, “The Melodramatic Moment, from Holcroft to Haynes”
ENG 7300 James Brooke-Smith, “Oscar Wilde in and out of Context”
ENG 7320 Robert Stacey, “The Poetry ‘Project’ in Modern and Contemporary Canadian Literature”
ENG 7376 Victoria Burke, “Feminist Bibliography and Recent Conversations in Early Modern Book History”
ENG 7382 Mary Arseneau, “Traditional and Digital Approaches to The Pre-Raphaelite Movement”
ENG 7321 Cynthia Sugars, “Contemporary Indigenous Drama in Canada”
Course Descriptions
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.
Reading:
– 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 6341:Shakespeare and War
Professor: Irene Makyryk
From the earliest comedies through the histories and tragedies to the late romances, Shakespeare’s works are peppered with references to, debates about, and representations of war. In part a reflection of England’s almost continuous military engagements in this period (in Ireland, France, the Low Countries, on the high seas, and in the “New World”), the omnipresence of war in the theatre also mirrored the early modern belief of the seriality and “normalcy” of war. It was considered a “natural” state of human affairs merely punctuated by periods of peace.
Early modern scholar Andrew Hiscock claims that the period 1480 to 1700 -- during which England was engaged in 29 wars -- was the most bellicose age in history, matched only by the twentieth century. At the same time, however, a flood of war pamphlets decried what was perceived as a decay in military culture and an alarming retreat from masculine values principally signaled by an increased interest in “effeminate” activities such as poetry, music, dance, and rituals of courtship.
This course will study the deep engagement and the imaginative energy that war released in Shakespeare through a focus on the construction (design) of the plays. Among the topics of close study will be the relationship between war and gender, genre, nation and national identity, and history. In addition to examining the work of contemporary pamphleteers, we will look at some classical war theorists (e.g, Machiavelli, von Clausewitz, and Sun Tzu) and will also explore theories of the sociology and psychology of war, violence, and trauma that might be helpful in illuminating Shakespeare’s plays.
Nota bene: This course assumes some knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays (ideally provided by a previously taken undergraduate Shakespeare course).
Texts:
- Course Reader of theoretical texts available at Reprography, Unicentre;
- Early modern war pamphlets available online through our library website;
- Any good scholarly edition of Shakespeare’s works (that is, with an introduction and notes) of Henry VI (Parts I, II, III); Richard III; Henry IV (Part I); Henry V; Troilus and Cressida; Coriolanus.
A list of recommended secondary sources will be made available On Reserve at the Morisset Library.
ENG 6360 18th-Century Bodies in Motion
Professor: Sara Landreth
When we read words on a page, how do we envision moving images in our mind’s eye? In what ways do writers and readers conjure mental images and then set them in motion? This course will explore the aesthetics of motion from Restoration typographical techniques to 21st-century virtual reality and 3D printing. During the long eighteenth century, debates about how we represent motion ranged from the microscopic to the global, from the flow of humours and animal spirits within the human body to the bloody cartography of the Atlantic slave trade. Writers fiercely debated which of the “sister arts” could most realistically or most beautifully depict movement: sculpture? painting? poetry? music? dance? theatre? We will consider theories about rhetoric, comportment, and conduct, as well as ways in which the motions of marginalized bodies—the female, the queer, the poor, the differently-abled, and the non-European—were scrutinized, controlled, and inscribed. Our course is divided into two units: Unit I (weeks 1-4) focuses on the aesthetics of motion in the long eighteenth century, and pursues key inquiries about how we perceive movement and how motion makes us feel. Unit II (weeks 5-13) examines sevenstates of motion in eighteenth-century literature: serpentining, transporting, wounding, digressing, travelling, sleepwalking, and marrying.
Texts:
Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book, Princeton UP, ISBN 9780691070766
William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, Yale UP, ISBN 9780300073355
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Oxford, ISBN 9780109532896
Tobias Smollett, Humphry Clinker, Oxford, ISBN 9780199538980
Charles B. Brown, Edgar Huntly…Sleepwalker, Broadview, ISBN 1554813387
Anonymous, The Woman of Colour, Broadview, ISBN 1551111764
ENG 6370 The Melodramatic Moment, from Holcroft to Haynes
Professor: Lauren Gillingham
From its emergence in the early nineteenth century, melodrama has frequently been dismissed as something of a cultural embarrassment. Theatrical melodrama subordinates dialogue to gesture and sound, and eschews investigation of motive and interiority in preference for exterior signs of character and feeling; melodramatic fiction represents family and social relations with an affective intensity that borders on the histrionic. Despite its apparent oversimplicity, however, melodrama has been the object of growing critical interest in recent years, with a range of scholars arguing that it plays a formative role in modernity by transforming political and perceptual consciousness and shaping the kinds of identification that constitute community. This course will take its lead from that research, following melodrama’s developments in an Anglo-American context from its earliest incarnations in Romantic theatre and fiction, through mid-nineteenth-century drama and the novel, women’s weepies of mid-twentieth-century film, and the reconception of melodrama in twenty-first century film and theatre. We will investigate melodrama’s distinctive formulations of spectacle, performance, affect, and non-linguistic communication in order to posit a theory of its engagement with modernity and its persistent role in the emergence of new media. We will be particularly concerned with its constitutive role in conceptions of race, gender, sexuality, and selfhood across this cultural history.
Texts:
• Available for purchase at Benjamin Books (122 Osgoode St, 613.232.7495):
Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon (Broadview Press)
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon (Dramatist’s Play Service)
Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (Broadview Press)
Ellen Wood, East Lynne (Broadview Press)
• Available for free on Brightspace, library reserve, or online:
Todd Haynes, Far From Heaven (DVD on 48 hr reserve at Morisset; also rentable on iMovie and Google Play)
Thomas Holcroft, A Tale of Mystery (Brightspace)
William Murray, Obi; or Three-Fingered Jack, A Melodrama (online)
Douglas Sirk, All that Heaven Allows (online)
—, Imitation of Life (online)
E. Wood and T.A. Palmer, East Lynne, A Domestic Drama (Brightspace)
Plus: additional secondary material posted on Brightspace
ENG 7300 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 goal, 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.
Texts:
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Soul of Man Under Socialism
The Decay of Lying
The Critic as Artist
The Philosophy of Dress
Pen, Pencil, and Poison
Salomé
The Importance of Being Earnest
Lady Windermere’s Fan
An Ideal Husband
De Profundis
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
Context
Plato, Symposium
St. Augustine, Confessions
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement
Walter Pater, The Renaissance
Gustave Flaubert, Herodias
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
J.K. Huysmans, Against Nature
Michael Field, selected poems
Afterlives
Marianne Faithful, Faithful: an Autobiography
Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber
Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love
Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty
ENG 7320 The Poetry ‘Project’ in Modern and Contemporary Canadian Literature
Professor: Robert Stacey
Sometime in the 1940s, Canadian poet E.J. Pratt began describing his historical long poems as his ‘projects’. It might have seemed, at the time, a curious term. But his use of it anticipates exactly the direction that Canadian poetry would take in the latter half of the 20th century. On the one hand, ‘project,’ for Pratt, implied a certain kind of process and a certain kind approach: the poem was the result of an intentional and organized effort; its production was a job involving research and sometimes the collaboration of authorities and institutions. Academic in the broadest sense, the poetic project’s exploration of its theme was simultaneously also the execution of a plan. On the other hand, the poetry project projected also a form: in opposition to the occasional lyric, or the poetry collection, the poetry project should realize or otherwise culminate in a conceptually unified and extended—ideally book-length—poetic narrative or sequence. If we take these two basic tendencies of the poetry project already latent in Pratt’s early adoption of the term—that is to say, (1) its explicit voluntariness (i.e. its non-spontaneous, anti-aleatory compositional practice), and (2) the extendedness and substantiality (the reach or heftiness or long duration) of the final work, then we have a way into thinking about the general ‘projectification’ of Canadian poetry since Pratt’s time: a trend that, needless to say, has been encouraged by granting institutions and writing programs, both of which expect coherent methodologies and concrete ‘deliverables’. To think Canadian poetry through the emergence and ascension of the logic of the project might allow us to see continuities otherwise obscured by the historical proliferation of apparently opposed genres, schools, movements, and concerns. (Eg., documentary poetics, appropriative and archival poetries, conceptualism, inter-media/multimedia poetry, écriture féminine, ecopoetics, and social justice poetries all rely on some idea of the project.)
This seminar traces the rise of the poetry project in Canada from the mid-twentieth century to the second decade of the twenty-first century by way of an examination of exemplary ‘works’ which we will read in tandem with extant criticism. As a way of problematizing the progressivist and self-valorizing rhetoric that tends to accompany these works, we will consider them in the context of Jean-Luc Nancy’s call in The Inoperative Community for an art that recognizes that genuine community—whatever it may be—can never be achieved in or through or as a project of any kind.
Texts:
Dorothy Livesay, Call My People Home (1949)
E.J. Pratt, Towards the Last Spike (1952)
Margaret Atwood, The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970)
Dennis Lee, Civil Elegies (1972)
Daphne Marlatt, Steveston (1974)
Stephen Scobie, McAlmon’s Chinese Opera (1980)
Darren Wershler, The Tapeworm Foundry (2000)
Erin Mouré, Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person (2001)
M. Norbese Philip, Zong! (2011)
Cecily Nicholson, From the Poplars (2014)
Christian Bök, The Xenotext Bk 1 (2015)
Jordan Abel, Injun (2016)
*Plus relevant criticism TBA
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. This will include articles from the special issue of the journal Huntington Library Quarterly, “Women in Book History, 1660-1830” (2020), and recent articles such as Cait Coker, “Gendered Spheres: Theorizing Space in the English Printing House” (2018); Kate Ozment, “Rationale for a Feminist Bibliography” (2020); and Sarah Werner, “Working Towards a Feminist Printing History” (2020). 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 articles from the special issue of the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America titled “Black Bibliography: Traditions and Futures” (2022), and materials related to an online symposium on “New Directions in Indigenous Book History” which will be held in March 2023. 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, reading articles such as Laura Mandell’s “Gendering Digital Literary History: What Counts for Digital Humanities” (2016) and Leah Knight’s “Digital Editions, or Handmade Tales: Remembering What Counts in Early Modern Women’s Manuscripts” (2021), and the website The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making. 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 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).
Texts:
Levy, Michelle, and Tom Mole. The Broadview Reader in Book History. Broadview, 2015.
The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, edited by Wendy Wall and Leah Knight http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/.
Selected essays posted on the course webpage and available on the web.
ENG 7382 Traditional and Digital Approaches to The Pre-Raphaelite Movement
Professor: Mary Arseneau
This seminar will chart the evolution of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, beginning with the moral aesthetic embraced by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848-1853), and tracing Pre-Raphaelitism through its diverse later expressions. Our study in this course will be organized around the poetry and prose of three central Pre-Raphaelite figures—Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and William Morris—and a wide variety of critical and digital approaches will be embraced. From its inception Pre-Raphaelitism was an inter-art movement. In keeping with this, our seminar will have an interdisciplinary dimension as we examine Pre-Raphaelite verbal/visual relations in Pre-Raphaelite painting, drawing, and book illustration. In addition, in this course we will include a digital humanities approach, and all students will be expected to learn some digital skills and apply them to scholarly research. Beginning with Jerome J. McGann’s Rossetti Archive, Pre-Raphaelite scholars have embraced digital formats, and our course will continue this trend in giving attention to the potential for digital humanities approaches to Pre-Raphaelite studies. We will also have the opportunity to examine musical settings of Pre-Raphaelite poetry as an emerging field in Pre-Raphaelite studies and consider interdisciplinary methodologies to describe how meaning functions in a text/music hybrid. In particular, students will engage in primary research on musical settings of Christina Rossetti’s poetry and will learn how to identify, catalogue, and archive digital materials using JSTOR Forum, an asset management system.
For their major course assignment, students will have the choice of submitting traditional written scholarship in essay form or digital humanities projects of various kinds. We will situate the Pre-Raphaelite movement in a broad historical context, first by exploring Pre-Raphaelite roots in the aesthetic principles of the early Christian church, early Italian painters, and the medieval poet Dante Alighieri; and second by situating Pre-Raphaelite arts within their contemporary Victorian social and cultural milieu. Themes and issues to be considered include Pre-Raphaelite medievalism, the Pre-Raphaelite interest in the “fallen woman” as subject and object, the place of the woman poet in the brotherhood, Tractarian poetics, the Rossettis and Dante, the Rossettis’ role in the Victorian revival of the sonnet sequence, and all three poets’ place in the evolution of the dramatic monologue. In the final stage of the course we will consider the later trajectories of our three main figures: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s turn toward aestheticism; William Morris’s politicized views on art; and Christina Rossetti’s late-life devotional writing. Although the original impulse of Pre-Raphaelitism was diffused, to the end the movement retained an opposition to convention and to mainstream bourgeois Victorian culture.
Texts:
Rossetti, Christina. Christina Rossetti: The Complete Poems. Text by R.W. Crump, notes and introduction by Betty S. Flowers. London: Penguin, 2001.
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Jerome McGann. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003.
Course Package
ENG 7321 Contemporary Indigenous Drama in Canada (Spring 2024)
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. Our discussion of these plays will take place in combination with one or two theatrical productions/performances in Ottawa, including a production as part of the Indigenous theatre stream of the NAC; one of the course requirements will be to attend a theatre production and write a review of the performance.
Texts:
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)
Alanis King, The Manitoulin Incident (Fifth House)
Yvette Nolan, Annie Mae’s Movement (Playwrights Canada)
Drew Hayden Taylor, Someday (Fifth House)
Ian Ross, fareWel (Scirocco)
Marie Clements, Copper Thunderbird (Talonbooks)
Drew Hayden Taylor, AlterNatives (Talonbooks)
Marie Clements, The Edward Curtis Project (Talonbooks)
Kevin Loring, Where the Blood Mixes (Talonbooks)
Cliff Cardinal, Huff (Playwrights Canada)
Secondary works:
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)