SUMMER TERM, C SESSION (17 JUNE-26 JULY 2024)
Professor: Andrew Taylor
Love, Sex, and Death in the Medieval Borderlands
“A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.” Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera
Medieval romances often evoke journeys into mysterious lands whose languages and sexual norms break or surpass the rules of regular society. These journeys can move entirely outside natural geography, leaping over oceans or plunging into the otherworld, or they can move through specific regions, noting local customs and landmarks; they can be written in some elevated literary standardized language, such as Latin or Chaucer’s English, or in the language of a specific region. These journeys are often perilous and sexually charged and they open up new possibilities of identity.
In this course we will follow a number of journeys as they move through actual geographic regions, such as the Welsh Marches, the edge of the Pennines in Cheshire, the borders between Scotland and England, and the edge of the Pyrenees near the Basque country. Many of the stories we examine will be about King Arthur and his court, material which circulated widely in many languages. We will explore the association of medieval borders with linguistic instability, multilingual contact, gender fluidity, shape-shifting, disguise, and creative mendacity, and try to isolate some significant locations in medieval border writing, such as the wasteland, the contact zone, the listening post, and the portal. We will make significant use of maps and local histories.
Grading: Seminar presentation and class participation 40%; major paper 60%
Texts: The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Arthurian Literature, ed. Kathy Cawsey and Elizabeth Edwards (2023).
FALL 2024
Professor: Tom Allen
African American Literature: The Harlem Renaissance and the Chicago Black Renaissance
The first half of the twentieth century witnessed two great flowerings of African American literature, visual art, theatre, and music. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s marked the birth of a new urban culture in New York City. The cultural milieu placed the work of writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston in dialogue with the creative expressions of performing artists in jazz (Duke Ellington), theatre (Paul Robeson), dance (Josephine Baker), and painting (Aaron Douglas). Two decades later, the Chicago Black Renaissance gave voice to a new generation of writers such as novelist Richard Wright, poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and playwright Lorraine Hansberry. This second Renaissance of the twentieth century was also defined by the mutual influences of different art forms, especially the Chicago blues scene. In this course we will study the literary achievements of these two movements in the context of the culture of their urban environments, especially music. We will also explore important themes such as Black identity in America, the role of Black writers and artists in fostering community, feminism, LGBTQ+ possibilities, and the role of a Black avant-garde in the struggle for social change. In order to reflect on the lasting legacy of this period of artistic flourishing, we will conclude the semester by reading Toni Morrison’s great historical novel of the Harlem Renaissance, Jazz.
Books:
The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, edited by David Levering Lewis
Home to Harlem, by Claude McKay
Cane, by Jean Toomer
Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
Native Son, by Richard Wright
The Street, by Ann Petry
Selected Poems, by Gwendolyn Brooks
A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry
Jazz, by Toni Morrison
Relevant critical readings will be available through the library or on Brightspace.
Professor: Mary Arseneau
Victorian Women Poets: Gender, Poetics, and a Female Literary Tradition
This seminar course will consider gender and poetics within the specific context of the nineteenth-century British woman poet’s tradition. We will consider how women poets self-consciously identified themselves as working in a female tradition, how that identification informs their poetics, and the critical implications of approaching this female canon as sequestered from a mainstream, predominantly male, canon. In the process of our literary study we will acknowledge the recuperative work undertaken by feminist scholars and consider what attitudes contributed to the last century’s erasure of the woman poet’s tradition.
Beginning with Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.) as originators of a discernible female poetic tradition in the nineteenth century, we will trace the tradition of the “poetess” through Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, paying particular attention to these poets’ deliberate self-representations as female artists. Finally, through a study of late Victorian poets Augusta Webster and Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), we will consider how the Victorian woman poet’s tradition extends to the later part of the century. We will trace the poets’ emulations of Sappho, Corinne, and the “improvisatrice”; their experiments with genres including the epic, dramatic monologue, and sonnet; and their engagement with larger social issues. Throughout the course, we will examine these poets’ compromises and confrontations with dominant gender ideology as they attempt to negotiate a transgression into the public arena while asserting and performing their “femininity.”
This poetic tradition is still in the process of being recovered and undergoing historical revision, and over the last decades various forgotten figures have gained a deserved scholarly profile. Our goal in the course is to continue this project of recuperating forgotten voices and discovering other neglected figures. As we shall see, the poetess tradition—which was thought of as conservatively and conventionally feminine—actually has extended into identities and poetry reaching well beyond the “Angel in the House” persona. Even when women poets are writing about emotions and domesticity, they often interrogate cultural issues. In her book The Political Poetess, critic Tricia Lootens asks and answers the important question, “Who made the Poetess white? No one; not ever.” In this course, we will pay particular attention to poets that articulate novel and ground-breaking views, and we will discover voices that are diverse in terms of sexual orientation, politics, subject matter, disability, race, and ethnicity. Through “Recuperating Women Poets” seminar presentations we will consider the poetry and critical reputations of figures whose poetry is less well known, with particular focus on identifying promising areas for future scholarship.
We will acknowledge and discuss the reality that the female poetic tradition is still in formation. Through brief seminar presentations we will also consider the poetry and critical reputations of other figures whose poetry is less well known, with particular focus on identifying promising areas for future scholarship. Other poets to be explored might include Dora Greenwell, Adelaide Procter, George Eliot, Matilde Blind, Bessie Rayner Parkes (Madame Belloc), Constance Naden, A. Mary F. Robinson (Madame James Darmesteter, Madame Mary Duclaux), Alice Meynell, Amy Levy, Mary E. Coleridge, and Graham R. Tomson (Rosamund Marriott Watson).
Method: Seminar and discussion
Grading:
30% major seminar presentation and handout
15% “recuperating women poets” seminar and handout
10% participation
45% final essay
Texts:
Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. Aurora Leigh. Ed. Margaret Reynolds. Norton critical edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995.
---. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Selected Poems. Ed. Marjorie Stone and Beverly Taylor. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2009.
Field, Michael (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper). Michael Field, The Poet: Published and Manuscript Materials. Ed. Marion Thain and Ana Parejo Vadillo. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2009.
Hemans, Felicia. Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Prose, and Letters. Ed. Gary Kelly. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2002.
Landon, Letitia Elizabeth. Letitia Elizabeth Landon: Selected Writings. Ed. Jerome McGann and Daniel Riess. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1997.
Rossetti, Christina. Christina Rossetti: The Complete Poems. Text by R.W. Crump. Notes and introduction by Betty S. Flowers. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001.
Webster, Augusta. Augusta Webster: Portraits and Other Poems. Ed. Christine Sutphin. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2000.
Professor: Emelia Quinn
Reading Animals: The Question of the Animal in Contemporary Literature
Literature is a traditionally human affair: reliant on language use for its production and reception, literary narratives tend to center around human agents and human concerns. However, the nonhuman animals with whom we share our world also have a significant, if overlooked, place in literary history. Animals have frequently figured as allegorical presences, from Aesop’s fables to George Orwell’s Animal Farm. They also figure as significant symbolic presences, as innocence and moral goodness in William Blake’s “The Lamb,” for instance, or as representative of the glory of imperial adventure in the big game hunts of H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. Animal characters are also pervasive as background presences in literary fictions, whether as modes of transport, domestic companions, or in the disembodied form of food and clothing. We should also not forget that animals have a significant spectral materiality in the history of the book itself: from the use of calfskin for vellum pages to the rabbit bones melted down to produce the glue for bookbinding.
And yet, despite a vast bestiary of animal presences in literature, literary criticism has tended to either ignore animals, focusing solely on the human actors in narrative, or failed to think about the animal itself, beyond its symbolic or metaphorical value. This has changed in recent years, with the rise of animal studies in the humanities demonstrating the importance of paying close attention to animals in literary texts and to the ways in which animals can assert their textual agency in unexpected and powerful ways.
The primary focus of this seminar will be on contemporary texts that engage with key ideas and debates in the field of animal studies. Just as philosophical views on animals have transformed dramatically over the course of human history, from Descartes’ sense of animals as machines to Peter Singer’s treatise on animal suffering, the representation of animals in literary texts has shifted over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in ways that reflect contemporary values, such as the advancement of animal rights; anxieties, including the contribution of industrial animal agriculture to the climate crisis and the looming threat of a sixth mass extinction event; and the influence of posthumanist thought, destabilizing that which we define as “the human.”
This seminar will consider a range of contemporary texts, including novels, short stories, and films, that engage with topics such as: pet-keeping and domestication, bestiality and zoophilia, animal language, anthropomorphism and empathy, extinction and conservation, the postcolonial animal, meat eating, animal satire, and animal revolution. In the process, we will encounter some of the major theoretical works in animal studies, from Carol J. Adams’s feminist-vegetarian theory of the “absent referent,” to Jacques Derrida’s concept of the “l’animot,” and from Donna Haraway’s vision of “multispecies entanglement” to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s sense of “becoming-animal.” We will also consider the ways in which animal studies scholars have engaged (not uncontroversially) with questions of race, gender, and disability, considering the intersections of animal studies with postcolonial studies, critical race studies, queer theory, ecocriticism, posthumanism, disability studies, and vegan studies.
Assessment: Oral Presentation (15%), Close Reading Assignment (35%), Final Essay (50%)
Sample texts:
Possible texts may include:
Patricia Highsmith, The Animal Lovers Book of Beastly Murder
Marian Engel, Bear
Octavia Butler, Dawn
J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals
Yann Martel, Life of Pi
Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide
Julia Leigh, The Hunter
Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats
NoViolet Bulawayo, Glory
Possible films:
Simon Amstell, Carnage
Bong Joon-ho, Okja
WINTER 2025
Professor Victoria Burke
War, Politics, and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century English Women’s Writing
In this course we will use the English Civil War and its aftermath (c.1640-1680) as the primary lens through which to examine a range of writing by women. We will consider poetry (including laments for the execution of King Charles I), prose (radical religious tracts written by Quakers, letters—both personal and fictional, and autobiographical writing), and five plays. These plays are Bell in Campo by Margaret Cavendish, The Concealed Fancies by her step-daughters, Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Egerton, and three plays by Aphra Behn: The Rover, The City-Heiress, and The Widow Ranter. We will study some of the historical, political, and religious contexts relevant to these works, and we will put them in dialogue with scholarly criticism. Two of our writers (Anne Halkett and Aphra Behn) were government spies, and so we will use the research of Nadine Akkerman and others to learn about the mechanics of espionage for women. The final play, The Widow Ranter, treats a rebellion in colonial Virginia and has just been published in an edition that offers contextual materials that illuminate discourses of empire and colonization. By studying writing from a range of genres (poetry, prose, and drama), political positions (from royalist to revolutionary), and religious affiliations (from radical to conformist), we will explore women writers’ insights into important events of this tumultuous century.
COURSE OBJECTIVES:
This fourth-year course is designed to introduce students to canonical and lesser-known but extremely accomplished writers from the seventeenth century, and to some of the critical debates in this field. It is also intended to foster an atmosphere of inquiry as we read, summarize, discuss, debate, and think through the implications of the primary and secondary texts we are reading. The course will offer students the opportunity to hone their skills in research, critical thinking, argumentation, and writing. It will also give them a chance to prepare and present a short seminar on a topic and to practice techniques of engaging their classmates in discussion.
METHOD: Lecture, seminar presentations, and discussion.
GRADING: Participation (15%), seminar presentation including written report (25%), term paper (30%), final in-person exam (30%).
TEXTS:
Behn, Aphra. The Rover. Edited by Anne Russell, Broadview Press, 1999.
Behn, Aphra. The Widow Ranter. Edited by Adrienne L. Eastwood, Broadview Press, 2022.
Early Modern Women’s Writing: An Anthology 1560-1700. Edited by Paul Salzman, Oxford UP, 2000.
Course reader plus additional materials that will be posted on the course web page.
Professor Cynthia Sugars
Margaret Atwood: The Writings, The Controversies
Variously described as a “legend,” a “prophet,” a “literary superstar,” a “juggernaut,” a “badass feminist prognosticator,” and the “Queen of CanLit,” Margaret Atwood is hard to ignore. So let’s see what all this fuss is about! This course will delve into the literary oeuvre and changing reputations of Margaret Atwood (the author, the celebrity, the activist, and the industry). We will begin with her early career, two early collections of poems The Circle Game and Power Politics, and read a selection of her poetry, novels, short stories, nonfiction, and social media interventions up to the present. Our readings will be accompanied by weekly chapters from Rosemary Sullivan’s biography of Atwood, and selected secondary works (by Atwood and other critics). Atwood has been a controversial figure from early on – from debates about her take on second-wave feminism in the 1970s, to her statements on Canadian cultural nationalism, to her representations of genetic engineering, to her opposition to censorship and book burning (in the past few years, The Handmaid’s Tale has been banned by a number of states and schoolboards in the US), to her challenges to the #MeToo movement in the early 2000s. Atwood’s work with PEN International on behalf of writers across the world had been widely applauded, yet for many of her fans, her 2018 controversial op-ed article in the Globe and Mail “Am I a Bad Feminist?” marked a betrayal. All this and more awaits us as we wade into the turbid waters of the Atwood universe. We will conclude the course with a discussion of Atwood’s conscious self-fashioning as a celebrity.
Grading: Seminar presentation (written and oral components) 30%: term paper 30%; final in-person exam 30%; class participation 10%.
Texts:
The Circle Game (1964) and Power Politics (1971) -- selections
Surfacing (1972)
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
Cat’s Eye (1988)
Bluebeard’s Egg (1983) -- selections
Wilderness Tips (1991) – selections
Stone Mattress (2014) -- selections
Alias Grace (1996)
Morning in the Burned House (1995)
Oryx and Crake (2003)
Burning Questions (2022) – selections
Professor Sara Landreth
Eighteenth-Century Black Voices
In 2022, the re-release of Gretchen Gerzina’s seminal Black England: A Forgotten Georgian Story marked a turning-point in how we view the history of Black lives in the eighteenth century. This 4th-year seminar will examine literature and culture of the antislavery movement throughout the Atlantic regions between 1760 to 1830. Our syllabus will focus on writings by eighteenth-century Black authors of the English-speaking world, including Briton Hammon, Phyllis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, and anonymous authors. We will read the anonymously published novel The Woman of Colour (1808), which features a biracial Jamaican heiress as its protagonist and primary narrator. In the final weeks of the term, we will turn to historical fiction, and will delve into how 21st-century representations of 18th-century racialized writers both embrace and reject the historical record. We’ll watch Amma Asante’s 2007 film, Belle, which adapts elements of Woman of Colour for the screen.
Method: In-person Seminar & Discussion
Required Texts
Gretchen Gerzina, Black England 139980488X
Vincent Carretta, Ed. Unchained Voices Anthology 0813108845
Anonymous, The Woman of Colour 1551111764
Henry Louis Gates, The Trials of Phyllis Wheatley 0465018505
Francis Spufford, Golden Hill 1501163884
Marking:
Seminar = 30% (15% quality of written script; 15% oral presentation and discussion leadership)
Participation = 30% (in-person spoken contributions, bringing printed texts to class, attendance)
Final Essay = 40% (appears as a take-home exam on the university schedule)
Course Objectives: To engage deeply and critically with a wide range of texts; to foster a generous intellectual environment where discussion and debate can thrive; and to hone our skills in oral presentation, in-person real-time conversation, and written communication.
Professor Kimberly Quiogue Andrews
Creative Writing seminar (prerequisite of a 3000-level Creative Writing course is required)
The Rectangle
“Genre always fails.” --Claudia Rankine
In this course, we will explore the possibilities inherent in one of the more generically-vexing forms of creative writing: the paragraph. Capable of containing entire stories and essays as well as experiments in the lyric, the paragraph-as-genre has both a rich history and an exciting present, and can offer creative writing students a wealth of new ways to explore and play with language. Over the course of our readings in this class, we will develop a kind of negative theory of the line—a theory, in other words, about what happens in the line’s absence, or in the line’s presence as delineated by the shape of the page. Students in this class will try their hand at various short prose forms with a focus on the “lyric” (a term we will complicate and unpack repeatedly), in the process gaining an enhanced understanding of both genre and lyric theories. The “rectangle,” as it were, has cropped up in nearly every major recent literary movement—be it Gertrude Stein’s modernism, Frank O’Hara’s New York-ism, Russell Edson’s neo-Surrealism, Christian Bök’s conceptualism, Harryette Mullen’s late-Oulipeanism, even Robert Hass’s careful formalism—and as such, students will also come away with a rich sense of the form’s applicability across traditions and time periods.
Method: Seminar
Texts:
• Ziegler, Alan. Short: An International Anthology. Persea Books, 2014.
• Cheng, Jennifer S. House/A. Omnidawn, 2016.
• Lundy Martin, Dawn. A Life in a Box is a Pretty Life. Nightboat Books, 2015.
• Lennon, Brian. City: An Essay. University of Georgia Press, 2002.
Assignment Overview & Grading:
• Workshop Participation and Attendance 20%
• Weekly Poems 40%
• Reading Responses 10%
• Recitation 5%
• Journal Presentation 5%
• Revision Portfolio w/ Cover Letters. 20%