ENG 6352
Marriage and Its Discontents in Early Modern Drama Thursdays 10:00 – 1:00
Professor
Jennifer Panek
Introduction In a culture where marriage conferred social status, betrothals were legally binding, divorce with remarriage was all but impossible, and marital infidelity was a matter of public scorn as well as private heartache, it is unsurprising that Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre-goers had a certain fascination with stories of marriages gone awry. This course will examine plays by a range of playwrights, including Shakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, Chapman, and Heywood, which deal with marital relations from courtship through to widowhood and remarriage. We will begin with plays illuminating issues central to the formation of marriage, such as the importance of female virginity. Next, a section on marital crises of obedience, with five plays raising questions about the limits of a husband’s power and the extent of a wife’s autonomy and moral authority. The third section focuses on those most stage-worthy of marital woes— adultery and cuckoldry—examining the cultural underpinnings of infidelity and the theatrical pleasures of staging jealousy, surveillance, and retribution. The fourth and final section looks at the stage figure of the remarrying widow, and the shifts in the balance of financial, sexual, and domestic power assumed to occur when a woman entered her second marriage. The texts will be supplemented with a reader of excerpts from contemporary nondramatic texts, such as marriage manuals and ballads, to provide additional context for the playwrights’ treatment of these topics. Grading Seminar presentations and participation, 50%; term paper, 50%. Texts Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed With Kindness (New Mermaid, ed. Brian Scobie) John Marston, The Dutch Courtesan (New Mermaids, ed. David Crane) William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (Signet Classics, ed. Robert B. Heilman) English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology (eds. David Bevington et al) from this anthology, the following plays: Middleton and Rowley, The Changeling Jonson, Epicene Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam Fletcher, The Woman’s Prize Anonymous, Arden of Faversham Middleton, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside The above texts will be available from Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode St. The course reader (available from Laurier Office Mart, 226 Laurier Ave. E.) will include the following plays, not easily available in modern editions: Anonymous, A Yorkshire Tragedy Chapman, The Widow’s Tears Middleton, The Widow
ENG 6357
Restoration? Literature and its discontents in the reign of Charles II Mondays 5:30 – 8:30
Professor
Nicholas von Maltzahn
Introduction The Restoration, for its proponents, was to have been exactly that: a political restitution strengthened by acts of religious and cultural recovery. In the event, what consensus had existed before the English Revolution was not easily retrieved in its aftermath, and the legacy of the Revolution itself was profound. As public servants, John Milton, Andrew Marvell and John Dryden had walked together in Cromwell’s funeral procession in 1658. In the next decades, however, their literary careers followed very different paths. Amid Restoration constraints on the public sphere and the growth of court culture, they and their contemporaries contested issues in poetics, politics and religion with a remarkable combination of energy and self-awareness. We shall explore these contests with special reference to the innovations in heroic poetry and drama of the 1660s and –70s. As important for our investigation will be the reactions—whether critical, satirical, factional, prophetic or republican—to the claims of that new aesthetic. Grading Seminar performance 50%; essay 50% Texts Dryden, John. Selected Poems, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (Longman) Marvell, Andrew. The Poems, ed. Nigel Smith (Longman) Marvell, Andrew. Prose Works, vol. 1, ed. Annabel Patterson and Martin Dzelzainis (Yale University Press) Milton, John. Samson Agonistes, Paradise Regained (any scholarly edition) Restoration Drama: An Anthology, ed. David Womersley (Blackwell) Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of. The Complete Poems, ed. David Vieth (Yale University Press) Sidney, Algernon. Court Maxims, ed. H.W. Blom et al. (Cambridge University Press)
ENG 6371
Thinking about Books: Bookish Discourse From Romantic to Postmodern Thursdays 5:30 -8:30
Professor
Ina Ferris
Introduction By the turn of the nineteenth century books and other printed matter were rapidly becoming part of everyday life. As book historians have noted, the period witnessed a boom in reading across a wide social spectrum, prompting earnest debates over who read or should read what. At the same time, books functioned as more than simply reading matter, and this course will focus on the emergence of a familiar discourse about books as subjective and affective objects (as well as vehicles for reading or learning) in the Romantic period. This discourse, shaped in the familiar essay by periodical writers like Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb, generated the figure of the modern “book-man” and founded an informal bibliophilic genre that was to persist until well into the twentieth century, practiced not just by avid book-collectors but by philosophers such as Walter Benjamin and Jean-Paul Sartre. Looking at some representative scenes of the book in writings from the early nineteenth and the twentieth centuries (mostly essays but some novels as well), we will pursue the implications of bookish discourse. How did attachment to the physical book impinge on and help shape subjectivities? is a bookish cast of mind inherently canonical or not? what can it tell us about the culture of books? and what might it have to do with the archival turn of modern historians or postmodern novelists? Our literary readings will be interwoven with a selection of critical/theoretical readings from the new book history, a vibrant field of study currently attracting a great deal of attention across the humanities. We will read essays by the founding figures of this new field (e.g. Chartier, Darnton), along with essay focused more specifically on the British history of books in the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment (e.g. Heather Jackson, Adrian Johns). Grading Seminar work (60%); term essay (40%) Texts (available from Benjamin Books) Leslie Howsam. An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture (University of Toronto) Ross King. Ex Libris (Penguin) A.S. Byatt. Possession (Vintage) Italo Calvino. If on a winter’s night a traveller (Harcourt) Course Reader (available from Repography) Selections from Roger Chartier, Adrian Johns, Heather Jackson, Robert Darnton et al Leigh Hunt. “My Books”; William Hazlitt. “On Reading Old Books,” “On Reading New Books”; Charles Lamb. “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading” Walter Benjamin. “Unpacking My Library” Jean Paul Sartre. Selection from Words Thomas Carlyle. “Anti-Dryasdust, “The Old Monk,” Prefaces to Cromwell Carolyn Steedman. Selection from Dust Rudyard Kipling. “The Janeites” Michel Foucault. “What Is An Author?”
ENG 7310
Stories of Experience: Work, Writing, and Selfhood Tuesdays 10:00 – 1:00
Professor Anne Raine Introduction This course will explore the relationship between work, writing, and selfhood in nineteenth-century American literature, focusing on the increasingly fraught dichotomy between mental and manual labor in an industrializing society. We will gain a working familiarity with this important theme through an examination of literary texts in a variety of genres. We will contextualize our inquiry theoretically through a consideration of writings by John Locke, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, and Richard White, and historically with some readings in U.S. labour history. Questions we’ll consider include: How do nineteenth-century American writers conceptualize the relationship between writing and other forms of work (agrarian, industrial, domestic, or slave labour)? What relationships to oneself, and to the material and social worlds, do these various forms of mental and physical work enable or restrict? How and why do nineteenth-century writers resurrect, reinvent, or reject the agrarian ideals of eighteenth-century writers like Jefferson and Crèvecoeur? How do experiences of work give rise to selfhood, and/or how do experiences of selfhood constitute a form of resistance to work? How can these nineteenth-century texts inform our thinking about our own work, scholarly and otherwise, in a post-industrial world? Grading Seminar work 50%; term paper 50%. Texts Karl Marx, The Portable Karl Marx (Viking) Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (U of Chicago P) J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (Penguin) Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Prose and Poetry (Norton Critical Ed.) Herman Melville, Great Short Works (Perennial) Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron-Mills (Bedford Cultural Ed.) Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Norton Critical Ed.) Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (Bedford Cultural Ed.) Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Norton Critical Ed.) Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life (Norton Critical Ed.) Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience (Penguin) Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (Norton Critical Ed.) Photocopied course packet
ENG 7320 ARCHIVES AND CANADIAN LITERARY STUDIES Mondays 1:00 – 4:00 Professor Jennifer Blair Introduction How are archives significant to Canadian literature and literary criticism? How have conceptions of the archive been refigured in recent critical thought, and how might this refiguration contribute to the study of Canadian literary and cultural texts? This course will examine the natures of archives in Canada, paying critical attention to the heterogeneity of contemporary approaches to archival study, and to the various ways in which archives influence Canadian literary scholarship. We will also explore the literary incorporation of archives in books by Afua Cooper, Michael Ondaatje, Phil Hall, and Wade Compton. Through these course readings, and also through presentations by professional archivists at Library and Archives Canada and the Archives and Special Collections at the University of Ottawa, students will be introduced to the practical matters of archival study (including identifying relevant archives, the use of finding aids, and archive etiquette), and they will also be introduced to the methodological concerns and debates informing the practices of working in archives today. One or two sessions will be held at Library and Archives Canada in Gatineau. Grading Seminar + accompanying short paper: Participation: Project proposal:
30% 30% 40%
Texts Literature Afua Cooper, The Hanging of Angelique (HarperCollins, 2006) Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion (Vintage/Random, pub. year: 1987) Phil Hall, Hearthedral (Brick, 1996) Wade Compton, 49th Parallel Psalm (Arsenal Pulp,1999/2005) Archival Theory & Methodology Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (University of Chicago Press, 1996) Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (Routledge, 2002) (selections) Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive and the Fantasy of Empire (Verso,1993). Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Rutgers UP, 2002) Coursepack containing readings by: Giorgio Agamben, Helen M. Buss, Kathryn Carter, Ann Cvetkovich, Gilles Deleuze, Carole Gerson, Catherine Hobbs, Patricia Levin, Jeanne Perrault, JoAnn McCaig, Michal O’Driscoll, Edward Bishop, and Pauline Wakeham.
ENG 7323
Studies in Canadian Literature: The Work of Poetry and the Poetry of Work Wednesdays 10:00 – 1:00
Professor
Robert Stacey
Introduction This course will explore the various ways that poetry has responded to and reflected the changing nature of work in Canada over the last century or so. In 1952, Northop Frye could write “Work [is] the efficient cause of civilization, and poetry in its social aspect has the function of expressing, as a verbal hypothesis, a vision of the goal of work and the forms of desire.” Indeed, up to about the first half of the 20th century many Canadian poets could follow 19th century precedents in taking seriously this mandate, understanding their work in terms of an imaginative exploration of civic possibility, whereby poetry was not simply a sign of culture, but its very means of production. But in the second half of the 20th century an idea of the poem as both a work and a particular kind of cultural ‘workingthrough’ is increasingly displaced by idea of poetry as play. Throughout the 60’s and 70’s the poem increasingly announces itself as a specifically non-utilitarian and even superfluous entity as poets begin to exhibit a hostility to an idea of poetry of/as work, a characteristic which might be read as the dominant sign of postmodern poetry in this country. How can we account for this change? If, following Fredric Jameson, we understand postmodernism as “a periodizing concept whose function is to correlate the emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new type of social life and new economic order” we can begin to a map a set of literary transformations onto the shift from an industrial, resource-based economy in Canada to a post-industrial, information and service-based one. Even so, vestiges and mutations of the earlier idea of the poem as a work and a ‘working through’ continue to circulate even within postmodernism, as evidenced by Steve McCaffery’s call to “restore reading and writing to a re-politicized condition as work.” Bridging the fields of theoretical poetics, cultural theory, and literary history, this course tracks changes in poetic practice in the writing of work from the late 19th century to the end of the 20th. Though the social and aesthetic changes to explored in this class are not unique to Canada, the subject is perhaps specially relevant to Canadian literature whose various productions have long been marked by a hostility in mainstream culture to the indulgent, superfluous, and impractical, and where poets, in their turn, have recurrently responded to this pressure to be relevant and useful by making work the explicit subject of their writing. Grading Seminar Presentation (30%), Class Participation (20%), Final Paper (50%) Texts Isabella Valancy Crawford, Malcolm’s Katie (1884 ed.) [Online at http://www.uwo.ca/english/canadianpoetry/longpoems/Malcolm's%20Katie/index.htm] Archibald Lampman: “The Land of Pallas” and “City of the End of Things” (1899) [course Kit] Dorothy Livesay, “Day and Night” (1932) and “West Coast 1943” (1947) [course kit] E.J. Pratt: “Towards the Last Spike” (1952) [course kit] Al Purdy, Searching for Owen Roblin (M&S, 1974) Tom Wayman, Free Time: Industrial Poems (1977) Bill Bissett, What Fukan Theory (1971) [course kit] Steve McCaffery, Carnival: The Second Panel (1978) [Online at http://archives.chbooks.com/online_books/carnival/?q=archives/online_books/carnival] bpNichol, Translating Translating Apollinaire (1979) Lola Lemire Tostevin, Gyno Text (1983) [course kit] Erin Moure, Domestic Fuel (Anansi 1985) George Elliot Clarke, Whylah Falls (Polestar, 1990) Christian Bok, Eunoia (Coach House 2001) Jeff Derksen, Transnational Muscle Cars (Talon 2003) Plus course kit of critical and theoretical readings, TBA. (Students should consult the instructor in August for a finalized reading list)
ENG 7385
After Marx: Ideology, Identity, Modernity, Globalisation Wednesdays 5:30 -8:30
Professor
Craig Gordon
Introduction This course will explore a range of contemporary critical theory that, in dif ferent ways, has been produced in the wake of Karl Marx. Though we will be reading a good deal of Marx’s work, the course will be less a course on Marx (or Marxism) than one which seeks to explore a variety of contemporary theoretical positions (e.g., feminism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, postcolonialism) as they respond to the issues raised by the tradition of Marxian thought. In that context, we will explore both theoretical positions that seek to follow after Marx (declaring their fidelity—often in competing ways—to the value of Marx’s project), and positions which situate themselves after Marx insofar as they suggest that his concerns or analytic approaches are, to varying degrees, a thing of the past. We will begin by establishing a solid grounding in Marx’s major theoretical statements, before seeking to explore the ways in which various theorists writing in his wake have read his work: extending, responding to, or critiquing his writing. In so doing, we will be interested not merely in distilling a Marxian theoretical vocabulary, but in learning what it means carefully to read theoretical discourse—attending both to the rhetorical strategies through which Marx develops his conceptual framework, and to the interpretive procedures through which others have sought to read his work. In addressing this range of theoretical discourse, we will be especially interested in one of Marx’s most important legacies to literary studies: a theoretical framework that insists on apprehending various forms of cultural production (including literature) as historically embedded in the material conditions of specific socio-economic situations. We will initially focus, therefore, on the ways in which our theorists (including Marx) approach the problem of ideology, and the ways in which ideological formations make their effects felt in terms of identity-formation or subjectivisation. In the later stages of the course, we will turn our attention to Marxian approaches to the problem of modernity, and consider the resources afforded by Marx’s legacy to recent attempts to theorise the processes of globalisation. N.B.: Students should, minimally, have completed the Communist Manifesto for the first seminar meeting, but it would be useful to have read other of Marx’s texts (the selections from The German Ideology or Capital) before the start of classes. Grading Seminar Work: 60%; Term Paper: 40% Texts Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Karl Marx: Jacques Derrida Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: Jacques Ranciere:
The Communist Manifesto (Broadview) The German Ideology (International) selections from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (International) Capital (Oxford UP) Spectres of Marx (Routledge) Empire (Harvard UP) Hatred of Democracy (Verso)
There will also be a course pack including the following selections: • Louis Althusser: “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” and selections from Reading Capital • Roland Barthes: “Myth Today” • Walter Benjamin: “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” • Luce Irigaray: “Women on the Market,” and “Commodities Among Themselves” • Michel Foucault: “The Birth of Biopolitics,” “On the Government of the Living,” and selections from The History of Sexuality (vol. 1)
• • • • • •
Fredric Jameson: selections from Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Jacques Lacan: “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: selections from New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time Kaja Silverman: selections from Male Subjectivity at the Margins Gayatri Spivak: “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value” Slavoj Zizek: “How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?” (from The Sublime Object of Ideology)