http://sfuo.ca/services/appeals/en/index.htmlhttp://sfuo.ca/services/appeals/en/index.html
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
Undergraduate Brochure
With courses assigned to full-time professors 2010-2011
3-Jun-10
UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAMS 2010-2011 Important information for Faculty of Arts undergraduates is published on the following webpage: http://www.arts.uottawa.ca/eng/students/index2.html.
Recommended course of study The Department recommends that all English students follow the progression of courses outlined on the links provided in the following table: • Honours with specialization (Co-op option available) English (http://www.arts.uottawa.ca/eng/sequences/honours-eng.html) •
Major in English (Co-op option available)
(http://www.arts.uottawa.ca/eng/sequences/major-eng.html) •
Minor in English
(http://www.arts.uottawa.ca/eng/sequences/minor-eng.html) •
Honours with specialization in Latin and English Studies (http://www.arts.uottawa.ca/eng/sequences/honours-lat-eng.html)
Please use the following link for a description of the Department’s undergraduate program requirements: http://www.english.uottawa.ca/program1.html.
Academic Regulations The most current Academic Regulations and Policies for Undergraduate Studies at uOttawa can be found at the following link: http://web5.uottawa.ca/admingov/regulations.html 1.
During their stay at uOttawa, students must assume certain responsibilities concerning academic affairs. http://www.uottawa.ca/academic/info/regist/crs/0305/home_4_ENG.htm)
2.
No credit will be granted and no grade recorded for any course for which the student has not been properly registered, in accordance with the registration deadlines published in the sessional dates. Students who wish to make a change to their course selection can do so by using Rabaska. Changes to the program of studies and the selection of courses may be made only up to the closing date published in the schedule of sessional dates (http://www.registrar.uottawa.ca/Default.aspx?tabid=3568#fall).
3.
Students must obtain a Letter of permission (http://www.registrar.uottawa.ca/Portals/43/Registrar/regi3141.pdf) before taking courses at other universities for credit as part of the Honours English degree requirements at the University of Ottawa.
4.
Attendance in courses of instruction and discussion groups is mandatory. The professor will state the attendance policy on the course outline, and may exclude from the final examination any student who has not complied with this policy.
5.
The professor will state the grading policy on the course outline, and may reduce grades for assignments that are submitted late.
6.
Absence from any examination or test due to illness must be justified; otherwise, a penalty will be imposed. If you are sick and must miss an exam, consult a physician right away and contact your professor or the Department before your exam. Students may submit to their professor a medical certificate from their doctor or from Health Services. If the medical problem is foreseeable, the student must advise the professor before the examination date. If the medical problem is not foreseeable, the student must submit the certificate to the professor within five working days after the examination date. Absence for any other reason must also be justified in writing no later than five working days after the examination. General information about exam deferral for health reasons is available on the Health Services website: http://www.uottawa.ca/health/health-services/policies.html. The Department and the Faculty reserve the right to accept or reject the reason offered. Reasons such as travel, summer employment, and misreading the examination schedule are not usually accepted.
7.
For an extension of the time limit to complete course requirements, a student must complete the “Request for a Deferred Mark� form (http://www.socialsciences.uottawa.ca/pdf/forms/scso5260.pdf). The student must attach the medical certificate, and hand the form to the professor of the course. The professor will, in agreement with the Chair, set a date for a special examination or for handing in the assignment.
8.
The use in an essay of material taken from outside sources without proper acknowledgment constitutes plagiarism, or academic fraud (http://www.arts.uottawa.ca/eng/students/fraud.html). An essay containing such unacknowledged indebtedness may automatically be assigned a grade of “0” and further rules and regulations of the Faculty of Arts may apply. Suspected cases of academic fraud will automatically be forwarded to the Dean of Arts for possible disciplinary action. Students should consult the Department’s Style Sheet and Working with Sources, available at the University Bookstore, to avoid committing academic fraud out of ignorance.
9.
The University recognizes the right of all students to see any of their written tests, assignments or examinations within six months after their final grade has been officially posted on Infoweb, and to appeal these marks (http://sfuo.ca/services/appeals/en/index.html). Students who are not satisfied with a mark should first the professor in order to request a review.
10.
Appeals Procedure
A student who wishes to appeal a grade should, within two weeks of the professor’s decision, write to the Chair, setting out the facts and including any relevant documents. The appeal will be considered by the departmental Appeals Committee, which may solicit additional material or information from the professor concerned. The Appeals Committee may recommend a higher mark or a lower mark if, in their view, a grade assigned by the professor is unreasonable in light of the definition of grades as set forth in the Faculty of Arts Calendar, or if evidence provided or solicited suggests the assigned grade significantly deviates from the standards reflected in other grades assigned by the professor. The Chair will make the final decision on the action to be taken and will advise the student in writing of this decision. Students cannot withdraw their appeal once a revised mark has been assigned. The student or professor may appeal the department’s final decision to the Faculty of Arts by addressing such an appeal to the Dean. 11.
The University reserves the right to destroy all documents contained in a student’s file at the end of the two-year period following the student’s departure from the University. Therefore, no corrections can be made to the official transcript once this two-year period has expired. Year of study
For admission and registration in the Faculty of Arts: Number of credits 0 to 23 credits 24 to 53 credits 54 to 80 credits 81 and more
Year of study 1st 2nd 3rd 4th
GRADING SYSTEM
Official grading system The University of Ottawa’s official grading system is alphanumeric, and it must be applied to all courses except those formally exempt by the University Senate. Indeed, in some instances, the expected learning outcomes for a course require a « Satisfactory/Not satisfactory » or a « Pass/Fail » grading scheme. Letter grade
Numerical value
Percentage scale value
A+
10
90-100
A
9
85-89
A-
8
80-84
B+
7
75-79
B
6
70-74
C+
5
65-69
C
4
60-64
D+
3
55-59
D
2
50-54
E
1
40-49
F
0
0-39
ABS
0
Absent
EIN
0
Échec/Incomplete
Other non-numerical grades – do not affect the student’s average P
-
Pass
S
-
Satisfactory
NS
-
Not satisfactory
Passing grades At the undergraduate level, the passing grade is usually set at D. “ABS” is used when a student has not attended the course and has not informed the University thereof in writing, within the time limits specified in the sessional dates section of the Web site. This symbol is equivalent to a failing grade (F). “INC” is used when at least one of the compulsory course requirements has not been fulfilled. This symbol is equivalent to a failing grade (F). For more information on the evaluation of student learning, please refer to uOttawa’s Regulations and Policies for Undergraduate Studies at: http://web5.uottawa.ca/admingov/regulations.html#r53.
UNDERGRADUATE COURSE DESCRIPTIONS for courses taught by Full-time professors, 2010-2011 For a complete list of ENG courses in Fall 2010-Winter 2011 please check the “Courses Offered” on the online course timetable, at www.timetable.uottawa.ca. General course descriptions are available online at: http://www.uottawa.ca/academic/info/regist/calendars/courses/ENG.html. ENG 1122/ENG 2122 Literature and Composition III: English Literature before 1700 (3 credits) Sections A‐G Professors will be published in August on timetable.uottawa.ca Description Development of critical reading skills and coherent discourse, both written and spoken. Study of selected authors before 1700 will furnish subject matter for frequent written exercises. Text The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th ed., Vols. A, B, and C (package 1) Text available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode St. ENG 1123/ENG 2123 Literature and Composition IV: English Literature since 1700 (3 credits) Sections A‐F Professors will be published in August on timetable.uottawa.ca Description Development of critical reading skills and coherent discourse, both written and spoken. Study of selected authors since 1700 will furnish subject matter for frequent written exercises. Text The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th ed., Vols. C‐F (packages 1 and 2) Text available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode St.
ENG 2140 Literature and Film (3 credits) Section C (Winter) Professor David Jarraway Description The recent block‐buster translation of canonical authors to the Big Screen‐‐Jane Austen, Henry James, E. M. Forster, etc.‐‐will prompt this course to investigate the various ways literary texts become co‐ordinate with film texts in their corporate effort to delight and instruct. As a laboratory example, therefore, the focus of study will be the genre of the ʺcrime storyʺ in both literature and film. In particular, the course will train critical attention exclusively upon so‐called ʺnoir narratives,ʺ that is, upon a selection of ʺhard‐boiledʺ crime novels of the 1950s, and their generic translation to Hollywoodʹs silver screen in the form of ʺfilm noirʺ drawn exclusively from the work of Alfred Hitchcock within roughly the same time period. Students are also advised that ʺliteraryʺ as well as ʺscreen theoryʺ will constitute a significant portion of the readings assigned for the course. Method Problem‐posing dialogue and discussion‐in‐group, rather than conventional lecture‐format. Grading Reports, weekly writing protocols, 2 short term‐papers: 50%; Mid‐term and Final Examinations: 50%. Texts Robert Polito, ed., Crime Novels, Vol. 2: American Noir of the 1950s (Library of America) *Toby Miller and Robert Stam, eds., Film and Theory: An Anthology (Basil Blackwell) Xerox Packet (available through Repro Services in Morrisset Library [Ground Floor]). Four of the following film‐texts directed by Alfred Hitchcock: ‐‐Shadow of a Doubt (1943) ‐‐Rope (1948) ‐‐Strangers on a Train (1951) ‐‐Rear Window (1954) ‐‐The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) ‐‐Vertigo (1958) ‐‐North by Northwest (1959) ‐‐Psycho (1960) *Texts marked with an asterisk are works of ʺtextual theory.ʺ All above texts (excluding Xerox Packet) are available from the University of Ottawa Bookstore on campus.
ENG2235 Women in Literature (6 credits) Section A Professor April London Description This course offers an historically focussed analysis of the place of women in literature, as perceived by both male and female authors. Special attention will be paid to changing views of women and the values accorded them in fictional narrative. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Papers 45%; term test 15%; final examination 25%; participation 15% Texts Frances Burney, Evelina Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen, Persuasion Mary Shelley, Frankenstein Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights Wilkie Collins, Woman in White Texts (all Broadview editions) available bundled at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode St. ENG 2400 Introduction to Canadian Literature (6 credits) Sections A and B Professor Janice Fiamengo Description This course introduces students to major texts and critical issues in Canadian literature. Surveying poetry and prose fiction from the early nineteenth century to the present, we will focus on representative works in their social and historical contexts. Method Lecture and discussion
Grading Term papers, 20% and 25%; Mid‐term exam, 20%: Final exam, 30% Texts Andrew Cohen, The Unfinished Canadian: The People We Are (McClelland and Stewart)
Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush (McClelland and Stewart) L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (McClelland and Stewart) Stephen Leacock, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (McClelland and Stewart) Morley Callaghan, Such Is My Beloved (McClelland and Stewart) Sinclair Ross, As For Me and My House (McClelland and Stewart) Mordecai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (McClelland and Stewart) Margaret Laurence, The Tomorrow-Tamer (McClelland and Stewart) Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf (McClelland and Stewart) Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (McClelland and Stewart) Joy Kogawa, Obasan (Penguin) Yann Martel, Life of Pi (Vintage) Texts available at University bookstore. Section C Professor Robert Stacey Description This course is a survey of Canadian literature from the mid‐nineteenth century to the contemporary period. We will read key texts in a variety of genres (fictional, poetic, and dramatic) with an attention to the different ways in which these texts speak to the historical and cultural contexts of their production and reception. The focus of the course is on English‐Canadian literature, though we will look at a few French Canadian works in translation. Method Lecture and discussion, plus web and audiovisual presentations where appropriate. Grading One 2000‐word essay (20%), one 2500‐word essay (30%), take‐home midterm test (20%), visual poetry assignment (5%), final test (20%), attendance and participation (5%). Texts Louis Hémon, Maria Chapdelaine (Dundurn) Martha Ostenso, Wild Geese (NCL) Hugh MacLennan, Barometer Rising (NCL) Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (NCL)
Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (Vintage) Judith Thomson, The Crackwalker (Playwrights Canada Press) Tomson Highway, Dry Lips Outta Move to Kapuskasing (5th House) Jacques Poulin, Volkswagen Blues (Cormorant) Fred Wah, Diamond Grill (NeWest) Christian Bök, Eunoia (Coach House) + Course kit of poetry and criticism Section D Professor Jennifer Blair Description This course offers an introduction to the most interesting and significant works of Canadian literature from the eighteenth century to the present day. The themes that we will address in this course, all key players in critical debates on Canadian literature, include: exploration, colonization and settlement; First Nations literatures; English‐French relations; issues of race, class and gender; literature and the telling of history; modernity and postmodernity in Canadian literature; Canadian literary regionalism; and immigration and multiculturalism. This course will situate these literary materials in the context of art, music, film, social policy, and historical and contemporary events in Canadian culture. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Fall Short Paper 10%; Mid‐term Test (in December exam period) 20%; February Mid‐term Test (in class time) 10%; Final Essay 20%; Final Exam 30%; Participation 10% Texts Cynthia Sugars and Laura Moss, eds., Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts Vols.1 & 2 (Pearson Canada) James De Mille, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (McGill/Queen’s UP) Sinclair Ross, As For Me and My House (McClelland and Stewart) Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (Knopf) Dionne Brand, What We All Long For (McClelland and Stewart) Eirin Moure, Sheep’s Vigil By a Fervent Person (Anansi) Texts will be available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode St. Coursepack (available at Laurier Office Mart, 226 Laurier Ave. East) containing works by Karen Solie, Thomas King, Isabella Valancy Crawford, and Alan Lawson.
Section F Professor Gerald Lynch Description This course surveys Canadian literature from the early nineteenth century to the present. The focus is on representative works and major authors in their historical and cultural contexts. Method Lecture and discussion Grading First‐term essay (4‐5 pp.), 20%; Mid‐course examination, 20%; Second‐term essay (6‐8 pp), 30%; Final examination, 30% Texts Brown and Bennett, An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. Third Edition (Oxford) Leacock, S., Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (Tecumseh) Richler, M., The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (McClelland and Stewart) Atwood, M., Oryx and Crake (McClelland and Stewart) Texts available at University of Ottawa Bookstore. ENG 2450 Introduction to American Literature (6 credits) Sections A and B Professor David Rampton Description In this course, students will study the growth of American literature from colonial beginnings to national and international stature. The focus will be on representative works and major authors. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Term work 60%; final examination 40% Texts Norton Anthology of American Literature, 7th ed. Shorter
N. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter E. Hemingway, In Our Time W. Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury Section D Professor Anne Raine Description In this course, we’ll develop a working knowledge of some key texts and issues in American literature. In particular, we’ll consider how American writers have used literary form to imagine and represent their relationships to the landscape and its inhabitants (indigenous and immigrant), and to the national community. We’ll also discuss and practice skills of close reading, critical and historical analysis, and argumentative writing central to literary studies. Method Primarily discussion and group work rather than formal lectures; active participation in class is expected and required. Grading Three essays, 40%; group presentation, 15%; mid‐term and final exams, 35%; homework and participation, 10%. Texts Belasco and Johnson, The Bedford Anthology of American Literature Two or three novels in the winter term, TBA Photocopied course packet Texts available at Agora Bookstore, 145 Besserer St. at Waller. Section E Professor David Jarraway Description This ʺintroductionʺ to American Literature will divide itself equally between six representative authors clustered about a white male novelist in the nineteenth‐century (Fall Term), and six representative authors clustered about a black female novelist in the twentieth‐century (Winter Term). The first set of authors is designed to open out a close‐reading of Herman Melvilleʹs Omoo (1847), and the second set an equally careful reading of Toni Morrisonʹs A Mercy (2008), in each case, probing the overriding question: What ʺcultural workʺ does the American literature text perform at any given time? Through both semesters, we shall also be attending to the innovative tradition of Pragmatist thought against which American literature is set, so that what it means to be ʺmodernʺ through two centuries will repeatedly present itself as a further question for our consideration. Method Problem‐posing dialogue and discussion‐in‐group, rather than lecture‐format. Students are also advised that ʺliterary theoryʺ constitutes a significant portion of the readings assigned for this course.
Grading Term work 70% (2 shorter papers, 1 longer, mid‐term examination); final examination 30%. Texts Fall Term: Nina Baym, et al., Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Sixth Edition (Norton) N. Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (Norton) *R. Goodman, ed., Pragmatism: A Contemporary Reader (Routledge) Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (Penguin Classics) Herman Melville, Omoo (Penguin Classics) Winter Term: Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (Bantam) Elizabeth Bishop, Complete Poems (Farrar, Straus) Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (Penguin) Jesse Fausset, The Chinaberry Tree (Beacon) *J. Hartley and R. Pearson, eds., American Cultural Studies (Oxford) Toni Morrison, A Mercy (Plume) Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (Vintage) *Texts marked with an asterisk are works of ʺliterary theory.ʺ All above texts are available from the University of Ottawa Bookstore on campus. ENG 3133 Elizabethan Shakespeare (3 credits) Section A (Fall) Professor Victoria Burke Description In this course we will study a selection of histories, comedies, and tragedies written by Shakespeare by 1603: Richard III, Richard II, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet. We’ll consider the plays as both literary and theatrical works, and their link to the culture of the time. Method Lecture, discussion, small group work Grading Take‐home midterm: 20%; Essay: 35%; Attendance and participation: 5%; Final exam: 40%
Text The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (Norton, 2008) will be used in class, but you may use any scholarly edition of all of the plays (e.g. Riverside), or of individual plays (e.g. Arden), that contains an introduction and detailed notes. Text available at Agora Bookstore, 145 Besserer St. ENG 3134 Jacobean Shakespeare (3 credits) Section B (Winter) David Carlson E‐mail: drcarlso@uOttawa.ca ENG 3316 Old English (3 credits) Section A (Winter) David Carlson E‐mail: drcarlso@uOttawa.ca ENG 3318 Romantic Literature (3 credits) Section C (Winter) Professor Ina Ferris Description The Romantic era was one of great cultural energy and innovation. This course traces some of the most important manifestations of this energy by focusing on the various literary “schools” identified in the period. Writers to be studied include William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats, along with an example of the afterlife of Byron in Russian literature. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Term work 60%; final examination 40% Texts Longman Anthology of British Literature, Vol 2A: The Romantics and Their Contemporaries, 4th edition Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Longman)
Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time (Penguin) Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode. Section D (Winter) Professor April London Description An introduction to the poetry and prose of the Romantic period. Method Lecture and Discussion Grading Term Work 60%; final examination 40% Text The Longman Anthology of British Literature Volume 2A The Romantic and their Contemporaries (3rd. edition) ed. Susan Wolfson and Peter Manning Text available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode. ENG 3320 Modern British Literature (3 credits) Sections A (Fall) & C (Winter) Professor Donald Childs Description In these sections of English 3320, we will study selected texts written between the 1890s and the 1930s by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and a number of others. The goal will be to highlight strategies of innovation in technique, topic, and idea that authors used to make literature modern. Method Lecture. Grading Students are required to write a term paper of 2,000 words (worth 50% of the final mark). Students dissatisfied with their grade for this paper will have the option of reducing this paper’s value to 25% of the final mark, providing they submit a second paper of 1200 words, which will be worth the other 25% of the final mark for the essay component of the course. In either case, there will be a final exam worth 50% of the final mark.
Texts
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels. Bantam. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Penguin. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. by M.H. Abrams, et al. 8th ED. VOLUME F. Norton, 2006. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. Oxford. Style Sheet, Working With Sources, Introduction to Research in English Literature. Department of English, University of Ottawa. Texts will be available at Benjamin Books. Section B (Fall) Professor Dominic Manganiello Description This course offers an introduction to selected works by some of the main British writers of the twentieth century. Emphasis will fall on the intellectual and literary forces which shaped the modern period. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Class exam 20%; Essay 40%; Final exam 40% Texts The Norton Anthology of English Literature (The Twentieth Century and After), (8th edition), Vol. F James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin) Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Oxford) T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party (Faber) J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (Harper Collins) Texts available at University of Ottawa bookstore. ENG 3321 Canadian Short Story (3 credits) Section A (Fall) Professor Gerald Lynch Description This course surveys the Canadian short story from the Confederation period to the Contemporary.
Method Lecture and Discussion Grading Essay (2‐3 pp.), 10%; Test, 20%; Essay (6‐8 pp.), 30%; Final examination, 40% Texts Margaret Atwood and Weaver, The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English (Oxford) Stephen Leacock, Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (Tecumseh) Alice Munro, Who Do You Think You Are? (Penguin) Texts available at University of Ottawa Bookstore. ENG 3323 Medieval Literature I (3 credits) Section A (Fall) Professor Andrew Taylor Description This course will explore Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the famous alliterative poem Sir Gawain, and some of the popular drama of the late Middle Ages. One of our first tasks will be to become reasonably comfortable with the language of these works, Middle English of rather different kinds. To this end there will be a series of short exercise and quizzes. We will then devote our time to a close reading of these works with some attention to the question of how they were performed or received in their own day and the significance of the manuscripts in which they are preserved. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Essay 1 , 1000 words maximum, 20% ; Essay 2, 2000 words maximum, 30%; Surprise quizzes, best 5 out of 6, 10%; Final Exam, 30% Texts Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Ed. R. Boenig and A. Taylor. (Broadview, 2008). York Mystery Plays. Ed. Richard Beadle and Pamela King (Oxford World Classics, 1984). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Text TBA. Course pack. Available at the Unicentre. Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode.
Section B (Winter) Professor David Carlson E‐mail: drcarlso@uOttawa.ca Section C (Winter) Professor Geoff Rector Description This course offers a social and rhetorical introduction to Middle English literature, generally focusing on the Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer, the reputed ‘Father of English Poetry.’ Along with the tales of this, Chaucer’s great unfinished masterpiece, we will read other major literary works of the Middle English period (1200‐1500), including two poems of the alliterative tradition (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and St. Erkenwald), the short 13th century romance ‘Sir Orfeo,’ as well as some Middle English lyrics. These other works will allow us perspective, not only on the nature of Chaucer’s achievements– his paternity of English literature– but also on the question of the tradition or traditions of Middle English literature. That is, given its wide variety of form, style, dialect– and even language– and its patent differences, even alterity, from modern English literary traditions, we will ask how Middle English fits in to the tradition and how (or whether) we can consider Chaucer its progenitor. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Participation: 15% (recitation 5%, response 5%, class participation/attendance 5%); Close Reading & Analysis: 15%; Essay: 35%; Comprehensive Final Exam 35% Texts Thorlac Turville‐Petre and J.A. Burrow, eds., A Book of Middle English 3rd ed. (Blackwell, 2005). Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: A Selection Ed. Robert Boenig and Andrew Taylor (Broadview Press, 2009) Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode. ENG 3339 Sixteenth‐Century Literature (3 credits) Section C (Winter) Professor Nicholas von Maltzahn Description A study of English literature from Wyatt to Shakespeare, with special reference to the poetry of the period. This section of the course emphasizes the works of Edmund Spenser and focuses on his epic The Faerie Queene.
Method Lecture and discussion Grading Optional midterm 20%; Final essay 40% (50%); Final examination 40% (50%) Texts Richard Sylvester, ed. English Sixteenth‐Century Verse (Norton) Philip Sidney. A Defence of Poetry, ed. J. A. Van Dorsten (Oxford) Edmund Spenser’s Poetry, ed. Hugh Maclean and Anne Lake Prescott (Norton) Shakespeare, Sonnets (any scholarly edition will do) Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode. ENG 3340 Seventeenth‐Century Literature (3 credits) Section C (Winter) Professor Nicholas von Maltzahn Description A study of English literature from Donne to Dryden, with special reference to the poetry of the period. This section emphasizes the achievement of John Milton by focusing on his epic Paradise Lost. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Midterm 20%; Final essay 40%; Final examination 40% Texts John Rumrich and Gregory Chaplin, ed., Seventeenth‐Century British Poetry, 1603‐1660 (New York: Norton, 2006) John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. David Kastan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005) Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode.
ENG 3341 Eighteenth‐Century Literature (3 credits) Section D (Winter) Professor Sara Landreth Description This is a survey of English literature from 1666‐1789. Our readings are organized around three eighteenth‐century spaces: London, “unified” Britain (including rural and Celtic regions), and the ever‐receding horizon beyond Britain’s shores. As eighteenth‐century Briton experienced increased mobility—thanks to new networks of roads and canals, more comfortable carriages, faster ships and safer navigation techniques—the boundaries between these spaces became more porous. While some writers celebrated urban growth and global expansion, others revealed the horrors of crime, war, colonial invasion and the slave trade. This course will explore not only the real‐life spaces of Enlightenment writing—including coffeehouses, prisons, country villages and colonies—but also imagined and metaphorical spaces such as dystopias and the hidden “depths” of a character’s mind/soul. We will address the major genres of the period, including Restoration comedy, ballad opera, proto‐novelistic forms, pastoral and georgic conventions, the epistolary novel, travel writing and autobiography. Method Lecture and discussion Evaluation Participation: 10%, Midterm Exam: 20%, Term Paper: 35%, Final Exam: 35% Texts The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. C, 8th edition Frances Burney, Evelina (Broadview) Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative (Broadview) Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode. ENG 3356 18th‐Century and Romantic Fiction (3 credits) Section B (Winter) Professor Sara Landreth Description This course focuses on seven works of prose fiction published between 1725 and 1818. These texts exemplify the popular genres and modes of eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century Britain, including the secret history, the epistolary novel, the picaresque, the sentimental novel, the “Oriental tale” and the
Gothic. This course will also consider a number of important historical and cultural factors, including wars, religious movements, new scientific techniques, gender roles, epistemology and colonialism. We will examine how so‐called “factual” genres—such as conduct manuals, newspapers and travelogues—influenced imaginative works of writing (and vice versa). Method Lecture and discussion Evaluation Participation: 10%, Midterm Exam: 20%, Term Paper: 35%, Final Exam: 35% Texts Eliza Haywood, Fantomina and Other Works (Broadview) Samuel Richardson, Pamela (Oxford) Frances Burney, Evelina (Broadview) William Beckford, Vathek (Oxford) William Godwin, Caleb Williams (Broadview) Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Norton) Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode. ENG 3362 Victorian Literature (3 credits) Section A (Fall) Professor Lauren Gillingham Description In this course we will read a selection of poetry, criticism, and narrative of the Victorian period in order to examine the language and forms in which the Victorians articulated some of the key social, cultural, and political issues of their age. The issues that we will explore include: the role of culture in an industrial society; religious doubt and scientific development; gender, sexuality, and identity; poverty, wealth, work, and class politics; and race, empire, and civilization. In addition to introducing important aspects of Victorian literature and culture, the course will invite us to consider the ways in which the formal properties of our texts shape the expression of social‐historical concerns, and the ways in which we, as contemporary readers, engage with those concerns. Method Lecture, discussion Grading Essay 35%, Term test 20%, Final examination 35%, Participation 10%
Texts The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 5: The Victorian Era H. Rider Haggard, She (Broadview) Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode. Section B (Fall) Professor Ina Ferris Description The Victorian age was one of enormous, rapid change and upheaval which generated deep cultural anxieties. A period marked by new ideas and new challenges, it produced gifted and inventive writers who were influential in redefining what culture might mean and what it could do. This course will study some of those writers, including Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, John Ruskin, Christina Rossetti. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Term work 70%; final examination 30% Texts Longman Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 2B: The Victorian Age, 4th edition Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (Penguin) Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode. Section C (Winter) Professor Mary Arseneau Description This course will examine the poetry and prose of the Victorian period, situating the writing within the context of the age’s political, philosophical, religious, aesthetic and social concerns. We will study poetry by Tennyson, Browning, Barrett Browning, Arnold, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins; non‐fiction prose by Mill, Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Newman and Pater; and one novel by Dickens. Method Lecture and discussion Grading One essay 50%; class participation 10%; final examination 40%
Texts M.H. Abrams, ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2B, The Victorian Age or The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2, 8th ed. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh and Other Poems (Penguin) Charles Dickens, Hard Times (Penguin) Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode. ENG 3364 Victorian Fiction (3 credits) Section B (Winter) Professor Lauren Gillingham Description In this course, we will read a selection of Victorian fiction in order to consider some of the key social issues and narrative forms that distinguish novels in the period. Among the issues we will examine are: the development of realism and the persistence of romance; the role of the novel in an industrial society; narration and perception; women, gender, and social change; the foundations of character and identity; and difference and social cohesion. We will take as our point of departure Charles Dickens’s popular 1837 novel, Oliver Twist, which raises interesting questions about the novel, identity, virtue, and social justice. From Dickens, we will turn to our other novelists to analyze the ways in which they each articulate, adapt, and contest both social and novelistic conventions as they explore some of the period’s central preoccupations. Method Lecture, discussion Grading Term work 55%, Final examination 35%, Participation 10% Texts Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Broadview) Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Broadview) Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (Oxford) Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (Oxford) Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (Oxford) Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Oxford) Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode.
ENG 3370 Modern British Poetry (3 credits) Section A (Winter) Professor Donald Childs Description This course traces the development of distinctively modern themes and styles in the work of major and minor poets writing in Britain between the late nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century. Method Lecture. Grading Students are required to write a paper of 2000 words (potentially worth 50% of the final mark). Students dissatisfied with their grade for this paper will have the option of reducing this paper’s value to 25% of the final mark, providing they submit a second paper of 1200 words, which will be worth the other 25% of the final mark for the essay component of the course. There will be a final exam worth 50% of the final mark.
Texts The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry; Vol. 1: Modern Poetry. Ed. by Richard Ellmann, Robert OʹClair and Jahan Ramazani. THIRD EDITION. Norton, 2003. Style Sheet, Working With Sources, Introduction to Research in English Literature. Department of English. University of Ottawa. Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode. ENG 3375 Critical Theory (3 credits) Section A (Fall) Professor Craig Gordon Description This course will provide an introduction to a range of influential literary and critical theories which have been articulated since, roughly, the turn of the 20th century. The goal of this course will not be to supplant our “naïve” reading practices with ostensibly more “scientific” es to the interpretation of literature, but to explore the history of recent theoretical models (including feminism, formalism, historicism, Marxism, post colonialism, psychoanalysis, post‐ structuralism, and structuralism) as a means of developing a series of theoretical vocabularies and frameworks within which we can reflect more rigorously and self‐consciously upon what it is that we do when we read and interpret literary texts. The basic supposition of the course, that is, will be that even our most “naïve,” pre‐critical acts of reading are predicated upon a number of important but often unexamined assumptions about the nature of literary texts and the process of reading; it will be our goal to use various recent theoretical models as a means of critically reflecting upon and examining the implications of those assumptions. In that light, our investigations will be guided by a few key
questions: How do we understand language, the medium in which all literary works are produced? How do we understand specifically literary language, as opposed to the other sorts of language with which we interact on a day‐to‐day basis? How do we understand human subjectivity (either as the object of literary representation, or as it affected by the act of reading)? And, how do we situate literary texts (and our interactions therewith) in relation to the broader social, cultural, historical, and political contexts within which they are produced and received? Though the bulk of our attention will be devoted to reading, understanding, and responding to a variety of theoretical texts, we will also test the usefulness of our theoretical models in relation to the practical criticism of a small selection of literary texts. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Midterm Exam: 20%; Term Paper 30%; Participation and short Response Assignments: 20%; Final Exam: 30% Texts Modern Literary Theory, 2nd ed. (Arnold) Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (Broadview) Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness (Bedford/St. Martins) ENG 3376 Contemporary Novel (3 credits) Section A (Winter) Professor Thomas Allen Description This edition of the contemporary novel course will focus on the genre that Tzvetan Todorov labels the fantastic: fictions whose meaning relies upon moments of interpretive hesitation in response to events or situations that cannot be explained. Taking up the work of writers from various countries, we will explore how elements of the uncanny and the marvellous function within narratives devoted to various forms of cultural and political critique. The works on the syllabus are all among the most critically acclaimed novels of the last thirty years. We will read seven novels over the thirteen week semester, a pace of about two weeks per novel, supplemented by a few critical and theoretical readings. Method Lecture and discussion
Grading Weekly quizzes (20%), Two 3-5 page essays (25% each), Final Exam (30%)
Texts J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) (Penguin) Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981) (Penguin) Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987) (Vintage) A. S. Byatt, Possession (1990) (Vintage,) Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange (1997) (Coffee House Press) Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist (1998) (Doubleday) Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) (Riverhead) Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural to a Literary Genre (Cornell University Press) Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode. ENG 3378 American Fiction of the 20th Century (3 credits) Section A (Fall) Professor David Jarraway Description The emphasis of this course will be on the ʺcontemporaryʺ rather than the ʺmodernʺ novel (which students ideally will have had some exposure from ENG2450 as useful background). Besides the ʺmulticultural” theory about a more recent canon of novel writing in America, this course will also start to explore some basic principles of ʺnarratologyʺ, derived mainly from psychoanalysis, for a better grasp and appreciation of the contemporary writer ʹs craft. Method Problem‐posing dialogue and discussion‐in‐group, rather than conventional lecture‐format. Grading Reports, weekly writing protocols, 2 short term‐papers: 50%; Mid‐term and Final Examinations: 50% Texts J .Updike, Rabbit Is Rich (Fawcett) N. Baker, Room Temperature (Vintage) *P. Brooks, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (included with Syllabus) J. Cheever, Falconer (Ballantine Books) *A. Elliott & S. Frosh, eds., Psychoanalysis in Contexts (Routledge) C. McCarthy, The Road (Knopf) T. Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Plume) J. C. Oates, The Gravedigger’s Daughter (Harper Perennial)
M. Robinson, Gilead (Picador) P. Roth, Zukerman Unbound (Vintage) *Texts marked with an asterisk are works of ʺliterary theory.ʺ All above texts are available from the University of Ottawa Bookstore on campus. SPECIAL NOTE: Students should have read and in hand Updikeʹs Rabbit Is Rich for the first meeting of Term. ENG 3381 Native Writing in Canada (3 credits) Section A Professor Cynthia Sugars Description The publication of Maria Campbell’s bestselling autobiography, Halfbreed, in 1973 marked a turning point in the development of Aboriginal writing in Canada. Since that time, there has been what has been described as a renaissance in Aboriginal art and literature in North America. This course will focus on contemporary Aboriginal writing in Canada. In our discussions, we will consider some of the following critical issues: questions of “Native” authenticity; cultural appropriation; national identity; cultural difference; the legacy of imperialism; orality; and the strategic use of humour. Of specific interest are the ways these authors “write back” to the western literary tradition or to the legacy of colonialism, as well as the ways their texts show digressions from mainstream literary custom and cultural ideas, often by parodying widely held stereotypes of Native peoples. Key to Native literary pattern is humour, and we will review how humour has been rallied by these writers in very tactical, and sometimes consciously troubling, ways. Method Lecture, seminar, films, and class discussion. Grading Attendance and participation 5%, Seminar presentation 20%, Review of theatre production 15%, Term paper 30%, Final exam 30%. Texts* Maria Campbell, Halfbreed (Goodread) Richard Wagamese, Keeper ’n Me (Doubleday) Tomson Highway, The Rez Sisters (Fifth House) Marilyn Dumont, A Really Good Brown Girl (Brick Books) Daniel David Moses, Coyote City (Imago) Armand Garnet Ruffo, Grey Owl (Coteau) Eden Robinson, Monkey Beach (Vintage) Marie Clements, Copper Thunderbird (Talonbooks) Thomas King, Green Grass, Running Water (Harper Perennial)
Drew Hayden Taylor, The Baby Blues (Talonbooks) Plus a prepared reader of additional essays, interviews, and poems. As a class, we will be going on two group outings: a theatre production at the NAC and the New Sun Conference at Carleton University. Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode St. *We will begin the course with Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed. Please note that the list of texts may change slightly. ENG 3385 Canadian Literature of the Confederation Period (1867‐1912) (3 credits) Section A (Winter) Professor Gerald Lynch Description This course studies the poetry and fiction of the major writers of the period 1867‐1912. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Essay, 10%; Test, 30%; essay (6‐8 pp.), 30%; final examination 30% Texts
Ware, T., ed., A Northern Romanticism (Tecumseh) Roberts, C.G.D., Selected Animal Stories (Tecumseh) Scott, D.C., In the Village of Viger (Tecumseh) Duncan, S.J., The Imperialist (Tecumseh) Texts available at University of Ottawa Bookstore.
Postcolonial Literatures ENG 3389 Section A (Winter) Professor Jennifer Blair Description This course will consider fiction, poetry, drama, and critical literature written from postcolonial, transnational, and diasporic perspectives. Course readings will address South Asian, African, Caribbean, English, American and Canadian cultural contexts. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Mid‐term 25%; Essay 30%; Final Exam 35%; Participation 10% Texts Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Doubleday Canada) Ama Ata Aidoo, Anowa (Pearson Education) Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family (McClelland and Stewart) J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton UP) Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mi Revalueshanary Fren (Ausable Press) Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux) Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (Penguin) Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode St. Coursepack available at Laurier Office Mart, 226 Laurier Ave. East ENG 4115 Medieval Literature: Seminar I – Innovation and Departure: the Idea of a Medieval Avant‐garde (3 credits) Section A (Fall) Professor Geoff Rector Description No period seems more inimical to the idea of an ‘avant‐garde’ than the Middle Ages. However, particularly in the 12th and 13th centuries, there were very distinct literary movements committed to the development of new literary techniques, radical aesthetic expression, and departure from classical models and tradition– a literature aware of and cultivating its novelty. This class proposes to look at these sites of literary innovation and change both through the lens of modern ideas of the avant‐garde– as literary movements ahead of their time, driving the emergence and development of new literary cultures through innovation and experiment– and through statements by medieval authors themselves about literary innovation.
The class will be organized into four sections: 1) Innovations in the vernacular, which will examine new departures in vernacular literary languages (particularly in England post‐1066); 2) Innovations in Genre, which will examine the invention of two new genres in twelfth century, the erotic lyric, through the work of poets like Marcabru, Guido Cavalcanti, and Dante’s Vita Nuova; and the courtly romance, particularly through the great early romance, Floire Blancheflor; 3) Innovation and the relationship with tradition, where we will consider how poets imagine literary innovations in relationship to prior, and especially classical traditions; here we will read two poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, the early House of Fame and his masterpiece, Troilus and Criseyde; and finally, in the final section 4) Innovation and the end of the Middle Ages, we will read the first part of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, a work which makes a series of literary, generic and linguistic innovations precisely by thinking about its avant‐garde relationship with medieval romance. The aim will be, first, to read the literary works closely, and assess how innovation and emergence are produced, described, dreamed, received; and second, to use the works to think about how we see literary change, innovation, and the avant‐garde as a cultural trend. Finally, and ideally, this will lead us to rethink our models of the ‘Middle Ages’ as an age of tradition, statis, repetition and conservatism– a structure innately hostile to the avant‐garde. Method Seminar Grading TBA Texts ‘Narcissus and Dané’: available from http://www.liv.ac.uk/sml/los/ Vie de saint Alexis: available from http://www.abdn.ac.uk/stalbanspsalter/english/translation/trans057.shtml Dante, De vulgari eloquentia (Course Reader) Marie de France, The Lais of Marie de France, trans. Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante. Baker Academic, 1995. Floire et Blancheflor (Course Reader) Geoffrey Chaucer, selections House of Fame (Course Reader) Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Barry Windeatt. Penguin Classics, 2003. Cervantes, Don Quixote, ed. and trans. John Rutherford, Penguin Classics, 2003. Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode St. and the Course Reader. ENG 4120 Literary Theory Seminar I ‐‐‐ A History of Ideas in Twentieth‐Century Literary Theory (3 credits) Section A (Fall) Professor Donald Childs Description A review of major literary theories of the twentieth century (including, but not limited to, formalism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, new historicism, post colonialism, and queer theory) in terms of their emergence from a background of ideas originally associated with
other disciplines such as history, linguistics, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and political science. Lectures on theory will be followed by seminars that study practical applications of theory. Method One class per week is devoted to a lecture; the other, to seminar presentations. Grading Students must write a 2,000‐word term paper (40% of the final mark), a 1,000‐word seminar paper (20% of the final mark), and a final exam 40% of the final mark). Texts Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Linda Peterson. 2nd ed. Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 2003 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Ross C. Murfin. 2nd ed.. Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1996 The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. V.B. Leitch et al. (NY: Norton, 2001) Style Sheet, Working With Sources, Introduction to Research in English Literature. Dep’t Course reader. (To be supplied by professor) Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode St. ENG 4151 18th Century: Seminar I – Truth and Subjectivity in Shakespeare (3 credits) Section A (Fall) Professor Bernhard Radloff Description The objective of this course is to unfold the historical and philosophical foundations of specifically modern “subject,” with special reference to selected works of Shakespeare. This calls for an examination of the concepts of “selfhood” and associated concepts of “truth.” The course proposes to draw on Machiavelli’s The Prince and Bacon’s Essays to bring out possible relations between selfhood, authority, and canons of “virtue.” Reference to the Marxist‐ inspired work of Jonathan Dollimore will serve orient the class in terms of contemporary critical debates. Method Seminar Grading Paper 1: 20%, Seminar and Written Report: 30%, Final Research Paper: 50% Texts William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Bedford/ St. Martin’s)
___________. Macbeth (Bedford/ St. Martin’s) ___________. Measure for Measure (Bedford/ St. Martin’s) ___________. Othello (Bedford/ St. Martin’s) ___________. The Tempest (Bedford/ St. Martin’s) ENG 4148 Renaissance Literature: Seminar I – Marriage and its Discontents in Early Modern Drama (3 credits) Section A (Winter) Professor Jennifer Panek Description 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 non‐dramatic texts, such as marriage manuals and ballads, to provide additional context for the playwrights’ treatment of these topics. Method Seminar Grading Seminar presentations and participation, 60%; term paper, 40% 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 (Norton, eds. David Bevington et al) Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode St.
Course reader available from Laurier Office Mart, 226 Laurier Ave. E.
ENG 4151 18th‐Century Literature: Seminar I – Science Fact and Science Fiction in Enlightenment Britain Section A (Fall) Professor Sara Landreth Description This course explores Enlightenment intersections between science and fiction: how did natural philosophical debates influence imaginative writing (and vice‐versa)? Inspired by discoveries in physics, astronomy, medicine and geology, Restoration and eighteenth‐century authors wrote early examples of what we now call science fiction. For many Enlightenment writers, the boundaries between science fiction and science fact were not clear‐cut. In his “factual” History of the Royal Society (1667), for example, Thomas Sprat describes an experiment that tested whether exposure to powdered unicorn horn caused spiders to become “enchanted.” The texts on our syllabus both celebrate and debate marvellous machines, human‐plant hybrids and advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. We will address the problematics of empiricism and the difficulty of recording experience in writing. Our readings exemplify a wide range of genres, including the Robinsonade, futuristic fiction, the Gothic, utopian and dystopian tales, and ballooning narratives. Method Seminar Grading Seminar Presentation (oral and written) 30%; Seminar participation (30%); Final essay (40%) Texts Cavendish, Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader (Broadview) Daniel Defoe, Journal of a Plague Year (Oxford) Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Penguin) William Beckford, Vathek (Oxford) Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly: Memoirs of a Sleep‐walker (Hackett) Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Norton) *Course Reader (at Laurier Office Mart) Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode St.
ENG 4165 Victorian Literature: Seminar I – Nineteenth‐Century Gothic Fiction in Britain Section A (Winter) Professor Lauren Gillingham Description The gothic novel exploded onto the scene in Britain in the 1790s, popularizing tales of terror and horror and familiarizing readers with such stock features as beleaguered heroines, predatory patriarchs, haunted dwellings, uncanny occurrences, and many a well‐kept secret. Although the mania for gothic fiction subsided in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the genre by no means disappeared. In fact, the gothic resurfaced repeatedly through the length of the nineteenth century (and beyond), usually serving as a form within which authors could explore deep‐seated fears, desires, and other “unconscious” sources of anxiety emerging from the most internal spaces of the individual and from the widest spheres of British society and culture. In this course, we will read a selection of gothic fiction in order to analyze the ways in which gothic conventions are taken up, adapted, parodied, and domesticated in British fiction across the long nineteenth century. We will begin with Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, the most celebrated gothic novelists of the 1790s. From there, we will study a range of novels that allow us to examine the following issues: relations of the self to the cultural, sexual, or racial other; identity, sociability, and the problem of desire; gender relations and gender instability; women and the bourgeois family; knowledge, experience, and the problem of perception; and the nation in relation to social, technological, and scientific change. Method Seminar Grading Term work, including seminar presentations and participation 60%, Research paper 40% Texts Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Penguin) Matthew Lewis, The Monk (Broadview) Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Oxford) Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Broadview) Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Broadview) Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (Oxford) Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (Penguin) Bram Stoker, Dracula (Broadview) Texts will be available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode St. Please note: Since some of the novels are long, especially The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Woman in White, you may want to read at least these two before the course begins.
ENG 4175 Modern British Literature: Seminar I ‐‐‐ Mythopeia: Modernism and the Inklings (3 credits) Section A (Fall) Professor Dominic Manganiello Description The practice of “mythopeia” is one of the distinctive features of literary modernism. In T.S. Eliot’s famous formulation, twentieth‐century writers adopted the “mythical method” as a structural device to give form and value to the meaningless flux of the present. Paradoxically, the use of this ordering principle often led modernists to a radical demythologizing that revived an ancient split between mythos (‘word,” “mystery”) and logos (“reason”). The group known as the Inklings also privileged the myth‐making faculty in their writings, but they insisted on the interdependence of myth, language, and meaning in an attempt to re‐mythologize the modern world. The seminar will explore various aspects of these alternating rhythms of modernism by focusing on key literary texts of the period in the light of theories of myth advanced in some cases by the authors themselves, while in others by prominent thinkers such as Frazer, Jung, Ricœur, and Girard. Method Seminar Grading Seminar paper 25%; seminar work 25%; research paper 50% Texts The Norton Anthology of English Literature (The Twentieth Century and After), (8th edition), Vol. F Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford) James Joyce, Ulysses (The Student’s Annotated Edition) (Penguin) Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Oxford) Chesterton, The Man who was Thursday (Penguin) C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Houghton Mifflin) Charles Williams, Descent into Hell (Eerdmans) J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Harper Collins) Dorothy L. Sayers, The Devil to Pay (in Two Plays [Vineyard Books]) Texts available at University of Ottawa bookstore.
ENG 4175 Modern British Literature: Seminar I ‐‐‐Managing the Masses: Modernism and Democracy (3 credits) Section B (Winter) Professor Craig Gordon Description Ezra Pound’s oft‐quoted dictum—“Make it New”—has provided a key principle governing much critical consideration of literary modernism. Because of its pursuit of novelty through formal experimentation, modernism has often been characterised in terms of a disregard for politics and history, or an elitist allergy to the sensibilities of the mass—not to mention a fairly widespread suspicion of liberal democracy. Without ignoring the intricacies of modernist formal experimentation, this course will explore the possibility that far from isolating literary production from the problems of the mass, politics, and history, modernist aesthetics often functions to pursue one of the period’s most pressing concerns: the representation, theorisation, and exploration of the consequences of the emergence and development of mass democratic culture. In order to explore this problem, the course will explore interdisciplinary methodologies as a means of situating a selection of early 20th‐century literary production in relation to the broad socio‐cultural context within which it is embedded. We will consider a series of modernist literary texts alongside a selection of philosophical, sociological, and psychological texts from the period in order to ask how these different fields of cultural production collaborate in the articulation (and contestation) of different understandings of democratic politics and culture (and, more broadly, of various forms of community). Method Seminar Grading Seminar Presentation and Paper: 25%; Seminar Response: 10%; Participation: 15%; Annotated Bibliography: 15%; Term Paper: 35% Texts* E. M. Forster: Howards End, and “Two Cheers for Democracy” Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels: The Communist Manifesto (Broadview) Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent (Oxford UP) Sigmund Freud: Civilization & Its Discontents (Penguin) Ford Maddox Ford: The Good Soldier (Broadview) Gertrude Colemore: Suffragette Sally (Broadview) D. H. Lawrence: Women in Love (Penguin) Virginia Woolf: Between the Acts (Penguin) Course pack containing additional required texts. *NB: This is a tentative syllabus, so students wishing to get an early start on course readings, should contact me in advance for a finalized reading list. Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode St.
ENG 4180 American Literature: Seminar I ‐‐‐ Writing Nature and Place Section B (Winter) Professor Anne Raine Description In this seminar, we will explore a variety of texts by twentieth‐century American writers, paying special attention to how these writers investigate human beings’ changing relationships to place. We will explore both aesthetic developments in modern and postmodern literature and the convergence of literary and environmentalist concerns in American writings about place. Questions we will explore include: How does where you are affect who you are; conversely, how does who you are affect your reaction to a place? How does nature fit into the twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century world of cities and strip malls, consumer culture and information technology; or, how can we understand the interaction of natural and cultural factors in the production of place? Is the (post)modern city a place of alienation and danger, or of pleasure and possibility? How does living in an increasingly globalized world affect our experience of local places? What different literary strategies have American writers used to articulate different understandings of place? Because the honours seminar is a milestone in your academic career and also one of the last courses you’ll take before moving on to other experiences, our course work will focus on two goals: first, drawing together the knowledge and skills you’ve gained to produce a term paper that represents your best academic work; and second, making connections between your work for the course and your life outside the classroom. Accordingly, we will spend class time honing the skills required for advanced work in literary scholarship, including working with critical and historical sources, developing a complex and sophisticated argument, and preparing oral presentations that raise productive questions for discussion. But you will also respond to the readings in a more personal, creative way in a journal project, constructed in instalments throughout the term, in which you use the literary texts as catalysts for reflecting on your own relationship to place. Method Seminar Grading Two reading responses/presentations, 30%; journal project, 25%; seminar paper, 35%; preparation and participation, 10% Texts Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (Vintage) William Carlos Williams, “The Descent of Winter” (in Imaginations, New Directions) Nella Larsen, Quicksand (Penguin) Langston Hughes, Montage of a Dream Deferred (in Collected Poems, Vintage) Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (Oxford UP) N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain (U of New Mexico P) Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (HarperCollins) Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange (Coffee House Press)
Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream (Vintage) Texts available at Agora Bookstore, 145 Besserer St. at Waller. ENG 4182 Canadian Literature: Seminar I ‐‐‐ The Archive and Canadian Literary Studies Professor Jennifer Blair Section A (Fall) Description This course will examine the relationship between Canadian literature, culture, and archives—including archive theory, film, audio archives, medical records, and visual and literary representations of the archive in novels and poetry. Specific topics to be addressed in this course include: the politics of the archive; the relationship between information and representation; the interplay between history, text, and book; methods of acquisition and distribution of collected materials; paper refuse and ephemera; legal history and literature; anthropology and the archives; and the materiality of the book. Method Seminar Grading Short Paper 15%; Participation 25%; Seminar Presentation 30%; Final Paper 30% Texts Daphne Marlatt, Ana Historic (1988, Rpt. Anansi 1997) Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970; Knopf 2008) M. Nourbese Philip, Zong! (Mercury 2008) Chester Brown, Louis Riel: A Comic‐Strip Biography (2003, Rpt. Drawn and Quarterly, 2006) Robert Kroetsch, Seed Catalogue (Turnstone, 1986, Rpt. 2002) Madeleine Thien, Certainty (M&S, 2006) Stephen Collis, The Anarchive (New Star, 2005) Dionne Brand, Ossuaries (M&S, 2010) Coursepack (available at Laurier Office Mart, 226 Laurier Ave. East) including readings by Wayde Compton, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Ann Laura Stoler, Albert Braz, Walter Benjamin, Aritha van Herk, Catherine Hobbs, Ann Cvetkovich, Pauline Wakeham, and Michael O’Driscoll. Film (to be screened in class): Lynda Jessup, Nass River Indians, film, directed by Marius Barbeau and James Sibley Watson (Montreal: Associated Screen News, 1928) Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode St.
ENG 4365 Victorian Literature: Seminar II ‐‐‐ The Pre‐Raphaelite Movement Section A (Fall) Professor Mary Arseneau Description The Pre‐Raphaelite Brotherhood’s original impulse was to reform British painting by reintroducing the sincerity, high purpose, and attention to nature that they felt had been lost since the time of Raphael. This seminar will chart the evolution of the Pre‐Raphaelite movement in art and poetry, beginning with the moral aesthetic embraced by the Pre‐Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848‐1853) and tracing Pre‐Raphaelitism through its diverse later expressions. Our study will focus on the poetry and prose of three central Pre‐Raphaelite figures—Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and William Morris—and will also take into account Pre‐Raphaelite painting as well as the various nineteenth‐century statements on Pre‐Raphaelite aesthetics. A wide variety of critical es will be embraced. 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 Rossetti’s and Dante, the Rossettis’ role in the Victorian revival of the sonnet sequence, and all three poets’ place in the evolution of that quintessentially Victorian poetic form—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 the Aesthetic Movement of the 1880s and 1890s; William Morris’s involvement in socialism and the Arts and Crafts Movement; 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. Method Seminar Grading Seminar presentations and participation, 50%, Term paper, 50% Texts Christina Rossetti, Christina Rossetti: The Complete Poems. Text by R.W. Crump, notes and introduction by Betty S. Flowers. London: Penguin, 2001. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Jerome McCann. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003. Course Package Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode St.
ENG 4375 Modern British Literature: Seminar II ‐‐‐ Imagining Modern London: The Capital as Text and Context (3 credits) Section A (Winter) Professor Keith Wilson Description This course will consider the changing and yet resiliently enduring use of London, as both text and context, in modern British fiction. It will engage with such questions as the relationship between London as centre and London as margin; London as imperial embarkation point and as post‐colonial destination; London as emblem of cultural cohesion and as site of apocalyptic fracture; London as external realist backdrop and as what Penelope Lively calls a ʺcity of the mindʺ. This will necessarily involve considering questions of historical moment, genre, audience, and authority (textual, intellectual, and political). Method Seminar Grading Seminars (2 x 15% each): 30%, Class contribution/weekly discussion points: 30%, Term paper: 40%. Texts Arthur Morrison, A Child of the Jago (1896; Academy) Somerset Maugham, Liza of Lambeth (1897; Penguin) Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907; Oxford) Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1927; Penguin) Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square (1941; Penguin) Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (1949; Anchor) Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956; Penguin) Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor (1985; Penguin) Penelope Lively, City of the Mind (1991; Grove) Monica Ali, Brick Lane (2003; Scribner) Ian McEwen, Saturday (2005; Vintage) We shall be considering the books in the order in which they appear on the above list. You are encouraged to read at least the first two texts before the course begins. Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode St.
ENG 4380 American Literature: Seminar II ‐‐‐ Twain, James, and Wharton: From Realism to Modernism (3 credits) Section A (Winter) Professor Thomas Allen Description Mark Twain and Henry James are generally considered the two most significant and accomplished writers of the realist movement in American fiction. Markedly different in both style and subject matter, these writers define two poles of the capacious sphere of late nineteenth‐century American realism. However, both of these writers have also been perceived as early instigators of many of the techniques that would, decades later, come to be associated with modernism. Their formal experimentation and radical es to questions of knowledge and perception link them to later American fiction writers such as Fitzgerald and Faulkner. Standing between these literary generations is the work of Edith Wharton, a disciple of Henry James whose brilliant career began in the 1890s and continued to flourish in the modernist heyday of the 1920s. This course will consider some of the most innovative and influential work of these three writers as we consider literary historical questions of influence, experimentation, and tradition. Method Seminar. Participation in class discussion will be required.
Grading Seminar Participation (20%), Two presentations/short papers (15% each), Research Paper (50%) Texts Mark Twain, Great Short Works of Mark Twain (Harper Perennial) ‐‐‐, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Norton Critical Edition, 3rd ed.) ‐‐‐, Pudd’nhead Wilson (Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed.) Henry James, Tales of Henry James (Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed.) ‐‐‐, The Portrait of a Lady (Oxford) ‐‐‐, The Turn of the Screw (Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed.) Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country (Broadview) ‐‐‐, The Age of Innocence (Broadview) ‐‐‐, Roman Fever and Other Stories (Scribner) Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode. Additional critical readings to be assigned available online through university library’s databases.
ENG 4382 Canadian Literature: Seminar II ‐‐‐ Theory and Practice of Postmodern Canadian Poetry Section A (Fall) Professor Robert Stacey Description This course explores the major theoretical and aesthetic developments in Canadian poetry since about 1960. While the lyric remained the dominant mode of poetry in this country throughout the 20th century, and remains so today, the shift towards postmodernism in the second half of the century saw the emergence of a number of new forms and practices which, in various ways, stood opposed to the values and assumptions underlying the lyric poem— particularly, the idea of a unified, coherent subject which could stand as origin and final authority over the poem’s meaning as well as the positive valuation of formal coherence and closure. This course will highlight six anti‐lyrical traditions in its attempt to map the terrain of postmodern “anti‐lyricism” in Canada: embodied poetics and feminist attempts to “write the body,” concretism (visual and sound poetry), the long poem and serial poem, procedural or rule‐generated poetry, experimental translation, and poetry inspired by the American school of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. Our study of the poetry will be supplemented with readings in theoretical poetics and relevant literary criticism. Method Seminar Evaluation Seminar presentation (30%), “Show‐and‐tell” presentation (10%), final paper (50%), participation (10%). Tentative Texts Earl Birney, “David” and “November Walk Near False Creek Mouth” [course kit] Bill Bissett, selected visual poems [course kit] Christian Bök, Eunoia [Coach House] Judith Copithorne, selected visual poems [course kit] Jeff Derksen, Transnational Muscle Cars [Talon] Daphne Marlatt, “Touch to my Tongue” [course kit] Steve McCaffery, Carnival: Panels 1 and 2 [course kit / online] Erin Moure, Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person [Anansi] bpNichol, The Martyrology: Books 3 and 4 [Coach House] Lola‐Lemire Tostevin, Gyno‐Text [course kit] Lisa Robertson, XEclogue. [New Star] Rita Wong, Forage. [Nightwood] Wade Compton, Performance Bond [Arsenal Pulp] [Plus course kit of selected theory and criticism.]
ENG 4394 Special Topic ‐‐‐ Romancing Books: The Bookishness of Postmodern Fiction (3 credits) Section A (Winter) Professor Ina Ferris Description Printed books and manuscripts are strangely prominent in many postmodern novels as plot triggers, character motifs, metaphors, thematic markers, and so on. Why do books remain so central a literary motif even as our culture moves into a digital era? Is it nostalgia for a disappearing past, a lost relation to writing and reading? Many of these bookish fictions are historical novels, recreating different eras of the past: why do they use books as a way into the past? Many are also contemporary thrillers: what makes books so attractive to this genre of writing? Others are speculative fictions in which books trigger reflections on larger philosophical and literary issues. To investigate questions like these, we will read a range of contemporary novels, along with some short meditations on books and reading. Since the book has always been an international phenomenon, our authors are an international set (e.g. Italian, Canadian, English, and Argentine). The course will be concentrate on two types of fictions: historical fictions in which writers seek to recreate a particular era (Ross King, Umberto Eco, Matthew Pearl) and more speculative fictions (Borges, Wharton, Calvino). Accompanying our reading of the novels will be a set of readings from Eco’s On Literature, along with essays from writers like Alberto Manguel, which will be available either on the course web site or in a course reader. Method Seminar Grading Seminar work (presentation, report, participation, discussion board, etc.) 60%; term paper 40% Texts Umberto Eco. On Literature (Harcourt) Umberto Eco. The Name of the Rose (Everyman) A.S. Byatt. Possession (Vintage) Ross King. Ex Libris (Minerva) Matthew Pearl. The Last Dickens: A Novel (Random House) Charles Palliser. The Unburied (Washington Square) Jorge Luis Borges. “The Library of Babel” (course web site) Thomas Wharton. Salamander (Emblem editions) Italo Calvino. If on a winter’s night a traveller (Lester Orpen & Denny) Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode St.–publishers may vary, depending on availability.
ENG 4397 Advanced Workshop in Poetry (3 credits) Section A (Fall) Professor Seymour Mayne Description This advanced workshop focuses on the writing of poetry and includes a survey of literary magazines and other avenues for publication of finished work. The professorʹs written approval is required for registration in this course. Students may apply to register by submitting up to fifteen pages of poetry to Creative Writing, Department of English, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5, before August 30. Translated literary work from other languages will also be considered. Students will be selected solely on the basis of aptitude as indicated by work submitted. They will be notified of their acceptance by September 7. Early submission is encouraged for timely and advanced acceptance. Since all material presented in this course must be computer‐generated, candidates should take this into consideration before making application. Method Discussion, seminars, and examination of literary texts, magazines, and online resources. Grading Written work, 60%; attendance, class participation, and in‐class work, 40%. Text No text required. There will be a fee to offset the cost of photocopied material. A suggested reading list will be distributed at the beginning of the course.