2008-05-06
UNDERGRADUATE COURSES 2008-2009 For a complete list of ENG courses offered in Fall 2008-Winter 2009, please visit www.timetable.uottawa.ca. General course descriptions are available online at the following URL: http://www.uottawa.ca/academic/info/regist/calendars/courses/ENG.html. Please use the following link for a description of the Department’s program requirements: http://www.english.uottawa.ca/programs.html. Important information for Faculty of Arts undergraduates is published on the following webpage: http://www.arts.uottawa.ca/eng/students/index.html.
ENG 1122/ENG 2122
LITERATURE AND COMPOSITION III: ENGLISH LITERATURE BEFORE 1700 (3 credits)
Sections A-G
Professors to be announced.
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. Texts The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th ed., Vols. A, B, and C (package 1). Texts will be available at Benjamin Books (122 Osgoode).
ENG 1123/ENG 2123
LITERATURE AND COMPOSITION IV: ENGLISH LITERATURE SINCE 1700 (3 credits)
Sections A-F
Professors to be announced.
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. Texts The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th ed., Vols. C-F (packages 1 and 2). Texts will be available at Benjamin Books (122 Osgoode).
ENG 2130
TRADITION OF KING ARTHUR (3 credits)
Section A
Professor Geoff Rector
Scope and Approach This course will explore the transformations of the story of King Arthur and his court through successive Western cultural periods, starting in twelfth-century folk-tale and legend and ending in the twentieth and twenty-first century film,. At the centre of this historical transformation, and so at the centre of this class, is the transformation of romance as a genre, which provides the legend in all its different manifestations with basic narrative forms. Patterns and desires. The class moves from the twelfth-century legends and historical fictions of Geoffrey of Monmouth and Chretien de Troyes; to the high ideals and crushing disenchantments of Thomas Malory’s late-medieval protonovel; to the comic anxieties and technological tragedies of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. The course ends with the 20th century conversion of Arthur to film, in Prince Valiant (Henry Hathaway, 1954), one of the many Cold War versions of the Arthur legend, and Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail. In each case, we hope to consider how the Arthurian tradition and its romance form are used, transformed, and adapted to different historical milieux. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Essay, 40%; Mid-term, 20%; Final, 30%; Attendance, 10% Texts Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain (HRB), Michael A. Faletra, ed. (Broadview) Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances (Penguin) Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur, Helen Cooper, ed. (Oxford World's Classics) Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Oxford World's Classics) (Texts are available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode).
ENG 2137
LITERATURE AND IDEOLOGY (3 credits)
Section A
Professor Craig Gordon
Scope and Approach In exploring the relationship between literature and ideology, this course will begin by examining two related claims: [1] that the meaning of the word ideology is not nearly as straightforward as we may initially think, and [2] that theories of ideology present a particularly powerful set of critical tools through which to explore the relationship between various sorts of cultural artefacts (literature not least of all) and the societies that produce them. We will, that is, seek to complicate the commonplace understanding of ideology as referring simply to various sets of commonly (and self-consciously) held beliefs. To do so, we will explore notions of ideology that seek to suggest our understandings of ourselves and our places in society are largely the product of rather more unconscious cultural mechanisms through which society encourages us uncritically to internalise its dominant values and structures. In this context, we will explore a series of literary examples in order to ask how and to what extent literature participates in the mechanisms of ideology. Are literary works ideological in the sense that they consciously promote particular sets of beliefs or views of the world? Do literary texts perform ideological functions by unconsciously reflecting or promoting certain dominant social values? How does the critical analysis of literature help us understand the ideological structures of the society that produces it, or to understand the cultural processes through which society shapes the ways in which we understand ourselves? And to what extent can literature itself function to criticize or expose the ideological mechanisms of society—working to produce a cultural experience through which we come self-consciously to interrogate values and assumptions that society would have us
unconsciously accept? Method Lecture and discussion Grading Mid-Term Exam 25%; Term Paper 40%; Final Exam 35% Texts Angela Carter: The Magic Toyshop Julian Barnes: England, England Dashiell Hamett: Red Harvest Aldous Huxley: Brave New World Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: The Communist Manifesto Ian McEwen: Atonement Mary Shelley: Frankenstein Zadie Smith: White Teeth **There will also be a Course Kit containing a series of short theoretical articles.
ENG 2140
LITERATURE AND FILM (3 credits)
Sections A & C
Professor David Jarraway
Scope and Approach 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 "crime story" in both literature and film. In particular, the course will train critical attention exclusively upon so-called "noir narratives," that is, upon a selection of "hard-boiled" crime novels of the 1940s (Fall Term) and 1950s (Winter Term), and their generic translation to Hollywood's silver screen in the form of "film noir" drawn exclusively from the work of Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock within roughly the same time periods. Students are also advised that "literary" as well as "screen theory" 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. 1: American Noir of the 1940s (Library of America) *Toby Miller and Robert Stam, eds.: Film and Theory: An Anthology (Basil Blackwell) *Xerox Packet (available through Agora Bookstore) For Section A (Fall 2008) Four of the following film-texts directed by Fritz Lang: --The Woman in the Window (1944) --Scarlet Street (1945) --Clash by Night (1952) --The Blue Gardenia (1953) --The Big Heat (1953) --Human Desire (1954)
--While the City Sleeps (1956) For Section C (Winter 2009) 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 "textual theory." All the above texts (including Xerox Packet) are available from Agora Bookstore (145 Besserer).
ENG 2235
WOMEN IN LITERATURE (6 credits)
Section A
Professor Mary Arseneau
Scope and Approach This course will consider women's place in the literary traditions of nineteenth-century Britain. Topics under consideration will include the female hero, Romanticism and feminism, female poetics and the emergence of a female poetic tradition, the "fallen woman," the woman as art and as artist, and the "new woman." Method Lectures, seminars, and discussion Grading Mid-term examination 20%; two essays 40%; one seminar presentation examination 30%
and class participation 10%; final
Texts David Damrosch, ed., The Longman Anthology of British Literature. Vol. 2 (Longman) Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (Oxford) Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Oxford) Charlotte BrontĂŤ, Villette (Penguin) George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin) Christina Rossetti, The Complete Poems (Penguin) Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (Penguin) Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Oxford) George Gissing, The Odd Women (Norton) Texts will be available at Benjamin Books (122 Osgoode).
ENG 2313
EUROPEAN CONTEXTS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE (3 credits)
Section A
Professor Dominic Manganiello
Scope and Approach After seven centuries Dante remains a luminous presence, a catalyst of literary renewal. Many twentieth-century writers, such as James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and William Golding, invoked the medieval poet as a major precursor. The course will therefore examine Dante’s presence in English literature with
special emphasis on the various ways in which modern authors adopted, adapted, and transformed his ideas, themes, and attitudes in their fiction. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Term work 60%; Final examination 40% Texts Dante, The Divine Comedy 1: Hell (trans. D.L. Sayers) [Penguin] ——, The Divine Comedy 2: Purgatory (trans. D.L. Sayers) [Penguin] ——, The Divine Comedy 3: Paradise (trans. D.L. Sayers) [Penguin] ——, Vita Nuova (Oxford) James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin) Samuel Beckett, “Dante and the Lobster” (will be made available) E.M. Forster, “The Celestial Omnibus” (will be made available) Charles Williams, Descent into Hell (Eerdmans) Charles Williams, All Hallows’ Eve (Regent) C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Harper) J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (Harper Collins) William Golding, Pincher Martin (Faber) Wendell Berry, Three Short Novels (North Point Press)
ENG 2400
INTRODUCTION TO CANADIAN LITERATURE (6 credits)
Section A
Professor Robert Stacey
Scope and Approach 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 3000-word essay (35%); take-home midterm test (20%); final test (20%); attendance and participation (5%) Texts Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé, Canadians of Old (Véhicule) Martha Ostenso, Wild Geese (NCL) Hugh MacLennan, Barometer Rising (NCL) Margaret Lawrence, A Bird in the House (NCL) Tomson Highway, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing (5th House) Judith Thompson, The Crackwalker (Playwright’s Press) Jacques Poulin, Volkswagen Blues (Cormorant) Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion (Vintage) Shyam Selvadurai, Funny Boy (M&S) Department of English Style Sheet
Course Kit of works by Oliver Goldsmith, Archibald Lampman, Charles G.D. Roberts, D.C. Scott, Pauline Johnson, F.R. Scott, Sinclair Ross, Morley Callaghan, P.K. Page, Leonard Cohen, bill bissett, bpNichol, and Dionne Brand. The course kit will be available at the Morrisset Reprography Centre. All other texts can be purchased at Benjamin Books (122 Osgoode St.). Section E
Professor Gerald Lynch
Scope and Approach This course surveys Canadian literature from the late eighteenth 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 (4-6 pp.), 20%; Mid-course examination, 20%; Second-term essay (6-8 pp.), 30%; Final examination, 30% Texts Bennett and Brown, A New Anthology of Canadian Literature in English (Oxford) Leacock, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (Tecumseh) Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (M&S) Atwood, Oryx and Crake (M&S)
ENG 2450
INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN LITERATURE (6 credits)
Section A
Professor Thomas Allen
Scope and Approach This course surveys some major works and themes in American literature from the colonial period to the present. Our readings for the year will address themes that include the relationship between history and the present, the impact of culture on identity, the place of dissent in a democratic society, and the role of authorship in American civilization. Rather than viewing the authors on the syllabus as somehow codifying a national heritage, we will analyze how they enter into conversations and debates with one another about how to define “America” as a place, “The United States of America” as a nation, and “literature” as a particular form of writing playing a special role in America. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Fall midterm exam 10%; Fall essay (3-5 pages) 20%; Fall final exam 20%; Winter midterm exam 10%; Winter essay (3-5 pages) 20%; Winter final exam 20% Text The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter 7th Ed. We will focus on volume 1 of the anthology in the fall and volume 2 in the winter. Section B
Professor Bernhard Radloff
Scope and Approach Survey of American literature in its historical and social context, with particular emphasis on the religious and political culture of the American colonies and the Republic
Method Lecture and discussion Grading Midterm, 20%; Essay I, 15%; Essay II, 25%; Final Exam, 40% Texts Nina Baym, ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter 6th Ed. (Norton) Fitzgerald, F.S. The Great Gatsby (Scribner’s) Hawthorne, N. The Scarlet Letter (Norton Critical) Melville, H. Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories (Bantam) West, N. The Day of the Locust Section D
Professor Anne Raine
Scope and Approach In this course, we’ll develop a working knowledge of some of the important 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 material landscape, to its inhabitants (indigenous and immigrant), and to the national community. We will also spend time in class discussing and practicing the skills of close reading, critical and historical analysis, and argumentative writing that are 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 The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 7th ed. Willa Cather, My Ántonia William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury Texts will be available at Agora Bookstore (145 Besserer St. at Waller).
ENG 3133
ELIZABETHAN SHAKESPEARE (3 credits)
Section A
Professor Victoria Burke
Scope and Approach In this course we will examine a selection of histories, comedies, and tragedies written by Shakespeare before 1603: Richard III, Richard II, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Much Ado about Nothing, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet. We will consider the plays as both literary and theatrical works, and their relation to the culture of the time. Method Lecture, discussion, small group work Grading Midterm: 20%; Essay: 35%; Attendance and participation: 5%; Final exam: 40% Text The Norton Shakespeare (Norton, 1997) 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.
The text is available at Agora Bookstore (145 Besserer St.). Section B
Professor Jennifer Panek
Scope and Approach This course examines six plays written before 1603, covering three dramatic genres of Shakespeare’s early career: comedy (The Taming of the Shrew; The Merry Wives of Windsor), tragedy (Titus Andronicus; Romeo and Juliet), and history (Richard II; Henry IV, part I). We will explore the plays as literary texts, as theatre, and as glimpses into the culture of Elizabethan England. Method Lecture, discussion, small group work Grading Term work, including class participation 50%; final exam 50% Text The Norton Shakespeare (second edition, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 2008) will be used in class, but you may use any scholarly edition (i.e., with a detailed introduction and notes) of the collected works or of single plays.
ENG 3134
JACOBEAN SHAKESPEARE (3 credits)
Sections A & B Professor Jennifer Panek Scope and Approach This course examines five plays written after 1603, covering three dramatic genres of Shakespeare’s later career: “problem” comedy (Measure for Measure), tragedy (Othello; Macbeth), and romance (The Winter’s Tale; Cymbeline) We will explore the plays as literary texts, as theatre, and as glimpses into the culture of Jacobean England. Method Lecture, discussion, small group work Grading Term work, including class participation 50%; final exam 50% Text The Norton Shakespeare (second edition, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 2008) will be used in class, but you may use any scholarly edition (i.e., with a detailed introduction and notes) of the collected works or of single plays.
ENG 3264
CREATIVE WRITING (6 credits)
Section A
Professor Seymour Mayne
Scope and Approach The professor's written approval is needed for registration in this course. Students may apply to register by submitting up to ten pages of poetry to Creative Writing, Department of English, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5, before August 29, 2008. 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 5.
Early submission is encouraged for timely and advanced acceptance. Since all material presented during this course must be computer generated, candidates should take this into consideration before making application. This course will focus on the writing of poetry; some attention may be paid to short fiction. Method Discussion, seminars, and examination of 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.
ENG 3318
ROMANTIC LITERATURE (3 credits)
Section A
Professor Ian Dennis
Scope and Approach This course offers an in-depth examination of one of the most important figures of British Romanticism, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and surveys other major texts from the period. We will devote about a month to Coleridge, as well as reading poetry and non-fiction prose by a range of other figures, including William Blake, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and Lord Byron. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Essay 40%; Term work 20%; Final examination 40% Texts The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition: Volume D, The Romantic Period, ed. Stillinger and Lynch (Norton) Wordsworth, William. The Major Works (Oxford) Sections B & C Professor Ina Ferris Scope and Approach 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, Felicia Hemans, James Hogg, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Term work 70%; Final examination 30%
Texts Susan Wolfson and Peter Manning (Eds.). The Romantics and Their Contemporaries, 3rd edition (Longman) Mary Shelley. Frankenstein (Longman Cultural edition) James Hogg. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Oxford) Texts will be available at Benjamin Books (122 Osgoode).
ENG 3320
MODERN BRITISH LITERATURE (3 credits)
Sections A & B Professor Donald Childs Scope and Approach In this section 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 James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels (Bantam) Joyce, James. 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. 2006 (Norton) Woolf, Virginia. 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 (122 Osgoode). Section C
Professor Craig Gordon
Scope and Approach This course will introduce you to a selection of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction prose written in Britain (and Ireland) during roughly the first half of the 20th century. We will begin with a small selection of Edwardian writers, but the bulk of the course will be devoted to exploring different manifestations of British literary modernism. In so doing, we will seek to understand various implications of Ezra Pound=s famous modernist imperative C AMake it new!@ C both as it motivates various formal experiments, and as it speaks to modernist attempts to produce literature that responds (or reacts) to the unprecedented social and historical shifts which come to characterise what Virginia Woolf refers to as Amodern life.@ Method Lecture and discussion Grading Close reading assignment 20%; erm paper 40%; Participation 10%; Final exam 30%
Texts E. M. Forster: Howards End (Penguin) James Joyce: Dubliners (Penguin) Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway (Penguin) The Norton Anthology of British Literature (8th ed.) Vol. F (The Twentieth Century and After) Section D
Professor Keith Wilson
Scope and Approach This course will focus primarily though not exclusively on the poetry of Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, and on selected prose works by Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and E. M. Forster. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Midterm: 20%; Final examination: 40%; Essay: 40% Texts Joyce, James. Dubliners (Penguin) Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse (Penguin) E. M Forster. A Passage to India (Penguin) The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. by M.H. Abrams, et al. 8th ed. Volume F (Norton) Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway (Oxford) Texts will be available at Benjamin Books (122 Osgoode).
ENG 3321
THE CANADIAN SHORT STORY (3 credits)
Section A
Professor David Staines
Scope and Approach A close examination of the development of the Canadian short story as a distinctive genre within the development of Canadian literature. Attention will be paid to selected writers and their achievements in the tradition. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Attendance and participation: 20%; two small term papers: 40%; final examination: 40% Texts Gallant, Mavis. Home Truths (McClelland and Stewart) Laurence, Margaret. A Bird in the House (New Canadian Library) Leacock, Stephen. Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (New Canadian Library) Mistry, Rohinton. Tales from Firozsha Baag (New Canadian Library) Munro, Alice. The Love of a Good Woman (Penguin) Richler, Mordecai. The Street (New Canadian Library) Ross, Sinclair. The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories (New Canadian Library) Seton, Ernest T. Wild Animals I Have Known (New Canadian Library)
ENG 3323
MEDIEVAL LITERATURE I (3 credits)
Sections A & C Professor Geoff Rector Scope and Approach This course is an introduction to the aesthetic and social history of Middle English literature, focusing generally on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Along with the tales of this 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,’ some short Middle English lyrics, John Trevisa’s Dialogue Between a Lord and a Clerk, as well as an excerpt from Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. These other works will allow us perspective, not only on the nature of Chaucer’s achievements, but also on the broader tradition of Middle English literature. Method Lectures and discussion Grading Paper 1 (2.5- 3 pages), 10%; Paper 2 (6-7 pages), 20%; Paper 3 (9-10 pages), 30%; Participation (recitation 5%, response 5%, class participation 5%), 15%; Final exam, 25% Texts Norton Critical Edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. 2nd edition Thorlac Turville-Petre and J.A. Burrow, Eds. A Book of Middle English. 2nd ed. (Blackwell) Texts will be available at Benjamin Books (122 Osgoode). Section B
Professor Andrew Taylor
Scope and Approach This course will explore Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the famous alliterative poems Pearl and Sir Gawain, the less famous poems Cleanness and Patience, and some of the popular drama of the period. Our first task 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 (2 pp), 10%; essay (8-10 pp), 40%; tests and class work, 20%; final examination, 30% Texts Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (Broadview) J.J. Anderson, ed., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience (Everyman) Richard Beadle, ed., York Mystery Plays (Oxford) Texts will be available at Benjamin Books (122 Osgoode).
ENG 3339
SIXTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE (3 credits)
Section A
Nicholas von Maltzahn
Scope and Approach 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 will be available at Benjamin Books (122 Osgoode). Section B
David Carlson
Scope and Approach This course studies sixteenth-century non-dramatic writing in England, with emphasis on social context and the history of modern literary movements. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Comprehensive final exam, 40%; mid-term exam, 25%; paper, 25%; in-class work (including quizzes and other participation), 10% Texts Richard Sylvester, ed., English Sixteenth-Century Verse (Norton) William Shakespeare, Sonnets, ed. Burto (Signet), or the equivalent (e.g., the text in the Riverside Shakespeare) The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1 (Norton) Texts will be available at Benjamin Books (122 Osgoode).
ENG 3340
SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE (3 credits)
Section A
Professor (Nicholas von Maltzahn)
Scope and Approach 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. The method is lecture and discussion. 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 will be available at Benjamin Books (122 Osgoode).
ENG3347
MILTON (3 credits)
Section A
Professor Ian Dennis
Scope and Approach This course offers an in-depth examination of one of the most important English poets. We will read all of John Milton’s shorter poems, and all of Paradise Lost as well as a selection of other works in verse and prose. We will also survey responses to Milton’s works amongst later British poets and critics. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Essay 40%; term work 20%; final examination 40% Texts Any edition of Milton’s complete works will be acceptable, but an edition or editions will be ordered at the University of Ottawa bookstore in the fall of 2008. For details at that time, see the English Department web site or contact the instructor.
ENG 3362
VICTORIAN LITERATURE (3 credits)
Section A
Professor Lauren Gillingham
Scope and Approach This course studies a selection of poetry, criticism, and narrative of the Victorian period in order to examine the language and forms in which the Victorians articulated and critiqued some of the key social, cultural, and political issues of their age. The areas of concern we will explore in the course 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 exploration. In addition to introducing students to important aspects of Victorian literature and culture, the course will invite us to think collectively about the ways in which the formal properties of texts shape the expression of socio-historical concerns, and the ways in which we, as contemporary readers, engage with those concerns. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Essay 40%; Term test 20%; Final examination 30%; Participation 10% Texts The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 5: The Victorian Era
H. Rider Haggard, She (Broadview edition) Texts will be available at Benjamin Books (122 Osgoode). Sections B & C Professor Keith Wilson Scope and Approach This course studies major prose writers and poets of the Victorian period. We shall concentrate primarily, though far from exclusively, on the work of Arnold, Browning, Christina Rossetti and Tennyson in poetry, and of Arnold, Carlyle, Dickens, and Ruskin in prose. We shall be setting these writers against the wider intellectual and social movements of which they were part, and considering their anticipation of many of the issues explored by twentiethcentury writers. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Essay 40%; Midterm 20%; Final examination 40% Texts The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Vol E: The Victorian Age Charles Dickens, Hard Times, ed. Graham Law (Broadview)
ENG 3364
VICTORIAN FICTION (3 credits)
Section A
Professor Mary Arseneau
Scope and Approach In this course we will examine seven representative examples of the Victorian period’s most popular literary genre—the novel. We will pay particular attention to the novels’ historical and cultural contexts, considering issues that include epistemology, religious crisis, industrialization, education, scientific progress, psychology, and gender and class politics. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Essay, 50%; class participation (including one brief oral presentation), 10%; final examination, 40% Texts Charlotte Brontë, Villette (Broadview) Charles Dickens, Hard Times (Norton) Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (Oxford) George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin) Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Oxford) Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Norton) George Gissing, The Odd Women (Norton) Texts will be available at Benjamin Books (122 Osgoode). Section B
Professor Lauren Gillingham
Scope and Approach In this course, we will read a selection of Victorian fiction in order to consider some of the key social issues and
narrative forms which 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 crucial questions about the novel, identity, virtue, and social justice. From Dickens, we will turn to our other novelists to analyze the extent to which they each articulate, adapt, and contest both social and novelistic conventions – themselves in flux as the century unfolds – in exploring some of the period’s central preoccupations. Method Lecture, discussion Grading Two essays, 20% and 35%; 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 will be available at Benjamin Books (122 Osgoode).
ENG 3370
MODERN BRITISH POETRY (3 credits)
Section A
Professor Donald J. Childs
Scope and Approach 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 O'Clair and Jahan Ramazani. THIRD EDITION, 2003 (Norton) Style Sheet, Working With Sources, Introduction to Research in English Literature. Department of English. University of Ottawa. Texts will be available at Benjamin Books (122 Osgoode).
ENG 3373
MODERN BRITISH NOVELISTS (3 credits)
Section A
Professor Craig Gordon
Scope and Approach Speaking of the writers of what she calls “Modern Fiction,” Virginia Woolf suggests that “they attempt to come closer to life, and to preserve more sincerely and exactly what interests and moves them, even if to do so they must discard most of the conventions which are commonly observed by the novelist.” In this course, we will explore a selection of British prose fiction written in the period between the turn of the twentieth century and the end of the second world war. In so doing, we will attend to the ostensible move away from the Edwardians’ large-scale acceptance of Victorian narrative modes, and towards the subsequent formal experiments to which Woolf refers. We will be especially attentive to the operation of different forms of language, and to the possibilities and limitations they offer. Following Woolf’s lead, we will also pay close attention to the socio-historical contexts (the stuff of “life”) in relation to which our authors situate their texts, in order to consider the ways in which various narrative forms respond to, and/or construct, life in the first half of the 20th century. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Close Reading Assignment, 20%; Term Paper, 40%; Participation, 10%; Final Exam, 30% Texts Samuel Beckett: Watt Mary Butts: Armed with Madness Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent Ford Madox Ford: The Good Soldier James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist D. H. Lawrence: Women in Love Katherine Mansfield: Bliss and Other Stories Virginia Woolf: The Waves
ENG3374
EMERGENCE OF THE MODERN IMAGINATION
Section A
Professor Craig Gordon
Scope and Approach This course will examine a range of writing from the late 19th- and early 20th centuries in order to trace the emergence of certain aspects of what we might call “the modern imagination.” More specifically, we will ask to what extent the literature of the period seeks imaginatively to grapple with, and intervene in, the emergence of ways of understanding the human subject and its place in society which will increasingly come to define life in the 20th century. In so doing, we will ask: In what ways is literature shaped by the social conditions out off which it arises? To what extent (and to what ends) does literature reflect those social conditions? And to what extent does literature—more than merely reflecting society—claim imaginatively to transform or articulate alternatives to the dominant intellectual frameworks of the period. We will take up these questions by examining primarily a selection of texts produced at a moment in history whose inhabitants understood their society and culture as undergoing a process of unprecedented (and perhaps cataclysmic) change. Focusing on the turn of the 20th century—and fin de siècle culture—we will examine the relationship between the period’s literary production and a variety of historical and cultural contexts with which it interacts. The issues that we will address will include literary responses to: Industrialisation, Scientific and Technological shifts, and the phenomenon of the New Woman, theories and sciences of degeneration, the Women’s Suffrage campaign, and urbanisation.
Method Lecture and discussion Grading Close Reading Assignment 20%; Term Paper 40%; Participation 10%; Final Exam 30% Texts Samuel Butler: Erewhon Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent Cicely Hamilton: Diana of Dobson’s Wyndham Lewis: Tarr G. B. Shaw: Plays Unpleasant H. G. Wells: The Island of Dr. Moreau Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway
ENG 3375
CRITICAL THEORY (3 credits)
Section A
Professor Donald J. Childs
Scope and Approach The aim of this section of English 3375 is to explore a number of the most important critical theories developed since 1900 for the reading of literature. Organized as a history of twentieth-century reading practices and the ideas that animate them, my course combines lectures on theory with lectures applying theory as part of the practical criticism of various works of literature. Method Lecture Grading Two 1,200-word essays (each representing 25% of the final mark) or one 2,500-word essay will be required (representing 50% of the final mark). There will also be a final exam (worth 50% of the final mark). Texts Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Linda Peterson. 2nd ed. (Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press) Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Ross C. Murfin. 2nd ed. (Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press) The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. (W.W. Norton & Company) Style Sheet, Working With Sources, Introduction to Research in English Literature. English Dep. Texts will be available at Benjamin Books (122 Osgoode).
ENG 3378
AMERICAN FICTION OF THE 20TH CENTURY (3 credits)
Section A
Professor David Jarraway
Scope and Approach The emphasis of this course will be on the "contemporary" as opposed to the "modern" novel (which students ideally will have had some exposure to from the Introduction to American Literature as helpful background). In addition to the "multicultural" approach for speculating about a more recent canon of novel writing in America today, this course will also undertake to explore several basic principles of "narratology" derived mainly from psychoanalysis for better comprehension and appreciation of the contemporary novelist's 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. Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (Vintage) *P. Brooks, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (included with Syllabus) M. Cunningham, Specimen Days (Picador) *A. Elliott & S. Frosh, eds., Psychoanalysis in Contexts (Routledge) S. M. Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees (Penguin) C. McCarthy, No Country for Old Men G. Naylor, Linden Hills (Penguin) J. C. Oates, The Tattooed Girl (Harper Perennial) P. Roth, The Ghost Writer (Vintage) J .Updike, Rabbit Redux (Fawcett) *Texts marked with an asterisk are works of "literary theory." All the above texts are available from Agora Bookstore (145 Besserer Street). SPECIAL NOTE: Students should have read and in hand Updike's Rabbit Is Rich for the first meeting of Term.
ENG 3383/CDN 3383 Section A
JEWISH CANADIAN WRITERS: The making of a tradition (3 credits)
Professor Seymour Mayne
Scope and Approach This course will focus mainly on the work of the major Jewish Canadian writers who have emerged in the past seventy-five years. We will examine Klein's poetry and prose, then turn to the work of Irving Layton, Miriam Waddington, Adele Wiseman, Mordecai Richler, Leonard Cohen and other contemporary figures. Attention will also be paid to the work in translation of Yiddish Canadian writers of the same period. We will consider how Jewish Canadian writers have influenced and shaped the development of Canadian literature, and how they have contributed to the recent multicultural renaissance in Canadian writing. Method Lectures, class discussion, seminars; use of archival and audio-visual material Grading Seminar assignments including paper, class participation and attendance 60%; tests and mid-term examination 40% Texts Klein, A.M., The Second Scroll (McClelland & Stewart, New Canadian Library; University of Toronto Press) ___________, Selected Poems, Z.Pollock, S. Mayne and U. Caplan, eds. (University of Toronto Press) Layton, Irving, A Wild Peculiar Joy: The Selected Poems (McClelland & Stewart) Waddington, Miriam, Collected Poems (Oxford University Press) ___________, Apartment Seven: Essays Selected and New (Oxford University Press)
Wiseman, Adele, The Sacrifice (McClelland & Stewart, New Canadian Library) Richler, Mordecai, The Street (McClelland & Stewart, New Canadian Library) Cohen, Leonard, Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs (McClelland & Stewart) ___________, The Favourite Game (McClelland & Stewart, New Canadian Library) Michaels, Anne, Fugitive Pieces (McClelland & Stewart) Rotchin, B. Glen, The Rent Collector (Esplanade Books,Véhicule Press) Mayne, S. and B. G. Rotchin, eds., A Rich Garland: Poems for A.M. Klein (Véhicule) Telushkin, Joseph, Jewish Literacy (HarperCollins) N.B. Students should consult the instructor before purchasing texts. The texts are either in print and/or on reserve at Morrisset Library. Many are also available from book dealers specialising in Canadiana.
ENG 4115
MIDDLE ENGLISH: SEMINAR I — Writing Around the Rising of 1381
Section A
Professor Andrew Taylor
Scope and Approach The Peasants’ Revolt, also known as the Rising of 1381, only lasted a few weeks before it was brutally suppressed, but this challenge to the established medieval social order had a profound impact on English society and provided a stimulus for cunning and daring experiments in English writing. After exploring some of the basic socio-economic facts about the Rising (such as how many of the rebels were actually peasants) we will turn first to a number of texts which describe the Rising, including the accounts of horrified chivalric chroniclers, then to texts that circulated among the rebels, such as John Ball’s letter, then to poems that allude to the Rising, such as Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale, and finally to poems that make no direct reference to the Rising but can be read as responses to it, including Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale and Langland’s revisions to his political allegory, Piers Plowman. Method Seminar Grading Seminar presentation and report, and class participation 40%; major paper 60% Texts William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. A.V. C, Schmidt (Everyman/J. M. Dent, 1995) Course pack The text will be available at Benjamin Books (122 Osgoode).
ENG 4148
RENAISSANCE: SEMINAR I — Contact Literature, 1490-1540 (3 credits)
Section A
Professor David Carlson
Scope and Approach This seminar will study the literature arising immediately from Western Europeans’ initial direct contacts with the peoples of the Americas, Africa, and India, in the earliest period, c. 1490-1540, including Columbus’ letters of report, the narrative purporting to describe the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci, Bernal Dias’ narrative of the Mexican conquest and Cortes’ letters, the letter of King Afonso I of Kongo, the Dominigo Paes account of Vijayanagara, and the initial reports of the Cabot voyages to Newfoundland.
Method Seminar Grading Final Exam 35%; term paper 35%; seminar presentations 20%; other participation 10% Texts Christopher Columbus, The Four Voyages, ed. Cohen (Penguin) Miguel Leon-Portilla, The Broken Spears (Beacon) Course pack
ENG 4175
MODERN BRITISH LITERATURE: SEMINAR I --- Mythopoeia: Modernism and the Inklings (3 credits)
Section A
Professor Dominic Manganiello
Scope and Approach The practice of “mythopoeia” 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, Ricoeur, and Girard. Method Lecture and discussion Grading Seminar paper: 25%; Seminar work: 25%; Research paper: 50% Texts M.H Abrams et al., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. II (8th edition) Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford) Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (in The Norton Anthology of English Literature) W.B. Yeats, “Selected Poems” (in The Norton Anthology of English Literature) T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land” (in The Norton Anthology of English Literature) James Joyce, Ulysses (Penguin) Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Oxford) Chesterton, The Man who was Thursday (Penguin) C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Fontana) 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])
ENG 4175
MODERN BRITISH LITERATURE: SEMINAR I — Imagining Modern London: The Capital as Text and Context (3 credits)
Section B
Professor Keith Wilson
Scope and Approach 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 "city of the mind". This will necessarily involve considering questions of historical moment, genre, audience, and authority (textual, intellectual, and political), and will lead to speculative conclusions about the source and nature of whatever cultural centrality London still has at the beginning of the Twenty-first Century. Method Seminar Grading Seminars, 30%; submitted weekly discussion points, 30%; term essay, 40% Texts George Gissing, The Nether World (Oxford) Arthur Morrison, A Child of the Jago (Academy) Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (Oxford) Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Penguin). Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square (Penguin). Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (Anchor) Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor (Penguin). Monica Ali, Brick Lane (Scribner) Andrea Levy, Small Island (Picador) Ian McEwan, Saturday (Anchor) Texts will be available at Benjamin Books (122 Osgoode).
ENG 4180
AMERICAN LITERATURE: SEMINAR I --- Writing Place (in twentieth-century American literature) (3 credits)
Section A
Professor Anne Raine
Scope and Approach 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 installments throughout the term, in which you use the literary texts as catalysts for reflecting on your own relationship to place. Method Seminar Grading Seminar presentation, 25%; critical article analysis, 10%, other seminar work, 15%; seminar paper, 50% Texts Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (Vintage) 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) Gary Snyder, Turtle Island (New Directions) Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (HarperCollins) Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange (Coffee House Press) Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream (Vintage) Texts will be available at Agora Bookstore (145 Besserer St. at Waller).
ENG 4182
CANADIAN LITERATURE: SEMINAR I: Feeling Canadian? “Affect” in recent Canadian literature (3 credits)
Section A
Professor Jennifer Blair
Scope and Approach “They were both always trying to find something tingling on their skin, something where their blood rushed to their heads and they felt alive” – Dionne Brand, What We All Long For What could it mean to “feel” Canadian? What is the relationship between something so personal, so embodied, as feeling, and something so public, and so much a product of the social imagination, as a nation? How, and to what ends, does feeling enter into the Canadian literary imaginary? In studying works of fiction and poetry published in the past decade or so, this course will explore the role of feeling—or, what is more properly termed “affect”—in recent Canadian literature. While “affect” is often understood as referring to “emotion,” this course will work from cultural theory’s broader sense of affect as the expression of the link between perception, image, memory and self. Several of the themes that have been prevalent throughout the Canadian literary tradition (postcoloniality, citizenship, immigration, the environment, First Nations cultures, the city…) will comprise a large part of our discussions, especially to the extent that affect is one of the most productive avenues through which Canadian literature currently pursues these themes. In addition to literary texts, we will study a few selected works of cultural theory on the subject of affect, and literary criticism that map the specific context of Canadian literature. Method Seminar Grading One short discussion seminar on Thirsty and/or one of the articles given in the first 4 weeks of class + resulting short paper, 15%; Formal seminar presentation, 25%; Final Paper, 40%; Participation, 20%
Texts Dionne Brand, Thirsty, 2002 Dionne Brand, What We All Long For, 2005 David Chariandy, Soucouyant, 2007 Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, 2000 Michael Redhill, Consolation, 2006 Vincent Lam, Bloodletting and Other Miraculous Cures, 2005 Richard Van Camp, The Lesser Blessed, 1996 Lisa Robertson, The Weather, 2001 (The theory and criticism readings listed below will be available in a Course Pack) Diana Brydon, “Dionne Brand’s Global Intimacies: Practising Affective Citizenship.” University of Toronto Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect.” Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, and Sensation (Durham: Sianne Ngai, “Animatedness.” Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005) David Chariandy, Review of What We All Long For. New Dawn: The Journal of Black Canadian Studies 1.1 Hilde Staels, “A Poetic Encounter with Otherness: The Ethics of Affect in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.” University of Toronto Quarterly 6.3 (Summer 2007) Ann Cvetkovich, “Public Feeling.” South Atlantic Quarterly 106.3 (Summer 2007) Rosi Bradotti, “Affirming the Affirmative: On Nomadic Affectivity.” Rhizomes 11/12 (Fall 2005/Spring 2006) Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Cornell UP, 2004) Daniel Coleman, “From Canadian Trance to TransCanada: White Civility to Wry Civility in the Canlit Project.” Trans.Can.Lit.: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature. Eds. Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki Peter Dickinson, “Subtitling Canlit: Keywords.” Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature. Eds. Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki (Wilfrid Laurier, 2007)
ENG 4342
SHAKESPEARE: SEMINAR II --- Shakespeare’s Rivals (3 credits)
Section A
Professor Jennifer Panek
Scope and Approach While the primacy of Shakespeare today can lend the impression that the Renaissance English stage offered a steady diet of nothing but the Bard, Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences in fact had a wide range of playwrights vying for their business at the box office. This course offers students the chance to expand their knowledge of Renaissance drama beyond Shakespeare, using his familiar plays as a starting point for examining how other playwrights, such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Heywood, engaged with some of the same dramatic genres, stage conventions, and controversial social issues. For instance, we might examine how Shakespeare’s famous revenge tragedy, Hamlet, reworks the patterns of its (at the time) equally famous ancestor, The Spanish Tragedy, and how both compare to the sex-and-violence sensationalism of the later Revenger’s Tragedy. Shakespeare’s Othello kills his innocent wife under the impression she has committed adultery, but Heywood’s Frankford, in A Woman Killed with Kindness, discovers his wife has committed adultery, and his reaction confronts us with an issue Othello only hints at: does a cheating wife deserve death? From cross-dressed heroines and comic cuckolds to weak kings and murderous overreachers, we will explore how numerous “Shakespearean” themes and motifs are more common, more varied, and more complex than a Shakespeare-only view of the renaissance theatre would suggest. Method Seminar Grading Two seminar presentations plus leading class discussion, 20% each; term paper, 50%; class participation, 10% Text English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology (eds. David Bevington et al). From this anthology, we will read
the following plays: Christopher Marlowe: Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1; Edward II Thomas Middleton and William Rowley: The Changeling Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker: The Roaring Girl Thomas Middleton: The Revenger’s Tragedy; A Chaste Maid in Cheapside Thomas Kyd: The Spanish Tragedy John Fletcher: The Woman’s Prize Elizabeth Cary: The Tragedy of Mariam Anonymous: Arden of Faversham Text is available at Benjamin Books. (122 Osgoode St.) Also required is one play not in the anthology: Thomas Heywood’s, A Woman Killed with Kindness (New Mermaids, ed. Brian Scobie) Students will be expected to own a scholarly edition of the complete works of Shakespeare for the following eight plays: Hamlet; Macbeth; Measure for Measure; Othello; The Taming of the Shrew; The Merry Wives of Windsor; Richard II; As You Like It. It will be useful to have read (and better yet, studied) these plays before the course begins, as the focus of the seminar will be on the non-Shakespearean drama.
ENG 4348
RENAISSANCE: SEMINAR II — Women’s Manuscript Poetry, 1580-1700 (3 credits)
Section A
Professor Victoria Burke
Scope and Approach This course will take as its focus the writing of poetry by women from the late sixteenth century through the seventeenth century. We will analyze the significance of modes of production and reception during this period, exploring the implications of presenting one’s work in various types of manuscript versus disseminating it in print, and how that significance changed during the period in question. We will discuss how the variables of gender and social status can inflect the writing of poetry. With reference to poetry by men which was published in manuscript and print, and women’s poetry which appeared in print, we will consider how the fourteen women in the anthology Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry dealt with topics of interest to other early modern writers and how they fit into literary history. Method Seminar and discussion Grading Seminar presentation and participation, 60%, specifically: Participation: 15%; Preparatory comments (Web CT discussion list): 15%; One seminar presentation (includes oral presentation and written report): 30%; Term paper: 40%. Texts Jill Seal Millman and Gillian Wright, ed., Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry (Manchester UP, 2005) Alastair Fowler, ed., Seventeenth-Century Verse (Oxford UP, 1991) Texts are available at Agora Bookstore (145 Besserer St.) . Photocopied course reader is available at Laurier Office Mart (226 Laurier Ave. E.).
ENG 4352
ROMANTICS: SEMINAR II --- Crossing Cultures: Genres of Encounter and Notions of Nation (3 credits)
Section A
Professor Ina Ferris
Scope and Approach Early 19th-century Europe witnessed the emergence of the modern idea of the nation, but at the same time readers in the period were fascinated by narratives that played with the permeability of national borders. Travel narratives and fictional tales of cross-cultural encounter had brisk sales, but such genres stood in ambivalent relation to the notion of the nation. On the one hand, they played a central role in underwriting national claims and identities; on the other, they tested and helped dissolve the boundaries and categories of national identity. The course will explore the tensions generated by this doubleness. The first half of the course will concentrate on the new genre of the national tale, which pivots on the plot of cross-cultural encounter; it will focus on different formulations of this plot in different national settings (Italy, Ireland, Scotland, India, and medieval England). The second half of the course will turn to travel narratives, specifically to the tropes of the female and male traveller established by Mary Wollstonecraft and Byron, concluding with two examples of a later development of these tropes by Charlotte Bronte and Byron’s Russian admirer, Mikhail Lermontov. Method Seminar Grading Seminar work (seminar presentation, written seminar report, participation, discussion board, etc.) 60%; term paper, 40% Texts Germaine de Stael. Corinne (Rutgers UP) Maria Edgeworth. Ennui [in Castle Rackrent and Ennui (Penguin)] Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan). The Missionary (Broadview) Walter Scott. Rob Roy (Oxford) —. Ivanhoe (Oxford) George Gordon, Lord Byron. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cantos 3 and 4 (online) Mary Wolstonecraft. A Short Residence in Sweden (Penguin) Charlotte Brontë. Villette (Penguin) Mikhail Lermontov. A Hero of Our Time (Penguin) Texts are available at Benjamin Books (122 Osgoode St.).
ENG4365
VICTORIAN LITERATURE: SEMINAR II --- Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fiction in Britain (3 credits)
Section A
Professor Lauren Gillingham
Scope and Approach 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 nineteenth-century novels which allow us to examine such issues as: 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 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) Matthew Lewis, The Monk (Broadview) Ann Radcliffe, The Italian (Oxford) Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Broadview) Bram Stoker, Dracula (Broadview) Texts will be available at Benjamin Books (122 Osgoode).
ENG 4375
MODERN BRITISH LITERATURE: SEMINAR II — Revisiting, remaining, and looking back in anger: the problem of Englishness in post-WWII British literature and culture (3 credits)
Section A
Professor Craig Gordon
Scope and Approach This course will examine literary explorations of English national culture in the latter half of the twentieth century, and focus on the ways in which various writers seek to posit, recuperate, or contest different notions of Englishness. We will begin by considering a few texts written immediately following the war, move on to a series of texts produced during the Thatcher era, and conclude with some texts produced during the ascendancy of New Labour. If, by the end of WWII, Evelyn Waugh has Charles Ryder mournfully revisit a lost golden age of English culture, we will ask what kinds of mourning are effected by the heritage industry fetish of the Edwardian costume drama (à la Merchant Ivory), or by Thatcherite moral populism (as couched within the revivification of AVictorian@ family values). Or how do more recent engagements of national identity address the simultaneous consequences of Britain=s Aspecial relationship@ with America in the wake of 9/11 (and the July 2005 bombings), and of the Blairite retreat into a domestic sphere defined largely in terms of individual economic opportunity? We will equally ask which of our authors (in a rather more melancholic mode) refuse this work of mourning, trying instead to disclose the wounds of history. Our investigation will, thus, be focused to a large extent by the problem of nostalgia. Many of our texts seek to revisit, look back at, or remain in the past, and in this context we will examine the ways our writers seek to employ these revisitations as a means of establishing or contesting different models of literary and cultural value. To what extent does literature attempt to embody (or revive) stable and lasting cultural values, and to what extent does it seek to reconsider the constraints of the past? This backward-looking tendency will be both thematic (how do moments of the past come to embody particular social values?) and formal (what resources do established cultural forms and literary genres provide, and what limitations they impose?).
In addition to exploring a range of British literature from the period, we will also be reading a selection of short critical, contextual, and theoretical writings which will enable us to develop both a better historical sense of the period (and critical response to it), and some theoretical frameworks within which to approach the problem of national identity. Method Seminar Grading Seminar Presentation and Paper 35%; Seminar Response 10%; Class Participation 10%; Research Paper: 45% Texts Julian Barnes: England, England (Vintage) Caryl Churchill: Plays: 2 (Methuen) – We will be reading Top Girls Michael Frayn: Democracy (Methuen) Nick Hornby: How to Be Good (Riverhead) Kazuo Ishiguro: Remains of the Day (Vintage) Ian McEwan: Saturday (Vintage) John Osborne: Look Back in Anger (Penguin) Zadie Smith: White Teeth (Penguin) Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited (Penguin)
ENG 4380
AMERICAN LITERATURE: SEMINAR II — Alternative Americas (3 credits)
Section A
Professor Bernhard Radloff
Scope and Approach This course will examine fictional versions of the “American dream” in the economic, the political and the theological senses of the term. These novels will be studied within their social and historical contests to establish how the tensions they dramatize are integral to the historical conflicts of democratic populism and theocracy, American exceptionalism and isolationalism, individualism and vampire capitalism. Method Seminar Grading Essay I: 20%; Seminar and Report: 30%; Final Essay: 40%; Class Participation: 10% Texts Ellis, Bret Easton, American Psycho Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Blithedale Romance Melville, Herman, Moby Dick Roth, Philip, The Plot Against America
ENG 4382
CANADIAN LITERATURE: SEMINAR II ---Imagining History in Contemporary Canadian Literature
Section B
Professor Robert Stacey
Scope and Approach This course explores works of fiction and poetry published after 1970 in terms of their engagement with received ideas about the historical past. Guided by selected readings in literary criticism and theory, this course will track
developments in the Canadian writer’s engagement with history, whether by that term we refer to a theory of historical process, a body of past events, or a narrativization of those events. Our focus throughout will be on the relationship between historical understanding and literary form: it is perhaps no accident that the modern tradition of historical fiction and ‘documentary’ poetry in Canada is likewise a tradition of formal innovation and experimentation. Finally, since any invocation of history is inescapably political, we will pay particular attention to the political implications of these texts, texts which are so often motivated by a deep awareness of social injustice. Method Seminar Grading Seminar presentation (30%); essay (50%); class participation (20%) Texts Anne Hébert, Kamouraska Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid bpNichol, The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid and The Long Weekend of Louis Riel Rudy Wiebe, Where is the Voice Coming From? [selections] Timothy Findley, The Wars Joy Kogawa, Obasan Keri Sakamoto, The Electrical Field Jacques Poulin, Volkswagen Blues Louse Bernice Halfe, Blue Marrow Daphne Marlatt, Ana Historic M. Norbese Philip, Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence Douglas Glover, Elle [Plus course kit of critical articles]
ENG 4382
CANADIAN LITERATURE: SEMINAR II --- A.M. Klein and His Circle (3 credits)
Section A
Professor Seymour Mayne
Scope and Approach From the 1920s to the 1960s Montreal was the thriving literary center for poets of various cultural backgrounds. In recent years critics and literary historians of Jewish Canadian poetry have begun to examine the cross-cultural connections of this period, and have singled out A.M. Klein as the major figure in these active decades. In this course we will mainly focus on Klein's writings, and we will study the poetry of other poets whose work is linked to his, including Irving Layton, Miriam Waddington, Leonard Cohen, and others. In order to appreciate more fully the cultural contexts of Klein's oeuvre, we will also read Yiddish Canadian poetry in translation. In addition, attention will be paid to Québécois poetry and poetics of the period. Given recent interest in cross-cultural approaches, we will consider how Klein has influenced and shaped the development of Jewish Canadian poetry, and how he and his associates in Montreal prepared the ground for poets of other communities who have come to the fore in the past twenty-five years. Method Seminar and discussion; use of archival and audio-visual material Grading Seminar presentation and report, class participation and attendance 50%; tests 10%; term paper 40%
Texts Cohen, Leonard, Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs (McClelland & Stewart) Klein, A.M., The Second Scroll (McClelland and Stewart, New Canadian Library; University of Toronto Press) ___________, Selected Poems, eds. Z. Pollock, S. Mayne, and U. Caplan (University of Toronto Press) Layton, Irving, A Wild Peculiar Joy: The Selected Poems (McClelland & Stewart) _____________, Engagements: The Prose of Irving Layton (McClelland and Stewart) Waddington, Miriam, Collected Poems (Oxford University Press) _____________, Apartment Seven: Essays Selected and New (Oxford University Press) Atwood, Margaret, ed., The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse (Oxford University Press) Geddes, Gary, ed., 15 Canadian Poets X3 (Oxford University Press) Mayne, Seymour and B. Glen Rotchin, eds., A Rich Garland: Poems for A.M. Klein (VĂŠhicule Press) Texts are either in print and/or on reserve at Morrisset. Many are also available online from book dealers specialising in Canadiana.