Department of English

Special and Select Topics

Projected Course Offerings for 2011-2012¹

 The information below is also available as a pdf document that can be downloaded and printed.

 Fall Semester 2011
Winter Semester 2012
 

ENGL 2228—INTERMEDIATE SPECIAL TOPICS
TOPIC: Comics as Literature
PROFESSORS: Lee Easton and Richard Harrison
This survey course looks at the emergence of the comic book as a popular medium of the 20th century whose characters have become a key part of the North American mythology. The course looks at the comic book medium in North America from a number of different formal and critical perspectives. Students will also explore the genres of manga and anime.
PREREQUISITE: English 1101/ General Education 1401 or 1402 or 1403 and one of English 1131, 1135, 1137, 1141 

ENGL 4401—SELECT TOPICS IN THEMES, FORMS, AND GENRES
TOPIC: Radical Cultural Theory: Post-Anarchist Studies
PROFESSOR: Michael Truscello
Concomitant with the rise of alter-globalization movements in the past decade has been the emergence of a substantial amount of scholarship in what might be described as “anarchist studies.” Anarchism is an often neglected political philosophy in the academy; but many of the alter-globalization movements have embodied anarchist concepts in their practices, and perhaps as a result a wave of recent scholarship has returned to the history and philosophy of anarchism. This course will examine a specific kind of anarchism: post-anarchism. Post-anarchism includes the work of Todd May, Saul Newman, Lewis Call, and Richard Day, among many, and often refers to one of two theoretical moves: to revisit classical anarchist thought from the perspective of post-structuralist philosophy; or, to reclaim elements of post-structuralist thought as properly anarchist. In the course, we will examine a wide range of cultural texts from post-anarchist perspectives, including the films V for Vendetta and The Dark Knight, and the YouTube phenomenon known as “riot porn.” What is post-anarchism? How would one define post-anarchist aesthetics? What is the post-anarchist conception of “power” in the age of corporate globalization?
PREREQUISITE: One 3000-level English course.

ENGL 4440—SELECT TOPICS IN LITERATURE OF THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY, 1790-1917
TOPIC: Pre-Raphaelitism
PROFESSOR: Sharon Smulders
This course provides an in-depth examination of the reciprocity between the visual and verbal arts within the aesthetic movement known as Pre-Raphaelitism. Founded in 1848, the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens, and Thomas Woolner—banded together in revolt against the classicism of the Royal Academy. An avant-garde movement, the PRB strove to create work that was more spiritually pure, more naturalistically real, and more emotionally authentic than that of their predecessor Sir Joshua Reynolds. In the process, they sought not only to recover the purity of vision that had characterized medieval art (that is, before Raphael) but also to reproduce the affective qualities that they admired in romantic verse. Rejecting contemporary visual practice, the PRB drew inspiration instead from the verbal arts by choosing, for instance, to give pictorial representation to the sensuous, the subjective, and the symbolic in John Keats and Alfred Tennyson. A few members, like D.G. Rossetti, went so far as to fuse painting and poetry in order to create the “double work of art.” While the PRB thus put pictorial images to written ones, the poets associated with the group—Christina Rossetti, George Meredith, William Morris, and Algernon Swinburne—simultaneously translated the tenets of early Pre-Raphaelitism from painting into poetry. Focusing on the dialogue between visual and verbal arts within the movement, the course will briefly consider the impact of Pre-Raphaelite syncretism on late Victorian artists and authors like Evelyn de Morgan, Michael Field, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Oscar Wilde, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic theory, particularly the work of John Ruskin, will inform examination of visual and verbal materials.
PREREQUISITE: One 3000-level English course. RECOMMENDED PREPARATION: One of English 3340, 3341, 3344, or 3345.

ENGL 4443—SELECT TOPICS IN LITERATURE OF THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, 1660-1832
TOPIC: The Gothic
PROFESSOR: Karen Manarin
This course explores the popular, and infamous, genre of the gothic novel and its influence on political and social debate in the long eighteenth century. Sex, violence, terror, and horror combine to push the boundaries of what can and cannot be represented in polite society. This course traces the development of the gothic novel from Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, through Radcliffe’s romance, The Mysteries of Udolpho, to the darker horrors of Lewis’s The Monk, and the psychological and narrative complexities of Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. However, this course also explores the impact of gothic tropes on political and social debate by examining newspapers, periodicals, and polemical texts. The French Revolution, social reform movements, marriage laws, religious sectarianism, and anxieties about literacy are framed by the gothic.
PREREQUISITE: One 3000-level English course. RECOMMENDED PREPARATION: One of English 3330, 3331, 3340, 3341.

ENGL 2228—INTERMEDIATE SPECIAL TOPICS
TOPIC: The Aboriginal/American Indian Experience through Literature
PROFESSOR: Renae Watchman
Aboriginal/American Indian experience recorded in fiction, autobiography, poetry, and essay in the 20th century brings to light specific tribal traditions, values, and practices. The course emphasizes the content and structure of the literature influenced by Government policies on native people, families, and communities. Historical, geographical, political, and economic contexts are considered in this study of works produced by Aboriginal/American Indian artists and intellectuals.
PREREQUISITE: English 1101/ General Education 1401 or 1402 or 1403 and one of English 1131, 1135, 1137, 1141.

ENGL 4410—SELECT TOPICS IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE, 1450-1700
TOPIC: The Gawain Manuscript and Its Poems
PROFESSOR: Kenna Olsen
The aim of this course is to study four of the most important Middle English poems, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Patience and Cleanness, in their manuscript context. British Library MS. Cotton Nero A.x. is the only known manuscript containing these anonymous poems, generally accepted to have been written by the same author, and belonging to the so-called ‘Alliterative Revival’ of Middle English poetry. While Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl are often briefly studied in junior level undergraduate courses by way of editions that have been constructed via significant editorial intervention, all four poems require a manuscript-based reading, in that a manuscript’s layout represents a signifying arrangement of text that facilitates our reading and connects us with medieval reception of texts. By studying all four poems in their manuscript context, we will examine the medieval origins of romance, chivalry, grief, humour, violence, sexism, racism and homophobia, all while considering important issues related to medieval manuscript studies and the Cotton Nero A.x. manuscript in particular, such as, authorial self-assertion, writing systems, and audience and scribal investment.
PREREQUISITE: One 3000-level English course.
RECOMMENDED PREPARATION: One of English 3323 or 3324.

ENGL 4440—SELECT TOPICS IN LITERATURE OF THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY, 1790-1917
TOPIC: Cultural Nationalism and Nineteenth-Century Canadian Literature
PROFESSOR: Michele Holmgren
This course focuses on the evolution of cultural nationalism in Canadian literature from its roots in regional writing of the early nineteenth century, through the development of mid-century literary periodicals and the Confederation period, until the beginnings of the modern period. The course will introduce concepts of regionalism and nationalism, and explore the way that literature in Canada encouraged the concept of an “imagined community” among Canadian writers and readers before Canada officially became a nation. Fiction, poetry—particularly patriotic verse—and non-fiction prose and literary criticism of the time will be explored in the following contexts: Romantic theories of cultural nationalism put forward by Fichte, Schlegel and Herder, cultural nationalist movements in other countries, including Ireland, the roles of Canadian literary periodicals and newspapers in encouraging nationalism before Confederation, the rise of the Confederation poets, and political movements, including Canadian Imperialist and the Canada First movements, that arose between Confederation and the First World War.
PREREQUISITE: One 3000-level English course.
RECOMMENDED PREPARATION: One of English 3340, 3341, 3344, or 3345.

ENGL 4446—SELECT TOPICS IN LITERATURE OF THE LONG TWENTIETH CENTURY, 1865-PRESENT
TOPIC: Canadian Literature and Globalization
PROFESSOR: Kit Dobson
This 4000-level seminar course is designed to give students exposure to Canadian literature in the context of theories around globalization / transnational studies. In a Canadian literary context, questions about globalization emerge most clearly in the late 1980s debates about the Free Trade Agreement with the United States (later NAFTA), as debates about protections for Canadian culture became a point of contention for writers. These debates blossomed in the 1990s at the same time as globalization became a buzzword that was heavily theorized by Marxist, postcolonial, and postmodern thinkers, among others, and have continued into the new millennium. While globalization is now so multi-faceted a term that it can be very difficult to define, it remains a part of our culture and a part of how literature in Canada has addressed its readers.
PREREQUISITE: One 3000-level English course.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

¹ Several factors, including (but not limited to) student demand and instructor availability, affect the number and range of courses offered in any one semester. This projected offering is, therefore, subject to change.

Updated: February 18, 2011