Winter 2025-6 Graduate Courses

Dr. Chinelo Ezenwa, ENGL 7400: Memoirs/Literatures from the Black Atlantic: Old and New ‘Diasporas’

 

Mondays 1500-1800

 

Image: Dr. Chinelo Ezenwa (2025)

 

Literatures from the Black Atlantic: Old and New Diasporas explores the literary and cultural productions of people of African and Black descent across different geographical spaces and time periods. There are older diasporas as well as contemporary diasporas, forced migrants and so-called economic migrants who attempt to navigate new environments while grappling with their histories and present realities.

 

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

 

• Understand the historical meaning and relevance of the Black Atlantic as it relates to the African Diaspora, especially in North America.
• Identify and discuss related themes like home and belonging, displacement, identity, hybridity, language, religion, gender, and afropolitanism (cosmopolitanism).
• Situate the themes within contemporary decolonization movements in North America.
• Further develop research, close reading, presentation, and writing skills through examining autobiographical/semi-autobiographical texts from the Black Atlantic.
• Enhance team skills and community consciousness through group projects

 

 

 

Dr. Fiona Polack, ENGL 7310: All at Sea: Writing and Visualizing a Changing Ocean

Tuesdays 1000-13000

 

Image: Manganese Nodules on the Seafloor, Clarion-Clipperton Zone. Source: Wikimedia Commons

 

 

Oceans have long been associated with intense forms of exploitation. European imperialism and slavery, from the early modern period onwards, relied heavily on moving people long distances via marine routes. More recently, the sea has become the “forgotten space,” as Allan Sekula and Noël Burch dub it, undergirding global capitalism; it is the prime means by which consumer goods are transported. At the same time as they have facilitated exploitation, oceans have become increasingly subject to it as well. From over-fishing to offshore petroleum production, and from plastic pollution to deep sea mining, the impacts of anthropogenic extractivism are everywhere visible (and invisible) across the blue planet.

 

This course considers imaginative responses from a range of cultural, temporal, and geographical contexts to oceans and extraction. It will, however, return repeatedly to our own North Atlantic circumstances. We will examine literature, art, documentary film and other media in our efforts to better understand the ways in which different human communities perceive the sea. In the process, we will draw heavily on the insights of environmental humanities’ sub-fields including the blue humanities and critical ocean studies.

 

 

 

Dr. Agnes Juhasz-Ormsby, ENGL 7603: Tudor Mythmaking in Early Modern English Literature

Thursdays 1000-1300

 

Image: Lucas de Heere, The Family of Henry VIII: An Allegory of the Tudor Succession (c.1572), National Museum of Wales, Cardiff (NMW A 564)

                            

This course explores the politics of literature under the Tudors (1485-1603), the most storied dynasty in English history. We will examine how literary works responded to and shaped the new political culture promoted by Tudor monarchs who saw themselves as national saviors and restorers of the mythical British golden age. By engaging with major authors of the sixteenth century—Thomas More, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Walter Raleigh, and Queen Elizabeth I herself—we will trace how writers, publishers, and other literary agents perpetuated or subverted Tudor mythmaking, and how they contributed to or destabilized political image-building, the mystification of power, and the representation of authority. We will query how the Tudor cult of monarchy influenced nascent ideas of English nationhood and empire, and how such propaganda was complicated by the profound religious changes and political conflicts brought about by the English Reformation. We will read representative literary works in conjunction with extant visual records, chronicles, news pamphlets, and festival books. We will also situate them within contemporary social, political, and religious contexts in order to delineate the complex networks through which they were produced and disseminated among diverse communities of readers throughout the sixteenth century.

 

 

Dr. Michelle Porter, ENGL 7207: Telling It Crooked: Oral Storytelling and the Shape of Stories

Friday 1300-1600

 

Oral storytelling is at the centre of all our literary arts and we’re all natural storytellers. In this class students will explore oral literature as a practice and as a literary art. We begin with the idea that oral stories are the foundation of literature and that we all know how to tell a story, but we’ve lost touch with the shape of oral storytelling. This class will examine academic literature on oral storytelling alongside Indigenous and non-Indigenous traditional and contemporary stories in order to understand the approaches to telling a story used by a range of storytellers, starting with Métis oral traditions and working out from there. Classes will alternate between intimate storytelling sessions and discussion-based seminars. At the end of this class students will have an in-depth understanding of stories that are spoken “from your lips” and the relationship of oral stories to their written work and have created a portfolio of stories to tell.

ENGL 7337: Comics and Their Networks

Dr. Andrew Loman

Wednesday, 13:00-1600

Images:  Ben Katchor, The Jew of New York (Pantheon Books, 1998); Henry Papprill (engraver), New York, with the City of Brooklyn in the Distance, from the Steeple of the St. Paul's Church, Looking East, South, and West, 1849.

The comics theorist Thierry Groensteen coined the term “arthrology” to describe comics as a narrative network or system of interrelated parts. This course will approach comics with this basic understanding but will also think of networks that extend beyond the text proper, both in terms of comics’ intertexts (the networks of cultural texts they announce and imply) and in terms of their production (networks of artists, editors, publishers, printers, and distributors, not to mention paper mills, printing presses, computers, and so on). Although our focus will be on recently published comics, we’ll try as much as possible to sustain an understanding of the form that spans the full two centuries of comics’ production in America, avoiding the myopia that sees “sophisticated” comics as an invention of the 1980s. Our reading list is certain to include Corman’s Victory Parade, Lutes’ Berlin, Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen, and Som’s Apsara Engine, and may also include one or more of Hull’s Feeding Ghosts, Katchor’s Jew of New York, Shaw’s Discipline, Ware’s Building Stories or Jimmy Corrigan.

ENGL 7225: The Secret Lives of Objects: Writing, Items, Archives

Dr. Aaron Tucker

Thursdays, 13:00-16:00

Image: Juan Sánchez Cotán, “Still Life with Game Fowl” (1600), Art Institute of Chicago

This course takes a multi-genre creative writing approach to objects, localities, histories, futurities, and archives and aims, in part, to incorporate creative research methods into poems and prose. Students in this class will consider what an object is, what an archive is, and how poetry and prose can reveal, narrate, argue, reconsider localities and narratives.

ENGL 7357: Ecopoetics

Dr. Joel Deshaye

Fridays, 14:00–17:00 

Image: David Howells from The Gazette (16 Sept. 2022)

This course is a small but representative survey of contemporary Canadian poetry, which we will read largely through rhizomes (à la Deleuze and Guattari) of ecopoetics, media ecology, and acoustic ecology. It begins with two canonical but contemporary figures, Jan Zwicky and Don McKay, before moving on to mid-career writers from various places and backgrounds, likely (but not yet definitely): Oana Avasilichioaei, Kaie Kellough, Marvin Francis, and Karen Solie. Each of these writers is interested in media, broadly conceived, whether media as metaphor (live or dead) or as something as potentially banal as an old tape deck or a step counter. In this seminar, we will look especially for media represented in natural environments, and we will draw on ecopoetics, media ecology, and acoustic ecology to help us conceptualize how natural environments change because of media in them.