Fall 2024 Graduate Courses

ENGL 7003: Trends in Contemporary Literary Theory

Dr. Andrew Loman

Monday, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Image: Abandoned design for a $20 bill that substitutes Harriet Tubman for Andrew Jackson. Obtained from the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing by The New York Times, 2019. 

Description:

This course will begin with some concept work involving its key terms – “contemporary,” “issue,” “theory,” and “practice” – asking, for instance, what temporal span we have in mind when we speak of contemporaneity, what meanings we imply in the word “issue,” and what distinctions we presuppose in drawing a line between theory and practice. The course will then turn to its central program: investigating those questions and topics that have been most urgently preoccupying critical theorists in the past decade. We’ll draw on two archives: the René Wellek Lectures at the University of California, Irvine; and the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University. The theorists and artists we’ll read include Wendy Brown, William Kentridge, Toni Morrison, Timothy Morton, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. In addition to the assigned course texts, students should have a good anthology of literary theory, ideally the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (3^rd ed.).

ENGL 7051: Remembering Postmodernism

Dr. Christopher Lockett

Friday, 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM

Image: Projection at a U2 concert in Boston, July 15, 2015 (YouTube)

Description:

What is postmodernism? Or perhaps we should ask: what was postmodernism? However we frame the question, it has almost invariably bedevilled those seeking a clear answer. From the vantage of the present day, we can perhaps begin to understand it in historical context. At the same time, it’s not as if the concept has gone away: far from being an artifact of the 1960s-1990s, the term “postmodernist” persists in current political and cultural discourse, almost always as an accusation deployed in disapprobation. It has become broadly synonymous with facile relativism, anti-Enlightenment resentment, and “wokeness.”

Are these fair associations? To quote a wise cleric: the short answer is yes with an if, the long answer no with a but. Before anything else, postmodernism was, and possibly still is, a cultural condition—its theorizations, aesthetics, and other such manifestations are all downstream from that. 

This course will unpack these issues by way of a selection of American fiction, starting with “classic” postmodern texts by authors including Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon. We will then look at more contemporary novels by Monique Truong and Colson Whitehead (among others), and ask the question: what is postmodernism now? Is it still a thing? Do we need to reconceptualize it?

ENGL 7300: Public Intellectuals in Canada

Dr. Joel Deshaye

Wednesday, 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Image: Adam Maida, Illustration for the New York Times, 2019.

Description: 

First designed to address the rise of Donald Trump in American politics in 2016, this course is having a comeback. It is not only about developing as a thinker but also addressing others as an “intellectual,” and it focuses not (primarily) on Americans but on Canadians who have taken on that role from the hotspot of the salon in the 1920s, through the rise of television in the 1950s and the subsequent expansion of the educated public, then through the conservative media’s growing interest in public intellectuals in the 1990s, to the Internet age and the emerging changes to concepts of privacy and publicity today. In the context of ongoing debates about the purposes and outcomes of graduate education, this course asks students to reflect on how they can use modern media and three key forms—the essay, the talk, and the blog (or vlog or podcast)—to critique and contribute to society as intellectuals inside and outside of academe.

English 7353: Women Travelers Narrating the North

Dr. Valerie Legge

Tuesday, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Image: Postcard with photograph by Garrett Byrne (Garrett Byrne’s Series No. 24)

Description:

This course will examine a number of travel narratives written by unusually intrepid women: Aritha van Herk, Josephine Peary, Elizabeth Taylor, Edith Watson, and Mary Schaeffer. Though oriented northward, these women described their remote destinations as "exotic geographies" (Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism). In Orientalism Said suggests that travel literature contributed to the formation of imperial attitudes and helped empires rule distant lands and unruly people: "From travelers' tales ... colonies were created and ethnocentric perspectives secured" (117). Central to Said's argument is the notion that stories about strange regions of the world enabled writers to assert their own sense of superiority and to privilege their own cultures and histories. This course will investigate why women travelers were attracted to northern regions of the world and what attitudes they expressed about the people who inhabited those regions. We will begin by reading “Ellesmere, Woman as Island,” an excerpt from Aritha van Herk’s Places Far From Ellesmere.