Fall 2026-2027 Graduate Courses

Dr. Julia Polyck-O'Neill, ENGL 7003: Trends in Contemporary Critical Theory

Mondays 1100-1400

 

 

 

Trends in Contemporary Critical Theory 

 

Contemporary Critical Thought: Theory and Practice: This course engages in an examination and analysis of contemporary critical thinking and reading, drawing from both theory and practice as it applies to literatures and related areas of inquiry. Students will develop a familiarity with major and minor movements in critical literary thought and reading as it circulates in this contemporary moment, with an eye for the current and historical events, movements, and critical genres that generate the trajectory of the scholarly, activist, and creative thinking undertaken now. The practical application of theory is central to this course.

 

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Dr. Robert Ormsby, ENGL 7105: Shakespeare Across Media

Wednesdays 1000-1300

 

 Image: John Singer Sargent, Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (1889). London, Tate Gallery.

 

Shakespeare Across Media

 

Shakespeare’s writings and life story have been re-worked in literature, film, and theatre for over four centuries, turning him into England’s “national poet.” By exploring works mostly from the twenty-first century, this course will examine how the cultural authority that comes with the status of such singular authorship is spread across many media and shared among many agents, including actors, directors, adaptors, writers, and spectators across the globe. We will also consider the theory that someone else authored the works attributed to the man from Stratford-upon-Avon and ask what it means to say that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare. Throughout the course, we will be concerned with questions of originality and copying, the relationship between biography and writing, and the intercultural reception and perpetuation of “Shakespeare.”

 

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Dr. Lisa Moore, ENGL 7208: Writing the Political Novella

Tuesdays 1000-1300

Image credit: Lisa Moore

 

Writing the Political Novella

 

We will explore how the social and political pressures of the present moment touch down in the lives of our fictional characters, and how even the smallest antagonisms – for example: losing a bus pass; or being victim of a renoviction;  getting on the wrong side of a new manager; the necessity of thwarting unwanted sexual attentions in the workplace – might provoke a vertiginous slide down the slope of relative stability to crushing precarity. On the other hand, we will also explore how individuals exercise agency against neoliberal forces, global capitalism and environmental desecration. We will reckon with the notion that plot is character; and character is plot, a tango of society demanding conformity and silence from the individual and the individual fighting back. At the same time, we will question the novella form and experiment with all its possibilities. We will fashion tension as calibrated as a combination lock; as radical as spreading the seeds of an invasive plant with roots that can crack through concrete next to an AI centre. And, we will ask how the length of a story affects our understanding of the unfolding of time. We will explore the politics of time: how it is bought and sold; who gets leisure time; what it means to be cast out of the community shaped by the punch clock. And we will focus on how the creation of point of view differs according to the length of a narrative, the allotted pages of a novella, as opposed to a poem, short story, or novel.  We will ask: what are the attributes of a novella, and how a compact form creates rhythm through unevenly distributed attention. And how concentrated attention is a form of bearing witness and a political act. And how many points-of-view can be jammed into this relatively short form, or how many angels fit on the head of a pin? To do all this exploration, we will read some very great novellas and discuss how they work, written by the likes of Kim Thuy, Miriam Toews, Melissa Barbeau, Otoniya J. Okat Bitek and Claire Keegan.