ENGL 492C-003: Popular Festival and the Critique of Aristocracy in Tudor and Stuart Drama – Katherine Sirluck
Senior Honours Seminar – Research Term: 2 W, 9:00 – 11:00 This seminar course will seek to discover how the characteristic forms, attitudes and energies of popular festival culture in Renaissance England serve to inform and sustain a critique of the aristocracy issued from within the commercial theatres of Tudor and Stuart London. The mimus, the […]
ENGL 492B-002: Story-telling Then and Now – Pamela Dalziel
Senior Honours Seminar – Research Term 2 Th, 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. Why do we tell stories? The very phrase “telling stories” is synonymous, to quote the Houyhnhnms in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, with saying “the thing which is not.” Yet most story-tellers are trying to articulate “the thing which is,” however they might define that […]
ENGL 492A-001: Literature and the Blues – Jerry Wasserman
Senior Honours Seminar – Research Term 1 F, 12:00 – 2:00 p.m. The blues in its various historical modes has played a central role in the evolution of African American literature, and to a lesser extent in the literature of Black Canada and First Nations. As “an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically” (Ralph […]
ENGL 491D-004: New Masses: Modernism and Crowds – Judith Paltin
Senior Honours Seminar – Theory Term 2 M, 12:00 -2:00 p.m. In this course, we will explore critiques of political theory, literatures of democracy, socialism, and dystopic collectives, technologies for the persuasion and control of crowds, and philosophies of bare life and biopolitics. It seems an appropriate moment to rethink the collective and some of the standard stories […]
ENGL 491C-003: Literature and Theories of Debt, Gift, and Commons – Jeffrey Severs
Senior Honors Seminar – Theory Term 1 T, 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. This course will ask questions about value in times of neoliberalism and financial crisis, exploring the intersection of economics, literature, and language. The course will in all likelihood be divided into four main units: 1) Money, finance, neoliberal capitalism; 2) Debt; 3) The […]
ENGL 491B-002: The Ecological Turn in Theory and Literature – Deena Rymhs
Senior Honours Seminar – Theory Term 1 Th, 10:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. What if make industry, energy dependencies, and sustainable futures relevant to literary criticism—or literary criticism relevant to them? What role can humanities scholarship serve in understanding the ecological, social, and epistemic implications of the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch shaped by human […]
ENGL 491A-001: 9/11: Trauma, Texts, and Story – Ira Nadel
Senior Honours Seminar – Theory Term 1 M, 100:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. This seminar will explore the literary impact of 9/11 through poetry, fiction and the essay. Trauma will be a major concern, the argument of the seminar that 9/11 generated, almost forced, new approaches to narrative and genre at the same time it drove a […]
ENGL 490-011: The suburbs – Miranda Burgess
Literature Majors Seminar Term 2 Th, 9:30-11:30 a.m. To the huddled masses of the nineteenth-century cities of western Europe and North America, the suburbs offered an idyllic dream of leisure, nature, and clean air. To the rebellious teens of the 1950s and 1960s, in contrast, the suburbs had become an object of mockery, even of […]
ENGL 490-010: Cli-Fi: Climate Fiction, or How Do We Witness Disaster? – Robert Rouse
Literature Majors Seminar Term 2 W, 10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. In recent years a new genre of speculative fiction has become increasingly popular; one that examines the impact of humans on the natural environment, and which speculates on the impacts of continuing climate change on modern human civilzation. Cli-Fi – or Climate Fiction – has become […]
ENGL 490-007: Early Modern Science and Literature – Dennis Danielson
Literature Majors Seminar Term 2 T, 9:30 – 11:00 a.m. Writers who wrote in English—or who received prominent translation into English—played a major role in a number of facets of early modern science, including early science fiction. Moreover, the literary dimension (broadly speaking) of those writers’ achievements repays examination from a humanities as well as […]