The 2 graduate seminars we plan to run in 2023 Summer Session are below.
Studies in Literature and the Other Arts
Term 2
TTh, 11:00 am to 2:00 pm
See full seminar description [PDF]
Food, cooking, and eating have long histories of being recorded, prescribed, celebrated, and mythologized through literary art and more recently through film. Contemporary audiences for discourses of food and displays of culinary art are often conscripted into positions as apprentice cooks, competing chefs, curious consumers, critical reviewers, or hungry foodie voyeurs caught in the mania of contemporary desire for food substitutes delivered in textual and filmic forms.
This course will explore food in literature, particularly life narratives, cookbook selections, and films across different cultures and borders, from the transnational to local Vancouver contexts. The production of food is essentially linked to histories of empire, colonial power, capital, racialized and gendered labour, and ecological change. Our discussions will explore these intersections.
Course Requirements:
1) Participation in the discussion of readings, topics, and questions: 10%
2) One oral presentation (20 minutes) on a primary text and/or critical contexts: 15%
3) One short critical meditation of 750 words: 15%
4) One longer project (3500-4000 words, or 14-16 pages), that could emerge out of your seminar presentation, personal research interests, and/or critical meditation paper: 60%
See full seminar description [PDF]
Studies in Environmental Humanities
Term 1
MTh, 1000 AM - 100 PM
This seminar is an introduction to the multidisciplinary field of “critical plant studies.” Our guiding question may seem simple: What is a plant? A dictionary can provide us with a quick, text-book answer. You could also point to a tree or flower, and say “That!” So, in this seminar, let’s ask an even more specific question: What in the Arts is a plant? This ramifies in unexpected ways, and it will be our task in this seminar to trace some of these branches across the Environmental Humanities. We’ll investigate this question from an array of disciplines: philosophy, Indigenous (Potawatomi) storytelling, anthropology, history, landscape design, the visual arts, film, and literary writing (poetry, memoir, short fiction). Along the way, we might find that “the Arts” is a too-limited rubric. And throughout we’ll keep a sharp eye on matters pertaining to gender, sexuality, and queerness.
Expect materials to be set up in nodes that mix disciplinary perspectives:
- Aristotle, Michael Marder, Mel Chen, Andrew Marvell, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and The Little Shop of Horrors (Vegetality & Animacy)
- Ovid’s myth of Apollo and Daphne, Han Kang, The Vegetarian, excerpts from Schiebinger and Swan’s Colonial Botany, and Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (Book): (Mobility & Circulation)
- Georges Bataille, Michael Taussig, Shakespeare, Robert Mapplethorpe, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Dorothy Allison’s “A Lesbian Appetite” (Reproductivity & Sex)
- Algernon Blackwood’s “The Man Who Loved Trees,” Stevie Wonder’s soundtrack to The Secret Life of Plants, Octavia Butler, “Amnesty” and Suzanne Simard’s Mother Tree (Communication & Signaling)
Students will deliver a seminar presentation and submit a final essay, which need not focus on a specific plant-text on this syllabus.