This seminar will allow for examination of topics related to African literature in English. Topics in any given year will vary but may include a range of themes and issues emerging from African prose (fiction and non-fiction), poetry, drama, and other genres and forms. Course may be taken more than once for credit as long as it is a separate section code/subtitle. Course topics for the upcoming year will be posted on the departmental website.

This seminar will allow for examination of topics related to South Asian literature in English. Topics in any given year will vary but may include a range of themes and issues emerging from South Asian prose (fiction and non-fiction), poetry, drama, and other genres and forms. Course may be taken more than once for credit as long as it is a separate section code/subtitle. Course topics for the upcoming year will be posted on the departmental website.

Taking a cue from Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting (2019); from the inseparability of remembering from forgetting; and from the importance of both to the period that brought us Freud, two opium wars, and numerous variations on the themes of nostalgia and amnesia, this class will explore the relation between remembering and forgetting in the Victorian novel and Victorian culture. We will discuss the role of technologies and institutions (museums; collections; photography; the novel) in shaping the ways in which, and the kinds of things, the Victorians chose to remember and to forget. Topics may include, among others: repression and forgetfulness; false and/or recovered memory; screen memory; post-memory; cultural and individual remembering and forgetting.

Beginning with George Eliot's idea for a new kind of realism, and taking as a given that there is no pure "genre," we will discuss the nature and interaction of those constructions understood as genres both within and between Victorian novels (such as realism; sensation fiction; Gothic and melodrama), and some non-novelistic ones, such as non-fiction prose and (again) melodrama; we will also look at the role of the critical establishment in producing and policing such distinctions, and the role of theory and criticism more generally in discussions of genre.

We are currently in the midst of a resurgence of memory studies, a field that crosses many disciplines and methodological approaches. Memory has always been one of the central motifs of Romanticism, and it has recently become a subject engaged anew by Romantic theorists. The historical and conceptual study of memory affords opportunity to interrogate the aesthetic, political, cultural, and sociological implications of Romantic discourse. We will examine poetry and prose that engage with questions of subjectivity and the self; the pathologies of nostalgia; nationalism and the past; and the tensions between history and memory. The perils of memory within all of these foci include sentimentalism, political xenophobia, and solipsism; its triumphs include cultural cohesion and self-identification. We will address Romantic memory in its full complexity.

Pastoral has long been a subject close to the centre of studies of British Romanticism. It has been absorbed into all of the major theoretical debates: from linguistic theories studying it as a forum for textual displacement, to historicist readings of pastoral that study its mediations of history and commodity culture, and more recently to eco-criticisms that read pastoral in terms of the economy of ecological and global considerations. Pastoral, and the georgic pastoral, have always been indispensable value terms in our understanding of the period. And yet pastoral, for all of its vital importance, is a term that still causes confusion, or that is sometimes used as a casual synonym for "landscape." This course will study the old subject of Romantic pastoral anew. We will study its variable definitions, the lively debates, both historical and contemporary, surrounding it, and the many crucial points of contact it makes with key issues in Romantic poetry. These include its inextricable relationship with elegy and other genres, and the central place played by pastoral in Romantic political, philosophical, and social culture.

This course explores the manifold, uneasy relationships between Romanticism and technology, a word in the process of taking on its current meanings during the period. We will focus on steam power in order to understand the modes of modernity that emerged from Romanticism's coal-fueled global and imperial history. From Joanna Baillie’s "Address to a Steam Vessel" and William Wordsworth's "Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways" to P.B. Shelley's "Letter to Maria Gisborne," and Thomas De Quincey's "The English Mail-Coach," Romantic writing grappled with "the all-changing power of steam." The phrase comes from an essay in the Asiatic Journal, in which the eponymous "Returned Exile" remarks that "the all-changing power of steam has performed its metamorphoses in India as well as in Europe." We will follow these metamorphoses to early British India, where a spate of speculative fictions appeared, tracing utopian and dystopian futures: H. Goodeve’s "1980" introduces its characters "of all colors and ranks" as passengers on "the Himalaya steam mail," while in H. M. Parker's "The Junction of the Oceans. [A Tale of the Year 2074.]," a project to cut a canal across Panama and let steam ships navigate between the Atlantic and Pacific unleashes a flood that destroys the world.

This course examines the late Victorians' intellectual efforts to move beyond mid-Victorian culture. In particular, we will focus on their conception of the relations between ethics and aesthetics, as a paradigm shift away from mid-Victorian ideas of ethics, which were primarily rational and prescriptive. By analyzing experimental forms of cognitive aesthetics in George Eliot, William Morris, Thomas Hardy, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, we will reconstruct a contestatory conception of ethics in these writers that was ironic, sensory, and counter-factual, a new "higher ethics" (Walter Pater). Issues to be discussed include ethology of skepticism, dialectics of futuristic envisioning, utopian superscription, naturalistic affect, and feelings as the intellect.

Marx analyzed a "state of society in which the process of production has the mastery over man." At about the same time, Emerson was lamenting that '"Things are in the saddle and ride mankind." In this course we will read works by major figures in the American renaissance (Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Douglass, Poe, and others) in conjunction with writings from roughly the same period by Karl Marx ("The German Ideology," "Capital," "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," Communist Manifesto). We may supplement this reading with excerpts from some recent examples of Marxist political philosophy (Jameson, Balibar, Derrida, Zizek, Spivak, for example). We will be considering, on a general level, the relationship between nineteenth-century American and Marxist critiques of capitalism, and we will be looking — more locally — for points of convergence in these writers' approaches to questions concerning commodification, the mass market, slavery, democracy, the charisma of political leaders and the mid-century revolutions in Europe.

What can critical race theory tell us about literary form? How might practices of formal analysis contribute to an understanding of the study of difference? This course proposes an exploration of the relation between literary form and critical race theory. Using critical comparative approaches from a range of humanistic and theoretical fields, we will pay particular attention to experimentation and genre and consider, on the one hand, global discourses of race (particularly Blackness), and, on the other, 20th and 21st century Black and diasporic literature and theory whose experiments with form trouble, challenge, or construct notions of identity, group, relation, and race.

This course will focus on Canadian ecopoetry, a form of poetry that is inspired by "nature" but departs from traditional nature poetry by engaging with environmental politics. We will begin with selections of late twentieth century poetry that is not consciously ecological yet evokes various forms of ecological interrelatedness. We will then read contemporary ecopoetry that self-consciously investigates the role of language and poetry in responding to current environmental crises. In reading this body of work, we will pay special attention to the diversity of formal and aesthetic strategies that Canadian ecopoetry encompasses, from the activism of Rita Wong and Stephen Collis, to the linguistic experimentalism of Dionne Brand and Canisia Lubrin, to the scientifically inspired poetics of Adam Dickinson and Christian Bök, to the anti-colonial aesthetics of Leanne Simpson and Craig Santos Perez. We will consider such questions as: What formal experiments are contemporary Canadian poets drawing upon in order to respond to the pressures of living in a 21st century marked by anthropogenic change? Can a poem be considered "ecological" even if it is not explicitly concerned with "nature" or the "environment"? How does contemporary ecopoetry speak to the intersections between environmental, social, and racial justice?

Sociological inclusiveness — serious mimetic attention to the middle and lower classes — is one of the hallmarks of modern realist literature. But what is social class as a subject of literary representation? What, in particular, is social class in modern industrial-commercial liberal-democratic society as opposed to its agrarian feudal-aristocratic predecessor? Is class a form of collective self-identification or just an academic descriptor? Is a class akin to a culture? How, if at all, do different classes interrelate? How has the nature and experience of social class changed over time? And what are the motivations and the special difficulties involved when the highly literate members of the educated classes attempt to sympathetically represent the less literate members of less educated classes? Why do issues of "culture" come up so frequently in such works? This course attempts to address such questions in relation to a selection of major works of American literary realism. In the first three weeks we will establish a set of shared conceptual reference points by recourse to some of the major sociological theorists of class, from Marx to Bourdieu. In all subsequent weeks the discussion will focus on a primary work of literature.

This course will engage with the construction and social function of autobiographical subjectivity in printed and graphic memoir forms that blend different discourses or combine two or more media. Framed by the premise that the memoir is a mediated mode of self-expression, the course will study the relationship between what Foucault calls the "technologies of the self" and the media technologies through which the memoir's self-referential subject expresses itself. We will approach this issue by putting memoirs in dialogue with a range of theoretical and critical material about life writing, subject formation, corporeality, and mediality. Our discussions will then focus on the performativity, positionality, and relationality of the writing subject; the tropes through which the body figures in self-narratives; the intertextual and inter/medial structure of memoirs; the ways in which discourses such as the self-reflexive essay, philosophy, autoethnography, and confession inflect self-expression; the agency gained in writing a memoir, especially in relation to collectivities; and the impact of digital technologies and social media on memoirs today. The range of (mostly Canadian) memoirs selected will afford us the opportunity to address these questions in relation to gender, sexuality, "race," and class.

In this course, we will examine the intersections of ecocriticism and postcoloniality across the Global South. With an emphasis on postcolonial methods and approaches, this course will be structured as a global and comparative study of texts from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Through these materials topics of discussion will include colonialism, neoimperialism and globalization, urbanity, indigeneity, the politics of storytelling, climate change, environmental degradation, and the narrative challenges posed by a combination of these and other factors.

This course reads a representative sample of texts by African-Canadian writers who may be regarded as "Black and Indigenous" and/or "Afro-Métis" and/or who explore this intersectional identity that has been long-obscured, often disputed, and yet indisputably present. Indeed, as more and more Black Canadians claim or name this identity, so will it be necessary to attend to their writing out of a dual-racial, or biracial, experience of oppression, protesting both notions of "race purity" and government definitions of who is or can be "status" Indigenous, Inuit, or Métis. For an introduction to the controversies and conundrums around this Black-and-Indigenous self-concept, see George Elliott Clarke, "Assembling the Afro-Métis Syllabus: Some Preliminary Reading," Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien, 42 (2022), pp. 10-41.

How do literary and cultural studies approach the question of similarity without collapsing into sameness? And how do we consider and write through the consequences of comparison? This course takes as its premise the unevenness inherent in any act of comparison across geography, history, group. Rather than treating the incommensurate but proximate as an impasse, this course investigates what methodologies can ethically bring intertwined and/or disparate histories into view, and explores how to productively read literatures that arise from contexts of oppression. Reading will focus in Black and Postcolonial Studies, but students are encouraged to do comparative work in their research paper within or beyond these fields.

This seminar will allow for examination of topics related to Medieval literature. Topics in any given year will vary but may include a range of themes and issues emerging from Medieval prose, poetry, drama, and other genres and forms. Course may be taken more than once for credit as long as it is a separate section code/subtitle. Course topics for the upcoming year will be posted on the departmental website.

Graham Greenes works often depict the decay of empire: The Heart of the Matter (1948) depicts Sierra Leone under British possession; The Quiet American (1955) depicts CIA activity as the French and Vietminh fought for control of Vietnam in the early 1950s. His works also depict revolutionary struggles against repressive regimes, as in Our Man in Havana (1958), set in Cuba in the years immediately before the accession of Fidel Castro; The Comedians (1966) set in the "nightmare republic" of Haiti under Papa Doc Duvalier; and The Honorary Consul (1973) set on the border of Argentina and Paraguay in the approach to the "Dirty War." This course would look at Greene’s attempt, imaginatively, to break out of the East-West dualism of the Cold War and turn his attention as a novelist to the Global South. Critics often refer to his sense of place as "Greeneland" – a territory of political uncertainty, poverty, and vulnerability, which he defined partly by pure observation, as he was an outstanding international journalist, but also by preoccupations with theology and psychoanalysis. His work repeatedly establishes imaginative elsewheres, and this course would seek to probe his accomplishments.

Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" is a paradigmatic text for considering the public life of books -- the geopolitical and cultural consequences of a novel's publication and reception in a series of both distinct and connected sites. This seminar will read Rushdie''s novel in three contexts: first, in and of itself; second, in the context of Rushdie's autobiographical writing and related reflections and interrogations of the book and its standing and impact; third, in the ongoing context of the "Rushdie Affair" associated with the Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 Fatwa, through to the 2022 attack on the author. These readings will be informed by our consideration of contemporaneous reviews, before and after the Fatwa; of Rushdie scholarship and current public writing about Rushdie; and of classic and more recent studies of the novel and politics ranging from the likes of Debjani Ganguly, Terry Eagleton, Aijaz Ahmad, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Irving Howe, among others.

This seminar will allow for examination of topics related to Early Modern literature. Topics in any given year will vary but may include a range of themes and issues emerging from Early Modern prose, poetry, drama, and other genres and forms. Course may be taken more than once for credit as long as it is a separate section code/subtitle. Course topics for the upcoming year will be posted on the departmental website.

This course will explore intersections between Canadian literary studies and the interrelated fields of critical animal studies and animal narratology. Anchored in seminal readings by Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Cary Wolfe, Donna Haraway, and J.M. Coetzee, the first half of the course will introduce some of the key ethical and representational questions that inform the interrelated fields of critical animal studies and animal narratology: What role does language play in mediating the boundary between humans and non-human animals? What power does literature have to imagine animals without erasing their "significant otherness" (Haraway)? Are certain literary forms more suited to this challenge than others? The second half of the course will take the lessons we have gleaned from our readings in critical animal studies and animal narratology to query the role of animals within the Canadian literary imagination. What is at stake in declaring, as Charles G.D. Roberts once did, that the animal story is a distinctly "Canadian genre"? In what ways has the Canadian literary imagination instrumentalized animals to bolster the English Canadian projects of "white civility" (Coleman) and settler-colonialism? And how have Canadian writers used literary aesthetics to imagine more ethical ways of being with animals?

This seminar will allow for examination of topics related to Restoration and Eighteenth-Century literature. Topics in any given year will vary but may include a range of themes and issues emerging from Restoration and Eighteenth-Century prose (fiction and non-fiction), poetry, drama, and other genres and forms. Course may be taken more than once for credit as long as it is a separate section code/subtitle. Course topics for the upcoming year will be posted on the departmental website.

This seminar will allow for examination of topics related to Romantic and Victorian literature. Topics in any given year will vary but may include a range of themes and issues emerging from Romantic and Victorian prose (fiction and non-fiction), poetry, drama, and other genres and forms. Course may be taken more than once for credit as long as it is a separate section code/subtitle. Course topics for the upcoming year will be posted on the departmental website.

This seminar will allow for examination of topics related to Twentieth-Century and Contemporary literature. Topics in any given year will vary but may include a range of themes and issues emerging from Twentieth-Century and Contemporary prose (fiction and non-fiction), poetry, drama, and other genres and forms. Course may be taken more than once for credit as long as it is a separate section code/subtitle. Course topics for the upcoming year will be posted on the departmental website.