In this course, we will both experience and critique the broad environmental implications of the urban "use" of nature — whether for art, criticism, or personal rejuvenation — by engaging with pastoral texts while physically enacting the movement from urban to rural and back again. We will read and discuss canonical American environmental and agricultural literature as well as key works of eco-criticism in light of twenty-first century environmental realities, analyzing the relationship between narrative, environment, and material experience in order to build a compelling set of literary and theoretical approaches equal to the urgent challenges of our contemporary moment. This is an experimental course designed to unite theory and practice by engaging in graduate-level study both on the St. George campus of U of T and on Bela Farm in Hillsburgh, Ontario. Students are encouraged therefore to think creatively not only about the pastoral form, its expressions, and its applications but also about the impact and potential of land-based experiential learning as a way of exploring these questions.

This course will focus on how Inuit cinematography refuses settler colonialism by affirming and demanding recognition of Inuit agency. Employing narratives (oral and written) but focusing primarily on films (feature and documentaries) by Isuma and Arnait (Women's Video Collective), both based in Igloolik, Nunavut, we will engage with what constitutes these Inuit production companies' cinema of refusal: from its critical engagement with a range of ethnographic and other archival material to its decolonizing documentary ethos; from its simultaneous appropriation and critique of western modernity to its assertion of Inuit modernity and self-determination; from its tactical refusal of subtitles to its community-based production. To better appreciate how the Inuit cinema of refusal can be understood as an enactment of Inuit "visual sovereignty" (Michelle Raheja) in relation to land, we will study these films in dialogue with a small selection of oral and written Inuit stories that directly address Inuit modernity. Our discussions will situate these visual and verbal texts in the context of Indigenous methodologies, specifically Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (Inuit traditional knowledge and ways of knowing), and related film and critical studies.

This course studies cultural forms that participate in movements of liberation. It focuses on the commitment to future revolutionary possibilities in anticolonial, antiracist, and feminist thought and praxis, especially on the reinvention of literary and media codes and canons that unfold in such struggles. We will analyze subversive fiction, political essays/manifestos, prison memoirs, resistance poetry, documentary and narrative cinema, and photographic and televisual texts to address urgent questions about political existence in the long twentieth century of decolonization.

Joyce's biographer, Richard Ellmann, once remarked "we are still learning to be Joyce's contemporaries." In Ulysses, Joyce turned to the well-known myth of a previous time in an effort to give shape to the much less obvious myths of his own time. Our primary question in this seminar will be: what did Joyce think he was doing in writing these stories and novels, how did that affect the way that he wrote them, and why did those narrative innovations become such a primary influence on the aesthetic of modernism? Joyce went out of his way, time and time again, to present himself as someone on a mission, someone who must not be stopped or Irish culture in particular, and World culture in general, would suffer. As we look at Joyce's fiction through the lenses of major theoretical approaches to in this seminar (psychoanalytic, feminist, post-colonial, Marxist, modernist — to name the most prominent), we will also maintain, throughout the course of the seminar, a keen interest in "the reality of experience" as Joyce would have witnessed it — the rise of advertising and commodity culture, as well as the birth of a new Art form: cinema.

This course explores the intersection of short fiction, intermedial adaptation, and narratology. Adapting a story from fiction to film offers filmmakers numerous opportunities to interpret, critique, politicize (or de-politicize), and generally reinvent the source text and, in doing so, to explore the possibilities and limitations of various genres and media. For literary and film critics, moreover, the process and results of adaptation serves as a laboratory in which to test, expand, or challenge how we read and analyze texts. What happens to our interpretive frameworks when a story crosses medial boundaries?

This course explores innovative 20/21C narratives as incitements to advance and revise narrative theory. Narratology is a field in its own right, but it also offers critical methods and analytical tools with broad applicability across literary studies — including feminist, queer, postcolonial, Marxist, and psychoanalytic criticism. This course has two complementary aims. First, it aims to provide a toolkit of narratological concepts and methods that students might use in their future research. Second, it explores the productive relationship between narrative theory and experimental narratives: how narrative theories are challenged and spurred by experimental literary practice (as well as by innovations in other media including film, comics and videogames). We will also explore key aspects of narrative, notably narrators and temporal structure, as ways through which narratives "argue" with pre-existing genres, power-structures and ways of seeing. Throughout the course we will attend closely to the wide-ranging scholarship on narrative theory and criticism. Like the narratives we will read, seminars will be conducted in the spirit of exploration and experiment. We will theorize and classify texts and techniques, but the pleasure and challenge will be in letting the narratives take us to the limits of theory.

When, in 1914-15, Georg Lukács chose the title The Theory of the Novel for his influential work on the modern literary genre par excellence, he named a field of endeavour that has preoccupied literary theorists and critics from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Borrowing his title, this course sets out to engage with landmark contributions to the theory of the novel over the last century. In addition to Lukács's Hegelian (and, later, Marxist) answers to the question of why novels exist and how they function, we will canvass Russian Formalist, structuralist, post-structuralist, psychoanalytic, and narratological approaches. We'll also make certain to have two literary texts in common to enable deeply informed in-class discussion and analysis — one novel and one short story. (Is this last, the short story, cheating? Among the issues we'll address is the extent to which the theory of the novel applies to all prose fiction.)

This seminar will allow for examination of topics related to genres and forms not delimited by national/regional literatures or periods. Topics in any given year will vary but may include a range of themes and issues emerging from a specific genre or form, such as the novel, drama, or poetry. 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.

Writing publishable work: without doubt the single most important ability for success in the academy but rarely explicitly taught in graduate school. This course teaches it. Students will choose the best paper (or the paper they judge to have the most potential) from their first-term coursework. Via workshopping and in response to feedback from their peers and the instructor, they will take that paper through a series of expansions and revisions to produce, by term’s end, a polished article. The final assignment will be to submit that article to a journal to be considered for publication. Along the way students will locate fitting venues for their work; identify and emulate successful aspects of recently published articles they consider the best in their field; evaluate academic writing for its style as well as its argument (recognizing that, in the humanities at least, the two are inseparable); and develop habits that enable them regularly to write and revise. Above all, they will come to think of themselves as writers: people for whom writing is not a sporadic activity driven by deadlines but a quotidian part of who they are and what they do.

In 2019, a report by Oxford University researchers found that adopting a plant-based diet was the single most significant intervention consumers could make in the face of climate disaster. Others counter that 'eating meat is one of the things that makes us human.' Derrida says the moral question isn't whether one eats or doesn't eat this or that. Is it possible to eat well in the Anthropocene, an era in which 'what it means to be human' is invoked with increasing frequency? Are there ethical omnivores? What do these questions have to do with students of English literature? During this course, we will study a range of thinkers who have engaged with the issue of eating, eating well, eating others, and (sometimes) 'what it means to be human.'

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer re-tells the Turtle Island and Garden of Eden creation stories, and imagines the fateful conversation that ensued when the two met. In this course, students will engage with Genesis 1-3 through the lens of the conversation Kimmerer proposes, asking how a reparative reading of this foundational cultural narrative might offer a strategy for meeting environmental crisis. By comparing different English versions of the Bible, students will explore how translation progressively stripped the language of Genesis 1-3 of its animacy and the story of its deep connection to land, enabling the myth to become a justification for colonization and environmental degradation. Then, utilizing apocryphal stories, Near Eastern mythology, ancient and medieval commentary from the Jewish and Christian traditions as well as ecocritical and translation theory, we will listen for echoes of an animate land-based cosmology present within the Biblical text. The course will culminate in an off-site workshop, where students will enact "re-story-ation," drawing the re-animated biblical myth into conversation with the land itself.

This course surveys the linguistic and cultural history of the English language from the late fifteenth century until the present day. It reviews representative developments in vocabulary, spelling, grammar, pronunciation, and the codification of English in dictionaries and grammars. Themes for seminar discussion and research papers may include such topics as the processes and implications of language change; standardization and prescriptivism; the functions of English, French, and Latin in and beyond Britain; language contact, pidgins and creoles; colonization, empire, and global Englishes; the literary use of English (standard and non-standard varieties) by native and non-native speakers; the linguistic effects of printing, news media, the internet, and technology general. Research deploying large digital corpora is changing the stories and histories of English, and the course will allow students to experiment with social and cultural microhistories of words and linguistic forms with the aid of available corpora and of digital searching methods. It will engage with theories of language evolution, variation, and change. Students will be encouraged to consider how to bridge historical linguistics and literature and how to bring knowledge of the English language into their literary studies.

A survey of diasporic Englishes, with strong emphases on lexicon, morphology, syntactical structure, and pronunciation in their distinctness from "standard English." Attention will be given to the historical and cultural circumstances that have informed these transformations. While we survey specific developments (such as, for instance, Englishes in Scotland, Canada, the Caribbean, India, and on the internet), these varieties will illustrate more general developments and dynamics of language variation in the diaspora. General topics may include concepts and terms for describing language; language contact and language change; pidgins and Creoles; the use of English as a primary language, and official second language, and an international language; globalization; language planning; issues pertaining to the codification and teaching of 'non-standard' Englishes; the dynamics of the Creole continuum and of language-mixing in literary and non-literary texts.

Disruptions to the social and material foundations of global society produced by climate change are now ubiquitous and growing in severity. Writers and popular artists who aim to consider the human future face a narrative challenge: climate change is seemingly indefinite in duration, comprised of an incalculable number of inputs, and difficult to explicate through the traditional paradigm of protagonist and antagonist. How to speak about what’s coming? Dystopian fiction seems to offer a starting point. Climate may be understood as an intensifier of traditional hazards that dystopian artists and thinkers have long interrogated: plague, resource conflict, brutalized social control, and the perils of new technology. This course will review fictional, near future dystopias, interpolated by recent theoretical work on climate. Questions to be examined include: Does the traditional dichotomy between literary fiction and genre fiction remain salient in valuing future-facing texts? Have speculative forms like science fiction and dystopia acquired a new primacy ahead of "merely" literary works? Is the book-text alone still capable of mobilizing social action on subjects like climate change or is adaption to visual media now requisite? Must emotional potency come at the expense of scientific nuance? Is alarmism productive or unhelpful in climate fiction?

First proposed by Guy Debord in his 1955 essay "Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography," the term "psychogeography" is defined as "the study of the specific effects (and affects) of the built environment (intended or not) on the emotions and actions of individuals" (Buchanan, Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory, 2010, pp. 390-91). As an impulse to experience urban spaces in radically new and imaginative ways, the concept "psychogeography" will guide our inquiry into the ways contemporary literature seeks to diagnose and re-imagine actual space. We will focus on selected 20th and 21st century fiction and non-fiction that explore the effects of spatial perception on the individual and communal psyche. Our aim is to examine the way imagined and, in some cases, even hallucinated spaces reflect the contemporary problems of spatial surveillance, control and dispossession while at the same time revealing the need and strategies of ordinary users to overcome their spatial alienation and reclaim their environment.

This course explores the topographies of contemporary dystopian fiction. Along with the subgenres such as the post-apocalyptic and "the new weird," dystopian fiction offers alternative narratives of the existing social order, imagines the consequences of environmental degradation, revises the norms of individual and communal identity, and re-situates the categories of race and gender. Despite its profound investment in re-conceptualisations of time and history, dystopian fiction offers critically engaging and deliberately distorted visions of social space and narrative setting. In this course, our primary concern will be with spatial imagination in the context of this genre. Challenging readers' expectations about the meaning of private property, domestic comfort, and grounded identity, the novels we are reading will propose a radically unsettled vision of present and future worlds.

This course will be preoccupied with the dynamics and implications of nonfiction writing that uses literary stylistics to advance compelling arguments. We'll ask why creative prose can be so effective in reaching large audiences. We'll wonder how the affective qualities of more literary-minded pose provide provoking contrasts to the established conventions of academic argumentation. We'll wonder if creative nonfiction is less "rigorous" than scholarly "rigor." We'll also consider why those who write on race, gender, class, and/or sexuality have often found the literary register more useful, inviting, and necessary.

When publishers, scholars, and critics talk about the prismatic literary and cultural traditions outside the West, they sometimes refer to them by their geographical provenance — African literature, say, or Sumerian art — or perhaps by their historical moment — Ottoman architecture, or postcolonial Indonesian poetry. More and more, the catch-all category of World Literature has begun to hold sway in influential places, and is changing the shape of how we think, learn, and write about non-Western aesthetics, as well as how we participate in our "own" complex cultures. If we can imagine a literature that truly goes under the heading of the World, what can we possibly exclude? What might we gain by using this term, and what might we lose? What histories are attached to the various names and classifications we assign to culture and how does cultural "othering" uphold or resist forms of economic, political, and military dominance? In this course we will work carefully through the history and influential writings of postcolonialism as a method designed to challenge to hegemonic forms of representation, cultural production, and study. In the second half of the semester, we will turn our attention to the historical underpinnings and current critics of World Literature.

Trees, writes botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, "are our teachers." This course looks at what trees teach in multiple ways. In creation myths and totem poles, in tales of metamorphosis of humans into trees, in meditations on snowy woods, in woodcarving, in a cozy fire, in paper itself, trees are a site of nature-culture. "[T]heir merely being there," John Ashbery archly suggests, "Means something." This course investigates the meaning of trees in diverse genres and traditions as well by walking through streets and parks. The seminar will introduce students not only to eco-criticism, theories of wilderness and colonialism, but also to botany and the Wood-Wide-Web or "dendrocommunication." Stories of trees speak of settler-indigenous relations and of global warming. German forester Peter Wohlleben suggests that trees communicate "daily dramas and moving love stories" among themselves. The first half of the course will range from creation myths to children’s literature to poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The second will focus on two major novels of the past decade, Annie Proulx's Barkskins and Richard Powers's Overstory, which respond to climate change via tales of deforestation, elevating trees over human characters.

"You'd think that biologists, of all people, would have words for life," writes Robin Wall Kimmerer. Forms of life writing have evolved, as environmental crisis prompts new ways of thinking about both writing and life. This course focuses on works that push the envelope of self-expression, nature writing, and literary form, blending biology and autobiography — with an emphasis on bio — including Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, Thoreau's Walden, Diana Beresford Kroeger's To Speak for the Trees, and Sumana Roy's How I Became a Tree. Boundary-pushing poets, naturalists, and foresters (e.g., Walt Whitman, Wangari Maathai, Aldo Leopold, Suzanne Simard) situate themselves and their work in a more-than-human world, which they imagine as interconnected, porous, or "transcorporeal." This seminar introduces students to ecocriticism, autobiographical theory, and new perspectives in botany and forestry, which show that plants have languages of their own. Like legal scholar Christopher Stone and historian Roderick Nash, we consider whether "Nature" has rights and what constitutes personhood. Most of the class will take place outdoors. Assignments will include creative projects that encourage students to rethink the boundaries of literary criticism and self-expression. Following Howard Nemerov's "Learning the Trees," we consider how books cooperate and/or compete with experience.

This is not a course in queer, feminist, or trans history. It is a course that will explore queer, trans, and feminist approaches and methods in historiography — that is, the techniques, sources, archives, practices, and theoretical approaches one might take to generate specifically queer, trans, and/or feminist understandings of and engagements with the past. In other words, we will concern ourselves not with recovering those sexual and gender identities at the margins of history but with exploring the methods, practices, and politics of how and why such histories get (re)told. We will be particularly concerned with the fictional, visual, and aesthetic shape of contemporary desires for relation to and/or use of the past. Speculation, imagination, attachment, potential history, counter-archive, and fabulation will all be key terms. We will read theoretical work by Azoulay, Freeman, Hartman, Nyong'o, Luciano, Ramirez, and others and literary texts by Dickinson, Hopkins, Hurston, de Waal, Carmack, Acker, and others.

O.W. Holmes: "The life of the law has not been logic but experience." O.Wilde: "Experience is the name we give to our past mistakes." Each week we will read several articles, along with several short stories and novels during the term. We will begin with a consideration of some of the questions and criticisms that scholars have recently raised as they have sought to justify or reorient the field. We will then look at some of the specific problems connecting law and literature at various points since the Renaissance. After a more intensive look at current theoretical debates, we will take up various problems at the intersection of law and literature: legal fictions, forms of legal writing and explanation, and the regulation of literature through copyright law. Next we will focus on two legal problems that have also occupied literary thinkers: the problem of criminal responsibility and literature's ability to document human thought and motives, and the question of privacy in criminal law, tort law, and fiction. We will end by considering possible future directions for law and literature. The course requirements will include a final paper and two or three response papers for presentation in class.

Visual media plays an important role in advancing human rights work. From its recognition as a site that directs the spectator's gaze to themes conveyed by human rights struggles and failures, to its pedagogical aims of providing viewers with a framework from which to act on behalf of others, documentary film participates in dramatizing and making proximate the future work that remains to be done to secure the protection of human rights. In this course, we will explore how visual media in the form of documentary film participates in these practices. We will screen films associated with literary texts to ask how visual media widens the scope of representation associated with human rights narratives and assess the degree to which film, like literature, disrupts settler-colonial nation- states representational practices that project a "fantasy of victims in the image of perpetrators" in order to justify "retrospectively what perpetrators have done" (Moore "Film After Atrocity"). Course readings and class discussions will focus on literature, film, and legal cases to explore how these texts overlap and diverge and assignments will provide opportunities to explore the aesthetic features of film and theoretical arguments associated with human rights.

This course will explore the production and portrayal of social robots in the cultural imagination in conjunction with literary and religious myths of creation. While the course looks back to the history of AI and early literary accounts of robots in the 1960s, it concentrates on modes of production and on works written in or after the 1990s when western society experienced "the development of a fully networked life." The course will explore the ethical and aesthetic questions raised by the intersection between the production and the imaginative portrayals of transhuman relationships. Questions to be considered in interpreting developments in AI and in reading literature about social robots in light of the religious and classical myths-include: how is creation figured? What or who is created and why? Who plays God? Who serves as Eve/Adam? Who is cast as Satan? What is the locus of the Garden? What constitutes power/knowledge? And, finally, how does a particular treatment of the social robot potentially alter our understanding of the foundational imaginative intertexts and, by extension, notions of divinity, humanity, gender, animality, and relations of kinship and care.

In this seminar, we'll map out a provisional novelistic subgenre: the novel of sexual ideas, in which plots of sexuality develop through or alongside philosophical speculation and argument about ethics, identity, pleasure, the will, the body and its sensations, instinct and impulse, subjects and objects. Combining the abstraction of the novel of ideas with the immediacy of the novel of sex, the novel of sexual ideas represents but also formalizes and philosophizes erotic life. The tradition of the novel of sexual ideas overlaps but is not identical with such traditions as the critique of the marriage plot, the novel of adultery, sex comedy, and the queer and trans novel. Unlike the novel of ideas, which often breaks away from narration into extended passages of philosophical argument, the novel of sexual ideas is more concrete in its philosophizing; it thinks through and with the particularities of bodies and intimacies. Unlike the pornographic novel, the novel of sexual ideas turns sex into a theoretical object, an ethical and political problem, an occasion for thought. The paradoxes that come from merging these two seemingly opposed genres will fuel our discussion.

Scholars in the humanities are increasingly drawn to debates concerning the social impact of science and technology. These interdisciplinary conversations often balance the rigors of scientific method alongside the interpretive power of the humanities. How has critical theory combined with science and technology studies (STS) to interpret and challenge scientific discourse across the years? This course will provide an introduction to important intersections between critical theory and STS. With an eye to the latest developments in these overlapping fields, we will investigate the nature of these interdisciplinary formations. From the 1960s "science wars" to critical code studies in the age of ubiquitous computing, this course will provide a grounding in methods and arguments that have shaped how literary and humanistic inquiry lay claim to the world of science and technology.

Marking walls, defacing monuments, burning books, blowing up statues, breaking windows…for as long as humans have created things, they have also wilfully defaced and destroyed them. What is vandalism? Who does it, and why? Does vandalism also create? Can a transhistorical, humanist approach to vandalism offer new perspectives on old and new forms of vandalism that period-specific historians and (more recently) social scientists may have missed? These are the working questions of my current research/book. Besides key theoretical discussions of vandalism old and new, this inter-disciplinary seminar will explore representations of vandalism in both "fact" and fiction, media coverage and creative literature. Our topics of conversation, and potentially of your own research and essays, will include such things as state-sponsored vs. citizen vandalism, cultural vandalism, political vandalism, literary vandalism, the vandalism of art, art as vandalism, vandalism for fun, and vandalism for profit.

This course will focus on writing in the genres of fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. On a regular basis, students will submit their creative work for discussion and feedback from the instructor and fellow participants. The workshop will include practival sessions on publishing in Canada.