400-Level Classes - 2013-2014

Honours Seminars

Please note:

• 6 cu at the 300 level is a pre- or co- requisite for any 400-level class.
• Honours seminars are only open to students who have been admitted to an Honours programm.
• Honours seminars are conducted in a different manner from regular classes. Limited to 15 students each, seminars provide opportunities for students to present papers and to engage in critical discussion of literature on a regular basis. 
• Each seminar is a PERMISSION ONLY class. After an advising appointment with a designated faculty member, please email allison.fairbairn@usask.ca to be added to the seminar permissions list. Seminars are first come, first served, and seats are limited.
• NEW: 6 cu of Category 5 may be used to meet 6 cu of Category 4 requirement for the Honours program

INCC 401.3 : DIGITAL CULTURE AND NEW MEDIA: CAPSTONE COLLABORATIVE DESIGN PROJECT  (This course is offered through the ICCC)

T2  TBA (Allison Muri)

Category 5

Prerequisite: Completion of the majority of the Minor in Digital Culture and New Media

This is a capstone seminar in which advanced principles of history, theory, and design are applied to a suitable interdisciplinary project in new media creation and commentary. The seminar, which builds upon the foundations established throughout the course of study, focuses on approaches to be taken in defining project objectives and scope, researching suitable contexts, and designing and implementing a new media project. Design philosophy and methods are discussed and explored in the context of the particular assignment. The course requires that the students work in groups to achieve a unified production, which may include a formal essay in addition to blogs, digital films, art, and/or soundscapes published online. Group interaction and performance is monitored throughout. When possible, guest lectures from various industrial and other representatives will be provided to enhance the student's design experience.

In Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, Henry Jenkins (Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and his co-authors define participatory culture as one:

• With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
• With strong support for creating and sharing one's creations with others
• With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices
• Where members believe that their contributions matter
• Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created). (pp. 5–6)

In this course, we will practice some of the roles and activities of participatory culture. This course builds on the foundation of traditional research skills, technical skills, writing skills, and critical analysis that you have learned throughout your undergraduate education, but also involves "new media" skills of collaboration, networking, negotiation, problem solving, and play to publish and interact online.

ENG 402.3 (02) : TOPICS IN ANGLO SAXON AND MEDIEVAL LITERATURE:  MEDIVAL TEXTS IN THE DIGITAL AGE

T2  T  NEW TIME 1:00 - 3:20 pm (Peter Robinson)

Category 1

An extraordinary effect of the birth of the digital age is that it has forced us to re-examine all we thought we knew of previous ages.  This course will centre on one area of our culture – broadly, English written culture before 1500 – where our understanding of the age has been transformed by digital media.  The over-riding question this course sets is: what is it, to read a medieval document in the digital age?  How is our appreciation of medieval material culture different from what was possible only a few years ago, before the internet brought images of medieval manuscripts to every desktop? How has it changed too, by the transformation in the media wrought by digital methods, making possible (for example) animations and other expressions of medieval narratives never before possible? A continuing theme in this course will be the ways in which changes in material culture affect every aspect of how we communicate, and we will survey the shifts from oral to written culture, from manuscript to print, and then from print to digital, examining how stories such as Beowulf or King Arthur are transformed as they move from medium to medium.  As well as showing how narratives themselves change, we will also examine the new ways of knowing opened up by the digital age, so that medieval documents may be explored in manners never before possible (through, for example, new modes of collaborative editing and reading).  Along the way, we will also critique the digital age itself: when we look at a modern animation of a Chaucer tale, or of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, what is lost, what is gained, by comparison with reading from the original manuscript, or from a printed book? Has the time of Facebook and Twitter damaged our ability to appreciate literature, as we once could? What are we to make of works like the Shrek films, or the film ‘The Knight’s Tale’, with their self-conscious play on medieval motifs?  What does ‘Medievalism’ mean in the digital age?  The course will focus on a few prominent medieval texts – Beowulf, the ‘matter of Arthur’ from the Welsh mabinogion through to the Gawain manuscript and Malory, Saints’ lives and homilies, the Bayeux tapestry, Chaucer from manuscript to print and beyond, the mystery plays as instances of medieval popular literature – to see how these fare in the 21^st century, and how we fare with them.

ENG 406.3 (01) : TOPICS IN 17^TH CENTURY LITERATURE IN ENGLISH: JOHN MILTON’S PARADISE LOST IN CONTEXT

T1 W 1:00-3:20 (Brent Nelson)

Category 2

This course will feature John Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Each week will focus on one of the twelve books of this epic poem in relation to other writings by Milton, his near predecessors and contemporaries, and his ancient sources. We will, for example, compare Milton’s notion of the heroic in Paradise Lost with that of Areopagitica, his classic prose tract on freedom of thought and expression, and we will examine representations of marriage in connection with Milton’s divorce tracts.  We will also read Paradise Lost in relation to the book of Genesis and earlier Renaissance writers such as Guillaume Du Bartas on the creation of the world (Divine Weeks, transl. Joshua Sylvester, 1605), and Amelia Lanyer’s defense of Eve and her role in the Fall in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611).

ENG 410.3 (01) :  TOPICS IN 18^TH CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE: LITERATURE, SEX, AND CULTURE, 1650-1750

T1  M 3:30-4:50 (Ray Stephanson)

Category 3

From the late 17^th-century a gradual but remarkable shift takes place in British sexual culture: human sexuality enters the “new” science as a subject of investigation in its own right; male libertines are replaced by more sentimental masculine types; one-sex anatomical models are updated as women are differentiated from men in new ways; reproductive biology suggests that embryos are preformed miniatures that go back to Eve’s ovaries; popular sex manuals hit the marketplace; the emergence of the modern male homosexual stereotype is on the radar screen; treatises about venereal disease and the horrors of masturbation become best sellers; pornographic novels enter the scene; female cross-dressers are objects of prurient literary treatment; “sexual orientation” begins to replace social and familial positioning as markers of one’s identity; debates and fights about gender issues carry on, as they always have…..AND female and male authors come to these various issues with passion, argument, and humor.

We will read some non-literary materials that help us to understand the new developments in an expanding print-culture milieu, but our main focus will be on literary works that represent, mock, challenge and subvert the status quo. From the notorious Earl of Rochester and his fan Aphra Behn, to the cheeky stage dramas of William Wycherley, the racy poetical and novelistic offerings of Alexander Pope and Eliza Haywood, to Fanny Hill (the first original pornographic novel in English), and Henry Fielding’s journalistic account of a female cross-dresser—we will survey some noteworthy sex-texts of the period, assessing their literary codes and cultural assumptions in a history of sexual artefacts. 

ENG 418.3 (01)  TOPICS IN 19^TH CENTURY CANADIAN LITERATURE: TRAVEL AND EXPLORATION

T1  M  9:30-11:50  (Wendy Roy)

Category 3, Canadian

Since the beginnings of contact between indigenous peoples and migrants to Canada, travellers have written about their relationships with members of First Nations, with settlers, and with other travellers. The focus of this course is on intersections in Canadian travel writing among issues of colonialism, social class, and gender at various periods in Canadian history—from exploration, to settlement, to northern adventure. We will study works that are temporally and geographically clustered, beginning with late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century exploration narratives, then turning to travel and settlement narratives of the mid-1800s, and ending with writings about travels to the north and outside Canada at the turn of the twentieth century. We will contextualize these published works by studying letters, diaries, essays and other writings that provide alternative historical and literary accounts. We will also consider the alternative perspectives provided by visual media created to accompany the travel writing, such as sketches, photographs, and mapss.

ENG 420.3 (01) : SPECIAL TOPICS: PROVERBS IN MEDIEVAL GERMANIC LITERATURE

T1  F 1:00-3:20  (Richard Harris)

Category 1

Among the phraseological building blocks of oral narrative, proverbs are usually perceived as originating among the folk.  They are also useful in the rhetoric of the learned, however, and their occurrences in the written texts of medieval Germanic literature attest to a sophistication and occasionally ironic significance not generally associated with the assumed spontaneity of orature. This course will first survey Old English and Old Icelandic wisdom literature and its backgrounds and then consider the literary uses of paroemial material in such works as Beowulf, three Old Icelandic sagas (Njáls saga, Grettis saga, and Fóstbrœðra saga) and the Middle High German Nibelungenlied.  It is to be expected that such a closely defined micro-structural approach to the texts will enrich our appreciation of the composition of this literature as well as providing a better understanding of that body of oral tradition from which it has grown.

ENG 444.3 (02) : TOPICS IN COMMONWEALTH AND POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES: THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE IN CARIBBEAN ORATURE AND LITERATURE

T2  T 1:00  (Susan Gingell)

Category 4

This seminar will explore the factors affecting writers’ and writer-performers’ choices in relation to language in a context where various national “standard” Englishes are the privileged “lects,”or varieties, in Anglophone Caribbean countries but are closest to the language of the colonizers while the lively vernaculars are the language that the majority of the population speaks among themselves and that comes to be associated with decolonization. Much of our focus will be on the intersections of oral and written cultures in the Caribbean. After an introduction to varieties of English and to the politics of language in the Anglophone Caribbean context, we will explore the career of Louise Bennett as exemplar of shifting language politics, studying the role she played in legitimating the use of Jamaican English Creole (and by extension other Caribbean Creoles) in literature and performance through her Anancy stories, radio monologues, stage performances, and page-based poetry. We will consider language politics in the form of the highly political oral, audio-, and print textualized verse known as dub poetry that issued from the confluence of Bennett’s work, reggae, and oppressive socio-economic conditions in Jamaica and its diaspora. The strategies that other poets and prose writers have developed to simulate a variety of Caribbean Englishes on the page and the ways writers and writer-performers negotiate the linguistic complexities of remaining both comprehensible and appealing to audiences at home, in the Caribbean diaspora, and beyond will command the balance of our attention. Although the writers to be studied will to some extent be determined by the availability of texts, writers most likely to appear on the reading list include Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Lorna Goodison, Olive Senior, V.S. Naipaul, and Marcia Douglas.

ENG 464.3 (02) : TOPICS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE: MAD MEN AND AMERICAN HISTORICAL FICTION

T2  T NEW TIME 9:30 - 11:50 am (William Bartley)

Category 4

The critically acclaimed television series, Mad Men (2007-present), created and produced by Matthew Weiner, reflects a current trend in television production that favors the so-called “long form” television narrative--that is a serialized, multi-season novelistic narrative, which often deals with historically-based thematic material. It keeps company, then, with such “long form”productions as The Wire, Deadwood and, most recently, Boardwalk Empire. Mad Men, as some of you may not know, is specifically and deeply preoccupied with social and cultural change during the 1960s, beginning with the election of John F. Kennedy and extending, to date, to include the emerging social and political turbulence of the mid-1960s. This course will approach Mad Men as a creative response to the genre of historical fiction and will examine how the genre is enriched and extended by television narrative itself—how, indeed, the novel as a genre is taking new form. Along the way, we will explore and defend the idea that fiction generally is an efficacious mode of ethical and political inquiry. Historical fiction is significant not only because it is the staple genre of American fiction, but also because ethical and political issues are most deeply understood within a generic concern for the problems of social and cultural change and for the relationship between such change and individual agency. We'll begin the year with a discussion of the genre itself and the immense impact it has had on American culture. This will involve an examination of the genre’s historical roots in the 19^th century—so students can expect contact with an unlikely but thoroughly relevant English antecedent: George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

Note: Students are encouraged to purchase their own copies of the series, which, to date, has run for 5 seasons; it is easily available discounted on Amazon.ca or .com. The first four seasons (to date) are available on Netflix.

ing how narratives themselves change, we will also examine the new ways of knowing opened up by the digital age, so that medieval documents may be explored in manners never before possible (through, for example, new modes of collaborative editing and reading). Along the way, we will also critique the digital age itself: when we look at a modern animation of a Chaucer tale, or of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, what is lost, what is gained, by comparison with reading from the original manuscript, or from a printed book? Has the time of Facebook and Twitter damaged our ability to appreciate literature, as we once could? What are we to make of works like the Shrek films, or the film 'The Knight's Tale', with their self-conscious play on medieval motifs? What does 'Medievalism' mean in the digital age? The course will focus on a few prominent medieval texts - Beowulf, the 'matter of Arthur' from the Welsh mabinogion through to the Gawain manuscript and Malory, Saints' lives and homilies, the Bayeux tapestry, Chaucer from manuscript to print and beyond, the mystery plays as instances of medieval popular literature - to see how these fare in the 21st century, and how we fare with them.

ENG 496.3 (02) : CAREER INTERNSHIP

T2  M 3:30-5:00 pm  (Kathleen James-Cavan)

Non-Category

If you’ve ever found yourself at a loss for an answer to this question, this course may be for you.

• research,
• public relations,
• writing for publication,
• grant-writing,
• editing,
• teaching writing, and
• promoting literacy.

Interns provide approximately 80 hours to the organization over a twelve-week period under the joint supervision of Prof. James-Cavan and a workplace supervisor. The time commitment is comparable to that expected in other honours seminars. In addition, all interns meet as a class fortnightly throughout the term. One short incident analysis, two brief journal entries, and one substantial term paper are required. There is no final written examination.

Internships are currently available with such organizations as Sage Hill Writing Experience, Saskatchewan Playwrights Centre, the Saskatchewan Literacy Network, the University Library, the University Learning Centre, Student Enrolment and Services Division, the International Student and Study Abroad Centre, Saskatoon Correctional Centre, and Sherbrooke Community Centre. Other placements are planned as well.

Interested students should contact Prof. Kathleen James-Cavan (kathleen.james-cavan@usask.ca) for further information on available internships and how to apply.

497.0 Honours Colloquium

The Department of English Honours Colloquium, now a compulsory part of the Honours programme, was offered for the first time in February 2011.

The Colloquium consists of an oral presentation of a short scholarly paper at a conference of Honours students. The paper is normally based on a paper already prepared, or in preparation, for a 300 or 400-level course. This will be a one- or two-day event in early February. In preparing the paper for this event, students should seek the advice of a faculty member. Note that this course is required for all Honours and Double Honours students, but has no credit unit value. Students will receive informal feedback, but no formal evalution.