Seminars 2023-24

• ENG 811 | Victorian Disabilities | Instructor: Kylee-Anne Hingston | Thursdays, 1:00pm to 3:50pm

During the nineteenth century, the concept of the human body—how it connects to one’s identity or soul, what it represents socially and culturally—was continually being negotiated in response to rapid changes in industry, technology, medicine, in social and economic class structures, and in religious doctrine and practice. As a result, “disability is everywhere in Victorian literature and culture,” Martha Stoddard Holmes notes. Focusing on mid-Victorian novels published during the governmentalization of health, marked by the 1848 Public Health Act, and the professionalization of medicine, marked by the 1858 Medical Registration act, students will examine disability and illness in both canonical and under-studied Victorian fiction, paying particular attention to narrative form and genre to uncover the ways certain bodies, minds, and behaviours were invested with meaning. To ground our analyses in the methodology of literary disability studies, we will place texts such as Jane Eyre and The Woman in White in dialogue with the foundational theories of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Lennard Davis, and David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, and with the current critical conversations in Victorian disability studies.

• ENG 819 | Mapping the Satire of London, 1660-1745| Instructor: Allison Muri | Fridays, 1:30pm to 4:20pm

                                           I might discry
The Quintescence of Grubstreet, well distild
Through Cripplegate in a contagious Map.

So wrote the water poet John Taylor in “Sir Gregory Nonsence His Newes from No Place,” and certainly his 17^th-century readers knew well what such a contagious map might signify – but how might we today understand the “quintessence” of a particular place in early modern London that is today, no place? “Where was Grub Street?” Pat Rogers asked the rhetorical question in his landmark study of “the topography of Dulness” in 18th-century London; he knew well Grub Street was once situated at particular coordinates of the city now occupied by Milton Street. And, as Rogers explained, Grub Street was also everywhere throughout the city, a permeating stink of intellectual turpitude and pedantry.

It’s not going to be an altogether pretty view: we’ll enter the libertine space of St. James Park with the scandalous Rochester and, along with the Grub Street hack Ned Ward, we’ll listen in on the Scatter-Wit Club at the Rose Tavern in Covent Garden; we’ll witness dead dogs in the open sewer of Fleet Ditch with Jonathan Swift; we’ll witness Alexander Pope’s dunces dive into its filthy depths; we’ll visit Bedlam Hospital and Bridewell Prison, among other places, with William Hogarth. Be assured that this course won’t be all muck and scandal: we will ultimately be concerned with using digital maps, images, and literary representations of 18^th-century London to investigate the construction and mediation of satire in the city. We’ll also read works by Aphra Behn, John Dryden, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, John Gay, and Henry Fielding.

• ENG 843 | Modernism and Life Writing | Instructor: Ella Ophir | Tuesdays, 1:30pm to 4:20pm

“Everything personal soon rots,” declared W.B. Yeats, in one of the more resonant formulations of the ideal of impersonality long associated with literary modernism. Recent criticism, however, has begun to remap literary modernism through its indirect but extensive relations with autobiography, biography, and other forms of life writing. We will look at how some early twentieth-century writers began playing with the distinction between writing lives and writing fictions, and between writing the self and writing others. Through their investigations and experiments, we will inquire into the very premises of writing a life, either as fiction or as auto/biography: Where does one self leave off and others begin? To what extent is an individual life a useful framework through which to approach social formations and broader histories? Primary readings will include works by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, and others. We may also trace lines of modernist experimentation into the contemporary scene, looking at works by Alison Bechdel or Rachel Cusk.

• ENG 803 | The Invention of Adventure | Instructor: Yin Liu | Tuesdays, 9:30am to 12:20pm

he wolde neuer ete

vpon such a dere day er hym deuised were

of sum auenturus þyng an vncouþe tale(Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, lines 91-93)

The word adventure entered the English lexicon around the same time that the genre of medieval romance entered English literary history. It was, arguably, the late Middle Ages that institutionalised the genre of adventure fiction, although elements of “adventure” narrative certainly preceded and informed medieval romance. This course focuses on the Middle English romances as literary paradigms for the concept of adventure. We will explore antecedents in Old English, European folktale, and medieval French; consider the elements, audiences, and ethics of medieval English adventure stories; and investigate the interactions of Middle English romances with other genres and types of discourse. We will also discuss ways in which late medieval English romance created the conventions of later adventure fiction and set precedents for enacting the concept of adventure beyond literature: role-playing games, thrillers, narratives of conquest and exploration, modern speculative fiction, adventure tourism, and possibly more. We will investigate adventure as a literary topos, but also as an idea with a social history that is often dark, inevitably conflicted, disturbingly attractive: an idea that was invented in particular historical circumstances and perpetuated by repeated acts of imagination, themselves entangled with their own histories and complexities of desire and motivation.

A comfortable reading knowledge of Middle English is strongly recommended – or at least willingness to attain a level of comfort and competence in Middle English. Texts in Old English and medieval French will be offered in translation, although you will be encouraged to consider them in the original languages.

• ENG 819 | Collaboration in Indigenous Literatures and Literary Study | Instructor: Kristina Bidwell | Mondays, 1:30 pm to 4:20 pm

In Elements of Indigenous Style, Cree author and editor Gregory Younging writes that, in writing about Indigenous people, “The key to working in a culturally appropriate way is to collaborate with the Indigenous Peoples at the centre of a work.” Indeed, collaboration is increasingly seen as essential in scholarly work involving Indigenous people.  And yet, while there is a large body of work on Indigenous community-engaged research in the social sciences, there is little guidance for how to collaborate in Indigenous literary studies.  With a focus on Indigenous literatures and their study, we will ask: What are the reasons to collaborate?  What are some of the forms that collaboration can take?  What are the characteristics of positive collaborations?  And what are the influences of cultural, institutional, and societal frameworks on collaborative relationships? We will look at these questions from a number of angles, first by considering Indigenous literary works that were written collaboratively, such as My Indian by Mi’sel Joe and Sheila O’Neill, Rehearsals for Living by Leanne Simpson and Robyn Maynard, and Cold Case North by Michael Nest, Deanna Reder, and Eric Bell.  We will then consider editing as collaborative work, looking at the editorial history of texts by Indigenous authors such as Maria Campbell, Edward Ahenakew, and Abraham Ulrikab.  We will also explore examples of collaborative Indigenous literary scholarship, such as the work of Daniel Coleman, Elizabeth Yeoman, and Warren Cariou.  And finally, we will explore the possibilities for doing collaboration ourselves by experimenting with methods of thinking, writing, and editing together in the classroom.

• ENG 843 | Postcolonial Women’s Writing | Instructor: Cynthia Wallace | Thursdays, 1:00pm to 3:50pm

  The Caribbean-American feminist writer and activist Audre Lorde famously proclaimed in 1983, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” In this seminar, we will seek to understand how various women writers in postcolonial locations echo, extend, or challenge Lorde’s provocative claim. In other words, how do women writers use and conceptualize the English language, the Western literary canon, the project of nation-building, the Christian religion, and the political aims of democracy, independence, and power? Can the goods and goals of oppressors be appropriated in the name of freedom, or are they inescapably tainted—and if so, what are the literary and political alternatives to using the master’s tools? We will alternate readings of key texts in literary and theoretical texts by women, likely including Toni Morrison, Jean Rhys, Buchi Emecheta, Louise Erdrich, Kiran Desai, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Gayatri Spivak, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Rey Chow, and others.

• ENG 801 | Introduction to Textual Scholarship | Instructor: Jon Bath | Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, 1 pm to 3:20 pm

This class will give an introduction to the theory, history and practice of textual scholarship. It will cover the following questions:  What is textual scholarship and why is it important?  The key concepts: texts, documents and works; the history of texts from 3000 BC to the digital age; key events in the history of textual scholarship over that period; fundamental vocabulary: the words, phrases and ideas needed to navigate scholarship relating to texts; fundamental people and organizations: the most significant people and organizations in textual scholarship over the last two hundred years; how texts, their study, use and editing are changing in the digital age.

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