4000-Level Course Descriptions
FALL 2024 | WINTER 2025
ENGL-4285-001 | Jim Crow Modernism | A. Brickey
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
This Honours seminar takes its inspiration from W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1903 assertion in The Souls of Black Folk that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line.” Literary modernism and the era of racial apartheid in the United States are historically concordant, and this period would come to define many of modernism’s most celebrated texts. We will read representations of segregation from writers such as Eudora Welty, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Ralph Ellison alongside theoretical work by scholars such as Fred Moten, Michelle Elam, and Christina Sharpe. Assignments will include presentations, close readings, and a final critical/creative project.
ENGL-4403-050 | Author Genre Form: Performance Studies | S. Pool
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
“A performance is declarative of our shared humanity, yet it utters the uniqueness of particular cultures. We will know one another better by entering one another’s performances.” -Victor Turner
In this course, students will be introduced to the interdisciplinary field of Performance Studies, a practice-based mode of inquiry that considers performance as both an object of study and method of analysis. We will consider the field, which draws from the social sciences, the humanities and the arts, focusing on the pervasiveness of performance as a central element of social and cultural life. Particular attention will be paid to avant-garde performance art, and interactive theatre but we will also consider other expressive behaviours as performance including rituals, storytelling, curation, public speaking, drag performance, political demonstrations, civil disobedience, electronic performance and more. By the end of the course, students will have a rich sense of how performance contributes to constructions of personal and cultural identity and how these identities can also be transgressed via performative modes. It will provide a valuable set of questions for thinking about culture as performative practice. While students need not have acting experience to participate, students should expect each week to complete a combination of ethnographic observation, fieldwork, performance ‘experiments’ and performance ‘research-creation’. Final projects will be site-specific research-based ‘performances’ taking place in and around the city of 丁香园AV.
ENGL-4717-001 | Indigenous Literature and Culture | C. Lypka
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course Description TBA
WINTER 2025
ENGL-4251-001 | Early Modern Lit and Cult | C. Tosenberger
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
In this course, we will focus upon literature, art and historical documents related to the early modern European witch hunts. How did the Renaissance interest in magic, and general revival of Classical culture, influence the early modern understanding of witchcraft? How did folk narratives and beliefs about devils and witches impact literary and visual representations? What role did artistic representations play in the spread of the witch trials, and vice versa? We will pay special attention to early modern conceptions of gender and sexuality and their influence on both beliefs and trials.
ENGL-4741-001 | Topics Screen Studies: Residual Media | A. Burke
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
This course will explore the persistence of the analog in the age of digital reproducibility. Zeroing in on the resurgence of physical formats in recent years – from the return of vinyl to the contemporary popularity of 35mm photography to the tenacity of both film and video – it examines the ways in which the analog never really disappeared, but simply went dormant, only to re-emerge in popular culture and artistic practice. In addition to looking at the re-emergence of analog practices in the present, the course will also consider how the digital era is defined by the residual circulations of older analog media, from the resale market for records and VHS tapes to the YouTube uploads of digitized VHS tapes and 16mm reels. This growing analog archive points to the ways in which our experience of the world as well as our understanding of history is mediated by format, by the very technologies that capture and preserve it.
As much as possible, the class will be hands-on, learning about the history of media through the use of that media, using an interactive approach – the spinning of vinyl, the viewing of films on VHS, the making of mixtapes, the shooting of Super8, the snapping of Polaroids – to think about the history of media use as well as the popular practices that animated these formats, made them part of everyday life. Through this physical engagement, the course will also speculate on the reasons for the persistence of these media forms in the present, asking what these analog formats, and the residual practices associated with them, offer contemporary users?
This is a course that operates at the convergence of cultural studies, media archaeology, social and cultural history, the history of technology, studies in visual culture, studies in everyday life, archive studies, and experiential learning, with course readings drawn from all of these fields. Of particular importance to the course is the consideration of the connections between format and practice, the analog and the oppositional. In what ways does the examination of analog formats open up an alternative history of the twentieth century, from the prominence of the mixtape in hip hop to the use of the video by radical political collectives? And in what ways does the contemporary use of analog formats thrive among artists seeking a practice that disrupts the liquid smoothness of both capital and the digital?
ENGL-4903-770 | Critical Race Studies| K. Sinanan
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
This course focuses on the narratives of enslaved people and the visual cultures of slavery, race, and the Caribbean plantation from the 17th century to the present day. We will examine autobiographies, testimonios of the enslaved, alongside portraiture, prints and material culture, especially glass and present-day virtual commemorations of slavery and read these in the context of the discourse of Enlightenment race-making and critical race theory responses.
We will discuss how visual media, such as statuary and portraiture, is used to forge race, paying attention to enslaved ‘servants’ in British and European conversation pieces and portraiture. We will look at the picturesque plantation and its role in white supremacist discourse. We will examine how glass as an ornamental material evolved in tandem with the history of transatlantic slavery and we will look at the work of contemporary artists such as Titus Kaphur and King Cobra to unmake the race-craft of material culture.