ENGLISH 790:  POLITICAL ECONOMY OF COMMUNICATION (RCD)
PROFESSOR PHIL GRAHAM

ENGLISH 795: AUTOBIOGRAPHY (LIT)
PROFESSOR CAROL ACTON

Fifteen years ago Debora Shuger helped to expand new historical studies of early modern literature and culture when she wrote that “religion during this period supplies the primary language of analysis. It is the cultural matrix for explorations of virtually every topic: kingship, selfhood, rationality, language, marriage, ethics, and so forth.” One part of this expansion has been a reconsideration of the relationship between religion and Tudor-Stuart drama. While criticism over the last half century has generally allowed the antipathy between some Puritans and the stage to define that relationship, recent work has begun to argue for a more positive, mutually-supportive interaction between religious reform and the great drama of the age.

In this class we’ll study religion’s place in the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, covering such topics as the reformation of manners, changing views of death and sacrifice, the redefinition of marriage and the domestic sphere, iconoclasm and visual culture, Catholic-Protestant divisions, and English attitudes towards Judaism and Islam. About half the plays studied will be Shakespeare’s. Back to top

This course will examine Defoe's relationship to eighteenth-century (and twentieth-century) popular culture. Defoe is best known today as the author of Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and other early novels-although some of those "novels," such as A Journal of a Plague Year and Memoirs of a Cavalier, are closer to the non-literary genres of ethnography and autobiography. Indeed, Defoe was a political writer, agitator, newspaper editor, and economic reporter, as well as a novelist and poet. With the scope of Defoe's authorial ambition in mind, the course will briefly sample the range of his writing in the context of the forms (such as newspapers, novels, rogue's tales, pornography, memoirs, travel literature, etc.) and contents (such as sexuality, race, class, national identity, etc.) of the popular culture of the period. We will conclude by considering the legacy of Defoe in one or two present-day genres such as technical writing, crime reportage, or "desert island" narratives (in film, on television, etc.). Back to top

Maud, In Memoriam and The Idylls of the King, the three primary works of this pre-eminent Victorian poet, explore the healing effects of friendship and love for the fractured individual and community. Our study of these three poems will demonstrate why Tennyson is not only the greatest English prosodist, as T.S. Eliot argues, but also the most widely read poet during his own lifetime in the history of English literature. Back to top

Although ideas of the emotions in Canadian literature have undergone far-reaching changes over the past hundred and twenty years, specific discussions of the emotions have often been conspicuously absent from Canadian literary criticism. This course will look at the question of the emotions in Canadian writing from 1880 to the present, focusing both on the continuing tendency to conceive the emotions as closely tied to reason, and the equally persistent, but contradictory, interest in defining the emotions as symptoms of unconscious desires. Topics of exploration will include: emotion and the idealization of community in Canadian literary criticism; the Modernist interest in instinct; how representations of the emotions have helped justify the exclusion of some writers from the canon; contemporary Canadian writers' use of philosophy and its effect on their representation of the emotions; and the relationship of the emotions to trauma in recent Canadian writing. Works studied in the course may include The Imperialist, Wild Geese, Hidden Rooms: Early Canadian Women Poets, The Rebel Angels, The Wars, The Robber Bride, Fugitive Pieces, and the poems of Anne Carson, George Elliott Clarke, and Jan Zwicky. Back to top

This course will explore three related theoretical resources for text analysis: rhetorical theory inspired by Kenneth Burke; systemic-functional grammar inspired by Michael Halliday; and critical social theory inspired by Pierre Bourdieu. Our goal is to understand these theories on their own - their sources, contexts, and effects - as well as the consequences of integrating the three strands. Students will produce a systematic and comprehensive text analysis for the course’s major project. We will use précis and commentary for readings and workshops to hone writing strategies and practices for text analysis. Back to top

This course examines Peter Jackson's recent film adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The purpose of the course is to explore the decisions made by Jackson in adapting the film to the screen, analyzing those decisions (under the auspices of theories of semiotics and social semiotics) to determine the differences caused by the changes. Two of the films - The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) and The Two Towers (2002)-will be available for class viewing throughout the course, and we will examine each scene by scene in conjunction with both the published novel(s) and some of the supplementary material surrounding the novel, as published by Christopher Tolkien after his father's death. Our analyses will allow us to speculate on the nature of the adaptation of the third novel, The Return of the King, which will be released in December of 2003.

You will be required to read the entirety of Tolkien's trilogy, including all introductory material and all appendices. In addition, you will read selections from Tolkien's other work, including The Silmarillion, The Book of Lost Tales, and the four-volume History of the Lord of the Rings (which shows the writing of the trilogy from its first drafts). Viewing assignments will include Ralph Bakshi's animated film The Lord of the Rings (1978), the 1991 BBC radio adaptation of the trilogy (okay, this is actually a listening assignment, not a viewing one), as well as all three Jackson films. Back to top

The dynamo, the telephone, the radio. The Bomb. The television, the mainframe computer, the washer-and-dryer. The microwave, the personal computer, the VCR. The Internet, the cellphone, the PDA. The history of the twentieth century can, in many ways, be described as a history of its technologies. As Neil Postman argued in Technolopoly, the West has long had a tradition of understanding cultural epochs as defined by key technologies around which historical narratives can be centred—the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Industrial Age. This course examines the narrativization of twentieth-century machines to apprehend various rhetorics of technology issuing from many sources looking at a variety of social texts (literary works, films, advertisements, opinion polls, educational texts, and public policy documents) we will see the interrelations between commerce, politics, culture, and technology, expressed through metaphor and narrative in the construction of a self-identified modern and technophilic century. Back to top

Taking materiality as the ground for investigation, this course will examine the “poetic”as a value, form, or mode operating in diverse expressions and practices other than the literary poem. We will consider popular verse and avant-garde experiment; marginally poetic phenomena such as song lyrics, graffitti, and oral history; social practices such as public recitation and tanka writing; and the “poeticization” of genres like the novel and film. Emphasizing the American context, we will read poetry in relation to its various “out-sides” and, with the help of work in diverse poetics, criticism, and cultural theory, begin to assemble component ideas for a non-literary poetics. Back to top

While contemporary indigenous writers draw on rich oral and written traditions, they also reinvent and rework earlier texts and modes of storytelling, as well as use and adapt Western literary genres. In this course, we will study the formal and thematic relationships between oral and written texts; the status and function of "story" in different cultural and institutional contexts; and the stylistic features and political efficacy of "rez english" or "aboriginal english." Contemporary theory and criticism about indigenous literatures (most of it authored by indigenous critics such as Gerald Vizenor, Lee Maracle, and Jeannette Armstrong) will inform our analyses. The primary texts that we will study include book-length works in various literary genres, including Maria Campbell's and Sherry Racette Farrell's Stories of the Road Allowance People, Monique Mojica's Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots, Marilyn Dumont's A Really Good Brown Girl, Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach and Tomson Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen. We will also analyze texts that are not usually considered "literary" (in the Western sense of that term) such as works of ethnography, oratory and life writing, but we will read these as being part of an indigenous literary tradition. Back to top

One of the central preoccupations of postcolonial studies has been the issue of difference and hybridity. Theories of hybridity in postcolonial studies are tools for analyzing cross-cultural contact, the creolization of cultures, and diversity within “multicultural” nation-states. This course will evaluate critically a range of postcolonial approaches to the issues of difference, otherness, and hybridity, with a view to defining an “emancipatory use of culture” (Bannerji) and understanding the place of “difference” in the changing field of postcolonial studies. How flexible is the language of difference as applied to creolized aesthetics and linguistics, political resistance to marginalization, and official state policies of tolerance and multiculturalism? Can the articulations of cultural hybridity taken up by postcolonial studies accommodate differences of gender and sexuality? How does ‘hybridity’ work in postcolonial studies when diaspora, transnationalism, and globalization have complicated the relationship between postcolonial studies and the framework of the nation? Although theoretical and literary texts will be geographically wide-ranging, the core questions of the course will be derived from Caribbean and Canadian contexts. Back to top

This course theorizes professional design practices in order to help students understand the discursive, rhetorical, and social dimensions of professional discourses while becoming accomplished and reflexive practitioners of it. Each case covered will address the design and production of a multimodal text. Back to top

Synonymous with rhetoric for over 1500 years, a period in which rhetoric suffused learning, art, and religion; Quintilian's Ideal Orator; Caesar's friend and rival, Augustus's champion, Antony's victim; a Skeptic, a Stoic, and a Peripatetic; the author who Augustine says turned him away from a life of sin, toward philosophy, and ultimately God: Cicero is the single most important figure in the history of rhetoric. We will study him.

Works will include his On invention, Brutus, De Oratore, The Orators, Topics, and Academics, as well as Hand of Cicero (Shane Butler, Routledge, 2002); requirements will include a presentation, a paper, regular participation, and weekly writing assignments. Back to top

This course is one of two required* graduate courses that survey theories of writing and communication. Theory I begins with the classics, and moves through medieval, Renaissance, enlightenment and ninenteenth century critical theories. Theory II begins with the twentieth century and ends with the present. The courses include instruction in research methodologies and practice. Assignments will include a major research paper on a topic developed in consultation with the professors, and reflecting one or more of the methodologies studied in the courses. *Please note that this program change is undergoing the approval process and is not yet formally reflected in the program description. Back to top

Brad Pitt’s 2004 blockbuster Troy made Homer quotable again for one summer. However, Homer’s Iliad, on which the movie was ostensibly based, is less than half the story of Troy. In fact, from about the fourth century to Shakespeare’s time, the main genre that told Europeans the famous narrative of the fall of Troy was the romance, not the epic, in Latin and French, not Greek, and the story took the side of the defeated Trojans, not the victorious Hellenes. Troy was the origin of the most powerful and lasting diaspora legend in European history (at least as important as the Jewish diaspora in the Old Testament and comparable to later narratives of the African diaspora) because for a thousand years European nations, including England, traced the ancestry of their kings back to fleeing Trojan survivors. Their mutual Trojan ancestry bound European monarchies together and underlay the ideological elaboration of feudalism and aristocratic culture; the Trojan diaspora of the middle ages is one of the central foundation myths of the west, creating a genetic link back to the classical past. This course will provide an overview of the medieval tradition of Troy, in Latin, French, Italian and English, in order to contextualize Geoffrey Chaucer’s original and psychological contribution to the tradition, his poem Troilus and Criseyde, the first and only love story of the Trojan war. The complete text of Troilus will be read in Middle English and language instruction will be provided. Readings in other languages will be in translation. Students are strongly encouraged to read The Iliad (any translation) before the course begins for the sake of comparison. Back to top

This course will examine the role of sexual disguise in eighteenth-century literature, biography, and journalism from both historical and rhetorical perspectives. Cross-dressing was a traditional motif in folk materials and in romances, but with the introduction of actresses on the English stage in 1660, the popular breeches roles that resulted linked the device to a heterosexualized stage. We will consider the implications of this historical development for the representation of cross-dressing in a number of literary genres and across the popular culture of the period. We will read literary works by Behn, Wycherley, Haywood, and Defoe, among others, and memoirs by the breeches actress Charlotte Charke and the female soldier Hannah Snell. We will also look at newspaper reports on the use sexual disguise at masquerades, plebeian riots, homosexual rendezvous, and among criminals and the industrious poor. Over the duration of the course we will consider the implications of our study for some recent critical ideas about the role of performance in the construction of gender identity (e.g., Judith Butler) and the role of typification in the practice of cultural studies (e.g., Stephen Greenblatt). Back to top

Joyce's writing career was a steadily expanding and consuming exploration into and experiment with the nature of language. From his first published story to the last stages of the writing of Finnegans Wake, his work evolved stage by stage in a complex literary and linguistic logic. This evolution involved a progressive and regressive revelation or waking of the sign and syntax. In this course, we will focus on the evolution of this revelation or waking, concentrating primarily on Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses, though we will begin and end with selected chapters of Finnegans Wake. Back to top

ENGLISH 790: POLITICAL ECONOMY OF COMMUNICATION (RCD)
PROFESSOR PHIL GRAHAM (FALL 2005)

Political economy is concerned with the production of values (the economic) and the distributions of power (the political) that are integral to the kinds of values produced at any given time in history. Political economy of communication is concerned with understanding how communication figures in politcal economy more generally. This course covers the development of political economy of communication as an influential field of research during the 20th century and the necessary transformations that this field must absorb if it is to remain relevant in a "globalised" media environment comprised of digital technologies. Of specific interest are the intricate relationships between new media, language, and what is socially perceived to be of value. Students will be exposed to a broad range of literature from major theorists in these fields and encouraged to consider new ways of theorising and analysing political economy of communication.

As media environments change so do language practices. New media are by definition new ways of relating. Add to this the fact that the so-called "knowledge industries" have become the major income producing industries of developed economies, and it becomes essential for students of language to understand the political and economic ramifications of a globally connected, digitally networked humanity. Knowledge, language, and value are intricately linked aspects of human interaction. They both affect and express how we relate, with whom, and under what circumstances. At the core of any knowledge economy are specialised ways of knowing, representing, evaluating, and relating. To understand how language practices, and communication more generally, figure in the development and maintenance of political economic formations is to understand the essence of any knowledge economy. This course gives graduate students theoretical and analytical tools that synthesise traditional approaches to political economy of communication for the digital environment.  Back to top

ENGLISH 791: WEAPONS OF MASS PERSUASION: RHETORIC, POLITICS, AND PROPAGANDA (RCD)
PROFESSOR MICHAEL MacDONALD (FALL 2005)

Over forty years ago Marshall McLuhan observed that material war waged by men and machines (the "outer conquest of space") would become ever more closely allied with immaterial war waged by media and information (the "inner conquest of spirit"). Today, in the age of spin, public diplomacy and "strategic influence," government officials and military planners are rediscovering the value of rhetoric as an instrument of national power and authority. Taking its point of departure in this conception of rhetoric as a form of "soft power," this seminar will explore the use of propaganda as a weapon of persuasion in the battle for the "hearts and minds" of the global masses. The goal of the seminar is threefold: first, to trace the evolution of propaganda techniques from the Great War (1914-1918) to the present; second, to elaborate a theory of propaganda as a mode of rhetorical persuasion; and third, to develop a set of practical tools and methods for analyzing propaganda messages in all their dimensions (text, image, audio, etc.). As we shall see over the course of the seminar, the modern arts of propaganda - from the "Speakers Corps" of the Hitler Youth to the "influence operations" of the Department of Defense - retool many of the concepts and principles of Classical rhetoric for the modern "battlespace" of ideas.

Readings: selections from Aristotle, Marx, Freud, Orwell, Huxley, Goebbels, Hitler, Benjamin, Adorno, Heidegger, Lacan, Debord, Burke, McLuhan, Barthes, Chomsky, Lyotard, Virilio, Kittler, Zizek, Baudrillard, the Defense Science Board, and others. Back to top

In this course we will study the social, historical, and rhetorical construction of the environment as revealed in pertinent literary, philosophical, scientific, institutional, and popular discourse. We will attend especially to the mobilization of environmental narratives in the service of local and global social movements and organizations, e.g., EarthFirst!, Greening Earth Society. Back to top

ENGLISH 701: THEORY AND CRITICISM II
PROFESSOR RANDY HARRIS AND PROFESSOR KATHERINE ACHESON (WINTER 2006)

This course is one of two required graduate courses that survey theories of writing and communication. Theory I begins with the classics, and moves through medieval, Renaissance, enlightenment and ninenteenth century critical theories. Theory II begins with the twentieth century and ends with the present. The courses include instruction in research methodologies and practice. Assignments will include a major research paper on a topic developed in consultation with the professors, and reflecting one or more of the methodologies studied in the courses.  Back to top

ENGLISH 720: BLAKE'S BODIES (LIT)
PROFESSOR TRISTANNE CONNOLLY

The human body is Blake's most central image. Just as he makes engraving an extended metaphor throughout his corpus, he composes his designs around human figures and his mythology takes the shape of a "Giant Man". Blake's narratives of creation and reproduction, and struggle between bondage and freedom, apply equally to humans, texts and artworks. In this course we will explore the bodies in, and the bodies of, Blake's works. The focus will be on selected illuminated books (including The Book of Thel, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Europe: A Prophecy, The Book of Urizen and Milton: A Poem) alongside other examples of Blake's writing and visual art. This will lead us into topics such as material versus spiritual bodies; male, female, androgynous or genderless bodies; metamorphosing bodies; pleasure and pain; expanding and contracting organs of perception. We will apply the parallel between human and textual reproduction to discussion of the creative and procreative processes, and their failures; homosexuality, heterosexuality and unreproductive sexual "perversions"; and the relationships between parent and child, and original and copy -- including copies of Blake's works. The ways Blake comes to us -- engraved imitations, photographs, typeset editions, hypertext, digital images -- are they manifold bodies extending Blake beyond private collections and museums, or alien and promiscuous bodies imposed on elusive, exclusive originals? Back to top

ENGLISH 730: RUSKIN ON ART, ARCHITECTURE AND ECONOMICS
PROFESSOR JOHN NORTH (WINTER 2006)

Ruskin is among the two or three geniuses of prose writing in the Victorian period.  We will study the progress of his work by reading selections from his theories on art in Modern Painters and PreRaphaelitism, architecture in The Stones of Venice and The Seven Lamps of Architecture, and economics in Unto This Last and The Political Economy of Art.  Of special interest will be his study of the paitings of JMW Turner, his analysis of Gothic architecture, and his denunciation of greed as the deadly principle guiding English life, promoted by "the pseudo-science of J.S. Mill and Ricardo."

Sudents will submit 3 pages of notes on each weekly reading assignment, two brief reviews of secondary literature, will lead at least one seminar session, and will submit a major paper.

Why are so many twentieth-century literary writers so pessimistic when they consider the future? Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Margaret Atwood each wrote compelling negative visions of the illiterate, vapid future they saw arising necessarily from the progress of mid-century capitalism and technologization. Post WW2, not even science-fiction writers could muster enthusiasm for the future. Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, and other lesser luminaries were no less bleak in their prognostications than the more highbrow crew. This course examines the many reasons why, through the greater part of the twentieth century, the drive towards imaginary utopia stalled so spectacularly. Back to top

By 1917, L.M. Montgomery was an established and successful writer of sentimental girls’ fiction; however, her journals record a history of illness, depression, loss, and personal turmoil. This course will examine the journals Montgomery wrote from her early childhood until the 1930's in conjunction with her fiction. We will begin with Anne of Green Gables (1908), the novel that established Montgomery’s fame, and then quickly move on to the novels she wrote between 1917 to 1937 (listed below). The class will begin by exploring the function of “children’s literature” in adult culture, taking as a starting point claims by Jacqueline Rose on the “impossibility of children’s fiction” (The Case of Peter Pan). We will also examine topics such as the construction of the home in sentimental fiction; the “angel in the house” and the male hero; familial aggression; sickness; trauma; and the intervention of “history” into the world of the child.

If possible, we will arrange a field-trip to the University of Guelph’s Special Collections Library which houses the originals of L.M. Montgomery’s journals, as well as other related material. Reading will include L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, Anne’s House of Dreams, Rilla of Ingleside, Emily of New Moon and Emily Climbs. Back to top

Roughly speaking, we examine early reactions to the emergence of so-called "mass culture" (Simmel, Adorno, Benjamin and Freud); the postwar debate on culture, class and consumerism (Hoggart, Williams, and Steedman); discussion of the 1960s and the society of the image (Enzensberger, Sontag, Debord, Bourdieu); and postmodernism (Lyotard, Jameson, and Haraway). Although the writers covered have what you might call definite family resemblances and certain shared obsessions, they vary dramatically in style and tone. One of the features of the course, therefore, is sustained attention to the different ways in which it is possible to write cultural criticism. Students taking the class should emerge with a good grasp of the most significant cultural debates of the last century, an acquaintance with a wide variety of cultural critics, and an appreciation of the different forms cultural criticism can take. Back to top

This course explores several historical simulation board games to determine how and in what ways they model specific historical elements, and how they combine these elements to produce a simulation of a complex historical sequence of events. We will play the games, then analyze how the rules and other components (such as playing board and playing pieces) combine to produce a meaningful signification of real-world events, structures, and/or systems. Assignments will include options for detailed analysis alone, or analysis combined with redesign of specific simulational components.

Besides specific readings in history, each reading related to elements modeled in the game, the course will be based in readings in semiotics. The primary text for the course will be Thomas Sebeok's The Forms of Meaning: Modeling Systems Theory and Semiotic Analysis. Other required readings will include Baudrillard's Simulations as well as his Simulacra and Simulation, Lars Skyttner's General Systems Theory, and J. D. Williams' The Complete Strategyst: Being a Primer on the Theory of Games of Strategy. Other texts to be consulted include Crookall and Saunders, Communication and Simulation: From Two Fields to One Theme, and articles on applied semiotics, semiotics and design (with social semiotics), and historical simulation design (in non-academic journals such as Wargame Design).

This course depends, to a significant degree, on actually playing the games. To that end, it will be scheduled differently from other courses, with two weekly meetings. The first will be three hours long, during which we will play the games. The second will be a two-hour discussion/seminar period, a more typical kind of class. In other words, it will be a course that combines one typical class with a “lab.” Students will also be expected to play games out of class (and the instructor will be available for game-play for at least three entire weekends). It is impossible to understand these games without playing them.

Games under study will include such simulations as Diplomacy (Hasbro), The Sword of Rome (GMT), The First Punic War (GMT), The Russian Campaign (L2 Designs), Thirty Years War (GMT), Paths of Glory (GMT). Others could include historical rail-building games and society-building games such as Advanced Civilization (Avalon Hill). None of these games need by purchased; all will be provided by the instructor. Back to top

Course Limit: 12

The invention or more accurately the perfection of the printing press by Gutenberg did not only have an immense impact on the dissemination of information, on reading and writing practices, editorial policies and so forth, but also on the interface between text and image. Ironically, this new technology coincided with the pinnacle in manuscript illumination in particular in France and the Low Countries with such commissioned works as the Très riches heures du duc de Berry to name but one example. The concept of the illuminated book as a work of art was to change rapidly as the use of movable type became the new method of text production across Europe. The objective of this seminar is twofold: We propose to trace the transformation of book and image production from the High Middle Ages to the Renaissance and secondly, to study the impact of the new technology on iconography in itself and in conjunction with the written text. In order to do this we will begin with a theoretical overview of iconography with texts by Panofsky, Sergei Eisenstein, Mieke Bal and others. We will address such issues as authorial influence, reader response, the construction of pictorial and textual narrative and semiotic. Back to top

Commodity systems change our relationship with things. Their advent offered perhaps the major challenge to modern poetry: to renegotiate a human relationship with the material world. Ambiguously representation and material thing itself, poetry offers a rich site for reflecting on the role of things and language as phenomenon, commodity, artifact, gift, particularly in the American context where Emerson's call for "an original relationship with the universe" generated multiplicitous and conflicting responses. Our focus, then, will be American poetry where, alongside philosophy, cultural theory, and poetics, we will read, among others, Stein, Williams, Bishop, Cage, Ammons, Graham, and Hejinian. Back to top

Voice interfaces are an emergent technology for interacting with computational routines and databases. This course is a seminar in designing, scripting, strategizing, developing, and learning this new style of interface, drawing largely on what is known about natural human/human verbal
interaction, and on the computer-mediated tasks the interfaces will front.

Among our goals will be sufficient familiarity with voice interaction to (1) read the literature of the relevant fields (speech recognition and synthesis, conversation analysis, pragmatics, interface design), and (2) design a voice interface.

Assignments will include weekly blogs and a collaborative voice-interface specification.

Class participation is expected and will figure in your evaluation.

Texts will include Voice interaction design (Harris, 2005). Back to top

The study of life-writing, a well established interdisciplinary academic field with its roots in English literature, focuses on the relationship between language and the creation of self.  This course offers a range of types of life-writing that will allow students to examine the concepts of ‘story’ or narrative, memory, and cultural discourse in the construction of self.

This is not an historical study of a genre, but rather an investigation into the way individuals construct themselves in forms of ‘life-writing’: autobiography, memoir, journals, diaries and letters. The focus in the course will be on the coming together of narrative, memory and cultural discourse in the constructions of self.  To aid in the practice of reading life-writing we will use Smith and Watson’s Reading Autobiography (see below) which outlines critical and theoretical perspectives as well as the primary areas that we will focus on outlined above.  This text will be supplemented by theoretical readings on narrative, the psychology of autobiographical memory, constructions of self (particularly looking at race and gender issues), and cultural studies.  I hope to use as a resource the expertise of some members of the University of Waterloo’s psychology department who study autobiographical memory.  Back to top

ENGLISH 792:  SEMIOTICS OF THE CITY (LIT/RCD)
PROFESSOR KEN HIRSCHKOP

ENGL 705:  MEDIEVAL AND MEDIEVALIST HUMANISM (LIT)
PROFESSOR NORMAN KLASSEN

ENGLISH 715: DISCIPLINARY MEASURES: POETRY AND RHETORIC IN THE ENGLISH REFORMATION (LIT/RCD)
PROFESSOR KENNETH GRAHAM

ENGL 730:  NATION AND NATIONALISM IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE (LIT)
PROFESSOR KATE LAWSON

ENGLISH 793:  WAYNE BOOTH (RCD)
PROFESSOR RANDY HARRIS

This course is one of two required graduate courses that survey theories of writing and communication. Theory I begins with the classics, and moves through medieval, Renaissance, enlightenment and ninenteenth century critical theories. Theory II begins with the twentieth century and ends with the present. The courses include instruction in research methodologies and practice. Assignments will include a major research paper on a topic developed in consultation with the professors, and reflecting one or more of the methodologies studied in the courses.  Back to top

Required Texts:
The Taming of the Shew; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Romeo and Juliet; King Henry IV, Part 1; Richard III; MacBeth; Hamlet; The Tempest.

It has been argued that the development of print culture in the early modern period led to the suppression or denigration of visually-presented information. As a broad statement, this is probably true, but what it ignores is the continuing importance of visual rhetoric in the age of print, and what it elides is the contribution that visual ways of understanding made to the development of verbal means of expression during the period. This course will examine modes of visual persuasion in printed works of the era, and their relationship to verbal modes. Examples will be drawn from all areas of printed materials, including literary, scientific, pedagogical, and statistical, and students will gain experience in locating and using these resources. Secondary reading will include work on the period and on information design and visual rhetoric. Back to top

In this course we’ll read and study contemporary American “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce and aesthetic response in the viewer” (McCloud), i.e., comics. We’ll take a look at the history of American comics—and comics in general—and think about the structure, function, and rhetorical potency of this genre of literature, which relies (usually) on an especially rich correlation of text and image. To help understand that correlation, we’ll draw on the work of visual language theorists, social semioticians, and comic artists themselves, such as Scott McClud and Will Eisner.Among the comic artists we’ll likely study are Lynda Barry, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, R. Crumb, Frank Miller, Joe Sacco, Art Speigelman, and Chris Ware. Course work will include a presentation, an essay, and a short comic (no drawing skills required). For more information, please follow this link: http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~amcmurry/comicgradcourse.pdf

ENGLISH 792:  SEMIOTICS OF THE CITY (LIT/RCD)
PROFESSOR KEN HIRSCHKOP (FALL 2006)

In this course we will examine the ways in which we interpret and experience urban life from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards.  The premise of the course is that cities are not merely built environments organising our economic and social lives, but also systems of signs, which compose a meaningful world for the urban dweller.  Meaningful, but not unambiguous: there are many different kinds of people in cities, who live in different places and interpret the city in different ways.  Much of our attention will be directed towards conflicting interpretations of the city and urban life, and struggles to shape a certain vision of the city.  As will become clear (I hope) through the course, these struggles are conducted not only through writing on the city, but also via decisions on how one shapes and decorates an urban environment, battles over the fates of neighbourhoods, occupies and uses public and private spaces – even how one walks.

Ideally, we would spend a great deal of time actually wandering through cities, given that our concern will be not only with texts on urban existence but with everyday acts of interpreting the city.  Unfortunately, a hands-on approach would prove unwieldly and perhaps expensive, so in the main we will content ourselves with different kinds of writing on the modern city:  essays, novels, texts by architects, sociologists, and urban theorists. Readings will include works by Kevin Robbins, Kevin Lynch, Henri Lefebvre and Walter Benjamin, and selections from Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, The Blackwell City Reader.

A good deal of research has been accomplished investigating the social action and conventions associated with various text-types or genres such as reports, mission statements, research proposals etc. But what happens when those text-types move into an online environment? What changes? What stays the same?

This course will combine genre analysis together with two social theories to explore the changes that occur when well-recognized professional text types move into online environments. From an activity systems approach (Vygotsky, Engestrom) we will be investigating genres as symbolic structures or tools that shape their users. From an actor-network perspective (Latour) we will be investigating the possibility that technologies (both computer and print) function as agents and shape information sharing and development. Back to top

This course is one of two required* graduate courses that survey theories of writing and communication. Theory I begins with the classics, and moves through medieval, Renaissance, enlightenment and ninenteenth century critical theories. Theory II begins with the twentieth century and ends with the present. The courses include instruction in research methodologies and practice. Assignments will include a major research paper on a topic developed in consultation with the professors, and reflecting one or more of the methodologies studied in the courses. *Please note that this program change is undergoing the approval process and is not yet formally reflected in the program description. Back to top

This course surveys humanism, its changing value as an approach to literary studies, and the applicability of the concept in the study of medieval literature, language, and art, including Chaucer. Humanism proves somewhat shape-changing in differing times and contexts, though not entirely without consistency. The course will begin with a review of the pressure put on the concept by contemporary philosophical thought and humanism’s surprising recent resurfacing. It will also investigate how reading strategies arising from this tension are deployed in the analysis of medieval texts. This course will be directed to both those with an interest in theory and critical methodology as well as medieval literature and art; it will be developed as a series of soundings. Some attempt is made to frame the beginnings and early development of medieval humanism; the course also engages related concerns arising out of particular medieval Christian commitments. These in turn are folded into the study of literature and textuality, including the theme of courtly love, the influence of Stoicism, and theoretical questions such as those that arise through reflexivity and the dialectic of language and apophasis. Though designed to engage the broad and varying interests of students in the graduate program in English, this course will also provide burgeoning medievalists with an introduction to common points of reference in humanistic medieval studies, whether from the perspective of the fields of history, political studies, religious studies, art history, the history of science, and even sociology and psychology, as well as literature. Readings will include works by Chaucer, Julian of Norwich, Langland and Marguerite Porete. Back to top

In this course we will consider religious verse from Wyatt to Milton as a branch of the disciplinary rhetoric of the English church.  We will studies theories of discipline, both old (e.g. Calvin) and new (e.g. Foucault), investigate their relationship to rhetorical practice, and trace the development of Protestant poetry within a changing “culture of discipline.”  Within this framework, we will spend most of our time reading and discussing the poetry and prose of such writers as (in addition to Wyatt and Milton) Robert Crowley, Anne Locke, Edmund Spenser, Fulke Greville, and George Herbert.
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ENGL 730:  NATION AND NATIONALISM IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE (LIT)
PROFESSOR KATE LAWSON

This course will examine national identity and nationalist ideology in the fiction of the mid-Victorian periods. Through a close examination of selected fiction of the era, we will investigate key developments in ideas of national identity and of the nation state that were of such central importance throughout mid-nineteenth-century Europe­developments which indeed shaped many of the major historical events of the twentieth century. Representations of the domestic and the foreign--and especially of England and the Continent--will be examined, including the following: the nostalgia for an ideal England as political ideology in Disraeli’s Sybil and Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family; representations of the foreign and the foreigner within England, and the Englishman or woman abroad in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities and Little Dorrit, and Brontë’s Villette and Shirley; gender, cosmopolitanism, and national character; sacrifice, religion, and national identity. Pedagogy as a model of nationalist indoctrination will be a special focus of the reading.

The course takes its impetus from recent critics who note that while the history and historiography of nationalism was explored in great depth in the 1980's and 1990's, the role of nationalism in nineteenth-century literary history has been significantly undeveloped or underexplored. For example, Lauren Goodlad claims that “an insufficiently expansive model of Victorian middle-class identity continues to impair critical elaborations of national character--what is sometimes alternatively conceptualised as Englishness or Britishness” (2000.143). Michael Cotsell, the general editor of the series English Literature and the Wider World, claims that “[l]iterary history . . . has been developed to reinforce an ethos of homogeneous and high-minded nationhood” (xi); this course will take up the challenge to interrogate this ethos.

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On March 8, 2005, Kevin Klerck posted a suicide note to his LiveJournal, engaged in a few last lines of chat conversation, and shot himself in the head with a shotgun.  Such events are not uncommon, as evidenced in the recent rash of Japanese multi-cybercides that have fascinated the news media.  Timothy Leary, the infamous Harvard professor and champion of psychedelia, presaged such events by putting forth the notion of “designer dying,” a concept that he hoped to enact by webcasting his own death.  Such tragic and heroic events--tragedy and heroism being the operative words here--encapsulate the metaphysics of computer culture that we will explore in this course.  This is a metaphysics rooted in two basic components of the human condition, two sides of the same coin: a) the need to be acknowledged and recognized as an individual, and; b) the inevitability of death. Both elements may be summed up tritely as the human “quest for immortality,” which has been altered radically by new technologies that both facilitate and exacerbate our tendency toward death-denial. Today, dreams of immortality come not only in cryogenics and genetic engineering, but also in personal web sites, home movies, mass mediated celebrity worship, and in an endless stream of fashionable gadgets that offer pre-programmed identities to their users.  We will explore the insidious irony of this situation by investigating technology’s material instantiation in warfare--our death-denying gadgets are either the direct result of military research, or they are immediately repurposed for military endeavors, all for the sake of human destruction. 

Building first of all on the theories of psychologist and philosopher Ernest Becker, this course will introduce students to a new field of study that I have called “necromedia theory," which aims to  provide a universal, psychosocial analysis of contemporary digital culture.   Besides Ernest Becker, the "necromedia theorists"studied in this course include Friedrich Kittler, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Katherine Hayles, Martin Heidegger, and Avital Ronell, among others.  Besides written assignments, students will undertake a "dead media project," which will require them to demonstrate their knowledge of necromedia theory in an artifact created with an antiquated media device. 

Provisional Reading List

Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death.  

Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. 

Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man.

Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman.  

Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology.  

Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.

Ronell, Avital. Finitude's Score.

Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema.

Literary criticism in Canada has a history just as long, indeed arguably longer, than the history of Canadian literature. John George Bourinot’s Our Intellectual Strength and Weakness, W.J. Alexander’s essays on Robert Browning, and sometimes-combative discussions on literary texts in nineteenth-century periodicals point to an early interest in theorizing about literature as much as appreciating it. This coeval development of literature and literary criticism helped establish a mutual influence, each affecting the other as it developed. Many of Canada=s most prominent creative writers, past and present, have had careers as important literary critics who comment on the themes and genres that their creative work represents in a different context. In this course, we will examine the reciprocal influences of literature and criticism by exploring a range of critical monographs and anthologies in conjunction with a limited selection of literary works. Some of the issues on which the class will focus are the artist and the critic as public intellectuals in Canada; the on-going concern with the canon; late twentieth-century movements to include lesser-known Canadian works in the canon; Canadian literary criticism versus theory; national debates over public funding for the arts; attacks on and defences of nationalism in literary criticism. Featured texts will span the Confederation to contemporary periods of literary criticism and may include Margaret Atwood’s Survival or her Strange Things; Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski’s The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada; Frank Davey, Surviving the Paraphrase; Heather Murray’s Working in English; Cynthia Sugars’ Unhomely States and Christyl Verduyn’s Literary Pluralities. The literary texts to be discussed may include works by Anne Michaels, Margaret Atwood, Robert Kroetsch, Thomas King, George Bowering, Sheila Watson and E. Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake.  Back to top

One of the central preoccupations of postcolonial studies has been the issue of difference and hybridity. Theories of hybridity in postcolonial studies are tools for analyzing cross-cultural contact, the creolization of cultures, and diversity within “multicultural” nation-states. This course will evaluate critically a range of postcolonial approaches to the issues of difference, otherness, and hybridity, with a view to defining an “emancipatory use of culture” (Bannerji) and understanding the place of “difference” in the changing field of postcolonial studies. How flexible is the language of difference as applied to creolized aesthetics and linguistics, political resistance to marginalization, and official state policies of tolerance and multiculturalism? Can the articulations of cultural hybridity taken up by postcolonial studies accommodate differences of gender and sexuality? How does ‘hybridity’ work in postcolonial studies when diaspora, transnationalism, and globalization have complicated the relationship between postcolonial studies and the framework of the nation? Although theoretical and literary texts will be geographically wide-ranging, the core questions of the course will be derived from Caribbean and Canadian contexts. Back to top

And when men did engage in debate about their deepest concerns, they found that each man could say unto his borther, Racca, thou fool.  - Wayne Booth

Wayne Booth is one of the most consistently interesting, but also one of the most consistently underestimated, critics of the latter 20th C. His driving theme was the rhetorical resources that encouraged, obstructed, or refined agreement: and, therefore, belief, knowledge, and action. We will read a range of his books, engage his issues, and seek agreement about the value of his critical pluralism, not only for understanding texts, but for understanding each other. 

Readings will draw upon the following

The rhetoric of fiction

Critical understanding

Modern dogma and the rhetoric of assent

The rhetoric of rhetoric

A rhetoric of irony

The company we keep

The essential Wayne Booth

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This course focuses on semiotic, social semiotic, and rhetorical methods for analyzing software interfaces. The goal is to provide and develop a methodology for discussing interfaces as texts within a specific genre of symbolic communication, and to determine, through analyses based on this methodology, the potential effects of changing key components of these interfaces. Studies will proceed according to a structure that includes a theory-driven hypothesis, a set of small usability tests, a presentation of findings, and a final paper combining all these elements.

In order to focus the discussions, we will examine only two software packages. The first is Microsoft Office 2007, current in beta but available by the start of the course. For the first time in roughly a decade, Microsoft has chosen to revamp the Office interface completely, to the extent that relearning is almost certainly necessary. We will compare the current Office interface (version 2003) with the new one according to our theoretical framework, exploring how the interface functions as communication, and we will test specific tasks (in a limited usability testing environment) to determine the meaning and effectiveness of the changes. The second software package will be decided upon when the course begins, from a list of those available on the computers in the available classroom (the LT3 Flex Lab in Dana Porter). The goal for the second package will be to explore a relatively simple but largely unfamiliar interface.  

Course texts will include the software itself (students need not purchase it) as well as papers in semiotics, social semiotics, and rhetoric, likely provided in the form of a combination of books and a course reader. In presentations and seminars, we will apply key concepts of the selected theories to specific elements of the interfaces under discussion in order to determine how those elements combine to create communication structures necessary to the user’s understanding of the range of choices available and the means of enacting those choices. From social semiotics, for example, we will engage issues such as modality and the role of context; from rhetoric we will apply theorist ranging from Aristotle (enthymeme, the appeals, the role of category) to Burke (consubstantiation and the pentad); from semiotics we will work with selected elements of both the Saussurean and the Peircian traditions. The goal for the class is to develop an analytic method from these sources that all class members can use as the basis for the interface analysis that comprises the major assignment.  Back to top

ENGL 785: LITERATURE AND THEORY (LIT)

PROFESSOR VICTORIA LAMONT

ENGL 720: LANGUAGE AND THE PASSIONS IN THE RESTORATION AND EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY   (LIT/RCD)
PROFESSOR REBECCA TIERNEY-HYNES

ENGL 770:  CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN CANADIAN LITERATURE IN ITS HISTORICAL CONTEXT (LIT)
PROFESSOR LINDA WARLEY

ENGL 794:  CYBERBODIES: RHETORIC AND FICTION (RCD)
PROFESSOR MARCEL O'GORMAN

ENGL 795: ACADEMIC ELECTRONIC GENRES (RCD)                       PROFESSOR CATHERINE SCHRYER

ENGL 795: KNOWLEDGE AND THE PUBLIC (LIT)                PROFESSOR ALAN BLUM

A course in rhetorical theory and criticism for graduate-level students
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This course will examine the motif of sexual disguise in eighteenth-century literature, biography, and journalism from both historical and literary perspectives. Sexual disguise was a traditional motif in folk materials and in romances, and, after 1660, with the introduction of actresses in breeches roles, it was linked to a heterosexualized stage. As well, since so many women disguised themselves as men to work or go to war, the motif also enters literature in connexion with women who were simultaneously sexually attractive to other women and lauded as industrious members of the poor. As we will see, writing about sexual disguise makes available both period notions of gender performativity and sexual variety, on the one hand, and period challenges to gender binarism and the association of masculinity with men, on the other. It also tells us some important things about how social class, paternalism, and sexuality were connected in the period.

We will read literary works by Shakespeare, Behn, Wycherley, Defoe, and Edgeworth, among others, and memoirs by the breeches actress Charlotte Charke and the female soldier Hannah Snell. We will also look at some examples of newspaper reports, comic ballads, and witty prose accounts that treat sexual disguise in intriguing, and frequently hilarious, ways. On the theoretical side, we will start the seminar with a look at theories of gender and sexuality by Eve Sedgwick and Judith Halberstam. Over the duration of the course we will consider the implications of our study for some recent critical ideas about the role of performance in the construction of gender identity (e.g., Judith Butler) and the role of typification in the practice of cultural studies (e.g., Stephen Greenblatt).  Back to top

"You are men upon the eve of a great domestic charge, for you are now in the eve of a great foreign outbreak.  England never received any change from the steady influence of its own people...I tell you that before you are six months older you will see such a revolution all over France and the Continent fo Europe, as this world never witnessed before.  It is from that, that liberty will come to England." 

Feargus O'Connor.  Speech in Nottingham.  July 1847.

Echoing O'Connor, but with a very different political outlook, de Tocqueville said in 1848:  "We are sleepiing on a volcano. . . Do you not see that the earth trembles anew?  A wind of revolution blows, the storm is on the horizon."  The storm of revolution did blow through Europe in 1848, France, Bavaria, Berlin, Vienna, Hungary, and Milan all participating in the ferment.  Almost as quickly, the storm blew itself out.  Nevertheless, the agitation leading up to 1848 -- including the Chartist movement in England -- and the consequences arising from it, had a formative effect on nineteenth-century Europe.

This course will focus on the representation of work, of the labouring classes, and of radicalism in texts clustered around 1848.  Although we will only read works published in English, we will to some degree analyse these central concerns within the broader European context.  We will begin by reading some of the key texts leading up to and including 1848 (by Carlyle, Engels, Marx), and then explore the work and radicalism in five major novels published from 1847-1849:  Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair, Shirley, Mary Barton, and David Copperfield.  Back to top

Why are so many twentieth-century literary writers so pessimistic when they consider the future? Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Margaret Atwood each wrote compelling negative visions of the illiterate, vapid future they saw arising necessarily from the progress of mid-century capitalism and technologization. Post WW2, not even science-fiction writers could muster enthusiasm for the future. Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, and other lesser luminaries were no less bleak in their prognostications than the more highbrow crew. This course examines the many reasons why, through the greater part of the twentieth century, the drive towards imaginary utopia stalled so spectacularly. Back to top

This course is a survey of critical theory and its impact upon literary study. While the course many include some classic theoretical texts, the emphasis will be on major schools of critical theory in the 20th and 21st century, including structuralism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, marxism, materialism, historicism, feminism, and post-colonial studies.  This course is recommended for students who are interested in theory, have not taken theory at the senior undegraduate level, are pursuing or planning to pursue a Ph.D. in literature, or are planning to write the literary theory field exam.   Back to top

"The mind has no firewall."

PSYOPS adage.

Over forty years ago Marshall McLuhan observed that material war waged by men and machines (the "outer conquest of space") would become ever more closely allied with immaterial war waged by media and information (the "inner conquest of spirit").  Today, in the age of spin, public diplomacy and "strategic influence," government officials and military planners are rediscovering the value of rhetoric as an instrument of national power and authority.  Taking its point of departure in this conception of rhetoric as a form of "soft power," this seminar will explore the use of propaganda as a weapon of persuasion in the battle for the "hearts of minds" of the global masses. The goal of the seminar is threefold:  first, to trace the evolution of propaganda techniques from the Great War (1914-1918) to the present; second, to elaborate a theory of propaganda as a mode of rhetorical persuasion; and third, to develop a set of practical tools and methods for analyzing propaganda mesages in all their dimensions (text, image, audio, etc.).  As we shall see over the course of the seminar, the modern arts of propaganda - from the "Speakers Corps" of the Hitler Youth to the "influence operations" of the Department of Defense - retool many of the concepts and principles of Classical rhetoric for the modern "battlespace" of ideas.

READINGS: 
Selections from Aristotle, Marx, Freud, Orwell, Huxley, Goebbels, Hitler, Benjamin, Adorno, Heidegger, Lacan, Debord, Burke, McLuhan, Bathes, Chomsky, Lyotard, Virilio, Kittler, Zizek, Baudrillard, the Defense Sicence Board and others.   Back to top

ENGL 720: LANGUAGE AND THE PASSIONS IN THE RESTORATION AND EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY (LIT/RCD)
PROFESSOR REBECCA TIERNEY-HYNES

This course is designed to examine the relationships among seventeenth-and eighteenth-century theories of the passions, language, and aesthetics. We will: investigate the intersections between philosophical and pornographic understandings of the senses and the passions in the eighteenth century, interrogating the divide between popular "high" culture; trace the links between discussions of language and of the passions, and try to understand whether or how eighteenth-century aesthetics might be a product of these discussions; examine eighteenth-century anxieties about the interplay of the concepts of sensibility, sentiment, and sensuality inthe context of the development of the novel as a genre; and think about the impact of changing notions of authorship and readership on philosophical theories of subjectivity and emotion.   Back to top

This course will be almost entirely concerned with the major poetry of G.M. Hopkins. As we read the poetry some little attention will be given to the traditions leading up to and away from his work, and we will on occasion refer to his letters and journals. Attention will be paid to the way in which he achieves the effects of his poetry: his world view, his poetics, his prosody. Back to top

In this course, we will examine the evolution of Modernism as a phenomenon of the expanding crisis of modernity in the early twentieth century.  We will focus on four writers and four texts: Sigmund Freud and the Wolf Man case history, James Joyce and Ulysses, T. S. Eliot and The Waste Land, Virginia Woolf and Mrs Dalloway.  In particular, we will focus on the psychopathologies (hysteria, obsessional neurosis, etc.) that both disorder and constitute the uses of language and the representations of subjectivity in these four texts and selected precursor texts. Specifically, we will be concerned with the generative instabilities of narrative and referentiality in the order of language and of temporality, gender, and sexuality in the order of subjectivity that constitute the modernity and the crisis of discourse in the early twentieth century.    Back to top

“African-Canadian literature has been, from its origins, the work of political exiles and native dissidents. It began in crisis, matured in crisis, and exists in crisis.”

(Clarke, G.E. Odysseys Home 327)

In this course we will study selected works by African Canadian authors in relation to the long and deep African presence in Canada. The course will begin by briefly tracing black history and the development of an indigenous black literary tradition. Throughout, students will prepare context presentations that illuminate the historical, regional, political and cultural issues that inform contemporary literary production. The focus of the course is on analyzing literary works, and we will pay attention both to cultural and political contexts and to formal and linguistic innovations that shape the writing. We will read broadly in different genres—poetry, fiction, drama and life writing—in order develop a sense of the diversity and complexity of contemporary African Canadian literature. Featured authors might include George Elliott Clarke, André Alexis, Djanet Sears, Dionne Brand, and Verna Thomas.   Back to top

Semiotics is a richly varied, transdisciplinary study of systems of meaning and their associated signifying practices. This course begins by introducing students to the classic thinkers of the semiotic tradition (e.g., Peirce, Saussure, Greimas, Sebeok) who were allied by a perception that beneath all appearances signs could be more or less grounded in ontological, epistemic, structural, biological, or textual principles. The focus then turns to a contemporary strand of semiotic theory that—drawing on the fields of functional grammar, critical linguistics, rhetoric, and design, as well as theories of power, discourse, literacy, and social change—emphasizes the social construction of signs. Social semiotics thus leaves aside the quest for formal laws of existing signs to attend instead to the ways that persons and groups create and use signs for pragmatic ends. Some of the thinkers we’ll consider in this respect are Roland Barthes, Norman Fairclough, Michael Halliday, Guenther Kress, Jay Lemke, and Theo van Leeweun. Case studies will be drawn from a wide-range of signifying practices including fashion, advertising, architecture, film, and literature. Students interested in rhetoric, critical discourse analysis, literary theory, and media studies may find this course useful.  Back to top

Over the past fifty years, cybernetics and bioengineering have led us to the view the body as an assemblage of micro-parts that can be controlled at will. This technoscientific rhetoric threatens the notion of a self-possessive, liberal humanist subject, and leads us to believe that both our identity and our destiny lie in technological progress, which will culminate in either a utopian virtual experience and/or in a mastery of the human genome. Today, specific technologies such as video games and the Internet lure us into forgetting about our bodies altogether, which pale in comparison to the infinite flights of fancy offered by digital embodiment. But in spite of the discourse on progress and disembodiment that characterizes technoculture, the body still remains--in fact, thanks primarily to screen based technologies that encourage immobility, bodies are getting bigger. This course will explore how technology--from the computer mouse to genetic engineering--has impacted the human body, both materially and conceptually.

We will approach the problem of "cybering the body" by examining critical theories of embodiment and fictional narratives of cyberspace and genetic modification. Theoretical and scientific readings will range from Norbert Weiner and Alan Turing to Michel Foucault, Katherine N. Hayles, and Avital Ronell. Readings in fiction will include Neil Stephenson, Margaret Atwood, and Bernard Wolfe. It should be noted that there will be a distinct feminist focus in this course. In addition to an essay and seminar presentation, students will partake in the development of a physical, interactive media project based on the concept of "embodied rhetoric." Previous experience in computer programming or microelectronics is not required. The goal of this project is to engage English students directly in the physical manipulation of electronics, a role that is traditionally reserved for electronic engineers. That being said, an electronic engineer and a digital artist will serve as consultants for this course. The results of the interactive media assignment, which will be conducted primarily in the new Critical Media Lab, will be showcased in Render, the University of Waterloo Art Gallery.

Provisional Reading List:

• Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake.
• Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women
• Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the body
• Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, eds. Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk.
• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
• Ann Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the postmodern
• William Gibson, Pattern Recognition.
• Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto"
• N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman
• Samantha Holland, "Descartes Goes to Hollywood: Mind, Body and Gender in   Contemporary Cinema"
• Deborah Lupton, "The Embodied Computer/User"
• Carol Mason, "Terminating Bodies: Toward a Cyborg History of Abortion"
• Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
• Sadie Plant, "The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics"
• Avital Ronell, Stupidity
• Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash.
• Katherine Stubbs, "Telegraphy's Corporeal Fictions"
• Edward Tenner. When Technology Bites Back.
• Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"
• Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen
• Barney Warf, "Compromising Positions: The Body in Cyberspace"
• Norbert Weiner, "Men, Machines, and the World About"
• Bernard Wolf, Limbo

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A study of Dante’s Christian epic poem and of his cultural/literary world, this course will examine the various strands of one of the greatest works of the western imagination, particularly as they affect literature in English. Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy is at once a medieval report on knowledge and a pre-modern gateway to the Humanities. It has nurtured the imagination of literati and artists all over the world and its pages have had a particular impact on literature in English from the Middle Ages onward. While exploring Dante’s intertextual and intratextual strategies in the Comedy, the course will introduce students to a dynamic reading of the poema sacro, emphasizing selective comparative approaches with literature in English beginning with Chaucer. It will further examine Dante’s textual ordering of select poetic ideas and the manner in which they are appropriated by English-speaking writers in order to underline enduring issues of our human condition.

Required texts: The Divine Comedy. Vols. I & II. Ed/Trans. R.M. Durling. OUP 2001;
Dante: Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. A.A. Iannucci, U of T Press, 1997.

Selections from Major English Language Writers’ works (subject to change) will be: Chaucer’s Monk Tale, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Shelley’s Triumph of Life, Pound’s Cantos, Eliot’s The Waste Land and Little Gidding, Joyce’s Ulysses, Beckett’s More Pricks than Kicks, and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Selections from Dante’s Vita Nuova, Convivio, De Monarchia, Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid, as well as other critical/theoretical pieces will be provided by the instructor.   Back to top

As distinct from images or signs, objects are material things that occupy space. Their role in the human sphere, their human meaning, their resistance to human meaning, has preoccupied many 20th-century writers. The lives of modern things—as commodities, artifacts, gifts, “stuff”—and the special way in which they obtrude themselves into the space of representation will be the subject of this course.

The goal will be to read a range of work in philosophy, anthropology, art history, and literary criticism as inspiration for an investigation of the object-matter of American poetry, fiction, and film. Literary readings may include works by Gertrude Stein, James Agee, Carlos Williams, Dr Suess, Elizabeth Bishop, and Don Delillo.  Back to top

In this course, students will examine the literary techniques and rhetorical strategies that helped imagine “Canada” in territorial, political, and cultural terms as a planned society, one carefully designed to guarantee the growth of an idealized national identity.  The course will include studies of such relevant concepts as the “architext,” high colonialism, and topocentrism in Canadian writing; it will consider the language of early disputes over land title by Euro-settler and First Nations groups; it will also explore the role played by genres such as the long poem on Canada and the social protest novel in conceptualizing Canadian nationhood as “designed.” 

The texts to be read range from environmental and political writing to fiction and poetry, and may include the following:

Irene Baird, Waste Heritage (1939)

Albert Carman, The Preparation of Ryerson Embury (1900)

George Munro Grant, Ocean to Ocean: Sandford Fleming’s Expedition Through Canada in 1872  (1872)

Nellie McClung, Sowing Seeds in Danny (1908)

Alexander McLachlan, The Emigrant (1861)

Alexander Morris, The Treaties of Canada with the Indians of Manitoba and the North-West Territories (1880)

E.J. Pratt, Brébeuf and His Brethren (1940)

Duncan Campbell Scott, “The Height of Land” (1916)

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Songs are designed. In fact, they undergo design during two processes minimally: writing and public performance. An even more extensive design process occurs during recording. Understanding how songs “work”, this course argues, is to a significant degree a function of understanding these three design processes.

In this course, we study songs in the wide-reaching popular music genres of rock, pop, folk, and alternative. Beginning with a look at the pre-rock music of the 1940s and a brief examination of the songs of musical theatre (Broadway and the West End primarily), we move through some specific song types of the 1950s through today. Through a combination of semiotic, social semiotic, rhetorical, and various musical theories, we will explore the means by which the songwriters, recording producers, and performers provide cues, codes and structures that alert us to how we are to experience the songs. This is not a course in song lyrics, although certainly lyrics are an important part of a song’s design; instead, we examine all elements of a song, its production, and its performance in order to arrive at a rhetorical and social semiotic analysis.

Music under study will include recordings by and/or recordings of songs written by, for example: Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Cole Porter, Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Jimmy Webb, the Band, Badfinger, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, Elton John, Elvis Costello, the Clash, Fleetwood Mac, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, the Eagles, Jane Siberry, Cyndi Lauper, the Police, the Bangles, Blondie, Nirvana, Dave Matthews, Fiona Apple, R.E.M., U2, Green Day, Sarah McLachlan, Alanis Morrisette, and many others up to the present day (students are invited to bring to class samples from their own collections). Because of the time required to listen to music, each class will be four hours long.

There are three assignments. One is an ongoing set of interpretations from each student made available to the rest of the class online as a bi-weekly blog, with part of the grade for this assignment consisting of the quality of each student’s responses to those blogs. At least one of the other assignments will consist of a researched academic essay. For the third, I am soliciting proposals for any of the following: (a) essay; (b) songwriting; (c) adding to an existing recording; (d) recording a version of an existing song; (e) recording a new song. I will do my best to provide recording capabilities (if all else fails, the computer in my office works fine for this); I am also planning to invite two or three songwriters/performers to help us workshop.

Please note that previous formal musical study is not a pre-requisite for this course. Nor is any experience in songwriting, recording, or performance. The only assumption is that you’ve listened to enough popular music over your lifetime and have an interest in studying it.

Partial Bibliography

Coursebook on rhetorical theory.
Van Leeuwen, Theo. Speech, Music, Sound.
Van Leeuwn, Theo. Introducing Social Semiotics.
Bennett, Andy. The Popular Music Studies Reader.
Moore, Alan. Analyzing Popular Music.
Tarasti, Eero. Signs of Music: A Guide to Musical Semiotics.
Brackett, David. Interpreting Popular Music.
Keller, Hermann. Phrasing and Articulation: A Contribution to a Rhetoric of Music.
Cooper, Grosvener and Leonard B. Meyer. The Rhythmic Structure of Music.
Temperley, David. The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures.
Mathieu, W. A. Harmonic Experience: Tonal Harmony from its Natural Origins to its Modern Expression.
Swain, Joseph P. Harmonic Rhythm: Analysis and Interpretation.

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We exchange suasions because we are social animals. Rhetoric allows us to distribute and negotiate our beliefs, our plans, our strategies, our desires, in ways that others find more or less compelling. But how does it work? Why are some suasive moves are more successful than others. In William James's terms, they got this power from "our ancestors in their attempts to get the chaos of their crude individual experiences into a more shareable and manageable shape." Their cognitive evolutionary success has made them "a part of the very structure of our mind." The machinery of argumentation, that is, and of suasion generally, is guided by the organizational principles and natural affinities of the human mind. No one disputes this for such phenomena as analogy and metaphor, research into which goes back decades in Anglo-American cognitive science, but it is demonstrably true for a wide range of other rhetorical patterns. We know, for instance, that the brain is particularly attuned to sounds of similar duration and frequency (that's why rhyming is such a successful mnemonic). We know that repetition is critically important for fixing sequences in memory (want to remember a phone number? --say it over and over again). All of these brain-function facts are utilized by the schemes and tropes of rhetorical theory. We know that much conceptual patterning is along lines of similarity and difference, lines that run parallel to rhetorical topoi. We know that thought rests heavily on processes of categorization and on the principles axiomatized in set theory, the same processes and principles that underlie argumentation.  We will look at this intersection of rhetoric and the structure of minds. 

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The notion of “knowledge mobilization” focuses upon making knowledge accessible to the public. Though typically treated as a problem of logistics, this concern raises questions relating to the ambiguity of notions such as ‘knowledge’, ‘access’ and ‘public’ that have long haunted the humanities as riveting existential concerns because the question of the application of knowledge to life has been and continues as a recurrent and heterogeneous social phenomenon for theorizing.

The treatment of the relation of knowledge to life as a settled matter of fact is the very phenomenon that we will take up in this course by exploring how conceptions of applying knowledge are grounded in ambiguous border relations to opinion, belief, faith and truth, in distinctions between speech and writing, visions of inscription as memory and recording and its storage in social forms such as journals, archives, encyclopedias, and data banks, and in contentious discourses around concepts such as self knowledge, bildung, health, necessity, and system among others. Fundamental turning points in this discourse will be identified and explored through texts from the Stoics and Epicureans, Plato’s dialogues, the enlightenment project and selected successors such as Hegel, Marx and, Freud, and novelists such as Tolstoy and Calvino. (Photo from Univer of Waterloo Library) Back to top

ENGL 785: FROM FREUD TO LACAN: PSYCHOANALYSIS IN LITERARY, VISUAL STUDIES AND SEXUALITY STUDIES (LIT)

PROFESSOR ALICE KUZNIAR

ENGL 720:  EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SCANDALOUS MEMOIRS (LIT)
PROFESSOR FRASER EASTON

ENGL 725: STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM (LIT)

PROFESSOR TRISTANNE CONNOLLY

ENGL 792: SEMIOTICS OF THE CITY (LIT/RCD)                             PROFESSOR KEN HIRSCHKOP                             

ENGL 794: GENRES OF TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION  (RCD)
PROFESSOR NEIL RANDALL

ENGL 794:  SPATIAL THEORY AND PRACTICE (RCD)
PROFESSOR MARCEL O'GORMAN

ENGL 775:  GENDER IN POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE (LIT)
PROFESSOR ARCHANA RAMPURE

A course in rhetorical theory and criticism for graduate-level students.  Back to top

It has been argued that the development of print culture in the early modern period led to the suppression or denigration of visually-presented information. As a broad statement, this is probably true, but what it ignores is the continuing importance of visual rhetoric in the age of print, and what it elides is the contribution that visual ways of understanding made to the development of verbal means of expression during the period. This course will examine modes of visual persuasion in printed works of the era, and their relationship to verbal modes. Examples will be drawn from all areas of printed materials, including literary, scientific, pedagogical, and statistical, and students will gain experience in locating and using these resources. Secondary reading will include work on the period and on information design and visual rhetoric. Back to top

Literary recovery refers to research that seeks to bring to light important but neglected literary works. It has been a significant trend in American literary scholarship since the 1980s, with Henry Louis Gates’ influential recovery of black writers, and critique of the dominant American canon by scholars such as Jane Tompkins (Sensational Designs, 1986) and Paul Lauter (Canons and Contexts, 1991). With this reopening of the American canon, more and more researchers turned their attention to the recovery of literary texts that had been excluded from American literary scholarship, anthologies, and university curricula. This course will survey important examples of, and theories and methods associated with, American literary recovery. Making use of digital archives such as The American Periodicals Series, Students will be complete a major project in which they make a case for the recovery of a literary text currently excluded from American literary scholarship, anthologies, and curricula.

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ENGL 785: FROM FREUD TO LACAN: PSYCHOANALYSIS IN LITERARY, VISUAL AND SEXUALITY STUDIES (LIT)         PROFESSOR ALICE KUZNIAR

Internet technologies have promoted a veritable explosion of life writing online in new media genres such as the personal homepage, blogs, and social networking platforms. As much as new media scholars interest themselves in understanding the writing genres and social selves created through these technologies, scholars in autobiography studies seek to bring their expertise to bear on theorizing these new modes of self-narration. These two fields—new media and autobiography—increasingly intersect, asking questions best answered with both an eye to the history and theory of life writing and to the practices and technologies of new media. Our theoretical readings will focus on poststructural understandings of the self, and we will examine these in light of how they have been taken up by both new media and autobiography theorists and practitioners.  Back to top

This course will focus on identifying areas of strain or conflict in public health and everyday life in relation to medical, literary, philosophical and everyday discourses of health and sickness. It will examine contested representations of the relations of health and life, healing and cure, pleasure and pain, self-governance and negligence, body and mind, and policy and polity. Core texts will span a wide variety of fields, eras and authors (e.g., Plato, Descartes, Freud, Parsons, Foucault, Gadamer, Garfinkel).
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ENGL 720: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SCANDALOUS MEMOIRS (LIT)
PROFESSOR FRASER EASTON

Scandal is both a speech act and a social energy. It is neither lampoon nor libel, exactly, and it can build up as well as tear down a reputation. Scandal is about one's public character, and about the publicity around it: it is, as it were, the flip side of the coin of celebrity. No less than in today's supermarket tabloids, eighteenth-century newspapers and magazines were full of gossip and tittle-tattle about the celebrities of the age. This gossip frequently focused, then as now, on sexual misbehaviour. Indeed, if could be argued that the narration of sexual misbehaviour helps to found the genre of autobiography: Augustine and Rousseau, for example, present their lives as at root sexual scandals. Moreover, scandalizing the reader seems to be an essential part of telling the story of one's life, or of others' lives, from the "Life of Johnson" to "Becoming Jane."

In this course we will look at the roots of both celebrity scandal and self-narration in the so-called "scandalous memoirs" of the eighteenth-century. From gender-bending female soldiers to masturbating free-thinkers, we will read these memoirs, and some fictional versions of the form, in the context of the life-writing of the period, on the one hand, and of contemporary theory about self-narration and transgression, on the other. Writers that we will examine may include Constantia Phillips, Laetitia Pilkington, Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Charke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lady Vane, Christian Davies, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, and Maria Edgeworth. Theorists will include Derrida and Foucault.

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ENGL 725: STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM (LIT)               PROFESSOR TRISTANNE CONNOLLY

The Romantic period sees the culmination of parallel cultural changes: the age of sensibility, the rise of domesticity, the medicalisation of childbirth, the shift (as Laqueur argues) from a "one-sex" model of analogy to a "two-sex" model of difference. Curiously, even as pregnancy and birth had come under the control of physicians, medical men and women midwives (such as Thomas Denman and Martha Mears) wrote treatises on how to "follow nature", and often drew on the language of sensibility and botanical imagery. Conversely, Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) used poetry (with extensive footnotes) to popularise the science of botany, which became a fashionable pastime for women, but a controversial one, considering that the Linnaean system of classification was based on sex, and Darwin had explained plant reproduction in terms of the dalliances of personified flowers in a myriad multiples and permutations of male and female. This course will examine the mutual collisions, and constructions, of nature, science and poetry, in relation to sex and gender, courtship and reproduction, passion and propriety in the Romantic period. What happens when humans are figured as plants and flowers, and plant life is mapped on human sexuality? Is this cross-species perversity, or reinforcement (and projection) of "natural" masculine and feminine social and reproductive roles? How do pain and death figure in a picture of childbirth as natural, and of women (and their beauty) formed and protected by nature for the purpose of attraction and reproduction? What space is there for non-reproductive sexuality in such discourses? Juxtaposed with Darwin's Loves of the Plants and Denman's and Mears' midwifery writing, we will consider poetry by William Blake, Ann Batten Cristall, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Elizabeth Moody, Charlotte Smith and others.        Back to top

This course will examine national character, the development of a national identity, and ideas of nation and nationalism in the fiction of the mid-Victorian period. The course will begin with three novels that write national histories: Dickens’s history of the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities; Charlotte Brontë’s history of Luddism, Shirley; and Disraeli’s novel of the aftermath of the Reform Bill and of Chartism, Sybil. We will take note of the contested ideas of the nation and of national character that these histories record, such as the conflict between a national ideal of self-sacrifice and the demand for rights, and between a new cosmopolitanism and a Tory nostalgia for a lost ideal England. The course will then go on to examine three novels that represent England and Englishness at home and abroad: Dickens’ Little Dorrit, Brontë’s Villette, and Charlotte Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family. We will test James Buzard’s claim, in Disorienting Fiction: the Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels, that the mid-Victorian novel represents England as a “transportable” national culture that colonises other spaces and places. We will particularly investigate how new practices of travel and tourism enculturate the young Englishman or woman into an ideology of Englishness and of the English nation.    Back to top

The texts of James Joyce enact and represent an unusual surplus in the usual generative relations between language and narration.  From his first short story in 1904 to the final revisions of Finnegans Wake in 1938, Joyce continuously deployed the fundamentals of language in literary use (eg., framing, deixis, replication, reference, intertextuality, etc.) as self-referential devices for the production of his narratives.   At each stage, the forms and functions of language generate the structure of the narrative at all levels and open a continual surplus in the possibilities of the reader’s reception, a surplus as available in the early stages as in the later seemingly more difficult stages.  In this course, we will be concerned with the first three of these four stages:  the three years of the development of the free indirect discourse and Naturalistic narration of Dubliners (1904-1907); the seven years of the evolution of the narrated monologue and the narrative symmetries of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1907-1914); the seven years of the emergence of the interior monologue of the early chapters and the polyphony of the later chapters of Ulysses (1914-1922).  Only in the first and last class will we briefly peer into the fourth stage: the seventeen years that Joyce devoted to the linguistic and narrative complexities of the Wake (1922-1939).  This continuous linguistic self-reference in narration made Joyce an influence and a resource for development of theories of language and/or narration, especially in Paris, in the later Lacan, for example, in Derrida, Cixous,  Kristeva, and Todorov, and our theoretical orientation will be centred in Narratology, which was named by Todorov in 1969 but has since developed into a multi-disciplinary.    Back to top

Ideally, we would spend a great deal of time actually wandering through cities, given that our concern will be not only with texts on urban existence but with everyday acts of interpreting the city. Unfortunately, a hands-on approach would prove unwieldly and perhaps expensive, so in the main we will content ourselves with different kinds of writing on the modern city: essays, novels, texts by architects, sociologists, and urban theorists. Readings will include works by Kevin Robbins, Kevin Lynch, Henri Lefebvre and Walter Benjamin, and selections from Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, The Blackwell City Reader.

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ENGL 794: GENRES OF TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION (RCD)
PROFESSOR NEIL RANDALL

This course examines a selection of the following genres in the technical communication field: Help Screens, Balloon Help, White Papers, Program update guides, Product Brochures, Spec sheets, Product walk-throughs, Interface analysis reports (incl. Usability reports), Magazine reviews, Magazine product roundups, Reviewers’ guides, Web content ­ specific product, Web content ­ services, Web information - consumer, Web information ­ enterprise, Sales and service proposals, Detailed technical explanations, Printed manuals.

Theoretical discussions from the literature in the technical communication field form the basis of our explorations of the genres. Readings will include one anthology of technical communication articles (/Central Works in Technical Communication/) as well as readings from journals such as /The Journal of Technical Writing and Communication/, /Technical Communication/, /Technical Communication Quarterly/, and the /IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication/. Still, the primary purpose of the course is the production of a substantial technical communication portfolio by each student. By the end of the course, students will have produced, individually and in teams, a solid range of the genres listed above, using an equally solid range of software to do so. Students need not be experienced in the software before starting the course, but a willingness to learn new software and advanced features of already-known software is essential.  Back to top

“Architecture is dead.” So says Philip Tabor, at least, in a brief essay entitled “I Am a Videocam.” He comes to this controversial conclusion by suggesting that physical, built spaces have no place in an age of electronic spectacle. This course asks students to look at such arguments very closely and to weigh the costs and benefits of moving from physical to digital spaces. Before arriving at such questions, however, this course will examine several modern and postmodern assessments of how place and space shape identity and culture. From the ultra-rationalist suburbs of LeCorbusier to the surreal, psychogeographies of the Situationiste Internationale, the high-tech surveillance forts of Los Angeles, and the delirious Manhattanism of Rem Koolhaus, this course will not only provide students with a solid understanding of spatial theory, but will also immerse them in hands-on spatial interventions. What is the relationship between writing and space? What is the future of the local rural landscape? What would Waterloo look like if Salvador Dali restructured it? Students will face such questions in this class, and develop writing/design projects suitable for an end of year exhibition organized by the instructor. Projects might include the development of a psychogeographical video game, the mapping of surveillance space with a video headcam, the construction of an online, text-based virtual world (MOO or MUD), or the creation of an acoustic digital audio space. Students are not required to have extensive tech experience, but they must be willing to learn the basics of a new software package or digital device. Since students are not expected to be design experts, the focus of the course will be on process and the students' ability to document the critical/theoretical purpose of their projects. Access to software and other gadgetry will be provided by the instructor.  Back to top

We will study allegory, a marriage of metaphor and narrative, from a cognitive perspective, drawing largely on texts from the medieval period, during which allegory was at its literary apogee. Specifically, we will examine the allegorical dream-vision poetry of Chaucer and William Langland (a crash-course in Middle English will be provided, but students will need to develop independent reading competence in the language), as well as selected works of scholastic philosophy and speculative grammar; our theoretical matrices will be drawn from from cognitive rhetoric (prominently featuring theories of figuration) and medieval studies (including theories of allegory, reading and language).

www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~raha/793CA_web/793CA.html

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This course will explore debates about politics and form, social change and the uses of art that took place in the United States, mostly in the 20th-century. Two concepts will guide our discussion: art and rhetoric. For much of the 20th century "rhetorical" was a term of disparagement in literary and aesthetic culture. A dominant strain in modern aesthetics was epitomised in statements like "A poem should not mean, but be." But the situation is complex. The poet John Ashbery has said that he admires music because it has "an ability of being convincing, of carrying an argument through successfully to the finish, though the terms of this argument remain unknown quantities." All art, then, from the abstract to the activist, behaves in a suasory manner, whether to compel its reader, viewer, or listener to assent to a work's specific aesthetic force, to adjust his mind or feelings, or to impel action however indirectly. Art does things to people. Art "argues." Emphasizing literature but giving some attention to music and visual art, this course will investigate the ways in which art behaves rhetorically through readings in art theory and rhetoric, and a series of cases from Whitman forward.  Back to top

The desire to return home defines neocolonial literature in Canada. In “Impassioned Reflection: Nostalgia in English-Canadian Literature 1880-1920,” students will examine the literary representations of this desire during the young nation’s transition from the Confederation period to the modernist one. Our point of departure will be that the relationship between “home” and “desire” in nostalgia harbours a capacious range of meanings, from the literal (the simple longing to regain a past domestic bliss) to the most abstract (the determination to recover, or discover, a lost Golden Age). Nostalgia’s capacity for association with so many different objects of desire made it attractive to a variety of settler-culture writers in Canada, for it allowed them simultaneously to lament distant places of origin, to indulge in nationalistic fantasies of a homogeneous collective identity, and to voice a determination to pursue utopian dreams in the New World. Indeed, nostalgia’s frequent attachment to as-yet-unachieved ideals is ubiquitous during these years. Consequently, the course will begin with a series of redemptive narratives that depict the longing for a lost Golden Age as the expression of a thinly-veiled desire to achieve an ideal that the subject has projected into the unknown future. Far from the sentimentality attributed to the phenomenon of nostalgia in recent decades, its key component in these narratives is an “impassioned reflection” on the reasons for the perceived disappearance of the longed-for past. Other works express a more ironic and less optimistic attitude toward nostalgic subjects’ ability to adopt a critical distance from the past to which they would return, and so the course will also feature narratives that perform more skeptical analyses of the experience. A number of authors during this period also deploy nostalgia in considerably different ways, and in the cases of Sara Jeannette Duncan, Stephen Leacock, and Lucy Maude Montgomery, the class will have the opportunity to compare these different representations by examining more than one text by the same writer.  Back to top

This course will explore the literary and critical terrain that theories of gender and sexuality share with postcolonial studies. Topics to be addressed will include colonial representations of and control over sexuality, the gendering of nationalism, masculinity and race, the body as colonial text and postcolonial space of performance, and queer postcolonialism. We will engage with such contested and complicated concepts through a wide range of postcolonial travel narratives. Texts may include Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather, articles by Jacqui Alexander, Kobena Mercer, Chandra Mohanty and others, and creative texts such as Peter  Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang, J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for  the Barbarians, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance, Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, Shyam Selvadurai’s Cinnamon Gardens, and M. Nourbese Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks.

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