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