Courses

Situating literary research methods in the context of those of other disciplines, this course is designed to introduce new graduate students in English department to conceptual and methodological frameworks which characterize literary scholarship; how to perform literature reviews; specialized research and writing resources; critical methods for interrogating those resources; and relevant, emerging issues in scholarly communication.

This interdisciplinary course investigates translation and multilingualism as they relate to the experience of the city. It provides an opportunity to study translation and various forms of languaging in narrative and poetic praxis, and explore the multilingual condition as a lived experience of translation in various cities, with an emphasis in Toronto.

Cross-listed in English, Humanities, and Translation Studies, this seminar introduces students to the conditions of emergence and development of the discipline of Comparative Literature from its beginnings in nineteenth-century Europe to its most recent global iteration of World Literature. Students will experience how expanded understandings of cultural translation and textuality have radically altered and expanded the Eurocentric character of the discipline. Questions for investigation include: How have the aesthetics and politics of Comparative Literature changed over the past two hundred years? What factors have influenced those changes? How is World Literature related to Comparative Literature? How do both relate to colonial, post-colonial, diasporic, cultural and translation studies and digital humanities?

In the British 18th Century, descriptions of art insist over and over again that it presents things as they really are - a critical demand which masks deeply felt desires, for certainty, for an ideal image of moral nature, including moral feeling, and for objectivity. Art furthers social consensus to the degree that it creates the conditions for an ideally impartial, and therefore shareable, judgment of history, justice, truth and morality.

This course examines the writings of the Brontës alongside the literary rewritings, film adaptations, and Gothic mash-ups that their works and lives have inspired.

This course focuses on the texts and theories of South Asian diasporic literature. The content and method change from year to year depending on the instructor.

This seminar takes a historical, theoretical, and interdisciplinary approach to sexuality, labor, and blackness in the genocidal territory known as the United States. We will engage in black feminist, trans, and queer methodologies of selected literature, film, and artwork while we also consider the limits of labor as a conceptual apparatus.

This course traces debates around and resistance to the form of the nation-state within post-colonial nations. We will explore the following questions: How do literary works, visual art, films, and theoretical texts critique the coloniality of post-colonial nation-states? What shape do these (anti)nationalisms take? What forms of nonnation sovereignties emerge in these struggles? We will focus primarily on South Asia and Africa.

This course considers fictional representations of American academic life, novels about the social and intellectual lives of students and/or professors and instructors (a popular subgenre sometimes referred to as the Academic Novel, or in Elaine Showalter's term, the Professorroman), and sometimes staff and administrators.

This course challenges now-canonical definitions of modernism by tracing the jazz inflections and infusions that were first heard in the early 1920s and continued to inspire-and incense-cultural workers, critics, and readers into the 1950s and 1960s. We will consider poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental jazz 'experience-books.'

Along with matters of craft, this workshop course considers questions that confront poets: how to make poetry relevant in today's society, what forms of attention does poetry allow, what relationship to poetic tradition is most effective, what is an effective relationship towards formal tradition and innovation, etc. All students will write both poetry and academic papers (critical and/or theoretical engagements with elements of contemporary poetry and poetics). Students taking the course as part of the GDiP in Creative Writing will be evaluated primarily on their poetry; other students will be evaluated on the basis of their academic work.

An overview of multimodal writing and associated techniques for creative writers working in an expanded field, including methods of reading and critiquing multimodal works, from visual poetry to digital media. We will develop a shared vocabulary across mediums, and consider the applications and effects of artistic choices, implications for the field(s), and workshop individual pieces and projects.

What exactly is realism in fiction? How is it challenged by other ways of telling? Where is the border between factual and fictional narrative? How do we engage creatively with a world in crisis? Readings will be drawn from a range of contemporary fiction and criticism, spanning regions and genres. Students will write fiction and a short critical paper.

This course will give an overview of Canadian literature criticism and theory since the nineteenth century with an emphasis on contemporary theory, highlighting major debates in the formation of a national literature and influential theorists in anglophone Canada.

Through an intersectional feminist lens, this course considers how contemporary writers and theorists explore refusal as a personal and political tactic.

This course focuses on current matters of concern and debate in contemporary literary and cultural theory. Issues will vary with Faculty expertise and contemporary developments. Students will acquire knowledge of the field and how it is variously transformed in practice.

This writing workshop analyses the components of the dissertation proposal, discusses appropriate writing strategies, and provides a faculty-member-facilitated, peer-review setting for students to develop their dissertation topics and draft their proposals according to Faculty of Graduate Studies' guidelines.