Upper-Level Course Descriptions 2009-2010
Fall 2009
Spring 2010
Fall 2009
ENGL 341: Chaucer
Professor Cynthea Masson
Cynthea.Masson@viu.ca
Throughout this course, students will become familiar with the plots, themes, genres, and characters of several of The Canterbury Tales and will be introduced to features of Chaucer's rhetorical style, his humour and satire, and his dialect of Middle English. To provide historical and theoretical contexts to the readings, we will discuss aspects of fourteenth-century class ideologies, economics, politics, and religious beliefs and will read excerpts from recent theoretical approaches to the Tales. Because the Tales will be read in their original language, some class time will be devoted to the study of Middle English and its pronunciation. Thus, in addition to an understanding of the Tales as literature, a basic knowledge of Chaucer’s Middle English is an objective of this course. With this objective in mind, the semester will progress toward a class reading and/or performance of The Miller's Tale in the final week.
ENGL 366: Shakespeare
Professor Keith Harrison
Keith.Harrison@viu.ca
We will explore Shakespeare’s art through close readings, mini-lectures, oral presentations, and film excerpts. The focus here will be on six of his most prominent dramatic works. These plays, which represent in different tones the two broad generic categories of tragedy and comedy, will be considered from a variety of interpretive approaches.
TEXT: The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. 2nd ed.
The reading list (in order):
Othello
As You Like It
Hamlet
Twelfth Night
King Lear
The Tempest
ENGL 382: Romantic Literature -
Romantic Revolutions and Print Culture
Professor Daniel Burgoyne
Daniel.Burgoyne@viu.ca
"If there are circumstances which invariably tend to convert free into absolute governments, there are fortunately, others which tend, by a process equally certain, to re-establish the dignity and the rights of human nature. Among these last, the most important by far, is the light of literature, widely diffused, and with increasing splendour, by the invention of printing. Literature [...] forms a concert of wills, and a concurrence of action too powerful for the armies of tyrants." -- Analytical Review (1788)
This exploration of British Romanticism will cover the writings of Blake, Barbauld, Lewis, the Wordsworths, Coleridge, Keats, Landon, Clare, and others. To approach Romanticism in terms of print culture is to resituate the literature of the period in terms of its social, commercial, and political contexts. Some factors we will look at include literacy rates, the rise of circulating libraries and mass editions of books, and the aggressive political dimensions of writing seen in the abolitionist movement, the pamphlet wars, and the laws regulating publishing. We will also consider ideas of literature debated in the period.
Texts:
The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Volume 4: The Age of Romanticism (Broadview, 2006)
Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Monk by Matthew Lewis
Resources:
University of Virginia's Blake Archive
Romantic Circles' electronic comparative edition of Lyrical Ballads
Romantic Circles’ electronic edition of The Political House that Jack Built
ENGL 384: Victorian Literature - Victorian Medievalism
Professor Terri Doughty
Terri.Doughty@viu.ca
Edward Landseer, “Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at the Bal Costume of 12 May 1842” (dressed as King Edward III and Queen Philippa).
Despite its celebration of Progress-with-a-capital-P, the Victorian age was also backward looking, focusing on the imagined medieval past. Victorian medievalism informed the period’s art, architecture, literature, religion, and social and political thought. Not a coherent movement, medievalism was used by both conservatives and radicals, to shore up the status quo and to rebel against it. We will examine a range of medievalist texts, focusing on politics and art (including painting and the Gothic Revival in architecture). Topics to be addressed include the intersection of politics and art, gendered medievalisms, and the Arthurian revival.
TEXTS: A selection of secondary materials on reserve; Walter Scott, Ivanhoe; Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present; John Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic,” William Morris, A Dream of John Ball, or News from Nowhere; Alfred Tennyson, The Idylls of the King; Cecil Y. Lang, The Pre-Raphaelites and their Circle.
EVALUATION: Short paper (20%), Presentation (10%), Research Proposal (10%), Research Paper (30%), Final Exam (30%).
ENGL 407: Studies in Globalization & Culture
Professor
Richard J. Lane
Richard.Lane@viu.ca
http://web.viu.ca/richardlane/index.htm
Terror and terrorism: two related themes in globalization and contemporary culture, feeding into the ever-increasing dominance of postcolonial novelists in the literary marketplace. We will explore Baudrillard’s postmodernist ruminations on the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre, in The Spirit of Terrorism, before moving back in time to American author Don DeLillo, and Mao II, a meditation on mass-movements and mass culture (it starts with a Moonie wedding), asking if the literary author has any significance in the age of terrorist events.
Our literary locations will vary considerably, as we travel to Africa with Thiongo’s A Grain of Wheat; India with Roy’s The God of Small Things; Pakistan with Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes; and multicultural London with Smith’s White Teeth. Our guide will include some critics and theorists of postcolonialism and globalization: all provided for the class in essay form, so we can concentrate on the novels themselves, engaging with differing cultures, and uncanny acts of terror or terrorism, and the unfolding, ever more complex issue of fundamentalism.
ENGL 420: Gay and Lesbian Literature
Professor Marni Stanley
Marni.Stanley@viu.ca
Autobiography is one of the most common writing performances. Most of us are guilty—if only in a letter or email—of an autobiographical act. It is also one of the richest genres in the exploration of emotion and experience and in experiments with form and style. Not only literary theorists, but historians, anthropologists, folklorists, sociologists, linguists and psychologists are finding autobiographies useful sources in their disciplines. The genre of autobiography invites us to imagine the ways in which each person matters regardless of the criteria of fame. It is a genre which helps us gain insight into differences among us, whether in sexuality, gender, race, etc. Authors may use it to record the events and people of their lives to both realize and transcend the self. In this way autobiography may transgress the boundary between public and private writing. In this course we will focus on contemporary lives.
Reading list (Subject to availability):
Paul Monette On Becoming a Man
Audre Lorde Zami: Another Spelling of My Name
Kate Bornstein Gender Outlaw
Alison Bechdel Fun Home
Samuel R. Delany Bread and Wine
Betty Berzon Surviving Madness
Tobias Schneebaum Secret Places
Louise Blum You’re Not from Around Here Are You?
Patrick Horrigan Widescreen Dreams
ENGL 430: American Literature to 1900
Professor: Richard Arnold, Ph.D
Richard.Arnold@viu.ca
Parameters of the course:
English 430 will begin with a brief study of the background to what is known as the “American Renaissance.” We shall pay particular notice to the English Romantics, and how that movement led directly to the Transcendentalists (e.g. Emerson, Thoreau) in the U.S. The main focus of the course will be on three major figures of the American Renaissance: Thoreau, Whitman, and Dickinson. Writings will be connected to the broader social, political, philosophical, and cultural contexts of the age. We shall consider how these major American writers signal a “modern” style of poetry, as well as a “modern” concept of humanity as it relates to its natural environment. There will be one or two short hikes during class time.
Readings:
Thoreau, WALDEN and selected essays and poems;
Whitman, LEAVES OF GRASS
Dickinson, Selected Poems and Letters (full reading list TBD)
ENGL 436 – Modern British Fiction
Professor: Richard J. Lane
Richard.Lane@viu.ca
http://web.viu.ca/richardlane/index.htm
Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this’. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, even if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style… Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleasing merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it. –– Virginia Woolf
The manifesto moment arrived in British literature with some remarkable modernist writers: Woolf sketches above, in her Impressionist way, some of the key concepts and creative impulses behind early twentieth-century British fiction. This course will explore the themes of desire, power and language in experimental British fiction and travel writing. We will travel through many landscapes, from Conrad’s Africa in Heart of Darkness, through the idealized English countryside in Forster’s Howards End and the competing fantasies of Forster’s India(s) in A Passage to India. Landscapes of shell shock will be encountered in West’s Return of the Soldier and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, before we turn again to Africa with Greene’s travel narrative Journey Without Maps and South America with Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.
Almost all of these novels and travel narratives ponder the idealized English countryside, landscapes and grand houses, comparing them with the new urbanism, war, and mechanization. Overseas the English novelist finds “the colonies”, and the psychological damage done to others. We will explore the British modernist journey into the psyche, into representations of the other and new ways of configuring the inner self. We shall look at radical new, experimental art forms, and the associated literary texts. All the time we will be observing how this remarkable group of British novelists experimented, played with ideas, and published some revolutionary novels.
ENGL 450: Canadian Fiction - Questions for Post-colonialism
Professor Dawn Thompson
Dawn.Thompson@viu.ca
“Post-colonial” is a complex and troubling term not only in its reference to history – when exactly was this movement from colonial to post-colonial? – and its Eurocentrism in organizing knowledge around that moment, but also spatially: in a multicultural country such as Canada, the question of who is the colonizer and who the colonized is complex enough to merit exploration.
Of course, we would all likely agree that Aboriginal people are the primary colonized. In that case, however, many would argue that as long as the Indian Act remains, Canada has not yet entered a post-colonial era. And who are their colonizers? First the French, but after the British conquered the colony of New France in 1760, French-Canadians became both colonizers and colonized. Some would argue that they remain colonized as well, and their literature certainly engages with this argument. The settler literature of the rest of Canada reflects different waves of immigration, all of whom might be considered in some way complicit in colonization. First came the English, writing back to England and then slowly developing their own sense of identity. But what about other ethnic and racial groups? Many immigrants were colonized peoples already, and came here to escape their predicament, not realizing that they were taking part in colonization again, sometimes in very contradictory ways. For example, many Ukrainian- and German-Canadians homesteaded in the West (thereby participating in colonization), yet were imprisoned as enemy aliens during the First and Second World Wars respectively, often precisely because of their formerly colonized status. Similarly, Chinese immigrants facilitated one of the most symbolically important colonial acts of nation-making, the building of the railroad, but they did so very much as second-class (or not even!) citizens. This course will consider several writers who, from very different perspectives, explore the complex (post)-colonial space of Canada, and their own relationship to it.
Tentative Reading List
Anita Rau Badami, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?
Tomson Highway, Kiss of the Fur Queen
Laura Langston, Lesia’s Dream
Sky Lee, Disappearing Moon Café
Lee Maracle, “Yin Chin”
Alistair McLeod, No Great Mischief
Jacques Poulin, Volkswagen Blues
Alanis Obamsawin, Kanehsetake: 270 Years of Resistance
Reading package of excerpts from (explicitly) colonial fiction (Frances Brooke, Susanna Moodie, Louis Hémon) and post colonial theory (Homi Bhabha, Benedict Anderson, Dennis Lee, Thomas King, etc.
ENGL 451: Canadian Drama
Professor Liza Potvin
Liza.Potvin@viu.ca
This course is designed to introduce students to styles of drama that have been popular in Canadian playwriting from the late 20th century to the present. We will begin with more traditional plays, then explore some of the more experimental works written recently, identifying the nature of social and political criticism in Canadian theatre since 1967. We will compare the stylistic strategies used by dramatists – realist, expressionist, absurdist, filmic, and consider the multiplicity of perspectives as drama has moved from the formation of a “national” theatre toward a postmodern, multicultural spectrum that deconstructs the canon.
Spring 2010
ENGL 310: Classical Rhetoric
Professor Matthew Beedham
Matthew.Beedham@viu.ca
Do you want to communicate more effectively? Do you want to know when and how you’re being persuaded? Do want to get back your farmland from an evil acquisition-hungry tyrant? Studying rhetoric will help you satisfy these wants, and in this course we will read and discuss the most important writing on rhetoric from the classical world.
When you hear “rhetoric” on TV, you might think it means something like fluff without substance. But that’s not what we’re studying. To me rhetoric means persuasion and the use of language and visuals to communicate meaning. You’ve got something to say, and you want others to understand your position. Understanding rhetorical principles will help you.
Rhetoric is one of the oldest subjects that we study at university: scholars have been studying it since the 5th century BCE. Although our primary task is to understand the key texts which formed the historical foundation for rhetoric, because our readings are from Ancient Greece and Rome, we will also, necessarily, spend some time talking about the Classical world and the debates of which these texts are a part. As well, along the way you’ll find techniques and strategies that you can use in all your courses and throughout your life.
Required Textbook
Bizzell, Patricia and Bruce Herzburg. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Second Edition. Bedford/ St. Martins, 2001.
Course Requirements:
Your final grade in this class will be based on grades in the following areas:
Participation 5%
Short Weekly Writing Assignments 15%
Presentation 15%
Research Paper Proposal and Annotated Bibliography 5%
Peer-review of Research Paper 5%
Research Paper 30%
Final Exam 25%
This course satisfies the Critical Theory requirement for the VIU degree in English.
ENGL 315: Advanced Workshop in Composition:
Writing Across the Universe
Professor Jeannie Martin
Jeannie.Martin@viu.ca
Taking its cue from a star-studded international line-up from Plato to the Dalai Lama, Mohandas Gandhi to Arundhati Roy, George Orwell to Maxine Hong Kingston, and Genesis to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this course encourages students to critically analyze writing and rhetoric. While taking up such ongoing debates as global terrorism, national myths of identity, environmentalism, and the cultural importance of the arts, students will write and workshop a series of short papers and informal assignments modelled on everything from creation myths to resistant-audience arguments. Regular journal responses, short assignments, and ongoing revisions will help focus students on their thought processes and quality of expression. Students will concentrate on reading critically, using evidence effectively, accommodating different views, structuring strategic arguments, and finding and evaluating quality resources.
ENGL 316: Studies in Narrative -
Native Narratives, or “The Truth about Stories”
Professors Dawn Thompson (English) &
Melody Martin (First Nations Studies)
Dawn.Thompson@viu.ca
Melody.Martin@viu.ca
Studying contemporary aboriginal narratives in an English course is a very tricky endeavor. Nothing is as students of English literature have been led to expect. As Paula Gunn Allen explains, in traditional tribal literature, “there are no heroes, no villains, no chorus, no setting, … no minor characters, … no`point of view.’” And in fact, “conflict, crisis and resolution” only “appear” through western interpretations of such tales (241-2). This course will focus on the ways in which not just the storytelling tradition, but oral culture and aboriginal thought, inform contemporary First Nations and Native American narrative fiction. The texts we will study merge at least two different aesthetic traditions, ways of seeing and being in the world, and different conceptions of language in its relation to the world to create something new and exciting. Similarly, this course will be a meeting of cultures as students and faculty broaden their understanding of oral and literate conceptions of the relations between story, history, theory, truth, fiction, self, and land. In addition, we will consider the implications of reading these texts in an English course. How might (must?) standard theoretical approaches and critical practices open and change to accommodate such texts? Our responses to questions such as this will necessarily remain, like any interpretation of narrative (with its own oral roots in the Greek gnarus = knowing), processual and provisional.
Work Cited:
Gunn Allen, Paula. “Kochinnenako in Academe.” The Sacred Hoop. Boston:
Beacon, 1992, 222-44.
Reading List:
Louise Erdrich, Tracks
Thomas King, Green Grass, Running Water
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
Eden Robinson, Monkey Beach
Ellen Rice White, Legends and Teachings of Xeel’s The Creator
Reading Package:
Maria Campbell, “Da Teef,” Stories of the Road Allowance People
From Julie Cruikshank, with Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith and Annie Ned, Life Lived like a Story
Paula Gunn Allen, “Kochinnenako in Academe”
Thomas King, “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial”
Lee Maracle, “Oratory: Coming to Theory”
---. “Yin Chin”
ENGL 318: Studies in Poetry - The Elegy
Professor Frances Sprout
Frances.Sprout@viu.ca
This course will study the elegy from its Classical roots through Milton’s development of the pastoral elegy as exemplified in “Lycidas,” tracing the relationship between the formal demands of this genre and the social and psychological demands of mourning. We will then consider how responsive this form has (or has not) been to the social changes of the 20th century with its refusal of the elegy’s traditional consolation. Thus we will also have to think about how this refusal coincides, sadly, with what Melissa Zeiger calls a “broad cultural turn to elegy” in the face of AIDS and breast cancer, as well as public grieving over events as disparate as the destruction of New York’s Twin Towers and the death of Princess Diana. Finally, we will speculate on the continuing role of the elegy in the 21st century, with a look at some contemporary examples, including lyrics of songwriters such as Lucinda Williams and Eric Clapton.
Reading List: While this has not yet been formalized, the courseware package is likely to include the following: theoretical readings by Freud on Mourning, as well as by Jahan Ramazani and Melissa Zeiger on the elegy; the poems will include Milton’s “Lycidas,” excerpts from Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” elegies and elegiac poems by Wilfred Owen, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, several yet unchosen AIDS and Breast Cancer elegies, with a Canadian focus on poems by Canadians Margaret Atwood, Lorna Crozier, Philip Kevin Paul.
ENGL 366: Shakespeare
ProfessorJohn Lepage
John.Lepage@viu.ca
Shakespeare is an institution in world literature. In spite of the four-hundred-year distance in time and the vast cultural gulf that lies between us and the English Renaissance, it is hard to be a full-fledged a citizen of the literary world without having explored Shakespeare’s plays – and entered into the deeply psychological and modern realm of their characters. The most surprising facet of these plays is that, in spite of their dated subject matter – kings, queens, military heroes, and public figures of importance in pre-democratic societies – they are so modern. Their language is lyrical and colloquial; they have the ring of natural speech even when particular idioms may not be familiar, and they are genuinely moving.
This course is a survey of representative plays by Shakespeare, including comedies, tragedies, a history, and a romance; it will also feature lyrical and narrative poems. The course begins with a brief account of the social, religious, and intellectual background to the sixteenth century, which will serve as a basis for unraveling some of the complex imagery of the plays. This year, the special emphasis of the course will be on narrative and dramatic structure. The course will try to shed light on characteristic imagery and motifs so as to give students a fuller sense of Shakespeare in his appropriate setting.
Because of the survey nature of the course, I will present topical lectures and close readings. My approach is to encourage student interaction. Students will be required to bring to class formal discussion points with some elucidation of their understanding of problems they have identified as important. I will also introduce discussion points. Attendance is an indispensable feature of the course. Because of the three-hour format, which places a tremendous burden on us to complete the course in a meaningful way, each class will be broken into mini-lecture, close-readings, focused discussion, and some group discussion sections. Students are expected to have read the materials in advance of class meetings.
Text: Stephen Greenblatt, et al., The Norton Shakespeare (2nd Edition, New York, 2008). Students will be encouraged to make use of the vast range of online and library resources.
Course requirements: Assignments: one home essay (typed or word processed, double spaced, approximately 2000-3000 words; 25%), short essay (1000 words; 10%) final examination (25%), annotated bibliography (10%); two discussion points (20%), participation and attendance (10%).
The plays:
Henry IV
Taming of the Shrew
Much Ado About Nothing
Othello
Coriolanus
The Winter’s Tale
The poems: selected sonnets, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece.
Provisional Outline:
January 4 Introduction and Background; some sonnets
11 1 Henry IV
18 1 Henry IV; The Taming of the Shrew
25 The Taming of the Shrew
February 1 Much Ado About Nothing
8 Much Ado About Nothing; sonnets
15 Lyric and narrative poetry; Short Essay due
22 Reading Break
March 1 Lyric and narrative poetry; Othello
8 Othello
15 Coriolanus
22 Coriolanus; The Winter’s Tale
29 The Winter’s Tale; Essay and Bibliography due
April 5 Easter Monday (no classes)
ENGL 369: Milton
ProfessorJohn Lepage
John.Lepage@viu.ca
This course is a detailed survey of the poetry and prose works of John Milton, the most remarkable non-conformist thinker of his time and one of the great writers of English literary history. On the surface, the reading is challenging in its complexity, if not in actual volume, for Milton had the gift of being able to pack difficult ideas into short spaces. The poetic style of his maturity was oratorical and clausal, marked by extended periods. Milton’s use of blank verse paragraphs allowed him to elaborate on single ideas over many lines. But Milton’s voice as a poet is so compelling that it becomes irresistible over time. And the poetry in particular is not without humour.
The course will be conducted as a survey of Milton’s works in relation to his life and times. Milton’s creative life may be conveniently broken into five stages: 1) education at St. Paul’s and Cambridge (1620s); 2) career deliberations and travels on the continent (1630s); 3) entry into the public domain (1640s); 4) service of the Commonwealth (1650s); 5) life after the Restoration (1660s and ’70s). The course will take the chronological form of a study of Milton’s maturing style and awareness of the importance of certain literary conventions as well as an examination of his ambitions, religious, political, social, and literary.
If there is thematic interest, it has to do with heroism. As a non-conformist Christian, Milton was uncomfortable with the leadership of bishops and priests; his was a Christianity of free-thinking, aspiring souls. In his politics, he sided against the royalty and with the Commonwealth cause. Milton had every reason to be suspicious of the leaders and the heroes fashioned by his society, and yet his life and his poetry indulged the creation and celebration of heroes. In his life, this is nowhere more evidenced than by his support of Oliver Cromwell even through the darkest years of the Protectorate. The heroes of Milton’s fiction are public figures; while they may have reputations as people of action, they are most distinguished by their words, and their rhetorical gifts mask their introspection and their introspective failures. The tremendous allure of the anti-hero of Paradise Lost was not lost on Milton. Samson Agonistes represents a less cunning hero and a less charismatic figure. Comus, the villain of his early A Masque, demonstrates vital energy next to the bumbling brothers of the story, but his command of rhetoric, and thus of the action of the masque, ultimately fails.
The course will be structured as a series of mini-lectures, close readings, and discussion points. I will lecture formally and informally, select passages for closer attention, and conduct close readings. Students will be expected to contribute discussion points and to discuss these in the interests of broader and deeper perspectives.
Course requirements: Assignments: one home essay (typed or word processed, double spaced, approximately 2000-3000 words; 25%), short essay (1000 words; 10%) final examination (25%), annotated bibliography (10%); two discussion points (20%), participation and attendance (10%).
Text: The Complete Works of Milton, Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg, eds. (Oxford, 2003).
Provisional Course Outline
January 4: Introduction; Early poems: On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, Paraphrase on Psalm 114
January 6: On Time, Upon the Circumcision, At a Solemn Music, On Shakespeare, On the University Carrier
January 11: L’Allegro and Il Penseroso
January 13: L’Allegro and Il Penseroso; A Masque
January 18: A Masque
January 20: A Masque
January 25: Lycidas
January 27: Sonnets; From The Reason of Church Government;
February 1: Of Education; The Areopagitica
February 3: The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates
February 8: Paradise Lost (Book 1)
February 10: Paradise Lost (Book 2)
February 15: Paradise Lost (Books 3 and 4)
February 17: Paradise Lost (Books 4 and 5); Short Essay due
February 22-26: Reading Week
March 1: Paradise Lost (Books 5 and 6)
March 3: Paradise Lost (Books 6 and 7)
March 8: Paradise Lost (Books 7 and 8)
ENGL 401: Studies in a North American Regional Literature - Atlantic-Canadian Literature
Professor Deborah Torkko
Deborah.Torkko@viu.ca
What is commonly called Canadian Literature today started in the Maritime Provinces, and while some of its most important and beautiful works were written here, they have been peripheral to most of the history of Canadian literature. New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland comprise a distinctive and vital literary region, one that has garnered increased critical attention since the publication of Janice Kulyk Keefer’s landmark study Under Eastern Eyes: A Critical Reading of Maritime Fiction (1987). This course will explore a representative selection of works published since the mid-1970s for how they communicate the complex social, economic, and cultural realities which shape the lives of the region’s inhabitants. We will examine the construction of images received as typically Maritime and consider the forces that defend and promote or that seek to erode the mythology of a regional culture, as well as those forces that might create new mythologies and idyllic impulses. Family, community, ethnicity, migration, socio-economic deprivation, and geography constitute themes central to our discussions. We will develop skills in describing and critiquing the fiction’s aesthetic and social complexities and consider the place of an Atlantic-Canadian literature within a Canadian literary mainstream.
If you want to read literature that is candid, accurate, sometimes funny, sometimes grim, but always deeply felt and powerfully moving, written by writers who are fascinated with things Atlantic Canadian – the geography, the cultural ways of knowing, the customs, the language, the music, the ceilidhs and the kitchen table;
If you want to explore how complex the interplay is between family generations, sea and land, life and death, personal memory and communal memory, mythic past and present day, fantasy and reality; how cultural narratives can be reclaimed; and how truth and fiction are inseparable;
Then you will want to read and discuss the following texts: Ann Compton, Ed., Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada; Lesley Choyce, Ed., Atlantica; Alistair MacLeod, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood; M.T. Dohaney, The Corrigan Women; Wendy Lill, The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum; David Adams Richards, River of the Brokenhearted; Nancy Bauer, The Irrational Doorways of Mr Gerard; Donna Morrissey, What They Wanted.
ENGL 402: Studies in West Coast Literature -
The West Coast Renaissance
Professor Jay Ruzesky
Jay.Ruzesky@viu.ca
Any examination of West Coast literature leads us quickly to an analysis of literary form, tradition, culture, environment, and social interaction. In this course, we will explore west coast literature from a variety of perspectives to examine what Robert Bringhurst and others have called “The West Coast Renaissance” which is essentially an observation that in this territory, much of our literature responds to and out of the geographical mythology from which it emerges. From the oral tradition of First Nations on the coast through to contemporary First Nations writers like Eden Robinson and Philip Kevin Paul; from the influence of Asian and African-American cultures to British and American impacts; and from schools of literary experimentalism like the TISH group and the Kootenay School of Writing to eco-centered writers. At least 75% of the content for this course will be Canadian.
ENGL 414:
Modern and Contemporary World Drama
Professor Craig Tapping
Craig.Tapping@viu.ca
This course explores a variety of traditions and styles in playscripts of the 20th century, in the belief that the study of drama is challenging, exciting for students, and illustrative of much modern and post-modern, post-colonial aesthetic and critical theory, as well as contemporary political realities. The plays we study will variously adopt, adapt, revise or reject conventional theatrical expectations regarding character, sexuality, race, and the place of the individual in a world where power seems distant, and the local is often abstracted or ignored. Our examinations will necessitate a trans-disciplinary understanding of just what “theatre” and “performance” might mean internationally, after a century of such change and transformation. Our chosen plays will explore the material and political worlds, and delve into the mythic or psychic and sacred world through various theatrical rituals, including song and dance.
Students will read, block out and examine plays from North America, Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Asian Diaspora, attending to technical concerns—staging, dialogue, setting, disrupting generic conventions, alienation, “folk” theatre—and theoretical and thematic issues of political engagement, the twin “towers” of entertainment and instruction, as well as the shibboleths of gender and tradition, and of race and geography. Most playwrights—in the quest for representational “truths”—revise some “classical” conventions and reject others, creating a ferment in contemporary theatre of ritual and realism, social realism, impressionism and minimalism. The innovations are often transglobal and cross-cultural.
If possible, the class will attend a performance on Vancouver Island.
Students taking this course will gain the experience of reading through play scripts, and gain the language with which to approach teaching drama in schools or as post-graduate students with teaching assistantships. The course is designed as both “seminar of inquiry”, and practical guide to 20th century theatre. The reading list itself will provide assistance in selecting plays for future self-designed syllabi, and the continued “dramatic” aspect of the class will build confidence and self-esteem in standing before an audience to read and perform.
READING LIST TBA
ENGL 435: Topics in Children’s Literature: Radical Change
Professor Terri Doughty
Terri.Doughty@viu.ca
David Wiesner, The Three Pigs
Do children’s books compete with electronic and digital entertainment, or are children’s books adapted to the digital age? Critics like Eliza Dresang and Maria Nikolajeva have noted that children’s authors and illustrators are becoming increasingly experimental, playing with nonlinear, nonsequential, multilayered narratives. The graphic novel has exploded traditional notions of narrative literacy. Even children’s picture books make use of sophisticated postmodern modes such as metatextuality, intertextuality, and magic realism. In this course, we will consider how children’s literature is changing, through the study of a range of picture books, graphic novels, and novels.
TEXTS: Picture Books: Anthony Browne, Voices in the Park; David Macaulay, Black and White; Jules Feiffer, Meanwhile; David Wiesner, The Three Pigs; Lauren Child, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Book?; Paul Fleischman, Glass Slipper, Golden Sandal; Peter Sís, The Wall; Neil Gaiman, The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish. Graphic Novels: Jeff Smith, Bone (vol. 1); Shannon Hale, Rapunzel’s Revenge; a Japanese manga; Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret; Louis Sachar, Holes; David Almond, Skellig; China Miéville, Un Lun Dun; Cornelia Funk, Inkheart; Kevin Major, Ann and Seamus.
ENGL 480: Research Methods
Professor Matthew Beedham
Matthew.Beedham@viu.ca
How is research conducted at graduate school and beyond? In this course we set out to explore scholarly research methods, how to research and write advanced research papers and reports. You will learn the language of research and the various methods for conducting research: how to identify and synthesize research literature, how to plan your research, and how to report research findings. Part of this exploration involves examining the various methods scholars have developed for discussing literature. We therefore survey the major theoretical movements from New Criticism to Cognitive Poetics, but while doing so our emphasis will be on practice, the practice of interpreting literature. To focus our research and interpretive skills, we will focus on just one novel, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. While this course should also enable you to improve your writing, upon finishing the course, you should have a clear understanding of what methods are available for your particular course of research, and which is most suitable.
Final grades in this class will be based on marks in the following areas:
Participation 5%
Short Weekly Writing Assignments 10%
Course Reader Project (Group)15%
Presentation 10%
Peer-review of Research Paper 5%
Research Paper (plus proposal and annotated bibliography) 30% (25 + 5)
Final Exam 25%
This course satisfies the Critical Theory requirement for the VIU degree in English.