Upper-Level Course Offerings 2011-2012
Note: Although normally the prerequisite for upper-level courses is two 200-level English courses, for students interested in specific courses, prerequisites may be waived through consultation with the Professor and Chair.
[And for a sneak-preview of the 2012-13 rotation, go here.]
Fall 2011
| Course Number | Course Title | Degree Requirement | Professor | Day & Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Theory |
Beedham |
M 6:00-9:00 |
||
20th C. |
Stanley |
M/W 11:30-1:00 |
||
Pre-1700 |
Lepage |
W 6:00-9:00 |
||
1700-1900 |
Hagan |
T/R 1:00-2:30 |
||
| Studies in West Coast Literature: Vancouver Stories | 20th C. or Canadian | Thompson |
M 1:00-4:00 |
|
| Studies in Globalization and Culture: Terrorism in the Post-Colonial Imagination | 20th C. or Multicultural | R. Lane | W 1:00-4:00 |
|
20th C. or Multicultural |
Rout |
T 6:00-9:00 |
||
20th C. |
Doughty |
T/R 8:30-10:00 |
||
American Literature to 1900: Marrying ‘America’: Language and Colonialism |
1700-1900 |
Atkinson | T/R 10:00-11:30 |
Spring 2012
| Course Number | Course Title | Degree Requirement | Professor | Day & Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Armstrong |
M 6:00-9:00 |
||
|
**Cowichan** |
Studies in Narrative: Fairy Tale Traditions and Revisions | Doughty |
||
20th C. or Theory |
Thompson |
T 1:00-4:00 |
||
Pre-1700 |
Masson |
M/W 11:30-1:00 |
||
| Romantic Literature: Revolt, Reform, Reaction | 1700-1900 | Burgoyne | M/W 10:00-11:30 |
|
Studies in a Major Author, School, or Movement: The Scientific Romance |
1700-1900 |
Burgoyne |
M/W 2:30-4:00 |
|
| Gay and/or Lesbian Literature: Autobiography | 20th C. | Stanley | W 6:00-9:00 |
|
| Children's Literature: The World Reflected: Issues in Children’s Literature | 20th C. | Wytenbroek | R 1:00-4:00 |
|
British Literature from 1900-1945: Education and Art in Women’s Writing |
20th C. |
R. Lane |
T/R 10:00-11:30 |
|
20th C. or Canadian |
Sprout |
T 6:00-9:00 |
||
| LING 350 | Linguistics and the Dimensions of Literacy | Beedham | M/W 4:00-5:30 |
Upper-Level Course Rotation: 2011-2013
(Go here for current, future, and past rotations. Use the links to past rotations for information on period coverage of courses you have already taken.)
2011-12 Timetables
Upper-Level Course Descriptions 2011-2012
Fall 2011
ENGL 310: Rhetoric
Professor Matthew Beedham
Matthew.Beedham@viu.ca
COURSE DESCRIPTION: 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.
In fact, rhetoric is one of the oldest subjects that we study at university: people who needed to communicate their ideas 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.
This course satisfies the Critical Theory requirement for the VIU degree in English.
TEXTS:
Bizzell, Patricia and Bruce Herzburg. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Second Edition. Bedford/ St. Martins, 2001.
Gorgias, Encomium of Helen
Aspasia (short fragments from Plato's,Menexenus; from Cicero's,De Inventione; from Athenaeus's,Deipnosophistae; from Plutarch's Lives)
Isocrates, Against the Sophists,from Antidosis
Plato, Gorgias, Phaedrus
Aristotle,On Rhetoric
Anonymous, Rhetorica ad Herennium
Cicero, De Oratore, Orator
Longinus, On the Sublime
Quintillian, Institutes of Oratory
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 Proposal and Annotated Bibliography 5%
Peer-review of Research Paper 5%
Research Paper 30%
Final Exam25%
ENGL 316: Studies in Narrative: Graphic Narrative
Professor Marni Stanley
Marni.Stanley@viu.ca
Graphic Narrative is a general term for Comic books, Graphic Novels, Manga, Graphic Memoir, and other forms of sequential art. Historically dismissed as pulp fiction for the barely literate, in the last thirty years comic art has moved from a problem in the critical hinterland to a major genre with its own well-developed critical practice. As a narrative form with a unique synthesis of text and image graphic works provide an interesting basis for a discussion of issues in the process and construction of narrative.
At the end of the course students will have an understanding of how distinctions in genre and style shape comics. They will be able to read and analyze critically the major forms of comic art. They will have an informed appreciation of comics as literary and artistic practice and a greater awareness of word/image relationships and the theory behind such a study.
ENGL 367: Topics in Shakespeare: Metaphysical Shakespeare
Professor John Lepage
John.Lepage@viu.ca
Course Description
The Metaphysical Shakespeare. Shakespeare is taken to be our most distinctive author, strangely without equal or parallel and yet receptive to all critical positions. This course attempts to set Shakespeare in an unusual though less distinctive context – as a metaphysical poet and playwright somewhat like poets in the tradition of Donne. The emphasis of the course is not so much on literary crosscurrents, however, as on Shakespeare’s commanding interest in the relationship of the body and soul and the individual identity. Shakespeare may legitimately be called the first modern poet of the individual identity. This course proposes to explore the theme through close reading of only three plays: Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, and King Lear. In addition, students will read from selected Metaphysical poems (such as Donne’s Second Anniversary) and selected essays by Montaigne, brief selections from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia: Or Urn Burial. The focus will be squarely on the pursuit of a “quintessence of dust” in Shakespeare’s three plays, but the course will yield insight into the entire Shakespearean canon and it will greatly enhance students’ critical and close-reading skills in general.
Texts: Shakespeare: Hamlet (Norton Critical Edition); Antony and Cleopatra (Norton Critical Edition); King Lear (Norton Critical Edition). The Metaphysical Poets, ed. Helen Gardner (Penguin). Other texts in a course package.
Course requirements: Assignments: one home essay (2000-3000 words; 30%), two close readings (1000 words; 15% each) final examination (25%), annotated bibliography (15%); active participation is an expectation of the course.
ENGL 384: Victorian Literature: The Sensation Novel
Professor Sandra Hagan
Sandra.Hagan@viu.ca
Mix in one part bigamy and one part danger; some drugs, disguise, and fine furnishings; and a series of strange coincidences and what do you get? The Victorian “sensation” novel. Scholars have identified the sensation novel as distinct from its Romantic era forerunner, the gothic novel, because it combines realism with romanticism, a very steady focus on the material world with an eye to the disruptions occasioned by the fantastic. With its attention to everyday Victorian life and concerns, yet acknowledgement of all that must be rejected to sustain it, the sensation novel offers a rich critique of the Victorian domestic sphere. Thus themes covered in the course will include gender, sexuality, consumerism, and psychology. Though our readings focus on the classic sensation novel, they will be contextualized in class with some discussion of the gothic novel and strains of sensationalism in later novels.
READING LIST
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
Ellen Wood (Mrs. Henry Wood), East Lynne
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret
Ouida (Maria Louise Rame), Under Two Flags
Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies
ENGL 402: Studies in West Coast Literature: Vancouver Stories
Professor Dawn Thompson
Dawn.Thompson@viu.ca
Quickly, what makes Vancouver, Vancouver? Here’s a crash course outline (in no particular order):
Bridge traffic; mountains; tall trees; outdoor sports; the bodies to match those sports; outdoor clothing to cover those bodies; nude sunbathing; pot; sushi; dim sum; Chinatown; Sikh temples; multiethnic couples; First Nations culture; wildlife (especially whales); hostility towards smokers; ferries; a really good airport; cruise ships in summer; the film industry; green politics; empty glass towers; rhododendrons; Japanese maple; hydroponic agriculture; appalling real estate prices; interesting architecture from 1946 to 1970; vague earthquake jitters… .
(Coupland, The Vancouver Stories)
Now that it has been showcased by the 2010 Olympics, Vancouver has received more international attention than it ever has before. And for many of the reasons listed by Coupland above (and a few not listed), it is a popular setting for quite a number of works of literature. In this course we will study Vancouver through the lens of a number of literary genres and situate it both within the larger context of the treatment of cities in literature, and within the context of Canadian Literature. (Field trip planned.)
ENGL 407:
Studies in Globalization and Culture:
Terrorism in the Post-Colonial Imagination
Professor Richard Lane
Richard.Lane@viu.ca
http://web.viu.ca/richardlane/index.htm
Terror and terrorism are two closely related themes in globalization and contemporary culture, influencing international and postcolonial novelists. We will explore the history and theory of terrorism (Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction), the terrorist attack at the Munich Olympic Games (One Day in September – in class video), Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernist ruminations on the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre, New York, in The Spirit of Terrorism, before moving onto American author Don DeLillo, and two of his novels: Falling Man, on 9/11, and Mao II, a meditation on mass-movements and mass culture (it starts with a Moonie wedding), which also asks if the literary author has any significance in the media age of terrorist events. Our literary locations will vary considerably, as we travel from America to postcolonial Africa with Thiongo’s A Grain of Wheat (British state terrorism and the Mau Mau), and then on to India with Roy’s The God of Small Things (psychological terror and political terrorism). Our aim will be to understand why terror and terrorism are major facets of the global postcolonial imagination.
ENGL 415:
Studies in Comparative Literature:
Modern Arabic Literature
Professor Katharina Rout
Katharina.Rout@viu.ca
The Arab world has been changing dramatically, and its revolutions have taken many by surprise—unless they had read recent international best sellers such as Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building. This course will allow us to catch up with the modern Arab world by giving us glimpses into the lives of ordinary citizens through novels and short stories from Morocco to Iraq, and from Egypt to Sudan.
We will gain insights into the history of Arab countries from colonization to independence and the post-independence struggles, into the petro-dollar culture and alternate views of modernity, and into the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. We will delve into questions of religious difference and Islamic notions of social justice, equality, tolerance, and practical compassion, and we will examine feminism, gender relations, and questions of sexual identity. The course will challenge clichés shaped by media coverage of 9/11 and the “war on terror” and lead to a deeper appreciation of the complexities of life—and current events—in the Arab world.
Our reading list will include modern classics from Naguib Mahfouz to Tayeb Salih, fiction by feminists such as Nawal El Saadawi and Latifa A-Zayyat, and award-winning contemporary fiction by authors such as Sahar Khalifeh, Elias Khoury, Khairy Shalaby, and Hoda Barakat.
ENGL 416: Studies in a Major Author, School, or Movement: Steampunk
Professor: Terri Doughty
Terri.Doughty@viu.ca
Steampunk is an aesthetic as well as a form of speculative fiction that combines steam-era technology and punk values, often in a Victorian, or pseudo-Victorian, setting. The genre explores technological roads not taken, alternative histories, and the conventions of the ripping yarn. In this course we’ll examine a selection of steampunk narratives in short fiction, novels, and graphic narratives, considering why the Victorian era still speaks to twenty-first century imaginations, what relationships we have with technology, what it means to be human, how alternative histories comment on our cultural politics, and why most of the producers of Steampunk are male.
TEXTS: Mike Ashley, ed., Steampunk Prime: A Vintage Steampunk Reader; Ann VanderMeer, ed. Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded; Mark Hodder, The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack; Alan Moore, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; Bryan Talbot, Grandville; Karin Lowachee, Gaslight Dogs.
EVALUATION: short paper (20%); presentation (10%); research proposal (10%); research paper (30%); final exam (30%).
ENGL 430: American Literature to 1900: Language and Colonialism
Professor Anna Atkinson
Anna.Atkinson@viu.ca
The word “America” appears in quotation marks in the title of this course for a specific reason. The name given to this continent comes from one of the family names of Vespucci Amerigo. Early cartographers claimed he had “discovered” America before Columbus; certainly Amerigo argued that it was indeed “new” land, and not a part of Asia. Attaching a family name to a possession — particularly one supposed to bring riches and become fertile and productive — would have suggested the metaphor of marriage in the early Renaissance. Certainly this metaphor was played out over and over in the literature of early colonialism. However, it relied for its effectiveness on the notion that the land was “virginal”: unoccupied and unowned. This course interrogates this metaphor, and looks at the role of language and ideology in the process of colonialism. It requires students to critically examine narratives from both European colonizers and First Nations people, and will introduce modern theorizations about language and colonialism. It also looks at twentieth-century interpretations of these early writings and metaphors, and examines the extent to which colonial language still informs “American” ideology.
Spring 2012
ENGL 316: Studies in Narrative
Professor: Clay Armstrong
ENGL 316: Studies in Narrative:
Fairy Tale Traditions and Revisions - **Cowichan**
Professor: Terri Doughty
Terri.Doughty@viu.ca
“No tale or fairy tale is ever new. We are always retelling and building on experience and wisdom to navigate our way through a world not of our making.”
--Jack Zipes
People hunger for stories to provide meaning: in Western literature, some of the key root stories are to be found in the fairy tale tradition. In this course, we will explore the intertextual relationships between classic European literary fairy tales and a selection of texts by modern writers such as Angela Carter, A. S. Byatt, Kelly Link, and others. Some of the questions to consider include the following: Why are some tales repeatedly retold while others are forgotten? How are these repeated tales both products and producers of cultural values? What is the nature and purpose of the intertextual relationship—adaptive, parodic, revisionist? Students will also be asked to do some contextual reading by critics such as Marina Warner, Jack Zipes, Maria Tatar, and Cristina Bacchilega.
TEXTS: Martin Hallett & Barbara Karasek, eds. Folk and Fairy Tale, 4th ed.; courseware package of short fiction by Tanith Lee, Francesca Lia Block, Sarah Maitland, and others; Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber; Jane Yolen, Briar Rose; Margo Lanagan, Tender Morsels.
NOTE: This course will be delivered in both face-to-face and videoconferencing formats
ENGL 321: Literary Theory from 1900
Professor Dawn Thompson
Dawn.Thompson@viu.ca
This survey course will consider the wide range of modern and contemporary literary theory that has radically altered the way we read and interpret literature, history, poplar media, and reality itself. We will begin with early Russian Formalism and Structuralism, and move on to New Criticism, Marxism, Feminism, Queer Theory, Psychoanalytic Criticism, Reader-Response Theory, New Historicism, Post-Colonialism, Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction and Cultural Studies. Questions we will consider include the relationship between language and reality, how meaning is produced and interpreted, and by whom, and how larger cultural, economic and political contexts influence the production and interpretation of literary texts – and vice versa!
ENGL 341: Chaucer
Professor Cynthea Masson
Cynthea.Masson@viu.ca
By the end of ENGL 341 you will have gained not only a new appreciation for medieval literature but a skill you can use to impress your friends and family—you will be able to read Chaucerian verse aloud. Try it now:
A knyght ther was, and that a worthy man,
That fro the tyme that he first bigan
To riden out, he loved chivalrie,
Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie. (General Prologue 43-46)
In addition to practising Middle English, we will examine the plots, themes, genres, and characters of several of The Canterbury Tales as well as features of Chaucer's rhetorical style, humour, and satire. 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. Your major paper assignment will encourage engagement with critical articles on the Tales from scholarly journals. The semester will progress toward a class reading and/or performance of The Miller's Tale in the final week.
ENGL 382: Romantic Literature: Revolt, Reform, Reaction
Professor Daniel Burgoyne
Daniel.Burgoyne@viu.ca
The profound influence of radical thinking on the spirit of the age of English Romanticism has long been recognized. In referring to the French Revolution as “the master theme of the epoch in which we live” (in an 1816 letter to Byron), Percy Shelley acknowledges the fact that, of all the diverse constituents of this period, “revolution” is arguably the most significant one. This course will consider a range of texts that engage with the revolutionary impulse of the period in its various registers, including matters of social and political reform, women’s rights, slavery, war, and freedom of speech.
This approach will reveal writing that is more political and socially progressive, radical and perhaps subversive, than Romanticism is sometimes understood. I want you to explore the Romantic imagination as a means to self-realization and social change. I encourage you to compare the issues, struggles, and recognitions of the Romantics with those that we face today.
Texts:
The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Volume 4: The Age of Romanticism, 2nd ed. (Broadview, 2010)
The Course Moodle includes additional resources and readings, as well as important reminders and a “live” schedule of dates. See https://moodle.viuonline.ca/course/view.php?id=2231
ENGL 416: Studies in a Major Author, School, or Movement
Scientific Romance: The Origins of Science Fiction
Professor Daniel Burgoyne
Daniel Burgoyne@viu.ca
This course will focus on the origins of Science Fiction in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before there was Science Fiction, there was Scientific Romance, an exciting nineteenth-century invention that took colonialism to new worlds and novel technologies to seemingly impossible extremes. It also used scientific discoveries to confront horrible recognitions about humanity’s place in an ever-older, ever-bigger universe.
Transforming travel and utopian writing, romance, and satire into a new species of imaginative narrative, early science fiction marked the intersection of science and literature. You will be able to explore writings by Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and others.
Texts:
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (Broadview 1996)
Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)
Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (Broadview 2002)
H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (Broadview 2003)
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Under the Moons of Mars
ENGL 420: Gay and/or Lesbian Literature: Autobiography
Professor Marni Stanley
Marni.Stanley@viu.ca
“Differences are what create individuals. Identities are what create groups and categories. Identities are thus conditions of comparative simplicity that complex individuals might move toward, but (fortunately) never achieve—until society, tired of the complexity of so much individual difference, finally, one way or the other, imposes an identity on us. Identities are thus, by their nature, reductive. “ Samuel Delany “Coming/Out”
The genre of autobiography is rich in the exploration of identity and experience and in experiments with form and style. The genre invites us to imagine the ways in which each person matters regardless of the criteria of fame. It is a genre that helps us gain insight into differences among us, whether in sexualities, 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 and help us understand the difference between individuality and identity. In this course we will focus on contemporary lives.
ENGL 435: Children's Literature:
The World Reflected: Issues in Children’s Literature
Professor Lynne Wytenbroek
Lynne.Wytenbroek@viu.ca
This course will look at children’s books for all ages that present diverse cultures, religions, races, socio-economic backgrounds, abilities, and family structures. The course is designed to give students a background of fictional material written for children that they can use to foster understanding between diverse groups of children. It will also assist students in evaluating such texts as regards quality of books available for different age-groups.
ENGL 436:
British Literature from 1900-1945:
Education and Art in Women’s Writing
Professor Richard Lane
Richard.Lane@viu.ca
http://web.viu.ca/richardlane/index.htm
Women were taking a much larger role in the creative arts in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth-century, and they changed the way in which art and literature was conceived of and produced. In this course we will examine the ways in which new opportunities of education and creative expression were argued for by key women authors and artists. We will look at the artistic/arts and crafts movement called the Omega Workshops and the writers/thinkers called The Bloomsbury Group (in-class handouts and visual materials provided). We will also examine in class the design for a Ballet called Jeux (Diaghilev and Nijinsky), which was based on Omega and Bloomsbury arts, as well as Virginia Woolf’s analysis of education, gender and feminism in her essays A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Our themes will be further explored in relation to Woolf’s To The Lighthouse (female and modernist art vs. male-dominated philosophy), Mrs Dalloway (class, gender, growing-up and aging, feminized shell shock), Rebecca West’s Return of the Soldier (love, aesthetics, class, the abject, shell shock), E.M.Forster’s Howards End (gender, feminism, education), and Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (interior design, architecture, sexual liberation vs. traditional family, the city vs. the countryside).
ENGL 450: Canadian Fiction: Urban Fictions
Professor Frances Sprout
Frances.Sprout@viu.ca
In this study of contemporary Canadian fiction, we will focus on representations of the city in our national literature. By placing this representation in historical, cultural, and theoretical contexts, we will consider the role an urban setting plays as a “contact zone” in which subjectivities based on race, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity meet in a landscape where regional meets global and natural environments border cultural ones.
LING 350: Linguistics and the Dimensions of Literacy
Professor Matthew Beedham
Matthew.Beedham@viu.ca
An introduction to theoretical and historical linguistic studies and the application of this knowledge to the development and teaching of literacy skills. Considers the shaping, formative role of language in a culture and investigates assumptions about the relationship between language, thought, and culture.