English

Graduate Courses - 2009-10

Spring 2010         

ENGL-7741/6-001: Topics in Local, National, and Global Cultures
National and Global Imaginaries: Culture, Community, Citizenship
Instructor: Dr. Diana Brydon
May 3-July 28, TuTh 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.  Room: 2C06
The world is becoming more global yet nations remain important. This course explores the overlap between global, national, and transnational modes of thinking and organizing experience in the world today. We will focus on three key modes of imagining and governing human identity and agency that are currently being re-negotiated within local, regional and global contexts: culture, community, and citizenship. Each of these concepts is important within a range of academic disciplines across the humanities and social sciences while also playing an important role in non-academic thinking. We will read a range of texts, including public reports, white papers, policy documents, manifestos, journalism, theory of various kinds (including cultural, feminist, postcolonial, and global), fiction, visual images, and poetry.

The course will be organized into the following divisions:

1. Introduction to the Key Terms (Imaginary; Nation, State, Globalization, International, Transnational) and Institutions.
2. Cultural Theory and Cultural Policy.
3. Community (nationalism, cosmopolitanism, planetary consciousness, belonging, borders, home and exile).
4. Citizenship and its others (identity, democracy, diaspora, refugees, human rights, animals, bare life and the camp).

The goal is to encourage students to think more critically and creatively about their place in the world and how they might meet the challenges that lie before us. By the end of the course, students should have a better understanding of how globalization studies and cultural studies are changing disciplinary and interdisciplinary modes of conducting research, how we learn and assess our knowledge, and how we apply it to understand and improve our world.

ENGL-7811/3 Topics in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Cultures
Romancing the Middle Ages: Contemporary Medievalisms
Instructor: Dr. Clare Bradford
May 3-July 28, Wed, 5:00-8:00 p.m.  Room 2C06
In contemporary society the medieval carries a variety of ideological freight, from representations of the Middle Ages as a space inhabited by noble knights and beautiful maidens, to the rhetorics of barbarism which in recent times have associated the term "medieval: with Islamic cultural practices.  The course "Romancing the Middle Ages" explores the popularity of medieval themes, characters and stories in contemporary film, fiction, and children's literature.  It will include a study of selected medieval narratives which have been reworked and revisioned, in addition to contemporary "inventions" of the medieval.  Through a study of the main patterns and tropes in contemporary revisions and versions of the medieval, students will be encouraged to think about the cultural work which these texts do, and the social and political agendas which they promote.  
   
  2009-10 Courses
 

ENGL-7103/3-001: Research Methods and Practice (Fall)
Research (in) Practice
Instructor: Dr. Zbigniew Izydorcyzk
Slot: F 8:30 - 11:20
Room: 2C06
This course  introduces students to advanced resources for and methods of finding, assessing, compiling, and documenting bibliographic and research information indispensable for graduate study and scholarship. While recognizing the efficiency of online research, the course explores its limitations and potential pitfalls; it also presents a broad range of print and manuscript tools that can provide access to information not accessible through digital means. Since finding and documenting textual information is bound up with past and present publishing practices, elements of enumerative, analytical, and descriptive bibliography will also form part of this course. Finally, the inherent instability of texts, both manuscript and printed, requires that some attention be given to editorial theories and practices. Although the course involves some informal lecture introducing new topics, it is largely assignment- and problem-driven, and it offers hands-on experience in dealing with various bibliographic and research challenges. There is ample discussion of what constitutes evidence and where to look for it.

ENGL-7112/3-001: Topics in Cultural Theory (Fall)
Critical Legacies of Marx, Freud, Foucault, and Derrida
Instructor: Dr. Peter Melville
Slot: M 2:30 - 5:15
Room: 2C10
This course examines the critical legacies of four thinkers in continental philosophy, namely, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Broadly speaking, the course considers how Marx's analyses of class, Freud's exploration of the unconscious, Foucault's interrogations of the discourses of power, and Derrida's writings on deconstruction have influenced the terrain of contemporary critical and cultural theory. As a way to navigate through the extensive and complexly interconnected legacies of these thinkers, this version of the course will pay special attention to figures of religion and/or the "religious" in their writings. Can Marx's view on religion, for instance, really be summed up by his famous aphorism: "Religion is the opiate of the masses"? Are Freud and Foucault likewise so cynical of the psychological and social functions of religion? How did Derrida, the architect of deconstructionist critique, become what Mark C. Taylor calls "one of the most provocative 'religious' thinkers of our time"? In addition to pursuing these and other questions viz. Marx, Freud, Foucault, and Derrida, the course will conclude with a comparative analysis of a rather unexpected (and somewhat controversial) exchange between cultural theorists Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Zizek on the question of Saint Paul and the "subversive kernel" of Christianity (Zizek 6).

Required Texts:
(Note: Readings from Marx, Foucault, and Julia Kristeva will be available through e-Reserve.)
Agamben, Giorgio. The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Trans. Patricia Dailey. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Trans. Ray Brassier. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Freud, Sigmund. Mass Psychology (Modern Classics). Toronto: Penguin Group, 2004.
Zizek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.

ENGL-7112/3-050: Topics in Cultural Theory (Winter)
Thinking Through the Skin: Culture, Embodiment and Psychic Life
Instructor: Dr. Angela Failler
Slot: W 6:00 - 9:00
Room: 2C06
This seminar is an interdisciplinary study of the significance of human skin. Observations will be drawn from various theoretical perspectives including phenomenology, psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory and feminist gender studies to explore the skin's capacity to bear multiple meanings as they materialize at the intersection of culture, embodiment, and psychic life. Alongside critical literature and examples from popular culture, creative texts including short fiction, film, and video art will be used to animate class discussions. Topics for study may include racialization and the production of national skins, sexed and gendered skins, eroticized skins, aging skins, skin memories, body modification and cosmetic surgery, artificial skins, cyber-skins, traumatized/injured skins, self-harm, skin dis-ease, and "narrative skin repair."

Required Texts
*Articles on Web-CT
Thinking Through the Skin. Eds. Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.
Selected readings from Skin: A special issue of English Studies in Canada 33.4 (Forthcoming 2009). Ed. Julia Emberley.

ENGL-7131/6-001: Special Studies in Cultural Theories and Practices (Fall/Winter)
French Fin-de-Siecle Art and Culture (1880-1914)
Instructor: Dr. Serena Keshavjee
Slot: T 2:30 - 5:15
Room: 2L17
This seminar course examines some of the dominant issues in France during the fin-de-siecle. Working within the critical categories of modernity and anti-modernity, we will consider such discussion topics as scientific and pseudo-scientific theories of degeneration, regeneration and evolution, constructs of the "natural," the unconscious, and psychology and notions of hysteria and mediumship. The student seminars focus on how these ideas were reflected in French visual culture at the turn of the century.

In order to take advantage of the material brought together to celebrate the centenary of Darwin's birth in 2009, I will be including a section on the fin-de-siecle attitudes towards humanity and nature, and on the display of culture and knowledge during the late-nineteenth century.

ENGL-7160/3-050: Topics in Cultures of Childhood (Fall)
Making Empire Children: The Persistence and Passages of Victorian Children's Literature
Instructor: Dr. Mavis Reimer
Slot: W 6:00 - 9:00
Room: 2C06
Victorian children's literature has long been regarded as setting in place the formal and thematic patterns that continue to inform texts produced for young people by adults. Using the method of genealogical inquiry, we will test the extent to which the genre of children's literature can be said to be the result of such a process of sedimentation; that is, to use Fredric Jameson's terms, whether it continues to take up the problems and the solutions first articulated by Victorian children's literature. We begin by reading the first books of three contemporary popular series for young people in Anglo-American societies: John Marsden's Tomorrow When the War Began (Australia, 1993), J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philospher's Stone (UK, 1997), and Lemony Snicket's The Bad Beginning from A Series of Unfortunate Events (US, 1999). We then move backwards into the Victorian era, reading children's books from various subgenres and considering how such reading might change, complicate, or confirm our readings of the contemporary books. Among the books we will consider are the boys' adventure stories that have long been understood to be carriers of the ideologies of exploration and conquest that are central to the colonialist project (R.M. Ballantyne, The Coral Island, 1858, and G.A. Henty, In Times of Peril: A Tale of India, 1881); stories set in the public schools that were said to be "nurseries of the Empire" (Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's Schooldays, 1857), and in the new girls' schools that were the result of first-wave feminist educational campaigns (Evelyn Sharp, The Making of a Schoolgirl, 1897); and the fantasy narratives that will allow us to inquire into the politics of the production of other worlds (Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865; Mary Molesworth, The Cuckoo Clock, 1877; and E. Nesbit, The Story of the Amulet, 1905).

This course engages with a particular historical form and ideological formation--Victorian children's literature at the height of the British Empire--but also seeks, more generally, to unpack the implications of generic sedimentation and to understand the place of texts for young people in the cultural system.

ENGL-7160/3-051: Topics in Cultures of Childhood (Winter)
Disney, Folklore, and Popular Culture
Instructor: Dr. Catherine Tosenberger
Slot: T 6:00 - 9:00
Room: 2C06
What do we talk about when we talk about Disney? And why does Disney have such a hold over the North American imagination? This course will focus on the many forms of Disney: the man, the films, the legend, the corporation, the ideology, the magic kingdom/evil empire, the global phenomenon ? and, especially, the shaper and subject of folklore. First, we will discuss Disney's use of folk narratives, particularly European fairy tales, from the perspective of folkloristics and film studies: we will study the manner in which the Disney versions of folk tales have become the dominant versions, and the various cultural reasons behind that. We will also be examining Disney's role in folklore and popular culture. There are a host of contemporary legends about Disney, which assure us that Walt Disney had himself cryogenically frozen, or that pornographic images can be found hidden in the films, or that the seven dwarves represent the seven stages of cocaine addiction (!). What can this folklore tell us about the place Disney occupies in our culture? On a broader level, we will use Disney to think through the ways in which folkloristics, film studies, and cultural studies intersect. Folklorists sometimes describe themselves as "closer to the ground" than cultural studies scholars; what does this mean, and how can we use these various theoretical and methodological approaches to illuminate cultural texts? Possible readings may include work by Jack Zipes, Maria Tatar, June Cummins, Mikel J. Koven, Kevin Shortsleeve, Jerry Griswold, Barre Toelken, Regina Bendix, Jan Harald Brunvand, and Donald Haase.

ENGL-7811/3-001: Topics in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Cultures (Winter)
Graphic Witness
Instructor: Dr. Candida Rifkind
Slot: M 6:00 - 9:00
Room: 2C06
This course studies graphic narratives from the early 1900s to the present to explore how a diversity of artists has used the medium of sequential visual images to witness political conflict. The focus of the course is on the medium itself as we pay attention to both the aesthetic and formal concerns of comics/comix/wordless novels/graphic narratives (part of our work is to understand debates in terminology), but we also explore the particular social, cultural, political, and economic contexts of each individual text. The majority of texts are auto/biographies, but we also study other non-fiction and life writing (travel writing, journalism) and at least one fictional text, such that the very divide between fiction and non-fiction becomes part of the exploration of the course.

The course begins in the 1920s with narrative woodcuts and ends in the 2000s with animated documentary cinema to situate the current boom in graphic narratives, and their increasing academic respectability, within broader historical, cultural and theoretical contexts such as modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and globalization. Although the texts are quite diverse in style and content, they are unified by the politics of witness and the practices of sequential graphic representation, both of which are the threads unifying the course from week to week. We also pay attention to print cultures and book histories of graphic narratives and to culturally-specific conditions of material production, technological innovation, and circulation.

Three Notes on Preparation and Expectation
1. Students do not need any prior contact with comics or graphic narratives, while those who have a long acquaintance with superhero comics or manga may be surprised by these "alternative" comics; whatever your familiarity with this medium, this course should stretch your prior knowledge and push your comfort zone into areas of new knowledge.

2. This course takes a theoretical approach to the material and, while a background in theory is not a pre-requisite, students should be prepared to engage with weekly readings in critical and cultural theory along with the primary texts. At least two of the weeks are focused on building theoretical knowledge to continue with the course readings. These readings will be placed on e-reserve in the UW Library in the Fall term.

3. These comics and graphic narratives may be challenging on the level of content. Students should be prepared to deal with serious subject matter as we read testimonial accounts of the rise of European fascism and the Great Depression, the Holocaust, the atomic bombing of Japan, the impact of nuclear testing on indigenous peoples in the South Pacific, the Iranian Revolution and its aftermath, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the 9/11 attacks in New York. Weekly presentations will help contextualize these events, but be forewarned that the material may be "graphic" in both senses of the word. For this reason, students are advised to read the texts well before the class in which they will be discussed in order to process the material and reflect on it in the contexts of other readings for the course.

Required Texts

1. Books

All texts will be ordered through Mondragon Books (91 Albert Street) and also available for purchase in the first class.

•   Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels by Frans Masereel, Lynd Ward, Giacomo Patri and Laurence Hyde. Ed. George A. Walker. New York: Firefly, 2007.
•   Nakazawa, Keiji. Barefoot Gen: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima, Vol. 1. San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2001.
•   *Spiegelman, Art. Maus I & II. Paperback Boxed Set. New York: Pantheon, 1993.
•   ---. In the Shadow of No Towers. New York: Pantheon, 2004.
•   *Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis Boxed Set. New York: Pantheon, 2005.
•   Delisle, Guy. Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2006.
•   Sacco, Joe. Palestine Collection. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2001.
•   Modan, Rutu. Exit Wounds. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2007.



*Both Maus and Persepolis have been reissued as complete editions, but please buy them as originally published in two separate volumes (now available in box sets) since, for our purposes as students of print culture, we will treat them both as texts published at different times in two sequential volumes.


2. Films (students do not need to purchase films; screening arrangements will be made in class)
•   Persepolis. dirs. Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi. Columbia/TriStar, 2007.
•   Waltz with Bashir. dir. Ari Folman. Sony, 2008.


3. Critical and Cultural Theory
•   Additional required readings will be placed on e-reserve in the UW Library in the Fall. Students are responsible for printing off the articles and bringing them to class.

ENGL-7901/3-001: Topics in Genders, Sexualities and Cultures (Fall)
Libertines, Whores, Mollies, and Female Husbands: Transgressive Sexuality in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Great Britain
Instructor: Dr. Kathryn Ready
Slot: T 2:30 - 5:15
Room: 2C10
This course aims to examine a selection of non-fictional, fictional, and other artistic representations of transgressive sexuality in Great Britain during the Restoration and early eighteenth century, with an effort to place these materials into cultural context, and to consider various theoretical frameworks for understanding them. As well as looking at primary sources from the period, we will be drawing on writings from the ever-expanding field of the study of sexuality. Evidently, this is a field which itself draws on a range of disciplines across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. For the study of sexuality, the Restoration period and eighteenth century arguably command special interest. In the backlash against Puritanism following the end of the Interregnum, British society saw more relaxed attitudes towards sex and more open expression of sexual desire (at least among elites) than ever before. Although moral censure and legal and other penalties remained potentially high, cults of libertinism flourished around the court of Charles II, and with these came greater tolerance for various forms of extramarital and homosexual sex. As the eighteenth century wore on, attitudes began to harden once again. However, the process of hardening was only gradual. In the meantime, theories of sexuality and the understanding of sexual difference were changing and becoming secularized as a result of developments in anatomy, physiology, psychology, and psychiatry. Some of the writers we will look act in this context include Aphra Behn; John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester; Daniel Defoe; Jonathan Swift; Alexander Pope; Mary Wortley Montagu; John Gay; Eliza Haywood; Henry Fielding; John Cleland; and Tobias Smollett.

Required Texts
Behn, Aphra. The Rover. Peterborough: Broadview, 1999.
---. Selected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, 1993.
Cleland, John. Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.
Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.
Etherege, George. The Man of Mode. London: Methuen, 2008.
Fielding, Henry. Tom Jones. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.
Gay, John. The Beggar's Opera. New York: Dover, 1999.
Mudge, Bradford K., ed. When Flesh Becomes Word: An Anthology of Early Eighteenth-Century Libertine Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004
Smollett, Tobias. The Adventures of Roderick Random. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.
Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester. The Complete Poems. New Haven: Yale UP, 2002.

ENGL-7901/3-002: Topics in Genders, Sexualities and Cultures (Winter)
Queer Counterpublics
Instructor: Dr. Heather Milne
Slot: M 2:30 - 5:15
Room: 2C10
Over the past decade, gays and lesbians have become increasingly assimilated into mainstream North American public culture. Gay marriage is now legal across Canada and in some US states, out lesbian comedienne Ellen DeGeneres hosts the most popular talk show on daytime television, and reality TV series like Ru Paul's Drag Race have attracted a large following well beyond the gay community. While the growing mainstream acceptance of gay and lesbian individuals might be interpreted as a positive step towards a more just and inclusive society, some have argued that this acceptance has had negative effects on the vitality and diversity of queer culture and identity. Assimilation may allow queer people to gain a degree of mainstream "respectability" and recognition but it is also based on the often-unexamined premise that queer people are, or should be, just like straight people. Ironically, this assimilation often hinges--explicitly and implicitly--on the very ideologies of capitalism and family values that many queer activists have sought to critique. Many gay and lesbian people have willingly rescinded their attachments to the outsider status of queer culture in favour of what Lisa Duggan has termed "homonormativity" or a "new neo-liberal sexual politics" that is "anchored in domesticity and consumption." In response to homonormativity, movements like "gay shame" have sought to expose and critique the apolitical, capitalist underpinnings of mainstream gay and lesbian culture. This course explores the tension between assimilationist and antiassimilationist gay and lesbian cultures and examines the political, subversive, and productive potentialities of queer counterpublics. Through a theoretically and historically grounded examination of several queer counterpublics and subcultures, including bathhouse culture, the lesbian punk and riot grrrl scenes of the 1990s, drag kings and queens, 18th century Molly Houses, and 1920s lesbian expatriates in Paris, we will consider the ways in which these sites have been integral to the social and cultural vitality of queer communities. We will also examine, as a point of contrast, the so-called homonormative elelments of mainstream gay and lesbian culture, and will consider how gay and lesbian people function within the larger publics of celebrity culture, the entertainment industry and the marketplace.

Required Texts
Barnes, Djuna, Nightwood.
Breedlove, Lynn. Godspeed.
Delaney, Samuel, R. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.

Readings on e-reserve Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter (Chapter 4: "Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion") ---. Undoing Gender (Chapter 5: "Is Kinship Always Heterosexual?")

Note: a three-credit-hour course ("/3") typically is a one-term or half course. A six-credit-hour course ("/6") typically is a two-term or full course.