English

Graduate Courses - 2010-11

Fall/Winter 2010-11

ENGL-7902/6-001 Topics in Genders, Sexualities and Cultures: The Body in the Visual Arts (Fall & Winter)
Professor Claudine Majzels
Friday 2:30 – 5:15 p.m.
Room 2L17

The representation of the human body in the visual arts has provided both an iteration of cultural norms and an arena for the construction of the spectacle of femininity and masculinity, ethnicity, and class. Theoretical approaches to be considered will include the feminist critique of the signifying practices of the canonical European tradition of the body in painting, sculpture and the graphic arts. The research projects of the students in the seminar will be focused on the contemporary visual arts of photography, film, video, installation, and performance art in Canada and elsewhere.

Fall 2010

ENGL-7103/3-001 Research Methods and Practice (Fall)
Professor Catherine Taylor
Wednesday 2:30 – 5:15 p.m.
Room 2C10
Note: This course is REQUIRED for all full-time graduate students.

This course has several aims. First, because Cultural Studies scholars work in such a wide variety of disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and anti-disciplinary ways, this course takes a survey approach designed to acquaint students with the range of methods available and to provoke deep reflection on the conceptual, practical and ethical challenges that ensue from our methodological choices. Second, the course is designed to provide critically-informed practical experience in conceiving, designing, and conducting research projects; analyzing the data; and reporting results through conference presentation, scholarly publication, and community knowledge exchange. Seminar discussions will reflect students’ research areas and my own involvement in critical social research involving marginalized people, including Aboriginal people and sexual and gender minority youth. Students are encouraged to make use of the course to support work on their assignments in other courses. Our main text will be Michael Pickering’s Research Methods for Cultural Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008). Supplementary readings will be made available electronically.

ENGL-7112/3-001: Topics in Cultural Theory: Watching the Detectives: Critical Theory and Crime Fiction (Fall)
Professor Andrew Burke
Monday 2:30 – 5:15 p.m.
Room 2C10

This course will examine the affinities between critical theory and crime fiction from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, paying particular attention to their tangled history, their shared conceptual preoccupations, and even their formal similarities. We will read theory and fiction in tandem in order to explore how their common compulsion to know is haunted by the anxiety that the mysteries and mystifications of the world might ultimately be unsolvable and impenetrable. We will also watch several films that project the detective onscreen and are the source of theoretical fascination. The final syllabus will include selections from the following possibilities. Fiction: Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Ruth Rendell, Henning Mankell. Film: Double Indemnity, Vertigo, The Parallax View.

ENGL-7901/3-001 Topics in Genders, Sexualities, and Cultures: Affect Theory/Ugly Feelings (Fall)
Professor Heather Milne
Thursday 6:00 – 9:00 p.m.
Room 2C06

This section of topics in genders, sexualities, and cultures will consider the recent turn towards the study of affect in gender studies. Specifically, we will examine the recent interest in “ugly feelings” such as shame, envy, paranoia, and disgust. Why have so many feminist and queer theorists turned away from themes like pride, collectivity, and desire in favour of a distinctly negative spectrum of emotions? What do these recent investigations into “raw” emotion suggest about the place of theory in the field of gender studies at the present moment? Readings will include selections from the following works: Sara Ahmed The Cultural Politics of Emotion; Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Life; Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity; Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings, Elspeth Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame; Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects; Sylvan Tomkins, Shame and its Sisters; and Kathleen M. Woodward, Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of Emotion.

Winter 2011

 

ENGL-7901/3-002 Topics in Genders, Sexualities, and Cultures: Sodomy and the Self in Early Modern England (Winter)
Professor Brandon Christopher
Friday 8:30 – 11:20 a.m.
Room 2C10

In early modern England, homosexuality as a concept did not exist.  Instead, what we would consider homosexuality, especially though not exclusively male homosexuality, was classified under the broad heading of “sodomy.”  Sodomy was not an identity category, though; it was a criminal act, like robbery or murder.  However, upon close inspection, it becomes increasingly evident that accusations and prosecutions of sodomy were not usually particularly interested in the specific sex acts that modern society has come to associate with the term “sodomy.”  Instead, what we discover is that the term becomes a catch-all for a whole host of assumptions and anxieties in a society that was becoming increasingly socially, ethnically, and economically fluid. In this course, students will undertake an examination of representations of sodomy in the literature and culture of late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century England.  Reading plays and poetry by Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, and their contemporaries alongside legal documents, libel tracts, and political and social theory, we will seek to understand the way in which representations of sodomy partake in and inform a burgeoning discourse of social change at the turn of the seventeenth century. Works to be studied might include William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice; Ben Jonson, Epicoene and Sejanus; and Christopher Marlowe, Edward II.  Critical works will include works by Alan Bray, Jonathan Goldberg, Michel Foucault, and Alan Stewart.

ENGL-7112/3-002 Topics in Cultural Theory: The Sublime since Kant (Winter) Professor Murray Evans
Tuesday 2:30 – 5:15 p.m.
Room 2C11

In his groundbreaking study in 1976, Thomas Weiskel announced the death of “the Romantic sublime” and the need for a “‘realist’ or psychological account” of the sublime, “purged” of “idealist metaphysics.” Only a few years later, in 1984, Jean-Luc Nancy opened his essay, “Of the Sublime Offering” with the comment, “The sublime is in fashion.” About three decades after Weiskel, Mark Cheetham echoed Jean-François Lyotard in observing “how the notion of the sublime,” including its “revelatory power,” nonetheless “continues to absorb and astonish contemporary theorists.” There is “the oddity, even the anachronism of the remarkable contemporary interest in this discourse.” This course begins by sampling some late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century texts on the sublime, by Burke, Kant, and Coleridge, for example. The course will then survey some more recent engagements of these traditions, including selections from figures such as Weiskel, Foucault, Nancy, Adorno, Lyotard, Zizek, and Derrida. This survey aims particularly to interrogate the collusion/collision of “cultural theory” and “critical theory,” including debates about the “persistence of the aesthetic” and “New Formalisms.”

ENGL-7740/3-001 Topics in Local, National, and Global Cultures: Theories of Language and Global Culture (Winter)
Professor Peter Ives
Monday 2:30 – 5:15 p.m.
Room 3C34

Language standardization and national languages have been integral aspects of modernity and the making of modern national communities, although the ideals of such processes have often been far from the realities of linguistic pluralism and fragmentation.  With the advent of many developments lumped together with the name “globalization,” new questions of identity, subjectivity, and global communication have arisen and old assumptions undermined.  These include ideas about one’s mother tongue, ownership and comfort in language, agency, authorship, authority, and power relations of communication.  This course traces modern European philosophy’s struggles to conceptualize language from the seventeenth century onwards with particular focus on the various “linguistic turns” of the twentieth century. We will consciously look back to those texts with an eye towards our current conditions in which the so-called triumphalism of English is riddled with complexities and contradictions.  The course will focus on the writings of Locke, Rousseau, Herder, Saussure, Bakhtin, Gramsci, Foucault, and Derrida as well as current work by Braj Kachru, Alastair Pennycook, and others.

ENGL-7160/3-001 Topics in Cultures of Childhood: Children, Desire, Fear (Winter) Professor Catherine Tosenberger
Wednesday 6:00 – 9:00 p.m.
Room 3C33 

In this course, we will explore the cultural discourses of pedophilia and pedophobia – the desire and the fear of children.  The child as victim and the child as villain occupy key places in folk, literary, and popular culture.  Quite often, this victimization or villainy operates in the realm of the sexual.  The angelic or demonic eroticized child, as James Kincaid argues, is the natural outgrowth of Western culture’s fetishization of childhood innocence – and of the horror, and allure, of the threat of innocence defiled.   We will trace this fear of and desire for the child through folklore and literature, media, and theory.  We will discuss the history of the concept of childhood innocence – usually attributed to the Romantics – and the way the concept has been mined for both erotic pleasure and horror; building upon that, we will also study the impact of the later development of the category “adolescence,” which extended childhood dependence well past puberty.  Throughout the course, we will discuss psychoanalytic theory:  the work of Freud, Klein, Lacan, and other theorists has had an enormous impact on both academic and pop-cultural constructs of childhood innocence, sexuality, and evil.  Assignments will include a film study and a final research paper.

ENGL-7740/3-002 Topics in Local, National, and Global Cultures: The Postcolonial Exotic (Winter)
Professor Heather Snell
Thursday 11:30 a.m. – 2:25 p.m.
(U of M campus)
NOTE: This course will be offered at the University of Manitoba, across town from the University of Winnipeg and may have limited enrolment.
As a process that transforms the “other” into a safe object of consumption, the exotic exerts considerable pressure on the institutionalization of postcolonial texts and cultures. Despite well-intentioned efforts on the part of practitioners in postcolonial studies to expand the canon to include works that have traditionally been excluded from consideration in the Euro-American academy, the field risks reproducing the very same processes of exotification it claims to oppose. This course explores the tension between an assemblage of critical theories and practices that aim to dissolve imperial structures, institutions, and discourses on the one hand, and on the other, a global market that traffics in culturally othered goods. Drawing on theorists and critics of the exotic from a number of disciplines, we explore several meanings and registers of exoticism in conjunction with a range of written, filmic, visual, performative, and musical texts that comply with, critique, and/or challenge exotifying processes and the fundamental sense of the exotic itself. Topics include Orientalism, Occidentalism, colonialist imperialism, diaspora, multiculturalism, tourism, transnationalism, and globalization.

Spring 2011

 

ENGL-7161/6-001 Topics in Cultures of Childhood: Sequels, Series, and Serials: Narratives and Repetition (Spring)
Professor Mavis Reimer
(Time and Room TBA)

This course will focus on various forms of serial narratives directed to audiences of young people—such as the part publications of Victorian serials (for example, E. Nesbit’s Treasure-Seeker stories first published in The Strand and later published in one volume as The Story of the Treasure Seekers), series books and the film adaptations of them (the Harry Potter series), TV series (the various iterations of Degrassi), and texts originally written as stand-alone narratives for which sequels were later written (Anne of Green Gables). The frame for our investigations of these texts will be a range of theories of repetition, from aesthetic theories of form and design, to psychoanalytic theories of trauma, to ideological theories of production and reproduction.

Details about required primary and secondary reading for the course will be available in Winter term. The course will be timetabled as a compressed six-credit course in the Spring term and will require students’ attendance at a scholarly symposium on the theme of series narratives and theories of repetition. Details of scheduling will also be available in Winter term. 

General 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.