English

Graduate Courses - 2011-12

Fall/Winter 2011-12

ENGL 7821/6-001 Topics in Visual Cultures (Fall-Winter),
offered simultaneously with History of Museums and Collecting/HIST 4830/6 and HIST 7830/6
Instructor: S. Borys
Slot: Wednesday 2:30-5:30 p.m.
Room: 2C10

Museums do more than just collect art objects, they display and produce culture. This course examines the collecting practices of Western museums, before and after the Enlightenment, as well as ideologies of collecting. We investigate how museums developed in tandem with the discipline of art history, and how both institutions were dependent on nineteenth and twentieth century ideologies of nationalism and colonialism. Students study how artifacts and collections function in the construction of cultural and national identities. Collections from the Medieval, Renaissance and Modern periods may be studied, including European and North American museums and galleries.

There will be a limit in the number of places available for students in the MA in Cultural Studies: Texts and Cultures.

ENGL-7131/6-001 Special Studies in Cultural Theories and Practices (Fall-Winter)
Practicum in Curatorial Studies,
offered simultaneously with HIST-4831/6 and HIST-7831/6
Instructor: P. Bovey
Slot: Tuesday 8:30-11:15 a.m.
Room: 2C10

This course blends the theory and practice of curatorial work, public history and experiential learning for students interested in achieving a university credit by working with a local museum or art gallery. The Practicum provides opportunities to explore a range of field placements with host institutions in order to learn many aspects of curatorial training. Weekly seminars at the University will introduce students to theoretical readings and provide opportunities for reflection and assessment. Students are expected to work 6 hours a week in the placement, as well as attend classes once a week. The program/project partners will provide on-site, in-house orientation, training and support for the interns who have chosen to work with them. Each site has its own particular required readings as defined by the practicum partnership, as well as the readings assigned by the instructor. The goal of this course is to link scholarship with community involvement and hands-on training.

Descriptions of each partnering site will be introduced during the first week of classes. Partnerships opportunities include, but are not limited to, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Plug In Contemporary Art Institute, Buhler Gallery, and other local galleries and museums.

There will be a limit in the number of places available for students in the MA in Cultural Studies: Texts and Cultures, and students in Texts and Cultures who want to register in this course will be asked to follow the Special Studies guidelines.

Fall 2011

ENGL-7103/3-001: Research Methods and Practice (Fall)
Research (in) Practice
Instructor: Dr. Zbigniew Izydorczyk
Slot: Monday 8:30-11:20 a.m.
Room: 2C10
Note: This course is REQUIRED for all full-time graduate students.

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-7160/3-001 Topics in Cultures of Childhood (Fall)
Child Perpetrators: Cultural and Political Representations of Aryan Youth and Nazism in the North American Context
Instructor: Dr. Doris Wolf
Slot: Tuesday 2:30-5:15 p.m.
Room: 3M58

This course explores the cultural and political functions of images of youth and childhood within discourses of Nazi perpetration, focusing on texts which have been produced or have gained wider circulation in the North American context. It looks at both fictional texts for young people that focus on representations of the Aryan child in the Third Reich (eg. Hans Peter Richter’s YA historical fiction, Friedrich, Max Von der Grun’s Howl like the Wolves, and Bette Greene’s juvenile fiction Summer of My German Soldier, which was adapted into a made-for-tv movie) and the recent outpouring of memoirs by adults who were children under Nazism (eg. Ursula R. Mahlendorf’s The Shame of Survival: Working Through a Nazi Childhood, Gertrud Mackprang Baer’s In The Shadow of Silence. From Hitler Youth to Allied Internment: A Young Woman's Story of Truth and Denial, and Tomi Ungerer’s Tomi: A Childhood Under the Nazis). The course explores how ‘youth’ figures as a highly fraught concept in these texts, having functioned as a primary site of indoctrination in Nazi policy and practice, but also, retrospectively, through an appropriation of one of the major social constructions of the modern child, that of childhood innocence, as a primary site of excuse or denial of guilt. It also takes up a number of overlapping issues, including the notion of childhood as a temporal state experienced through memory, the impact of the politics of the present on interpretations of the past, and the effects of migration on discourses of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (the ways in which Germans, nationally and individually, have attempted to come to terms with their guilt over Nazism) as it relates to North America. Studies on trauma, testimony, autobiography, memoir, and Vergangenheitsbewältigung will help frame our analyses.

ENGL-7901/3-050: Topics in Genders, Sexualities and Cultures (Fall)
Thinking Through the Skin: Culture, Embodiment and Psychic Life,
offered simultaneously with WGS-4004/3 CULTURAL STUDIES AND FEMINISM
Instructor: Dr. Angela Failler
Slot: Wednesday 6:00-9:00 p.m.
Room: 3C29

The field of cultural studies has been shaped by encounters between several forms of inquiry including but not limited to feminist critique, class-conscious ethnic and critical race studies, psychoanalysis, anthropology, sociology, education, folklore studies, indigenous, postcolonial, and diasporic studies, as well as studies in communications and media, literature, visual arts, and the performing arts. This seminar style course highlights feminist engagements with the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies. Specific themes in the course vary by instructor.

The specific theme for the Fall 2011 offering of this course is Thinking Through the Skin, an interdisciplinary study of the significance of human skin. Observations will be drawn from various theoretical perspectives that intersect with feminist gender studies including phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial theory 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.”

There will be a limit in the number of places available for students in the MA in Cultural Studies: Texts and Cultures.

Winter 2012

ENGL-7112/3-001: Topics in Cultural Theory (Winter)
How Language Encodes Culture
Instructor: Dr. Karen Malcolm
Slot: Monday 2:30 p.m.-5:15 p.m.
Room: 2C10

Sociolinguists, anthropological linguists, discourse analysts, systemic functional linguists and communication linguists have spent decades exploring the interface between language and culture. They have developed valuable theoretical tools with which to investigate this interface, and they have years of research to back up their discoveries concerning the way language and culture interrelates. Yet their research is not well known by scholars in the field of Cultural Studies.This course offers students of Cultural Studies a theoretical breadth and methodological variety that enables students to investigate texts: verbal, visual and multimodal of personal scholarly interest in a great wealth of linguistic detail and cultural awareness.  A background in the intricacies of linguistics is not required; however, an interest in the subtleties of communication is.

The course will be taking a three prong approach to the study of language and culture. It will

1. explore the theories of language and culture that have evolved out of this research,
2. describe the range of research in which scholars in these fields are currently engaged
3. while at the same time develop a descriptive methodology that will enable students to pursue their own analyses

The course is taught by means of informal lectures and individual analysis.

ENGL-7901/3-051: Topics in Genders, Sexualities and Cultures (Winter)
Transgender and Transbiology in Traditional and Popular Culture,
offered simultaneously with WGS-4200/3 ADVANCED FEMINIST THEORY
Instructor: Dr. Pauline Greenhill
Slot: Wednesday 6:00-9:00 p.m.
Room: 3C29

This course opens exploration of the imaginative worlds of traditional and popular culture.  Transgender indicates a lack of fit between gender identity (social, cultural, psychological) and sex identity (biological, physiological).  Transbiology includes representations of animals or humans who masquerade or transform, particularly as another species, and/or who mess with hard-and-fast distinctions between species, including between human and non-human.  A trans imagination -- the conceptualisation that a person, self or other, is or could be of a different sex, gender, or species than they appear -- manifests, for example, in folk literature and popular audiovisual media. Trans enactments, in which individuals physically present themselves as another sex, gender, or species have long been part of traditional and popular games, rituals, celebrations, and protests. This course offers sustained enquiry of trans imagination and enactment not only as fantastical creations, but also as prefiguring embodiments of concerns about marginalisation, oddity, and exclusion from society and culture.

There will be a limit in the number of places available for students in the MA in Cultural Studies: Texts and Cultures.

ENGL-7740/3-001 Topics in Local, National, and Global Cultures (Winter)
Representations of Aboriginal Peoples Then and Now: a Cultural History (and Critique) of the Mainstream
Instructor: Dr. Paul DePasquale
Slot: Thursday 2:30-5:15 p.m.
Room: 2C11

The first half of this course explores the history of stereotypes, stereotyping, and racism as they pertain to Native North American peoples. We will examine non-Native representations of Aboriginal peoples in artistic and non-artistic texts from the early modern period to the present day, including travel narratives, colonialist rhetoric and propaganda, visual art, literature, as well as today’s texts circulating on the internet, television, through news media, and word of mouth. The course considers theories of representation and racism across a range of disciplines and contexts, and analyzes the practice of representation, in order to locate discursive patterns, tropes, representational strategies, and persistent modes of thinking as reflected in mainstream cultural productions. The second half of the course focuses on Indigenous-centred theoretical approaches and Aboriginal cultural and artistic productions that critique European-based assumptions and theories. The aim is to define, however tentatively, the concerns and discursive strategies of contemporary Aboriginal resistance and agency, as well as the opportunities for (and challenges of) Native and settler reconciliation in the present day.

ENGL-7811/3-001 Topics in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Cultures (Winter)
Mad Scientists, Machines, and Monsters: Science, Technology, and the Gothic
Instructor: Dr. Kathryn Ready
Slot: Tuesday 2:30-5:15 p.m.                           
Room: 3M56

This course will approach Gothic literature within the context of the history of science, technology, and culture. Scholars have associated the emergence of the Gothic as a genre with a reaction to Enlightenment rationalism and empiricism, both of which contributed to an unprecedented growth in the development of science and technology during the period. Yet by the end of the eighteenth century the relationship between science, technology, and the Gothic had already become complicated. In the last two centuries this relationship has continued to evolve, as innovations in science and technology provide ongoing sources of inspiration for Gothic writers and film makers, providing a vehicle for the expression of cultural anxieties about science, as well as utopian dreams about its transformative possibilities, and challenging assumptions about the fixedness of disciplinary boundaries. In their treatment of science and technology, Gothic writers and film makers challenge, in various and sometimes unsettling ways, the boundaries between nature and culture, the human and the non-human, and the conscious and the unconscious.

In investigating the relationship between science, technology, and the Gothic, we will be particularly interested in representations of the mad scientist, beginning during the nineteenth and carrying forward to the twenty-first century. As part of this investigation we will be looking at a variety of different media, including literature, film, and CD-rom, and considering the impact of different technological mediums in mediating the mad scientist narrative

Spring 2012

ENGL-7160/3-001 Topics in Cultures of Childhood (Spring)
Childhood and the New Millennium
Instructor: Dr. Mavis Reimer
Slot: Wednesdays 2:30-5:15 p.m.
May 2 - July 25, 2012
Room: TBA

In the final decades of the twentieth century, there was an extraordinary interest shown in the conditions of childhood. In 1989, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which defined childhood as a universal condition. At about the same time, Neil Postman declared that childhood in the developed world had effectively disappeared in the media age. New media has become not only a primary vehicle for the distribution of child pornography and for the entrapment of pedophiles, but also the site of the expression of young people's sexuality, through such practices as "sexting."  In legal and social services discourse, the presence of children outside the home or inside an unsafe home is a trigger for the intervention of the state. At the same time, the image of the vulnerable child can be summoned by the state as the justification for war, as George Bush did in his speeches in the run-up to the US-led "shock and awe" bombing of Iraq. In this course, I propose that we will investigate the textualization of contemporary conditions of childhood as we enter a new millennium. The focus will be on texts produced and distributed in Canada. Among the texts that will be considered, for example, are the UN Convention, Canadian laws governing the relations between child and family, media discourses on child pornography, print and graphic narratives about and for children, and some of the many international, award-winning documentary and narrative films about street kids produced during the past ten years.

ENGL-7112/3-001 Topics in Cultural Theory
Audience Studies and Reception Theory
Instructor: Dr. Naomi Hamer
Slot: Tuesdays 2:30-5:15 p.m.
May 1 - July 24, 2012
Room: TBA

Within the broader field of Cultural Studies, Audience Studies has emerged as its own area of study with a focus on the theoretical and methodological issues associated with cultural consumers. This course examines the two main theoretical frames that underline the study of cultural consumption: reception theory and active-audience studies. While reception theorists define the reader and spectator as textual constructs, active-audience studies explore the dynamic role of the audience in the negotiation and production of cultural meanings. Some of the key issues that will be raised in this course include: the historical context for early audience studies and media 'effects' research; issues around young people as an audience; moral panics and censorship; theories of spectatorship in screen and film theory; theories of audience from performance and visual studies; issues of gender, studies of race, sexual orientation, nationality, and socio-economic class in relation to audience studies; globalization and cross-cultural audiences; consumer culture and audience studies; the fan audience and participatory cultures.

The evaluation for this course will include a number of assignments related to focused audience studies proposed by individual students. Students will complete a research proposal, short literature review, transcript analysis, and analytical report for their audience study in addition to seminar presentations around critical readings. The course readings will include central articles in the field of Audience Studies (e.g. Mulvey; Ang; Radway; Barker; Jenkins; Fiske; Morley; Hoggart; Stacey) as well as case study examples of audience studies research.

Possible course texts:

Gauntlett, David. Creative Explorations: New approaches to identities and audiences. London: Routledge, 2007.

Brooker, Will and Deborah Jermyn Eds. The Audience Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 2003.