English

Graduate Courses - 2012-13

Fall 2012

Zbigniew Izydorczyk, English
7103/3 Research Methods and Practice (required)
Mondays 8:30 - 11:15 a.m.

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.

Faculty Bio: Zbigniew Izydorczyk, Department of English, University of Winnipeg, is a medievalist, a historian of language and culture, a scholarly editor, and a translator. He is the author of Manuscripts of the Evangelium Nicodemi: A Census (1993), the editor of The Mediaeval Gospel of Nicodemus: Texts, Intertexts, and Contexts (1997), a co-author of L’Évangile de Nicodème (1997) and A Gospel of Nicodemus Preserved in Poland (2007), and the translator of K Patalas, The Providence Watching: Journeys from Wartorn Poland to the Canadian Prairies (2003). Dr. Izydorczyk has taught courses in linguistics, history of English, and Old and Middle English language and literature.

 

Catherine Tosenberger, English
7160/3 Topics in the Cultures of Childhood: Folk Narratives and Popular Culture
Tuesdays 6:00 - 9:00 p.m.

 In this course, we will study the links and disjunctions between oral storytelling and popular mass-mediated discourse: while folklore and popular culture are often traditionally posited as oppositional, we’ll be examining popular culture as interpreter, shaper, and transmitter of folk narratives. We will begin the course with an examination of the three major forms of folk narrative (myth, legend, folktale), and an overview of popular theories of myth and folklore that have made their way into pop culture, often to the dismay of scholars. During the semester, we will cover topics such as urban legends, horror media as miner and transmitter of folklore, monsters/monstrosity, fairy tales and fairy tale films, audience studies and fandom, and popular religious discourse and folk narrative. 

Faculty Bio: Catherine Tosenberger, Department of English, University of Winnipeg, is a specialist in young people's texts and cultures, folklore, and fandom studies. She is the author of multiple articles on fandom studies and fairy tales, and is an associate editor of the journal Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures. She recently completed a book on Harry Potter fanfiction on the Internet, and her next project will be on pornographic films that invoke fairy tales.

 

Margaret Sweatman, English
7811/3 Topics in Manuscript, Print and Digital Cultures: Creative Production and Reception in Literary Communities
Wednesdays 6:00 - 9:00 p.m.

This course will explore poetry in a variety of aesthetic situations and English language cultures. The intention is to investigate the shift from modernist aesthetics to postmodern and post-Romantic twentieth and twenty-first century poetics, to study theories of language and reception, to consider how poetic form and language in particular evoke meaning in interpretive communities. Primarily, we will be reading poetry with specific epistemological questions in mind: What are the degrees, strategies, and intentions of representation or performance in poetic language? Is the modern a nostalgic aesthetic? How does poetry position its readership? In pleasure, in solace, in a historical moratorium, in rapprochement to or quarantine from popular culture? Has the “Tradition” of poetry been reduced, in John Ashbery’s words, to “the already all-but-illegible scrub forest of graffiti on the shithouse wall” (“Grand Galop”)?

Faculty Bio: Margaret Sweatman, Department of English, University of Winnipeg, is a playwright, poet, performer and novelist. Her plays have been produced by Prairie Theatre Exchange, Popular Theatre Alliance and the Guelph Spring Festival. She has performed with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra, among others, as well as with her own Broken Songs Band. Sweatman is the author of the novels Fox, Sam and Angie, The Players, and When Alice Lay Down with Peter, which won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and several other awards. With Glenn Buhr, Sweatman won a Genie Award for Best Song in Canadian Film. Her most recent libretto “Red Sea,” was performed by Sarah Slean with the Penderecki String Quartet.

Winter 2013

Murray Evans, English
7112/3 Topics in Cultural Theory: The Sublime since Kant
Thursdays 8:30 - 11:15 a.m.

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 “after theory,” the “insistence of the aesthetic,” and “New Formalisms.”

Faculty Bio: Murray J. Evans, Department of English, University of Winnipeg, teaches medieval literature and medievalism, Coleridge, children's literature, and theory. He has published articles on Malory and the Malory manuscript, Chaucer and literary theory, Piers Plowman and the sublime, C.S. Lewis' Narnia books, and Coleridge's Opus Maximum. He is also the author of Rereading Middle English Romance: Manuscript Layout, Decoration, and the Rhetoric of Composite Structure (McGill-Queen’s UP, 1995), and Sublime Coleridge: The Opus Maximum (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2012).

 

Heather Milne, English
7901/3 Topics in Genders, Sexualities, and Cultures: Affect Theory
Mondays 2:30 - 5:15 p.m.

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 and affects? 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.

 Faculty Bio: Heather Milne, Department of English, University of Winnipeg, specializes in feminist theory, queer theory and poetics. She is the co-editor of Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women's Writing (2009) and of a special issue of the poetics journal Open Letter dedicated to the work of Lisa Robertson.  Her current research examines twenty-first century North American feminist poetics.

Jaqueline McLeod Rogers, Department of Rhetoric, Writing and Communication
7740/3 Topics in Local, National and Global Cultures: Walking Winnipeg: Going Local
Fridays 9:30 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.

This course blends local cultural rhetorics with geography, and looks at Winnipeg in art and history, from both public and private perspectives. Core texts for the course include 1James Donald’s Imaginging the Modern City and Calvino’s Invisible Cities. We will also draw on LeFebvre and Soja to develop a concept of thirdspace. We will explore Winnipeg as place and state of mind, a mix of memories, experiences, art, and present life; we are each growing our own city, for what we imagine continuously responds to new experience, inter-subjectivities, and the material place itself.

 Faculty Bio: Jaqueline McLeod Rogers, Department of Rhetoric, Writing and Communication, has published Aspects of the Female Novel (1991), Two Sides to a Story: Gender Difference in Student Narrative (1996) and several composition textbooks for Canadian students. She convened a conference at the University of Winnipeg focusing on Marshall McLuhan (Fall 2010) and is currently co-editing a collection of new articles for a book with the working title Marshall McLuhan in a Post Modern Age: Is the Medium Still the Message? She has recently published on Margaret Mead and family rhetorics, and on writing and place. Linking her recent research interests is the question of how we form and strengthen community.

Fall-Winter 2012-13

Stephen Borys, Winnipeg Art Gallery
7830/6 Topics in Visual Cultures, offered simultaneously with HIST-7831/6 History of Museums and Collecting
Thursdays 2:30 - 5:15 p.m.

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.

Faculty Bio: Stephen Borys is the Executive Director of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, an Adjunct Professor at the University of Winnipeg, and a Scholar in Residence at the University of Manitoba. Previously, he was curator at The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota; curator at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio; and curator in European Art at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. He has also held teaching and research posts at various academic institutions. Dr. Borys has organized numerous exhibitions, written accompanying catalogues and scholarly articles, and lectured across North America. He is the recipient of several prestigious research and exhibition grants from such institutions as the Canada Council, Canadian Heritage, National Endowment for the Arts, and Samuel Kress Foundation.

 

Pat Bovey
7131/6 Special Studies in Cultural Theories and Practices: Practicum in Curatorial Studies, offered simultaneously with HIST-7831/6 Practicum in Curatorial Studies
Tuesdays 8:30 - 11:15 a.m.

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.

Faculty Bio: Patricia Bovey, FRSA is a Winnipeg-based art historian, author, consultant, the former director of the Winnipeg Art Gallery (1999-2004) and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (1980-1999). She was appointed Adjunct Professor at the University of Victoria in the 1990s, and, in 2011, at the University of Winnipeg, where she teaches art history, cultural policy and arts management. In 2007, she inaugurated the Buhler Gallery at St Boniface Hospital in 2007, a unique program in Canada. Widely published, she has lectured internationally and participated in many international exchanges. Currently Vice-Chair of the University of Manitoba Board of Governors, and member of the Eckhardt-Gramatté Foundation and the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation, she has served on the Boards of the National Gallery of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Federal Museums Task Force. She chaired both the Canadian Art Museum Directors Organization and the Board of Governors of Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Bovey was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (UK) in 2006, and received the Canada 125 Medal, Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal, Woman of Distinction for the Arts (2002), Canadian Museums Association Distinguished Service Award (2007), and the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal (2007).

 

Spring 2013

Brandon Christopher, English
7811/3-001 Topics in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Cultures: Remediating Shakespeare
Tuesdays, 10:00 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.

This course takes as its focus adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare and his works across media. From seventeenth-century responses to and adaptations of his plays to film adaptations to comic books to popular music, Shakespeare and his plays and poetry have been the subject of a range of artistic engagements. Over the course of the term, we will take Shakespeare as a test subject to investigate the meanings and limits of adaptation, drawing on a range of theorizations of adaptation and appropriation, including works by Gérard Genette, Linda Hutcheon, Jacques Derrida, and Julie Sanders, among others. Possible topics include (but are not limited to): novelizations of Shakespeare’s plays, high school film adaptations, postcolonial Shakespeare(s), comic book adaptations, Shakespeare’s life on film, the Authorship Question as adaptation.

Peter Ives, Politics
7740/3-001 Topics in Local, National, and Global Cultures: Theories of Language and Global Culture
Wednesdays 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m

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 have been 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 17th century onwards with particular focus on the various ‘linguistic turns’ of the 20th century. We will 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.

 

Heather Snell, English
Dean Peachey, Global College
7740/3-002 Topics in Local, National and Global Cultures: Reading Course in Post-Conflict Truth, Memory, and Reconciliation
Mondays and Wednesdays 5:00 – 8:00 p.m. (compressed half course, two meetings per week for six weeks)

The suffering from atrocities during wartime is often seen as producing lingering individual and collective trauma, contributing to either personal dysfunction or successive cycles of violence where oppressed groups become the perpetrators in future regimes or conflicts. This course probes the role of memory in transitional societies, with particular emphasis on using memory to strengthen mechanisms for justice and human rights. Reconciliation projects, ranging from community-based initiatives to formal legislated undertakings such as truth and reconciliation commissions, are examined in depth. The course aims to prepare students to attend the Field Course taking place in South Africa in the last two weeks of June, but it is also open to graduate students who are not registering for the Field Course. Therefore, in addition to providing background reading in the history and politics of South Africa and the various international truth and reconciliation commissions examined, the course provides a venue in which to discuss theoretical readings in trauma, witness, forgiveness, testimony, performativity, transitional justice, postcolonialism, and the representational regimes through which the past is managed. These readings are supplemented by some examples of how various artists, in South Africa and elsewhere, have critically engaged issues of post-conflict truth, memory, and reconciliation in film, drama, visual art, and literature, including popular works such as those that make up the growing body of pulp fictions that critic Shameen Black dubs “Truth Commission thrillers.” While the emphasis of this course is on reading, students are expected to contribute regularly to class discussions, conduct one seminar presentation, complete a number of short written assignments, and construct an annotated bibliography. Please note that this course is required for all Cultural Studies graduate students who are registering for the Field Course.

 

Dean Peachey, Global College
7740/3-003 Topics in Local, National and Global Cultures: Reading Course in Post-Conflict Truth, Memory, and Reconciliation, two weeks in South Africa,  June 15-29, 2013, with final assignments due in July 2013. 

The course will be taught as a two-week field course in South Africa, starting in Cape Town and ending in Johannesburg. This course probes the role of memory in transitional societies, with particular emphasis on using memory to strengthen mechanisms for justice and human rights. Reconciliation projects, ranging from community-based initiatives to formal legislated undertakings such as truth and reconciliation commissions are examined in depth. Given the South African setting for the course, the course focuses primarily on the post-Apartheid experiences and efforts of truth-telling, memorialization, and reconciliation. However, the course will be framed with international experiences and perspectives on these topics. International perspectives will be examined primarily through the course readings, and to a lesser extent in lectures and discussion.

Pre-requisite: GENG-7740.3-002 Special topics reading course to be completed in May and early June, and permission of the Instructor.