400 Level English

Courses at the 400 level afford intensive engagement with advanced topics in English Studies. Offered as seminars, these courses enable students to engage in intimate and sustained conversations about literary and other cultural materials, and to pursue compelling and original avenues of research.

Please consult the University Calendar for a full listing of our ENGL courses, not all of which are offered in a given year. Our department also offers Film Studies and Creative Writing courses.

Spring 2024

ENGL 426/635: Shakespeare and Ecological Crisis: Four Shakespeare Plays and the Issue of Our Times
C. Sale

This course gives students the opportunity to engage an urgent question for literary studies, with four Shakespeare plays as our starting point: in the face of an ever-increasing global ecological crisis, how does literature help us imagine responses to the rapidly growing threat to humanity’s existence that scientists have predicted and warned about for decades?

The Shakespearean drama is especially helpful in this regard. Written on the brink of modernity, Shakespeare’s work reflects developments in Shakespeare’s lifetime that precipitated our current crisis. At the same time, Shakespeare’s work powerfully exemplifies the immense imaginative capacity that literary writers bring to the problems that humanity has created for itself and for the planet’s non-human beings.

We will study four plays — A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Hamlet, and The Tempest — in relation to select secondary readings that help us situate both the Shakespearean drama and ecological crisis in relation to historical and contemporary thought. Our governing question as we discuss the plays in relation to select secondary readings: how does Shakespeare represent human relations to the “natural” world?

Secondary readings will include a couple of key scholarly articles as well as excerpts from Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse; Jairus Victor Grove’s Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics and the End of the World; Robin Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass; George Monbiot’s Regenesis; the recent collection Solarities edited by Cymene Howe, Jeff Diamanti, and Amelia Moore; and Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World.

Summer 2024

ENGL 409-B1: Studies in Literary Periods and Cultural Movements
The Social, Political, and Textual Worlds of Elizabeth I
L. Schechter

This course will focus on the vibrant social, political, and textual worlds of England’s Queen Elizabeth I, who famously ruled on her own for forty-five years. While many can immediately summon an image of Elizabeth--the iconic paintings that show her pale skin, red hair, and extravagant clothing, for example, or the more recent popular representations on film or tv--fewer are familiar with her wide corpus of written texts or her ability to work in (at the very least) Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, and Flemish. While concentrating on materials authored by Elizabeth, the class will also consider important works written to and inspired by one of England’s most celebrated queens. Topics will include family relationships, marriage debates, courtly love, political plotting, displays of imperial power, and encomiastic representations of royalty. Students will likely participate in scheduled roundtable panel discussions or an undergraduate symposium at the end of the semester; details for this assignment will be confirmed closer to the start of classes.

fall 2024

ENGL 409 LEC A1: Studies in Literary Periods and Cultural Movements
Victorian Conceptions of the Self
P. Sinnema

This course takes up a few central “statements” about the individual as a construct—of narrative fiction (i.e. the first-person voice/perspective typical of the bildungsroman), of scientific debate (evolutionary, legal, and psychological investigation), of the emergent self-help industry—in order to investigate how the self was conceptualized (written, positioned, dissected) and subjected (to juridical, state, satirical, etc. apparatuses and practices, but also made into a semi-autonomous being, an agential subject) in Victorian Britain. The idea of the self serves only as a potential touchstone for our approach to these disparate texts; students are encouraged to develop and refine their own interpretive interests, and to have Villette read for the start of class. 

ENGL 426 LEC A1: Studies in Literary and Cultural Histories
Reading, Readers and Mass Media
D. Fuller

When contemporary readers turn to books, fan fiction or audiobooks in their leisure time they are participating in popular culture. They are also choosing an activity – reading – that is often viewed as more socially and culturally valuable than others, such as watching television or playing online games. In this course we examine why reading books gives kudos to readers; how mass media and the publishing industry inform what and how we read and our ideas about it; and how and why readers share their reading, and connect with others both on- and off-line. This is not a traditional literary text-based course since it engages with scholarship and methods from reading studies and book history, but no prior knowledge of these fields is required. Hands-on activities (e.g. an in-class reading group) and mini-research tasks (e.g. observing readers in libraries and bookshops) will also inform our learning and thinking.

ENGL 430 LEC A1: Studies in Theory
A Geopoetics of Habitat
S. Krotz

This course takes an experience-based approach to theories of space, place, and ecological thought that illuminate our shared urban habitat. Conducted outside the classroom when weather allows, we explore how theorists such as Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Yi Fu Tuan, Tim Ingold, Timothy Morton, Rebecca Solnit, Jenny Odell, and Robin Wall Kimmerer invite us to "read" our habitats in new ways. Ideally, this class would be taught in the Fall term on T-R afternoons, when it is still warm enough to conduct classes outside for the first two months (and the 80-minute class time allows us to explore the river valley and other parts of campus).

ENGL 465 LEC A1: Studies in Gender & Sexualities
Women Writing War
L. Harrington

Women’s experiences of and participation in war and violent conflict are often not read. In fact war literature is traditionally associated with men, while women are regarded as peripheral or innocent victims. While victimhood is one important consideration, particularly when women’s bodies are weaponized and co-opted by state-sponsored narratives around nation-building, so too is the issue of women as active participants in both armed combat and peace processes. This course will examine these concerns through the contemporary writing of women in Northern Ireland, Bangladesh, and Israel and Palestine. We will study a selection of forms and genres, including poetry, short fiction and non-fiction narratives, to query cultural conceptions of gender in these three locations of conflict. In so doing, we will take up discussions of the body, borders, precarity, language and the Mother myth.

winter 2025

ENGL 409 LEC B1/German 460: Studies in Literary Periods and Cultural Movements
The Holocaust as Memory Politics
K. Ball

The Canadian Parliament’s standing ovations in September 2023 for Yaroslav Hunka, a former member of the Galician division of the Waffen SS, betrayed a shameful ignorance about the the SS’s internationally recognized criminal role in the genocide of European Jews among many other groups. In the immediate wake of this incident, the University of Alberta was compelled to dismantle a fund named for Hunka and officiated by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, an academic unit founded by a former University Chancellor, Peter Savaryn, who was himself a Waffen SS veteran. This course will offer an opportunity to examine the context of this incident and others in and beyond Canada as examples of memory politics: the historical and typically identity-based contestation about traumatic pasts and their meaning for different communities and generations over time. With the aim of deepening our understanding of the polarization that shadows the Holocaust in particular, our conversations will focus on pivotal debates and long-running antagonisms that highlight how fluctuating memories of the genocide have precipitated divergent emotional attachments, identifications, and resentments since the end of World War II.  Along with the Hunka controversy as it illuminates the legacy of Canada’s war-time antisemitism, we might consider previous debates about Shoah representations in Germany before and after its reunification as well as current battles connected with Israel’s war with Hamas.  Among the texts we might draw upon to further our reflections: Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem; Irving Abella and Harold Troper’s None Is Too Many; Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life; Michael Marrus’s The Holocaust in History; Michael Rothberg’s The Implicated Subject; Tom Segev’s The Seventh Million; Bashir Bashir’s edited collection, The Holocaust and the Nakba; Omer Bartov’s Genocide, The Holocaust, and Israel-Palestine; Elie Wiesel’s Dawn; and Adania Sibli’s Minor Detail.

ENGL 426 LEC B1: Studies in Literary and Cultural Histories
Energy | Culture
M. Simpson

In this age of anthropogenic climate change, energy as topic and problem will necessarily foreground fossil fuels, precisely because these fuels saturate everything: the petroculture we continue to inhabit mediates all other facets of contemporary life. From this emphasis, however, we will strive to extend energy as concept and paradigm to encompass such things as bio-matter and geo-matter, attention and affect, information and data, commodity production and financial speculation, and so on. Key terms for (and so theoretical perspectives on) our endeavor will include: aesthetics; affect; materiality; temporality; mediation; capital. A prime aim in this course is to consider what happens—to imagine what could become possible—when taking up energy as focus yet also frame: as at once object and analytic.

The syllabus will prioritize readings in critical and cultural theory, but will also features as pivots selected aesthetic materials drawn from fiction, film, photography, and performance art.

ENGL 426 LEC B2: Studies in Literary and Cultural Histories
The Literature and Culture of Human Rights
T. Tomsky

The language of human rights is instantly recognizable, providing a way to make powerful claims for recognition and for justice. According to scholars, literature is key to the narration and dissemination of those human rights. While the novel has been singled out as a particularly effective genre that has enabled sympathy towards others, this course examines a broader range of narratives that raise awareness of human rights. This course asks, what kind of human rights feelings can these narratives – literary, fictional, autobiographical, visual, comic – cultivate? Who is the subject of human rights and how is that political subject constructed at the level of genre, form, structure, plot, and content?

ENGL 426/635: Studies in Literary and Cultural Histories
Shakespeare and Ecological Crisis
C. Sale

This course gives students the opportunity to engage an urgent question for literary studies, with five Shakespeare plays as our starting point: in the face of an ever-increasing global ecological crisis, how does literature help us to understand the causes of and imagine responses to the rapidly growing threat to humanity’s existence that scientists have predicted and warned about for decades? Shakespeare’s work is immensely helpful in this regard. Written on the brink of modernity, Shakespeare’s work reflects developments in Shakespeare’s lifetime that have played a role in shaping our current crisis—or rather the concatenating crises imperilling humanity and myriad other species. At the same time, Shakespeare’s work powerfully exemplifies the immense imaginative capacity that literary writers bring to the problems that humanity has created for itself, the planet’s non-human beings, and the Earth’s elements and atmosphere.

We will study A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Lear, The Tempest, and Pericles in relation to select secondary readings that help us situate the Shakespearean drama and ecological crisis in relation to historical and contemporary thinking about humanity's relationship with non-human nature.

Keeping in mind the ancient Greek root of the word “ecology,” οἶκος, which means house or dwelling, we will also ask how the Shakespearean drama helps us consider what it takes to maintain a common house or dwelling that sustains Earth’s species, human and non-human, as well as living matter, and what our current “crisis” demands by way of response to ecocidal impulses and forces.

Our secondary readings will begin with Jason Moore’s “Capitalocene, Part 1: On the nature and origins of our ecological crisis” and will include selections from:

• Jorge Bergolio (Pope Francis), Laudato Si’ (2016)
• Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (Verso Books, 2006)
• Jairus Victor Grove, Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World (Duke UP, 2019)
• Genevieve Guenther, The Language of Climate Politics (Oxford UP, 2024)
• Polly Higgins, Eradicating Ecocide (2015)
• Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Press, 2013)
• George Monbiot, Regenesis: How to Feed the World Without Devouring the Planet (Penguin, 2022)
• David Wallace Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth (2019)
• Solarities: Elemental Encounters and Refractions (Punctum Press, 2023), eds. Howe, Diamanti, Moore
• Imre Szeman, Futures of the Sun: The Struggle over Renewal Life (University of Minnesota Press, 2024)
• Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (HarperColllins, 2020)

ENGL 430 LEC X50: Studies in Theory
Forms of Refusal
M. Litwack

The deathmongers do not have a monopoly on unmaking.

—Rasha Abdulhadi

What I am interested in is the experience of the desire for the impossible. That is, the impossible as the condition of desire…We do not give up the dream...[e]ven if we know it is impossible and that it can be perverse.

—Jacques Derrida

What, if anything, is useful about saying “no”? In this advanced seminar, we will address this question by undertaking an intensive study of the politics, ethics, aesthetics, and limits of refusal. Inquiring into the practice of refusal in its multiple forms and avatars, we’ll read theoretical and philosophical writings, psychoanalytic criticism, and political manifestos and communiqués, also engaging a bit of experimental media along the way. In so doing, we’ll ask: What possibilities open up–and shut down–when we refuse to compromise, cooperate, or show up to the negotiating table? Is refusal an inherently conservative project in its resistance to transformation (think: the refusal to change or be educated, to “improve” or “develop,” to move or move on), or do such refusals in fact obstruct efforts to conserve the present order of things? How does refusal bind and unbind social relations? What’s the relationship between “refuse” as verb or activity and “refuse” as noun (waste, lumpen, shit, that which is worthless or useless)? Indeed, should refusal even be considered an activity or, alternatively, does it mark the cessation of activity?

These queries will lead us to explore some canonical forms of refusal, as well as refusal’s less canonical and perhaps less recognizable and more uncomfortable forms. But thinking with these various forms—from the general strike to riots, from Shabbat to bling, from martyrdom to masochism—will simultaneously require us to tarry with a host of contradictory problematics that the theme of refusal also brings forth. These include negativity and affirmation, destruction and creation, sacrifice and enjoyment, sovereignty and passivity, fidelity and betrayal, self-defence and self-abolition. Taking up these and related issues, participants will collectively examine and evaluate how the question of refusal has been engaged, often in quite distinct ways, across several prominent critical traditions, including incongruous strains of Marxism and Black study, psychoanalysis, queer theory, (the critique of) political theology, anticolonial thought, and poetics. 

ENGL 465 Lec B1: Studies in Gender & Sexualities
Early Modern Masculinities
M. Cárdenas

How useful is the category of masculinity to personal and societal flourishing? What does it mean to be a good man, as opposed to simply a good person? Modern chauvinistic Internet personalities have woefully answered such questions to the general detriment of people of all genders. Yet as writers like Richard Reeves have suggested, boys and men may be gravitating to Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, and the like in the absence of alternative cultural models of masculinity.

This advanced undergraduate seminar will provide a historical perspective on such issues. Students will consider widespread discourses in the early modern period for questions and answers on masculinity and manliness—many destructive, many surprising. Masculinities then and now are not homogenous or consistent; they are constructed and deconstructed in complex and contradictory ways, and they intersect with age, class, race, marital status, and other identities. To navigate these manly ideas and exemplars of the renaissance, readings will combine critical examinations of gender and masculinity (e.g., Eve K. Sedgwick, Between Men), scholarly texts specific to the early modern period (Alexandra Shepherd, Jennifer Jordan, Michael Kimmel, Elizabeth Hodgson), and primary texts by and about men. These may include literary works, e.g., by Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Margaret Cavendish, and John Milton, as well as some of the didactic literature in treatises about manhood. Seminar participants will have a chance to synthesize and critique these early modern masculinities through in-class discussion, short presentations, and literary essays.

ENGL 483 LEC B1: Studies in Popular Culture
Literary Sound Studies
M. O’Driscoll

This advanced undergraduate seminar will redirect the attention of students of literature from the print text of dominant visual culture to often overlooked audio objects of literary creation and performance. Our critical approach to listening to literature will take place at the intersection of literary studies, sound studies, and the digital humanities in establishing the foundations for audile techniques, or listening practices, that inform a critical methodology of audiotextual analysis.

Those more recent examples of born-digital audio experiments, such as Susan Howe’s Thiefth, Oana Avasilichioaei’s Eight Track, and Jordan Abel’s performances of A Place of Scraps, will be read alongside theories of resistant, critical listening such as such as Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s The Sonic Color Line and Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening.

Previous Offerings

2023-24 Fall and Winter Term Courses
2022-23 Fall and Winter Term Courses

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