Graduate Courses

Please consult the University Calendar for a full listing of our graduate-level ENGL courses, not all of which are offered in a given year.

fall 2024

ENGL 579 LEC A1: Gender Studies
Debating Gender: Feminist Poetry before 1800
K. Binhammer

Wife and servant are the same
But only differ in the name

– “To the Ladies,” Lady Mary Chudleigh

Poetry by women and non-binary writers before the advent of the modern feminist movement, such as Lady Chudleigh’s “To the Ladies,” often contains surprisingly spirited articulations of sentiments we now identify as feminist. This course focusses on this rich and diverse archive of early English poetry, from Old English laments to 17th-century “querelles des femmes” dialogues to 18th-century Enlightenment heroic couplets to 1790s equal rights epistles. Women writer’s poetic muses frequently erupt as responses to misogynist texts; for instance, Lady Chudleigh’s longer poem, “The Ladies Defence” was occasioned by her reading a misogynist wedding sermon. In considering the dialectical nature of feminism and patriarchy, we will read poems by men, women and unknown genders that debate the role and nature of women. We will focus on gender and genre, considering what poetry offers writers who are searching for a language to express the unsayable within dominant culture.  Why did women often choose to write poetry to respond to misogynist prose? What can we learn about the history of gender, patriarchy and feminism (and how it is both similar and different from our current moment) by reading poetry? We will encounter a diversity of writers, from aristocratic to laboring class, from religious to secular, from married to single, including “Anon”, Gwerful Mechain, Geoffrey Chaucer, Aemilia Lanyer, Rachel Speght, Alexander Pope, Mary Leapor, Jonathan Swift, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Mary Collier. We will cover a range of topics, including heteronormativity, sexual assault, colonialism, slavery, and sex work. Students can develop research creation, public humanities, or digital humanities projects to amplify feminist voices of the past or they can research literary historical and critical essays for the class projects.

ENGL 585 LEC A1: Indigenous Texts
Joy is art is an ethics of resistance--Indigenous Literatures in North America
J. Abel

In this grad class, we'll be thinking through Indigenous Literatures in relation to Billy-Ray Belcourt's theorizations of NDN joy that he discusses in A History of My Brief Body. Our task will in part be to re-think and re-imagine canonical Indigenous texts like Maria Campbell's Halfbreed and Basil Johnston's Indian School Days within and against the frameworks of joy set out by Belcourt, and also to account for more recent writings that approach joy from a much different position, including Tenille Campbell's Nedi Nezu, Molly Cross-Blanchard's Exhibitionist, Tanya Tagaq's Split Tooth, and Joshua Whitehead's Making Love With the Land. My hope is that this grad course will give students the necessary contemporary and historical footholds to continue forward in the field of Indigenous Literary Studies and to draw attention to a particularly important discussion in the field. We will also be reading excerpts from Daniel Heath Justice's Why Indigenous Literatures Matter as well as various academic articles throughout the semester that will provide further context to these ongoing dialogues.

ENGL 680 LEC A1: Post-Colonial Texts
Queer Freedom in Caribbean Diasporic Narratives
M. Bucknor

Since the mid-twentieth century, Caribbean writers and artists have engaged in forms of literary activism through their representations and critiques of sexism, homophobia, and transphobia within the Caribbean and its diasporas. These writers not only document and narrativize aspirations towards queer freedom in the Caribbean and beyond, but they also provide representations that inform the tactics and strategies of queer activists throughout the region. The Caribbean, especially through the lens of local popular culture, is often understood as a place in which queerness is external to domestic conceptualizations of national sovereignty and citizenship. Put differently, queer identity is often positioned through juridical and social constructions as in tension with Caribbean postcolonial civil society. In the wake of neoliberalism and increased globalization, Canada, the United States of America and Britain have often been asylums for queer subjects seeking refuge from the Caribbean. Caribbean Diasporic literary and cultural production brings these worlds together in a way that exposes both the limits of freedom for, as well as the “accommodations” of, queer subjects in both regions. Like Rinaldo Walcott’s Queer Returns, which examines the relationship between multiculturalism, diaspora, and queer subjectivities, this course asks how do narratives of belonging and sexual politics in the Caribbean diasporas articulate modes of freedom beyond the nation-state? How do Caribbean diasporic narratives help to complicate our understandings of queer subjects in both the Caribbean and its diasporas? What complexities surround the matrices of sexuality, race, ethnicity and national belonging for queer Caribbean diasporic subjects?

Winter 2025

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 673 LEC B1: Victorian Texts
The Aesthetics of Disruption: or, How to Imagine the End of Everything in Nineteenth-Century Literature
E. Kent

This course examines the imagination of possible futures in nineteenth-century fiction, with a focus on the disruptive effects of science and technology. From scientific theories of entropy and the inevitable heat death of the universe; multi-dimensional geometry; geological deep time; evolution; and the consequent disruption of ideas like biblical literalism, nineteenth-century science posed fundamental challenges to the way people conceived of their place in the cosmos. Simultaneously, advances in communication like the telegraph, telephone, and radio as well as modes of transportation like rail, bicycles and pneumatic tubes were seemingly making the globe a smaller place. How did writers and artists respond to these disruptions? What possibilities for social change are registered in their work? What social or planetary endings are entailed by a sense of time that is measured in geological epochs rather than human millennia? How can we re-imagine our place in nature, when we neither sit at its centre nor have the power to bend it to our will.

Course Objectives and Expected Learning Outcomes
Students who successfully complete this course will gain:

• an understanding of the role of literary writing in mediating the threat of technological disruption
• knowledge of a range of genres in nineteenth-century British fiction
• skills in archival research, including the use of specialised databases
• advanced skills in research project design
• experience in the presentation of research findings to peers

ENGL 693 LEC B1: Literary Genres
Diaries and Journals
J. Rak

Diary keeping, a practice that began in the seventeenth century with spiritual diaries and commonplace books, and developed with the invention of the timetable, the clock and the account book, has played a central role in the development of ideas of selfhood, privacy and autonomy in the western world. Since the eighteenth century, when Benjamin Franklin created a chart to track his daily attempts to embody thirteen virtues, journaling has been an important way to record on paper what Michel Foucault called “The Care of the Self” and the constitution of selfhood from various technologies of the self, including writing and reflection. From this, liberal models of selfhood and secular practices of self-improvement for its own sake journeyed from spiritual journaling to the broader notions of identity-making dependent on the development of technologies to keep, manage and conceptualize time which led to diary-keeping.

This course delves into the fascinating world of the “secret genre” of diary and journal keeping, from archival examples, to famous published diaries like those of Virginia Woolf and Anne Frank, to activist diaries, to contemporary practices of journaling in the “post-digital” media ecosystem in which we find ourselves today. We will use work from diary theorists critics, material from the study of life writing, new materialist theory of intra-action and work from book history on the post-digital turn to learn how to read, interpret and even write diaries and journals from the past, and in the present.

Students are encouraged to connect their own research interests to the material in the course in their final essays.

Tentative texts

Archived diaries in U of A special collections, RAM archives
Elizabeth Penashue, I Keep the Land Alive
War diaries, Canadian Great War Project
Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank (critical edition)
Philippe Lejeune, On Diary
Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self
Samuel Pepys, Diary (online resource)
Desiree Henderson, How to Read a Diary
The Diary of Anaïs Nin
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Batsheva Ben Amos, The Diary: Epic of Everyday Life (selections)
Abby Sy, The Art of the Travel Journal

Previous Offerings

2023-24 Fall and Winter Term Courses

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