2013-2014 English 400-Level Course Archive
ENGL 483 “I’m just drawn that way”: Femininity in Comics and Graphic
Narrative
Winter Term 2014, T 1830-2130
Instructor: C. Devereux
Graphic narrative has emerged at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twentieth
as a key location for the representation of gender in popular culture. Dominated, some critics have
suggested, by figures of masculinity, the genre—or medium, as Scott McCloud suggests it should be
seen—is also characterized, as Hillary L. Chute points out, by women’s increasing mobilization of the
graphic for autobiographical narrative. In this course, we will consider the ways in which femininity is
represented in graphic narrative, with reference both to the numbers of women producing graphic
texts—autobiographical and other narratives—and to the representation of women through word and
image in graphic texts produced by male and female authors. Course materials will include comic
books from the later twentieth-century context, zines and online comic serials, autobiographical
comics by women, girl-focused coming-of-age narratives, future dystopias, girl superhero figures, as
well as other texts. We will consider some theories of narrative and of representation, as well as
critical studies of graphic novels, including Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and Hillary L.
Chute’s Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, taking up questions of the ways in
which graphic narrative word and image negotiates, reproduces, and resists the social and cultural
framework within which ideologies of femininity circulate.
Texts TBA
ENGLISH 401 JANE AUSTEN
Fall 2013, MWF 1100-1150
Instructor: J. Mulvihill
This course will consider Jane Austen’s fiction both in terms of its thematic preoccupations and its
stylistic features. The notion that the politics of the revolutionary decade are absent from Jane
Austen’s fiction—a commonplace of critical lore—is long since disproved. The precise nature of
Austen’s views, however, is still being debated. While criticism has tended to align Austen with the
conservative reaction in England against the French Revolution, citing a traditionalist vision of family
and community in her novels, recent studies have questioned this reading. Where one view
emphasizes Austen’s conservatism, then, the other infers a more subversive mind behind the comedy.
This course will consider both options by reading Austen’s fiction against the highly-polarized
opposition between tradition and change characterizing Romantic England generally (1789-1832),
whether in the great constitutional debates of the 1790s or in controversies over landscape gardening
during the same decade and afterwards. The course will also survey Austen’s development as a
novelist, from the early writings of the 1790s to the mature work of the Regency period two decades
later, particularly the ways in which gothic and sentimental aesthetics aided her in developing the
emotional vocabulary of her later novels.
Texts
“Lady Susan” in Lady Susan/The Watsons/Sandition (Penguin)
Northanger Abbey (Broadview Press)
Sense and Sensibility (Broadview Press)
Pride and Prejudice (Broadview Press)
Mansfield Park (Broadview Press)
Emma (Broadview Press)
Persuasion (Broadview Press)
ENGL 405 William Butler Yeats and Irish Nationalism
Fall 2013, MWF 1000-1050
Instructor: R. Brazeau
William Butler Yeats remains one of Ireland’s most compelling poets and public figures. Yeats was a
Nobel prize winning poet, a leading dramatist of the day, a practitioner of mysticism, a writer of
horoscopes, the editor of a briefly published but successful journal, a self-defined Irish nationalist, a
Senator, a fascist, a philanderer, a proponent of eugenics, and, through all of this, one of Ireland’s
most important and impressive citizens.
While not apologizing for the many odd beliefs that Yeats espoused at times, this course will read his
compelling poetry within the context of the history that he simultaneously immersed himself in and
challenged. We will focus on Yeats’s many canonical poems, like “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “Easter,
1916,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” “The Second Coming,” “Meditations in a Time of Civil War,” and “The
Circus Animals Desertion.” However, this course will also offer students the opportunity to become
well-versed in less canonical but no less important poems like “The Hosting of the Sidhe,” “No Second
Troy,” “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” the Crazy Jane series and the many spirtualist and occult
poems that Yeats composed and published (and a number that remained unpublished for some 40
years after his death). While we will read some of Yeats’s prose, the focus of this course will remain on
Yeats’s poetry.
ENGL 407 Shakespeare and the Commons
Winter 2014, TR 1100-1220
Instructor: C. Sale
In this seminar, we will read select plays by Shakespeare, including As You Like It, Hamlet and King
Lear, in relation to historical conceptions and contemporary theories of the "commons." For our
historical conceptions we will draw upon the work of Aristotle, Erasmus, Thomas More, Hobbes, and
Marx. Our contemporary theoretical reading will include the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,
Jacques Ranciere, and Paolo Virno. Our central questions: how do we place the Shakespearean drama
within the political philosophy of "holding all things in common"? How do we imagine the
Shakespearean drama engaging in this philosophy in its own moment? And what might it bring to
imaginings of the common or commons now?
ENGL 407 STUDIES IN TEXTS AND CULTURES BECOMING ANIMAL
Winter 2014, TR 1230-1350
Instructor: K. Ball
This course will adopt the standpoint of the creature, the beast, and the animal as a means of
exploring the question of what it means to be “human” (or “post-human”) and to function (or not) in
“civil” society. Martin Heidegger’s distinction in “The Origin of the Work of Art” between humans who
are rich in world and animals who lack it will provide a departure point for our exploration of how this
opposition is challenged by Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Emmanuel Lévinas,
Thomas Nagel, Donna Haraway, and Nicole Shukin. The course begins with conceptual material that
opens up real or imagined intersections between the animal (with its instinctual nature) and the
repressed, falsely moralizing, and putatively rational human. We will subsequently shift to texts that
represent the transformative, sexual, or dangerous commerce between humans and animals (Franz
Kafka, Ilse Aichinger, Sigmund Freud, J.M. Coetzee, Jonathan Safran Foer, Edward Albee, and Alfred
Hitchcock). The course will also provide an opportunity for students to explore a range of
philosophical, social, and cultural issues while refining their understanding of the function and effect of
metaphor, personification, parable, and allegory as a means of rendering explicit the hopes, failings,
and hypocrisies of “civilized” existence.
ENGLISH 407 Sidney, Spenser, and Elizabethan Culture
Winter 2014, TR 0930-1050
Instructor: R. Bowers
This course will focus on the poetry and occasional prose of two central Elizabethan writers. Their
concern for politics, morality, emotionality, and poetry itself will be of utmost importance in relation to
broader issues of cultural expression within their period in history and through the cultic
representation of their “divine” monarch Elizabeth I.
As Elizabethans, Sidney and Spenser create the imagery of English political assertion at the same time
as they sing both the praises and pain of emotional involvement. Taken together, their work occurs
both as a response to and a creation of their historic moment in culture: Sidney, from an aristocratic
position at court where he remains always a significant cultural outsider; Spenser, from the periphery
of a posting in Ireland where he weaves an alternative political world. Poetically sensitive, critically
aware, and ideologically assertive, these two poets activate and demonstrate English letters in the
latter part of the sixteenth century.
TEXTS
Sir Philip Sidney. Katherine Duncan-Jones, ed. Oxford.
Edmund Spenser's Poetry. 3rd Edn. MacLean & Prescott, eds. Norton.
ENGL 465 Masculinities in Middle Eastern Literature and Film
Winter 2014, MWF 1000-1050
Instructor: L. Ouzgane
In an age when the complex relationship between the Middle East and the West has never been more
critical, and yet never more susceptible to myth--when Islam, the religion of about one-fifth of
humanity, and Arabs, in particular, have become subjects for urgent analysis and discussion
throughout the world since September 11 and more recently in the wake of the Arab Spring--this
course will focus on the representations of Muslim men and masculinities in major texts and films from
the Middle East and North Africa. We will explore the ways in which a serious examination of the male
characters opens some key texts from this wide-ranging but internally differentiated region to an even
greater, perhaps, more obviously politicized set of meanings than has ever been the case. We will also
consider representations of desire and male sexuality in Islam, the Arab Spring, the suicide bomber
phenomenon, men and traditional gender roles, and feminist challenges to hegemonic masculinities.
The Arabian Nights. Trans. Husain Haddawy
Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North
Assia Djebar, A Sister to Scheherazade
Nawal El Saadawi, God Dies by the Nile
Rawi Hage, Cockroach
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Films
God's Horses
Wedding in Galilee
Man of Ashes
Paradise Now
ENGL 482 Brecht without Brecht
Fall 2013, MWF 1400-1450
Instructor: R. Appleford
As one of the most important performance theorists of the 20th century, Bertolt Brecht has become a
victim of his own success. His ideas about Epic Theatre and performance for the “scientific age” have
informed theatre and performance studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and Marxist studies so
completely that students of modern culture most often encounter him as an adjective – “Brechtian”.
And as anyone who has become an adjective can tell you, once you’re an adjective, it’s often very
hard to be taken seriously as a noun. In this course, we will attempt to rethink Brecht as a noun, that
is to say, as a poet and playwright rather than as a theorist. We will begin with his early emergence as
an uncomfortable Expressionist in the early 1920s, move through his polemic-teaching plays of the
early 1930s, consider his attempts to wed social criticism to musical and popular performance in the
late 1930s and early 40s, and end with his strange interlude in Hollywood in the mid-to-late 1940s. As
the course develops, we will think about how Brecht’s theories about performance inform, contradict,
and illuminate our own discussions of his creative work.
Texts May Include:
Brecht, Collected Plays (A&C Black):
Vol. 1 (Baal, Drums in the Night, In the Jungle of Cities, The Life of Edward II in England)
Vol. 2 (Man Equals Man, The Elephant Calf, The Threepenny Opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of
Mahagonny, The Seven Deadly Sins)
Vol. 3 (St. Joan of the Stockyards, Lindbergh's Flight, The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent, He Said
Yes / He Said No, The Decision, The Exception and the Rule, The Horatians and the Curiations, The
Mother)
Vol. 4 (Round Heads and Pointed Heads, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, Senora Carrar's
Rifles, Dansen, How Much is Your Iron? The Trial of Lucullus)
Vol. 5 (Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children)
Vol. 6 (The Good Person of Szechwan, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Mr Puntila and His Man
Matti)
Brecht, Poems 1913-1956 (A&C Black)
ENGL 484 Seeing Ourselves: Arts Students and Professors in Film,
Literature, and Criticism
Fall 2013, TR 1100-1220
Instructor: P. Demers
This course explores and assesses the representation of ourselves, Arts students and faculty, through
examining the expressions of experience and knowledge along with the embedded assumptions in
three related textualities: films, novels, and disciplinary criticism. We will consider the persistence of
comic and pathetic cinematic stereotypes, inherited respectively from Charles Chaplin’s Professor
Bosco in The Professor (1919) and Emil Janning’s Professor Rath in Der Blaue Engel(1930). By testing
disciplinary critiques against embodiments in fiction and film, we will attend to the cultural
instruments of writing in various media. Extending the field of inquiry to include interpretation of the
imaginative artifact of film, we will also investigate the resonances of parody, the effect of emotional
and cultural disjunctions, the varying forms of adaptation, and speculative approaches to parametershifting, open-ended, inventive capabilities.
In the lively and expansive field of the history of ideas about university education, specifically an
education in the Arts, the course provides a platform where many forms of scholarship and modes of
expression and representation converge. As an interdisciplinary exercise, it blends three distinct ways
of seeing Arts disciplines by both clarifying the assumptions of each vantage point and then
deliberately dissolving the walls that appear to separate them. The exercise will involve various tests
of feasibility. As readers accustomed to the modes of literary studies, we will face the challenge of
widening the practice of analytical and theoretical reading from verbal to visual media, and exploring
the ways this practice can show how individual works “talk back” to their contexts. Consideration of
the multiple functions of signifying modishness, from self-portrait, performance, and imitation to
parody and satire, will turn the spotlight on us as observers and assessors of the possible relations
between our perceptions and circulating popular images. This integration and synthesis of diverse
conceptual perspectives should yield illuminating ways of seeing and talking about ourselves.
FILMS
Wonder Boys 2000 (directed by Curtis Hanson; based on novel by Michael Chabon)
We Don’t Live Here Anymore 2004 (directed by John Curran; based on novel by André Dubus)
The Squid and the Whale 2005 (written and directed by Noah Bumbauch)
Starting Out in the Evening 2007 (directed by Andrew Wagner, based on novel by Brian Morton)
The Visitor 2007 (written and directed by Thomas McCarthy)
The Savages 2008 (written and directed by Tamara Jenkins)
Smart People 2008 (directed by Noam Murro)
Elegy 2009 (directed by Isabel Coixet, based on Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal)