English Graduate Course Descriptions

ENG 626 
Readings in Poetry  

Tuesday 6:00pm - 9:00pm
New Poetry Hire 
** open only to creative writers 
 
 
ENG 640
Critical Reading and Methods in English  

This course is for first year students and designed to introduce or review the methods of research in literary studies, the conventions of scholarly conversations about literary works, the critical approaches to literary analysis, and the components and mechanics of literary-critical essays. Together we will read a novel and cultivate hermeneutic practices that include reading “against the grain” and situating one’s own critical voice in relation to other scholars. We will also study a host of theoretical models like Marxism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Queer Theory, among several others. Students will have the opportunity to write a final seminar paper on a primary text and theoretical model of their choice.  
 
 
ENG 644 
Topics in Literary Theory: The Image of Reading 

Tuesday 2:30pm - 5:15pm
Dr. Craig Carey 
Fulfills the theory requirement 
 
What do we see when we read? How does “the image of reading” change historically? In this theory rich seminar, we’ll explore the dialectics of reading and seeing across three historical transitions: the invention of print and the book; the acceleration of capitalism and commodity fetishism in the nineteenth century; and the rise of operational images in the age of algorithms and AI. How do technologies of reading and seeing transform each other, and to what end? 
 
In the first unit, we’ll explore technologies of script, print, typography, the page, and the book, investigating the spatial and diagrammatic logics encoded into reading since the printing press. The second unit will then turn to the commodification of reading and seeing in the nineteenth century, working through Marx’s analysis of the commodity form, Walter Benjamin’s cultural and media criticism, and early theories of photography, film, and montage. Our third unit will explore the algorithmic capture of reading and seeing in computational infrastructures governed by data, capital, surveillance, and control. Along with selected readings, students will bring to the class their own literary case studies and interests, learning how to apply methods from the course to their creative and critical practice. 
 
Readings will include selected theory and criticism by John Berger, W.J.T. Mitchell, Karl Marx, Sergei Eisenstein, Walter Benjamin, Walter Ong, Vilém Flusser, Fredric Jameson, Lev Manoich, Katherine Hayles, Andrew Piper, Anna Kornbluh, Hito Steyerl, and Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Literary selections will likely include Mark Twain’s No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, poetry by Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville, Don DeLillo’s Point Omega: A Novel, and Johanna Drucker’s artist book Diagrammatic Writing. Films or film clips may include Citizen Kane, Man with a Movie Camera, The Battle of Algiers, JFK, Cache, Memento, and video installations by Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen.  
 
 
ENG 670 
Studies in Early American Literature I: American Visions 

Tuesday 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Dr. Luis Iglesias 
Fulfills the American Literature pre-1865 requirement 
 
"And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. [And] for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."
 
From the moment of the Encounter, the Americas were both a vision of what could and could not be imagined – a landscape shaped by ideas that preceded their realization as well as an expression of wish fulfillment. This course will examine the evolving encounter between Anglo-American writers, artists, and the American landscape from the colonial period through the nineteenth century. Beginning with early contact narratives, we will explore how the American wilderness, frontier, and pastoral ideal were imagined, aestheticized, and contested in the literature and visual arts. Throughout, the seminar will foreground the reciprocal relationship between textual and expressive forms, by tracing a lineage of creative expression and their attempts to celebrate and ultimately master a landscape that exceeded these writers’ and visual artists’ imaginative grasp, asking how aesthetic forms shaped national identity, imperial ambition, environmental consciousness, and the mythologizing of the hemisphere.  
 
Readings and Artists will include works by (and others): 
John Smith (1579-1631) 
John White (c. 1539-1593) 
William Bradford (1590-1657) 
William Bartram (1739-1823) 
James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) 
Thomas Cole (1801-1848) 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) 
Frederick Edwin Church (1826-1900) 
Walt Whitman (1819-1892) 
Thomas Moran (1837-1926) 
 
 
ENG 721 
Seminar in Fiction Writing  

Wednesday 2:30pm - 5:15pm
Dr. Joshua Bernstein  
** open only to creative writers 
 
In a 2013 essay in Slate entitled “I Like Likable Characters,” Jennifer Weiner explains that “while there are plenty of complicated, flawed, unlikable heroes in literature, it’s just as easy to rattle off dozens of characters who do, in fact, feel like friends…I will freely admit to reading books to find friends.” In this workshop we will read stories told by and depicting some of the most horrible human beings in literature. If you come away from this workshop feeling like you have new friends, there is something seriously wrong with you. 
 
Just kidding. But we will interrogate the concept of likeability in fiction, including the market demands that may drive it, its history as a literary trope and device, and the question of whether likeability (or its corollary, unlikability) can be said to distinguish certain kinds of writing. Is the concept gendered, classist, elitist, hegemonic, or rooted in other assumptions? And most important, how can we as authors learn to craft our stories with or without the concept of likeability looming over us, and how can we grow from that distinction? We’ll read a lot of fiction, produce some ourselves, and begin classes with optional writing prompts inviting you to write fiercely and abhorrently about others (or yourself, if you so choose).  
 
Likely readings, some of which may be optional, include Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Italo Calvino’s The Cloven Knight, Richard Wright’s Native Son, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House, and selected works by Patricia Engel, Lisa Ko, David Foster Wallace, and Claire Messud. 
 
 
ENG 722 
Graduate Poetry Workshop: The Five Obstructions  

This workshop has its source in Lars von Trier’s 2003 film, The Five Obstructions, in which von Trier asks his mentor, director Jorgen Leth, to remake his 1967 short film, The Perfect Human in accordance with various crippling stipulations, or “obstructions,” such as “no frame longer than twelve frames,” “set it in the worst place in the world,” etc. In the workshop version, the student submits his or her poem, which is commented on by the first respondent, also known as the “vile obstructionist,” then by the group as a whole.  At the end of the discussion, the obstructionist provides the poet with one or more obstructions which he or she must use in the revision. We will workshop new poems by half the class each week, and the other half will serve as Vile Obstructionist. The semester will end with a reading of the obstructed poems. 
 
 
ENG 745 
The Junior Novel and the Pre-History of YA 

Monday 2:30pm - 5:15pm
Dr. Eric Tribunella 
Fulfills the Non-Traditional Literature requirement 
 
Before the development of Young Adult (YA) literature in the late 1960s, the so-called “junior novel” was written for and marketed to young people who were thought to have outgrown children’s books and to be looking for alternatives to adult modernist fiction.  The standard history of YA literature suggests that it offers grittier and more sophisticated fare than its predecessor, while the junior novel tends to be dismissed as sanitized and benign.  We will reconsider this history of YA literature by reading a selection of junior novels from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.  The class will consider the complex ways they represent American youth culture, place these works in conversation with the history of adolescence and the American teenager, and conclude with texts that represent the turn to contemporary YA literature.  Readings will include junior novels of different genres: adventure, historical fiction, romance, science fiction, the career novel, and the sports story.  Selected readings may include the following: 
 
Let the Hurricane Roar (1933), Rose Wilder Lane  
Sue Barton (1936), Helen Boylston     
Iron Duke (1938), John Tunis 
Seventeenth Summer (1942), Maureen Daly     
Hot Rod (1950), Henry Gregor Felsen      
To Tell Your Love (1950), Mary Stolz 
Tunnel in the Sky (1955), Robert Heinlein 
South Town (1958), Lorenz Bell Graham  
 
 
ENG 760 
Shakespeare in Context 

Wednesday 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Dr. Jameela Lares 
Fulfills the British Literature pre-1800 requirement 
 
This graduate seminar will examine Shakespeare’s sonnets and a representative sample of his plays in their cultural and historical context. Besides diligently reading and participating in weekly discussions, each seminar member will also be writing at least ten weekly discussion posts, presenting on an additional play by Shakespeare or a contemporary, and teaching a 60-minute class on the primary text assigned for a given class meeting. The required seminar paper can be on any topic with a demonstrable connection to the course material. Seminar members are encouraged to build on their own research interests as far as possible. 
 
Course texts and contexts: 
Sonnets and the Italian Renaissance 
A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Shakespeare biography 
Romeo and Juliet and performance 
1 Henry IV and historical chronicles (Holinshed, Halle, Plutarch, etc.) 
Henry V and epic 
Love’s Labour’s Lost and classical rhetoric 
Twelfth Night and music 
Macbeth and politics 
Hamlet and humor theory 
Another play TBA 
The Tempest and romance 
 
Required text(s): Class members may elect to use either the online University of Victoria Shakespeare (https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/plays.html) for most of these plays or their own print copies of Shakespeare as long as those texts are university-level academic editions with line numbers for poetry and act/scene/line numbers for plays, along with scholarly notes and glosses. I will order for the bookstore some optional copies of the Norton Shakespeare anthology along with Folger copies of any individual plays not included in the U of Victoria website, but students are welcome to choose whichever acceptable texts work best for them. 
 
 
ENG 764 
Strange Cases: The Victorian Gothic 

Thursday 2:30pm - 5:15pm
Dr. Alexandra Valint 
Fulfills the post-1800 British Literature requirement 
 
Vampires, ghosts, haunted mansions, secret passageways, prophetic dreams, dark and stormy nights. Finding yourself suddenly alone…or, suddenly not alone. The gothic trades in fears, anxieties, surprises, and thrills; it attempts to speak the unspeakable, know the unknowable, and disrupt the normative. To explore the possibilities of this expansive genre, we will read a riveting assortment of “strange cases” (to borrow from the full title of Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). We will seek not only to define the gothic, to itemize its trappings and set pieces, but also to interrogate the gothic’s functions and uses: what does using the gothic make possible? We will consider the gothic’s potential (and limits) for cultural transgression and critique, tracking how the gothic utilizes and transforms bodies, selves, environments, and relationships between the metropole and colony. To this end, we will read a variety of gothic theory and scholarship representing subfields such as ecogothic, female gothic, queer gothic, and imperial gothic. The gothic genre, much like a vampire, won’t stay dead—let’s learn why the Victorians, as well as authors since then, have continued to turn to its creepy possibilities. Likely texts include the following: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, "The Were-Wolf" by Clemence Housman, as well as works by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Rabindranath Tagore. 
 
 
ENG 771 
Studies in Modern and Contemporary Literature 

Monday 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Dr. Charles Sumner  
Fulfills the post-1865 American Literature requirement 
 
This class will present a detailed study of selected American writers and movements since 1900.  We will read writers including but not limited to Henry James, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, H.D. and Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Kay Boyle, Djuna Barnes, Sinclair Lewis, Sylvia Plath, and Don DeLillo, and we will reflect on how the styles and themes of prominent American writers have changed over the last 125 years.