Graduate Courses Offered in 2024-2025

  • ENGL 5050 WA/SOCJ 5011 WE: Globalization – (Thunder Bay; on campus) – Dr. Anna Guttman

      Is globalization the happy melding of the world’s cultures?  Or a corporate-driven endeavour that will lead to both cultural and financial impoverishment for the world’s people?  How does it impact me as a student of English? How does globalization affect our understanding of identity?  The nation?  Using both theories and case studies, this course will examine the interrelationship between the cultural and the economic and consider the ways in which globalization impacts the production, circulation and reception of texts.

 

  • ENGL 5110 WDE – Plays of Christopher Marlowe – (both campuses – Zoom) – Dr. Douglas Hayes

This will be a seminar focused on Marlowe's dramatic work and its late 16th-century context.

 

  • ENGL 5413 WDE – Comics and Graphic Narratives – (Thunder Bay; hybrid) – Dr. Daniel Hannah

This course will examine recent trends in graphic narrative and consider a range of theoretical approaches to reading the form of comics. Some of the questions this course will consider include: what kinds of questions about adaptation are raised by graphic rewritings of? What do graphic narratives reveal to us about the ethics and limits of representation? How do comics reconfigure familiar genres and narrative modes of life-writing, history, reportage, and fiction? What challenges do visual narratives (or imagetexts) pose to the conventions of literary criticism and theory?

 

  • ENGL 5430 FA – Victorian Life Writing – (Thunder Bay; on campus) – Dr. Monica Flegel

In this course, we will examine a variety of genres from the Victorian period that can be defined as “life writing,” including biography, autobiography, testimony, and diaries. Some of the questions we will consider: what forms of “significant selfhood” authorize these texts? What social constructs are central to the narrative of lifespan as presented in these texts? How does the question of audience change how we read these, and in what ways?

 

 

 

  • ENGL 5430 FAO – Blake and Visual Poetics – (Orillia; on campus) – Dr. Alice den Otter

Building upon William Blake's best-known Songs of Innocence and of Experience, this course explores his intriguing artistic and poetic creations in light of his visual poetics.  How do Blake’s paintings illuminate or complicate the descriptive and metaphorical nature of his poetry?  And how do his poetic myths and imaginative philosophies extend or interrogate his paintings?  How does Blake seek to open the doors of perception?  Besides examining selections from Blake’s Songs, this course will explore a variety of Blake’s illustrated texts in terms of visual communication, historical context, and rhetorical appeals for social justice, looking particularly at texts such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and Milton.

 

  • ENGL 5711 WAO – Black in Canada – (Orillia; on campus) – Dr. Sarah Olutola

      A study of Black history, community, and experience in Canada by studying the literary works of African Canadian novelists and poets alongside postcolonial theory. and Black Canadian thinkers.

  • ENGL 5750 FDE – Indigenous Horrors: Traditions, Settler-Colonialism and the Gothic – (both campuses; Zoom) – Dr. Judith Leggatt

This course will study the burgeoning genre of Indigenous Horror with a focus on the intersections of three primary sources for the terror—and sometimes healing—in the texts: mainstream horror tropes (such as ghosts, vampires, werewolves and zombies), scary stories from Indigenous traditions (such as Rolling Head, Rougarou, Deer Woman, and dangerous beings who should be referred to obliquely), and settler colonialism (such as residential schools, human remains in museums, smallpox blankets, MMIWG). Texts to be studied will include novels, short stories, poems, comics, and film by creators including Cherie Dimaline, Darcie Little Badger, Jeff Barnaby, and Stephen Graham Jones. Warning: the material on this course will be disturbing.

  • ENGL 5770 FDE – Advanced Scholarly Methods – (both campuses – Zoom) – Dr. Daniel Hannah

Students will be offered instruction in graduate-level research, writing, and reading skills. An overview of major modes of literary studies scholarship will be provided with special attention paid to: conceptualizing a research project; accessing and evaluating primary and secondary sources; and planning, drafting, and revising proposals and essays. The course content will build toward a conference of student work.