2012-13 English Graduate Handbook

1 INTRODUCTION

The University of Windsor

The Department of English

Library Resources

2 THE M.A. IN ENGLISH

2.1 Programs of Study

2.2 The MA. in English: Language and Literature

2.3 The M.A. in English: Creative Writing and Language and Literature

The Language and Literature and Creative Writing field allows students to combine graduate-level study of literature with advanced work in a two-term creative writing seminar and a significant, independent creative writing project. Prior to beginning work on the creative writing thesis, students must submit a prospectus, which will be prepared in consultation with their advisor(s). The prospectus (approximately 1,000 words, or 4 pages) is a formal, detailed plan of work which sets out clearly the scope and nature of the project, its particular use of genre and how the work is situated within contemporary creative and critical writing in Canada. The prospectus is accompanied by a bibliography of primary and secondary texts that provide a context for the project. The prospectus will be circulated to appropriate members of the Department of English for approval.
Students in the Creative Writing and Language and Literature field must take the two-term 26-591/592 Creative Writing Seminar; admission to this seminar is by portfolio, which should be submitted along with application to the Department of English (see below). In addition, students must take four other graduate seminars from the regular course offerings, and complete an independent writing project. The requirements are as follows:

four graduate seminars
26-591 Creative Writing Seminar A
26-592 Creative Writing Seminar B
26-794 Creative Writing Project
26-500 Scholarship and the Profession (a pass/fail 4-week course)

Note: students in the Creative Writing and Language and Literature field must register in 26-794 Creative Writing Project in every term in which they use university facilities for their work.

The independent writing project, 26-794, which normally emerges from work in
26-591/592 Creative Writing Seminar, is a book-length manuscript (approximately 70-120 pages). The manuscript will include creative work in a particular genre followed by an author’s statement (approximately 3,000-4,000 words). This statement must contextualize the student’s creative work, and might include one or more of the following: articulating the process of composition, reviewing the theory/history of a mode or genre featured in the thesis (for example, historical fiction, the elegiac, concrete poetry, etc.), and/or situating the work within contemporary creative practice. The student will work independently on this project under the guidance of a committee consisting of a principal advisor, a departmental reader, and an outside program reader (a faculty member from another department in the University). This committee will be recommended to the Executive Committee of the Faculty of Graduate Studies for approval.

The principal advisor normally has full responsibility for the direction of the student’s work. The other members of the committee may be involved at the early stages of the research and writing, but all will read the final draft of the project and participate in the examination of the candidate during the project defense. Students should consult the current graduate calendar (uwindsor.ca/ gradcalendar), the booklet Procedures to Follow in Preparing a Thesis or Dissertation (available from the Faculty of Graduate Studies), and the booklet Guide to M.A. Theses (available from the Department of English) before beginning or submitting the project.

2.4 Thesis and Project Deadlines

2.5 Scholarship and the Profession

2.6 Non-English Courses

2.7 Duration of Study and Time to Completion

3 ADMISSION TO GRADUATE STUDIES IN ENGLISH

3.1 Admission Requirements

3.2 Qualifying or Placement Examination

3.3 Admission to the Creative Writing Field

4 Financial Assistance

4.1 External Scholarships

www.scholarships.com.

4.2 Internal Awards

4.3 Graduate Assistantships
cupe4580@uwindsor.ca

5 GRADUATE COURSES

5.1 Graduate Seminars

5.2 Grading

5.3 Additional Departmental Resources

Publications:

Reading Series:

Student Conferences:

Student Achievement - A Sampler

PROPOSED GRADUATE SEMINARS
SUMMER 2012

26-560 LITERATURE OF CANADA
Seminar conducted by Dr. Karl Jirgens

SHORT FICTION: THE CANADIAN SHORT STORY – TRADTION AND INNOVATION

Canadian short fiction has featured internationally lauded stylistics that begin with traditional forms and then move into new frontiers of expression. Mikhael Bakhtin has said that the novel is an infinitely expandable form, but much the same can be said about counterpart movements in short fiction. Earlier Canadian short fiction features realism and satire. More recent fictions display magic realist, postmodern, meta-fictional, and postcolonial tendencies demanding an awareness of what Gadamer calls the “fusion” of socio-political and structurally innovative “horizons”. Astute readers may already be aware of formal innovations that include techniques of indeterminacy (aporia, bricolage, dialogism, fabulation, inter-textuality, self-reflexivity, etc.) During this seminar course, each short story will be matched with a critical essay in order to help illuminate the story’s literary form. Seminars will cover each fiction from a prescribed critical perspective. A textbook will be ordered featuring stories on the course, and a second textbook (or course-pack) will provide critical perspectives.

Assignments and Grading
One seminar presentation (30%), one shorter assignment (10%), class participation and response papers (30%), one final paper (30%).

Primary Texts
Margaret Laurence: “The Mask of the Bear”
Alistair MacLeod: “As Birds Bring Forth the Sun”
Alice Munro: “The Jack Randa Hotel”
Guy Vanderhaeghe: “Dancing Bear”
Rohinton Mistry: “The Ghost of Firozsha Baag”
Thomas King: “One Good Story, That One”
Leon Rooke: “The Woman Who Talked to Horses”
Rudy Wiebe: “Where Is the Voice Coming From?”
George Bowering: “The Hayfield”
Sandra Birdsell: “Flowers for Weddings and Funerals”
Matt Cohen: “Trotsky's First Confessions”
Douglas Glover: “Swain Corliss, Hero of Malcolm's Mills (Now Oakland, Ontario), November 6, 1814”

Secondary Texts
Theorists covering narrative modes, postmodern, postcolonial and post-structural views will be required for the analysis of each of the above fictions. Viewpoints applied may include but will not be confined to the following thinkers and critics: Virginia Woolf, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ferdinand de Saussure, Mikhael Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, Northrop Frye, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jűrgen Habermas, Deleuze & Guattari, Julia Kristeva, Linda Hutcheon, Annette Kolodny, Barbara Godard, among others).

Prerequisites
Previous undergraduate courses in literary theory, recent fiction and a willingness to engage texts and theoretical models from manifold perspectives.

PROPOSED GRADUATE SEMINARS
FALL 2012

26-500 SCHOLARSHIP AND THE PROFESSION
Seminars conducted by faculty
Fall Term

METHODOLOGIES AND PROFESSIONAL ISSUES

This course will prepare graduate students for advanced research, scholarly writing, and further educational or professional opportunities. Topics will include research strategies, database searching techniques, electronic tools, archival resources, bibliography, careers in and out of the academy, journalism, and publishing. Students will learn how to assess doctoral programs, write conference proposals, apply for grants and scholarships, submit manuscripts to journals, prepare cover letters and curriculum vitae/résumés, conduct scholarly research, write a book review, and assemble a teaching dossier.

Guest lecturers from the Department of English, Leddy library, and/or research services will be invited to discuss particular topics as appropriate.

Assignments and Grading
This course is graded Pass/Fail. Students are expected to attend all classes and to complete all assignments to an acceptable standard. Assignments may include:

a grant proposal
a conference proposal
a library research project
a professional curriculum vitae or résumé

Texts
Joseph Gibaldi, MLA Style Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (New York: Modern Language Association, 2003)

26-535 LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Seminar conducted by Dr Katherine Quinsey

“JOINT TENANT OF THE SHADE”: ANIMALS AND ENVIRONMENTALISM IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Once a traditional theme of eighteenth-century studies, the study of “Nature” is only recently re-emerging in the light of recent developments in ecocriticism. The Enlightenment was a period which saw the radical redefinition of “humanity” and of the human place in the environment, the establishment of scientific empiricism and a subject-object relationship between human observer and natural world that inspired such seminal works as Merchant’s Death of Nature (1985), and the exponential growth of urbanisation, with its concomitant growth in landscape aestheticism and environmental philosophy. In this course we will examine the idea of ecology—defined as the understanding of the non-human environment as being separate from human definition / domination and as having its own reason for being—in the works of a range of writers of the period, including Margaret Cavendish, Anne Finch, Aphra Behn, Alexander Pope, James Thomson, Sarah Trimmer, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Of particular interest will be the ecofeminist perspectives in the work of Cavendish and Finch, the organic environmentalism and animal advocacy in Pope’s work as well as women’s writing, and Romantic concepts of natural and animal-human relationships in Wollstonecraft and Thomson. The pictorial representations of this theme in the works of artists such as Hogarth and Blake are also potential material for critical discussion. The course will consider closely the changing representation of animals in the period, in the shift from their traditional emblematic significance, to the renegotiation of traditional animal-human boundaries, to animals considered as separate creatures in themselves, “joint tenants of the Shade” (Pope, Essay on Man), to the growth of the concept of animal welfare in this period.

Assignments and Grading
Oral reports (15%), prospectus and bibliography (10%), seminar presentation (20%), research paper (40%), class participation (15%)

Texts
Works by Cavendish, Finch, Behn, Thomson, and Pope; course pack including selections from other writers of the period. Students will be encouraged to do primary research in collating and studying non-canonical works in their consideration of the course’s theme. Materials for the course will be available both in published texts and as primary sources through online databases EEBO (Early English Books Online) and ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online).

Prerequisites
Previous undergraduate courses in seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century literature are advisable though not essential. Courses in women's studies, philosophy, or history of the period are advantageous.

26-540 LITERATURE OF THE ROMANTIC PERIOD
Seminar conducted by Dr. Suzanne Matheson

WALKING AND THE LANDSCAPES OF BRITISH ROMANTICISM

Leslie Stephen famously stated that the literary production of the late eighteenth-century was due “in great part, if not mainly to the renewed practice of walking”. This seminar will test Stephen’s premise by examining walking as an image, position and strategy within Romantic poetry and prose. Drawing upon a diverse body of poetry, essays, travel narratives and journals -- the work of authors such as John Clare, William Cowper, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, William Hazlitt, John Keats and Charlotte Smith, as well as lesser-known travel writers and tourists -- we will consider the ways in which walking challenged contemporary social, cultural and political categories. Several recent critical studies of Romantic pedestrianism, along with topographical, geographical and historical materials, will be consulted to provide a material context for our discussions. Of particular interest will be the relationship between walking, talking and writing, the aesthetic implications of moving through a landscape on foot, and the ways in which walking was theorized in the period.

Texts
Walking literature coursepack to be prepared by the instructor and available at the University of Windsor Bookstore
Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel. London: MacMillian, 1997.
Geoff Nicholson, The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy. Literature, Theory and Practice of Walking. Harbour: 2010
Jeffrey C. Robinson. The Walk: Notes on a Romantic Image. Rpt. Illinois: Dalkey Archive: 2006
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Viking, 2000.
Anne Wallace, Walking, Literature and English Culture: The Origin and Uses of the Peripatetic. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.
Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, ed. P.Woof. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.
William Wordsworth, The Prelude: A Parallel Text, ed. J.Wordsworth. Middlesex: Penguin, 2004.

Assignments and Grading
Informal Presentations 20%
Individual and group presentations on specific primary and critical works throughout the semester.

Weekly Insight Papers 30%
Pithy, insightful critical observations on a specific assigned work, presented in a short, well-written paper (500-750 words). Emphasis will be placed on a close reading of the text and the manner in which it represents/theorizes walking or the walker.

Term Participation 20%
The participation grade is made up of three distinct components: 1) weekly, ongoing contribution to discussion - both the frequency, relevancy and quality of each student’s remarks will be taken into account throughout the semester; 2) the degree of preparation and familiarity with assigned texts evidenced by each student; 3) a walking journal, documenting assigned and ‘free’ walks taken throughout the term.

Seminar Presentation and final paper 20%

Lab Work 10%
Creative assignments designed to test and theorize the precepts of pedestrian culture.

Prerequisites
None

*****

26-555 LITERATURE OF THE UNITED STATES
Seminar conducted by Dr. Richard Douglass-Chin

CHINESE AMERICAN LITERATURE

The influence of China, and of Western ideas about China, upon 20th century American modernism has been profound. For example, Ezra Pound’s preoccupation with Chinese poetry led him to publish Cathay (1915); in Chinese writing, he found a model for a radical new modernist poetry for the West—economical and dynamic, juxtaposing images, allusions, quotations and narrative fragments—that culminated in his famed Cantos. This course seeks to understand not what others have written about China or Chinese Americans, but what and how Chinese Americans themselves have written about their own experiences. We will examine the works of a number of Chinese American writers and some important Chinese influences upon their works—for example, the significance of the Tao Te Qing in Chuang Hua’s Crossings; the roles of Confucian ethics and Chinese myth in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fakebook; and the influence of China’s Communist Revolution upon David Hwang’s M. Butterfly.

We will inquire: how do Chinese American writers situate themselves in relation to China? In China itself, Chinese emigrants to America (or any other part of the world) are simply defined as “overseas Chinese”: 中國移民 zhōngguóyímín or 华侨huáqiáo. The term “overseas Chinese” suggests the centrality of China to all Chinese, and their eternal connection to the motherland. However, the Chinese American protagonist of Woman Warrior, daughter of poor laundromat owners in California, writes: “The news from China has been confusing. . . . The revolutionaries had taken Fourth Aunt and Uncle’s store, house, and lands. . . It is confusing that my family was not the poor to be championed.”

We will investigate the importance of language, semiotics, and translation in Chinese American works. Poststructuralist Western theorists such as Derrida have enthusiastically but mistakenly described Chinese writing as non-phonetic and non-logocentric, in contrast to the phonetic, logocentric, and presence-obsessed West. Ironically, in such a description, these theorists have constructed China as the mythical, stereotypical and fantastical “opposite” of the West. At the level of language, semiotics and translation, how do Chinese American writers grapple with such important problems of “othering,” and self-representation?

The term “Chinese American literature” encompasses not only Chinese American writers who were born, raised and educated in America, but also those born, raised and educated in China—for example, Mai Mang, born in Hunan province, educated in Beijing and America and writing poems in both English and Chinese. In the 21st century, complex global realignments have led us to ask: who is “Chinese American? What does “Chinese American” mean as an ethnic and racial signifier in an era of transnationalism where ethnicity is produced beyond the parameters of the nation-state? What constitutes Chinese American literature in terms of formal aesthetics? How are lived experiences of being “Chinese American” represented? Susan Koshy has suggested that, often, poststructuralism’s “formulaic invocations of ‘multiculturalism,’ ‘hybridity,’ ‘plural identities,’ or ‘border-crossing’ are used promiscuously without any effort to link them to the material, cultural or historical specificities” of the actual lived experiences of Asian people (“The Fiction of Asian American Literature,” 314). It is with these lived experiences that we concern ourselves.

In what many critics and theorists have begun to call “The Chinese Century,” this course raises questions that are more relevant now than ever.

Assignments and Grading
Insight papers 15%
Seminar 25%
Paper proposal 15%
Final Conference-style Paper 25%
In-class participation 20%

Texts
Sui Sun Far (Edith Maud Eaton), “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian.” 1890
Louis Chiu, Eat a Bowl of Tea (Citadel Kensington reissue, 1986)
Chuang Hua, Crossings (New Directions, 2007)
Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fakebook (Vintage, 1989)
Woman Warrior: Memories of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (Vintage 1989)
Amy Tan, Bonesetter’s Daughter (Putnam, 2001)
David Huang, M Butterfly (Plume, 1993)
Frank Chin, Gunga Din Highway (Coffee House Press, 1995)
Mai Mang, Stone Turtle: Poems 1987-2000 (Godavaya, 2005)
Selected Theoretical Readings
Rey Chow, “Brushes with the-Other-as-Face,” Protestant Ethnic& The Spirit of Capitalism (Columbia UP, 2002)
Frank Chin, “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake,” in The Big Aiiieeeee (Meridian 1991)
Tao te Qing, (excerpts)
Analects, Kong Fu Zi (excerpts)
Yibing Huang, Contemporary Chinese Literature: From the Cultural Revolution to the Future (Palgrave 2007)
Tunc and Marino, Positioning the New: Chinese American Literature and the Changing Image of the American Literary Canon (Cambridge Scholars, 2010)

Prerequisites
None

*****

26-596 COMPOSITION PEDAGOGY: THEORY AND PRACTICE
Seminar conducted by Dr. Dale Jacobs

TEACHING COMPOSITION: THEORY AND PRACTICE

In this course, we will examine the relationship between theory and practice in the teaching of writing. We will look at a variety of composition pedagogies as a way to spur our discussion of current theoretical debates within the field. We will combine theory and practice by continually linking our readings and discussions to the actualities of teaching within our own writing classrooms. This course will introduce composition as a vibrant academic discipline and assist with critical and reflective thinking about teaching.

Assignments and Grading
Each student will be expected to write weekly teaching and reading journals, lead class discussion, observe and critique another student’s class, and undertake a final project that links composition theory and practice.

The final grade will be calculated as follows:
Journals 30%
Leading class discussion 10%
Class Observation 10%
Class participation 20%
Final project 30%

Texts
Vandenberg, Peter, Sue Hum, and Jennifer Clary-Lemon. Eds. Relations, Locations, Positions: Composition Theory for Writing Teachers. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2006.
Other composition theory texts to be announced.

Prerequisites
This seminar is required for all Graduate Assistants assigned to Composition (26-100). Other students will be admitted with the consent of the instructor.

*****

PROPOSED GRADUATE SEMINARS
WINTER 2013

26-515 LITERATURE OF THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD
Seminar conducted by Dr. Joanna Luft

THE TREACHEROUS WOMAN: MEDIEVAL AND MODERN

This seminar will consider each work in its own right as well as in relation to the others. We will examine the representations of the three great traitoresses of Arthurian romance, Guinevere, Isolde, and Morgan le Fay, and compare them to that of Criseyde in Chaucer’s version of the classical story about Troilus and Criseyde. Are these women portrayed at all sympathetically? Is there a level of treachery that is acceptable, perhaps even necessary, for the smooth running of chivalric society? What is being said about the nature of love and loyalty? We will also consider how two later works, The Great Gatsby (1925) and Brooklyn (2009), may be read as re-castings of Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women provides a contrast, being about women who are betrayed in love by men. We will begin the seminar with a study of the medieval genre of romance, since its conventions influence how we read the medieval stories. How might a knowledge of romance conventions, not to say of the medieval romances themselves, enrich a reading of the two later works?

Assignments and Grading
Seminar    25%
Term Paper     30%
3 Presentation Papers   30%
Participation    15%

Texts
Brown, Catherine. Introduction. “Reading in Walter’s Library.” Contrary Things: Exegesis, Dialectic, and the Poetics of Didacticism. 1-14.
Mortimer, Ian. The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England. 6-15, 35-58, 264-73.
Barron, W.R.J. Introduction. “The Nature of Romance.” English Medieval Romance.1-10
Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
Malory, Le Morte DArthur
Tóibín, Brooklyn (2009)

Prerequisites
None
We will be reading the medieval works in their original Middle English. The editions we will use are well glossed, however, and we will not rush through the books. That said, understanding the language does require a certain diligence.

*****

26-525: TOPICS IN RENAISSANCE DRAMA
Seminar conducted by Dr. Mark Johnston

(METAPHORIC) HERMAPHRODISM ON THE EARLY MODERN STAGE
Representations of hermaphrodites or androgyns feature prominently in early modern medical / sexological treatises but also haunt contemporary diatribes against cross-dressing, tales of sexual transformation and transgression, accounts of monstrous births, and so forth. As a conceptual and symbolic figure representing alterity, ambiguity, and liminality, the (metaphoric) hermaphrodite alludes to other types of intermediacy, mobility, and in-between-ness (political, social, historical, linguistic, racial, economic, religious, geographic, generic, classist, etc.). In this course, we will reconsider the trope of hermaphrodism from diverse perspectives in order to trace and interrogate the early modern English appetite for hypothesizing hybridity/mediocrity/ alterity in both cultural and dramatic terms. How do stage representations of hermaphrodism, androgyny, and transvestism gesture toward other kinds of category crisis, and how do the fears and fantasies the figure provokes “play out” in various early modern cultural contexts?

Assignments and Grading
Seminar Presentations (2)   20% (10% each)
Response papers (2)    30% (15% each)
Conference Proposal    10%
Conference Paper    40%

Each student will be responsible for leading two seminars focused on non-dramatic readings, and writing two response papers that focus on the drama. Students will produce both a conference proposal and a conference-length paper based on that proposal for presentation at a conference of their choice. Students will then present their research papers and field questions about their work at a colloquium scheduled for the final day of class.

Texts

I. Dramatic

Jonson, Ben   Epicoene, or the Silent Woman
Dekker and Middleton The Roaring Girl
Lyly, John   Galatea; May Day
Marston, John.   Antonio and Mellida; Antonio’s Revenge
Shakespeare, William Twelfth Night, or What You Will; As You Like It; The
Merchant of Venice; The Taming of the Shrew.

II. Non-Dramatic

Allen, Thomas   An Exact Narrative of an Hermaphrodite now in London
    (1667).
Anonymous   Hic Mulier / Haec Vir
Crooke, Helkiah Mikrocosmographia (excerpts)
de Montaigne, Michel “Of a Monstrous Child” and “Marie Germaine” (excerpts) (1580) in Complete Works (London, 1957).
Ovid    Metamorphoses (Salmacis & Hermaphroditus)
Paré, Ambroise Of Monsters and Marvels (excerpts) Trans. Janice L.
    Pallister (U Chicago P, 1982).

Prerequisites
None

*****

26-545 LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN PERIOD
Seminar conducted by Dr. Carol Margaret Davison

OUR MONSTERS/OURSELVES: CLASSIC MONSTERPIECES, 1764-1898

In this course, we will examine the development of the secret/repressed/split/monster self over the course of a century. As monsters literally “show forth” cultural fears and fantasies and, as Joseph Conrad insightfully maintains, “fashions in monsters do change,” attention will be paid to the relevant socio-historical and cultural contexts and developments (e.g. the changing ideas about subjectivity; the advent of industrial modernization). To this end, a cross section of historical and theoretical/critical essays on such issues as cultural teratology and the figure of the double will be brought to bear on the ideological make-up of the monsters under examination. We will consider the complex intersection of subjectivity and monstrosity in each novel — how each protagonist/monster is represented and positioned in terms of such categories as class, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and religious affiliation. As classic “monsterpieces” often speak back to each other and constitute a tradition of their own, consideration will be given to intertextual relationships — technical, thematic, and ideological — in the eleven works under examination. Topics for discussion will include issues of genre (do the classifications, for example, of “psychological novel” or “confessional novel” illuminate or obscure these works?), the dynamic between self-development/self-expression and the role of society/religious community/nation, the monster’s relationship to national identity formation (is there a specifically Scottish contribution to this tradition?), the monster and modernity (a shorthand term for broad social, economic, and cultural transformations), and the nature and effects of the authors’ narrative strategies.

Assignments and Grading
Each student is responsible for four 4-page papers relating to the works studied (excluding Walpole), one 4-5 page critique of an assigned critical article, a 45-minute seminar presentation on an assigned primary source, oral responses to at least two seminar presentations (which will contribute to the participation grade), and a final 15-page essay (which may be a development of the seminar presentation) with Annotated Bibliography.

The grading breakdown is as follows:

Critical Article Assessment — 10%
Sickly Taper website bibliography (topics as assigned) — 10%
Seminar Presentation and Written Summary, 20%
Essay, 15 pages, 25% & Annotated Bibliography of 4 sources, 5%
Participation, 10%
Four Response Pieces, 5% each — 20% total

Primary Texts
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764) — Oxford
Matthew Lewis, The Monk (1796) — Oxford
Charlotte Dacre, Zofloya; Or The Moor (1806)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) — Oxford
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) — Oxford
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) — Oxford
H. Rider Haggard, She (1887) — Oxford
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) — Oxford
Richard Marsh, The Beetle (1897) — Penguin
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897) — Oxford
H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898) — Fawcett

Secondary/Critical Texts
Carol Margaret Davison, History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764-1824 (University of Wales Press, 2009).
Selected historical essays and theoretical/critical readings.

Prerequisites
A previous course in Gothic, Romantic, or Victorian literature.

PROPOSED GRADUATE SEMINARS
FALL AND WINTER 2012-13

26-591/592 CREATIVE WRITING SEMINAR A and B
Seminars conducted by Dr. Nicole Markotić

GRADUATE CREATIVE WRITING SEMINAR
The creative writing seminar is an advanced writing workshop focussing on process, development, and completion of new writing. This two-term course is geared toward sharpening students' writing, publishing, and editorial skills. While students are welcome to produce some work with an eye to shaping their thesis project, this class mainly provides a space in which they can experiment, both in their favoured genre and in those genres in which they find themselves less familiar. This course involves the practice and theory of advanced writing. Particular attention will be given to formal structures, to standard writing conventions, and to the many literary variations on those literary conventions. I expect students to write approximately100 pages of excellent, polished (which means re-written, not first draft) prose, poetry, or mixed genre, which will be handed in and critiqued in regular instalments.

The class will be conducted primarily as a manuscript workshop. Students should expect intensive reading and writing, and should come to class prepared to discuss their colleagues’ writing with care and with constructive, informed, and intelligent criticism. Students must read not only in their own genre, but across writing styles and outside familiar territory. Workshop participation is integral to the course; we will develop ways to talk about literature that will foster the critical reading skills crucial not only to the composition process, but to possible future graduate work, teaching, and editorial endeavours. A great deal of reading and discussion of contemporary published works will facilitate and enrich these conversations. This reading material will be determined partially by the professor and partially by the students, who will choose published works that complement or challenge their own projects. Workshopping at this advanced level is intensive and complicated, and students must become good editors as well as writers to complete this course. We accomplish these goals, in part, by critiquing others’ writing as we would published material, giving the text critical attention that will place it within a context of writing and writing genres. These workshops will help the writer to determine the text’s inherent direction, possibilities, and flaws.

Texts
Michael Murphy A Description of the Blazing World (Freehand Press)
Robert Kroetsch Completed Field Notes (UofA Press)
Rosemary Nixon Kalila (Goose Lane Press)
Maxine Gadd Lost Language (Coach House)
D.M. Bryan Gerbil Mother (NeWest Press)
Julia Darling Crocodile Soup. (Ecco Press)

In addition to these books, the course pack will include:

– short stories by David Arnason, Melanie Little, Jill Sexsmith, and Jessica Grant.
– extended prose by Frank Davey, David Sedaris, Suzette Mayr, and Fred Wah.
– poetry by Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, George Bowering, Roy Miki, and Rosmarie Waldrop.
– theoretical selections from: Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot, Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Literature, William Gass’s The World Within the Word, and Tzvetan Todorov’s Genres in Discourse, and Gerard Genette’s narrate theories. As well, I shall pass out articles on magic realism, the origin and theories of the short story, articles theorizing the novella form, “difficult” poetry, and the structure of the prose poem.

Winter Texts will be assigned by the end of November.

Assignments and Grading
Grades will be based on writing, oral and written abilities to critique, class participation, and formal presentations. Students will regularly hand in writing packages (max. 25 pp. per packet) for workshop review, and will be responsible for preparing thoughtful, detailed, and insightful written critiques of others’ work. As well, critical assignments are to be handed in for immediate feedback and grading. Finally, students will give one oral presentation each semester that will constitute part of their overall grade.

Short Critical Assignments 15%
(in addition to creative assignments, students will submit three reading reports, critical peer responses, and two critical reviews per term)

Workshop Contribution & Participation 15%
(students are expected to participate in the weekly workshops, offering thoroughly articulated and critically useful oral feedback to their classmates)

Presentations 20%
(students will contribute two 30-45 minute seminars on contemporary works – the first will be a critical analysis of published work, and the second will be an intense analysis of a published book in relation to their own writing)

Creative Submissions 50%
(in addition to creative exercises assigned by the professor, students will hand in their own writing – either parts of larger works, or discrete stand-alone pieces)

Class Reading
There will be an all-inclusive Gala reading showcasing all levels of CW students some time in March. Students are expected to participate, attend the entire event, and to read from 2 pages of their work. In addition, the 591/592 class will hold a solo reading in the beginning of January, performing course work and original writing.

ENGLISH GRADUATE FACULTY

LOUIS CABRI, B.A. (Carleton), M.A. (Calgary), Ph.D. (University of Pennsylvania), teaches modernist, postmodernist, and contemporary American poetry and poetics, with secondary specializations in literary theory and Canadian poetry and poetics. His areas of interest include poetry’s social address, poetic formal innovation, poetry in relation to theory, philosophy, politics, linguistics, art, and movements / moments / institutions. His recent essays and papers consider work by Bruce Andrews, Peter Inman, Frank O’Hara, Roy Miki, Catriona Strang, Fred Wah, Pound, and Zukofsky, poetry’s “social command” propounded by Osip Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky, and the literary nonce-word. He has recently edited a selected poems by Fred Wah, The False Laws of Narrative (Wilfrid Laurier UP) and with Peter Quartermain a special issue of ESC: English Studies in Canada on sound and poetry. Cabri’s poetry includes Poetryworld (forthcoming from Capilano University Editions), —that can’t (Nomados), and The Mood Embosser (Coach House Books), which was acclaimed a 2003 Book of the Year by the Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center (San Francisco). Current projects include a study of Zukofsky and the Language Poets, a collection of essays on contemporary poetics, and anthologizing a poets-in-dialogue series he edited and curated (PhillyTalks, 1997-2001).

CAROL MARGARET DAVISON, B.A. Hons. (With Distinction, Dean’s List), (Concordia), M.A. (York), Ph.D. (Dean’s Honour List), (McGill), is a specialist in Gothic and Victorian literature, African-American literature, women’s writing, and cultural teratology. A former Canada-U.S. Fulbright scholar, she is currently working, with the assistance of a SSHRC Standard Research Grant, on Gothic Scotland/Scottish Gothic, a theoretical examination of the Scottish Gothic tradition. She will conduct further necessary research on this project in 2010 when she takes up her position as a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. She continues in her role as the Director of the sickly taper website, the world's largest and most comprehensive website devoted to Gothic bibliography (www.thesicklytaper.com), and has published Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature (Palgrave Macmillan 2004), which was shortlisted for the J.I. Segal Award, and History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature, 1764-1824 (University of Wales Press, 2009). The author of numerous articles and book chapters, she is also the editor of a special issue of Gothic Studies on the Gothic and Addiction (2009), co-editor of a special issue on Marie Corelli for Women’s Writing (UK, 2006), and the editor of Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Sucking Through the Century, 1897–1997 (Oxford: Dundurn Press, 1997), which won the Lord Ruthven Assembly Award (chosen by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts) for the best non-fiction book on Dracula and vampires for 1997.

THOMAS DILWORTH, B.A., M.A., Ph.D. (Toronto), University Professor, Killam Fellow, specializes in Modern Literature and Romantic Poetry. Interdisciplinary in his interest in relationships between literature and visual art, he is the author of The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones, which won the British Council Prize in the Humanities, and Reading David Jones. He is the editor of Jones’s illustrated Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Jones’s Wedding Poems, and Inner Necessities, the Letters of David Jones to Desmond Chute, and co-editor of The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: Composition as Conversation. He has edited the Ad Solem bilingual (English/French) editions of Jones’s works, is writing Jones’s biography for Jonathan Cape. He has published over a hundred chapters and articles, on William Cowper, William Blake, William Wordsworth, S.T. Coleridge, John Keats, Herman Melville, Edward Lear, Joseph Conrad, Auguste Rodin, Edward Lear, G.M. Hopkins, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, W.C. Williams, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Wyndham Lewis, David Jones, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Antonin Artaud, Virgil Thomson, William Faulkner, Kenneth Clark, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Patrick Kavanagh, Samuel Beckett, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, William Golding, Marshall McLuhan, A.R. Ammons, Peter Porter, Sylvia Plath, Audre Lord, and Robert Morgan. His recent poetry has appeared in Salmagundi, Rampike, Ontario Review, Notre Dame Review, Windsor ReView and Poetry (Chicago).

RICHARD DOUGLASS-CHIN, B.A. (McMaster), M.A. (Western), Ph.D. (McMaster), specializes in pre-twentieth century American literature, especially African American and Asian American literary forms. He has published articles in MELUS, FUSE, and Revista la Torre. His critical text, Preacher Woman Sings the Blues, investigates the literary connections between contemporary African American female authors and their eighteenth and nineteenth-century predecessors. He has also published poems and short stories in Rampike and several anthologies, and is experimenting with Arabic, West African, and Chinese poetic forms. He is presently examining the influence of Asian and West African literary and philosophical traditions not only on Asian American and African American writing, but also on American transcendentalism and American modernism in general. Other research interests include post colonialism; cultural studies; African diasporic literature; and colonialism and terror in American media and literature.

JOHANNA FRANK, B.A. Hons. (Michigan), M.A., Ph.D. (Indiana), is a performance theorist and historian whose research focuses on U.S. drama, theatre, and performance art. Her areas of interest include: performance theory; race, gender, and sexuality in/as performance; intercultural performance; narrative theory and performance; and histories of interdisciplinary performance. She has published essays in journals such as Modern Drama, Journal of Dramatic Literature and Theory, and Biography, and she is the editor of a special issue of Modern Drama on the work of playwright Adrienne Kennedy. She is currently working on a book titled Geographies of Performance: Acts of Writing, Spaces of Play, and the Second World War, which develops strategies for theorizing the relationship between narrative, performance, and theatrical and textual presence. Her recent production credits as a director and dramaturge include Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul (University of Louisville), Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (University of Windsor), Suzan-Lori Parks’s 365 Days/365 Plays (University of Windsor), Jane Martin’s Talking With (Windsor Feminist Theatre), Gertrude Stein’s Curtain Raiser and Counting Her Dresses (SteinSemble), Tristan Tzara’s The Gas Heart (SteinSemble), and George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession (College of Wooster).

SUSAN HOLBROOK, B.A. Hons. (Victoria), M.A. (Calgary), Ph.D. (Calgary), specializes in North American 20^th-century and contemporary poetry and poetics. Her critical articles on experimental poetry appear in such journals as American Literature, differences, Essays on Canadian Writing, and Open Letter. Holbrook’s poetry books are the Trillium-nominated Joy Is So Exhausting (Coach House 2009), Good Egg Bad Seed (Nomados 2004) and misled (Red Deer 1999), which was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Stephen J. Stephensson Award. She recently co-edited The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: Composition as Conversation (Oxford U P, 2010).

DALE JACOBS, B.A., M.A. (Alberta), Ph.D. (Nebraska), specializes in Composition and Rhetoric with interests in composition pedagogies, literacy, multimodal rhetorics, comics studies, and digital rhetorics. He is the editor of The Myles Horton Reader (University of Tennessee Press, 2003) and co-editor (with Laura Micciche) of A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion in Composition Studies (Boynton/Cook, 2003). His articles have appeared in journals such as JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, College Composition and Communication, English Journal, Composition Studies, Biography, and the Journal of the Assembly of Expanded Perspectives on Learning. In addition, he is the editor of North by North Wit: An Anthology of Canadian Humour (Black Moss Press, 2003) and Ice: New Writing on Hockey (Spotted Cow Press, 1997).

KARL E. JIRGENS, B.A. (Hons.), (Toronto), M.A., Ph.D. (Distinction), (York) is a specialist in contemporary literature with a focus on Canadian. He is the author of Bill Bissett and His Works (ECW), Christopher Dewdney and His Works (ECW), Strappado (Coach House Press), and A Measure of Time (Mercury Press) and has edited a book on Canadian painter, Jack Bush (Coach House) and another on poet, Christopher Dewdney (Wilfrid Laurier University Press). His scholarly articles on postmodern/ postcolonial literature appear in international journals such as La Revista Canaria de Etudio Ingleses (Spain), Q/W/E/R/T/Y (France), Open Letter (Canada), and World Literature Today (USA). He wrote the entry on Jacques Lacan for the Dictionary of Literary Biography edition on Twentieth Century European Cultural Theorists. His fiction and poetry appear in Canadian journals such as The Tamarack Review, Only Paper Today, Impulse, Descant, The Journal of Canadian Fiction, Inter, Filling Station, and internationally in The Ontario Review (USA), Tyuonyi (USA), UNIverse (Germany), Essex (USA), the International Symposia of Concrete & Visual Poetry (Australia), and Offerte Speciale (Italy), among others. His fictional works have been anthologized by Coach House Press, Black Moss Press, and Mercury Press. Jirgens is a grand-master of the martial art of Tae Kwon Do. His theatre / performance works have been presented nationally and internationally including at the Ultimatum Fest in Montreal and at the INTER-Festival in Quebec City. Karl Jirgens has edited Rampike, the international literary journal of post-modern art and writing, since 1979.

MARK A. JOHNSTON, B.A. Hons. (Western), M.A. (Queen’s), Ph. D. (Western), specializes in early modern English drama, particularly the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, children’s drama, the history of medicine, and gender studies. His critical articles appear in English Literary History, Studies in English Literature, and English Literary Renaissance, and his recent activities include contributing a chapter exploring the depravity inhering in early modern representations of the barber and his shop to the forthcoming collection City of Vice: London 1500-1700. He is currently working on completing a monograph focused on the significance of beards to construction of gender in early modern drama and culture.

JOANNA LUFT, B.A., M.A. (Wilfrid Laurier University), Ph.D. (McMaster), specializes in medieval English literature and medieval French romance. She has published on le Roman de la Rose and is currently working on Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation of Love, exploring how its message of love is conveyed through literary form and imagery. She is also interested in the phenomenon of twentieth-century re-castings of medieval works and has published on the intertextual relationships between Alice Munro’s “Wenlock Edge” and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as well as between Chaucer’s Prologue to The Legend of Good Women and The Great Gatsby.

NICOLE MARKOTIĆ, B.A. (Calgary), M.A. (Manitoba), Ph.D. (Calgary), specializes in Canadian Literature, Creative Writing (fiction and poetry), Disability Studies, and Children’s Literature. She is author of two poetry books, Connect the Dots and Minotaurs & Other Alphabets, the novella Yellow Pages, and her latest novel, Scrapbook of My Years as a Zealot. As well, she has edited a collection of poetry by Dennis Cooley, By Word of Mouth, and has co-edited a collection of essays on film and disability, The Problem Body: Projecting Disability on Film. Her interests include theorizing what she terms the “problem body” (as distinct from the “normal body”), representations of disability in film and literature, and twentieth-century Canadian literature. Recent articles include: “To All the Girls I’ve Loved (Before)…” (Open Letter), “Widows and Orphans” (in the anthology Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative), and “Leading with Your Head: Bordering Disability, Sexuality, and Nation,” (in the anthology Sex & Disability). She has worked as a freelance editor, and has edited special issues for such literary journals as Canadian Journal of Film Studies / revue canadienne d’études cinématographiques, Open Letter, and Tessera. She was poetry editor for Red Deer Press for six years and has just joined the NeWest literary board as one of its fiction editors.

C. SUZANNE MATHESON, B.A. Hons. (McGill), M.A. (Toronto), D.Phil (Oxon), is a specialist in British Romantic literature, late eighteenth and early nineteenth century visual culture, aesthetic theory and book arts. She has worked extensively on the poetry and design of William Blake, particularly on the intermediation of Blake’s early illuminated books. She is currently writing a social history of public art exhibition in Georgian England and the fraught ‘invention’ of art-viewing audiences in the period. A recent interdisciplinary project on Tintern Abbey, the subject of a 2008 exhibition at the University of Michigan and forthcoming monograph Composing Tintern Abbey, carries her interest in spectatorship, theories of the gaze and Romantic visual culture into the appraisal and representation of an iconic British site. Other interests include eighteenth century optical technology, especially the Claude mirror, which is the subject of a current collaborative study and related web installation. She has held fellowships at the Yale Center for British Art, The Lewis Walpole Library and Huntington Library. Matheson has contributed articles to the Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, the Times Literary Supplement, and participated in the Courtauld’s exhibition and catalogue Art on The Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780-1836. In 2008 she was a University of Windsor Humanities Research Group Fellow.

STEPHEN PENDER, B.A. Hons. (Toronto), M.A. (Queen’s), Ph.D. (Toronto), is a specialist in the poetry and prose of early modern Britain, intellectual history, the history of medicine, and the history of rhetoric. Recently, he has published articles in Philosophy and Rhetoric, Rhetorica, Early Science and Medicine, the British Journal for the History of Science, and the Dalhousie Review, as well as a number of chapters in collections of essays, including the first collection on the history of pain in early modernity. He is currently at work on the relationship between rhetoric, medicine, and emotion in early modern England, medical thought in contemporary historiography, early modern ethics, the history of the imagination, and laughter. Dr. Pender has presented over thirty papers at national and international conferences, and has been invited to the Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry at the University of Iowa to contribute to their 'New Rhetorics, New Histories' project and to Leiden University for a conference and collection of essays on pain in early modern Europe. In 2003, he co-edited The Common Sky: Canadian Writers against the War in Iraq (Three Squares Press); he is poetry editor for Three Squares, and on the educational advisory board for The Walrus magazine. With Nancy Struever, emeritus, Johns Hopkins University, he has edited Rhetoric and Medicine in Early Modern Europe, a collection of ten papers, with a long introduction, forthcoming from Ashgate, UK, in 2011. This year his monograph, Essaying the Body: Rhetoric, Medicine, and Emotion in Early Modern England, which was supported by a SSHRCC grant in intellectual history, now under contract, will be finished. Dr. Pender is a former director of the Humanities Research Group, University of Windsor, and holds a research leadership chair in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. He very much likes stout, and recently published his first collection of poetry, Histologies.

KATHERINE QUINSEY, B.A. (Trent), Ph.D. (London), has published extensively on the poetry of Pope and of Dryden, as well as articles on seventeenth-century poet and translator Edward Sherburne, Restoration poet Anne Finch, Canadian poet Margaret Avison, and Biblical tradition in the canon of English literature. She is editor of Broken Boundaries: Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama (1996), of Lumen: Selected Proceedings of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (1998), and co-editor of a special issue of Canadian Poetry devoted to the work of Margaret Avison (2007). Her current SSHRC-funded project is a book on Pope's religious thought, Tempting Grace: The Religious Imagination of Alexander Pope. Her second major project is a book on Pope and print culture, Rhyme and Print: Pope, Poetry, and the Material Text. She is currently editing another collection, Under the Veil: Spirituality and Feminism in Post-Reformation Britain and Europe. Other scholarly interests are religion and colonialism 1600-1800; print culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; seventeenth-century and Restoration rhetoric, politics, and linguistic philosophy.

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2012-13 English Graduate Handbook

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