Graduate Seminars 2011-2012

Graduate Course Descriptions

All graduate courses are seminars. Enrolment is limited in these courses, because considerable contribution is expected from each member of the seminar.
Full course descriptions of the proposed graduate seminars for 2011-12 can be found below.

26-500. Scholarship and the Profession
26-501. Tutorials
26-505. The English Language and Linguistics
26-510. Literature of the Old English Period
26-515. Literature of the Middle English Period
26-520. Literature of the Renaissance
26-525. Renaissance Drama
26-530. Literature of the Restoration Period
26-535. Literature of the Eighteenth Century
26-540. Literature of the Romantic Period
26-545. Literature of the Victorian Period
26-550. Literature of the Twentieth Century
26-555. Literature of the United States
26-560. Literature of Canada
26-565. Post-Colonial Literature
26-570. Literary Genres: Poetry
26-575. Literary Genres: Drama
26-580. Literary Genres: Fiction
26-585. Literary Genres: Criticism/Cultural Studies
26-591/92. Creative Writing Seminar A and B
26-596. Composition Pedagogy: Theory and Practice
(Required for Graduate Assistants assigned to teach 26-100.)
26-794. Creative Writing Project
26-797. Thesis/Project
 

PROPOSED GRADUATE SEMINARS
SUMMER 2011

26-505 TOPICS IN LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS
Seminar Conducted by Dr. Dale Jacobs
Summer Term

DIGITAL RHETORICS

In this course we will explore the theory and practice of digital rhetorics through an examination of digital texts/spaces such as e-mail, social networking sites, electronic discussion lists, twitter, video games, blogs, wikis, web pages, video mash-ups, and video sharing sites. In doing so, we will examine the ways we engage with digital rhetorics in our daily lives, both as creators and as viewers/readers. In doing so, we will attempt to think through a number of important questions about the use of digital rhetorics. How do we make meaning from digital texts/spaces? What are the multiple modes through which meaning is created and communicated? How does persuasion operate in digital rhetorics? What are the digital rhetorics in which we are engaged in our lives? What elements do they have in common? How do they differ? What is the role of logic in these various kinds of texts? The role of emotion? Ethics? The assumptions shared by particular communities? What counts as successful digital rhetoric? Our exploration of a variety of theories of digital rhetoric and multimodality will help us to think more critically about and engage more actively with these questions as we think through the relationship between the theory and practice of digital rhetorics and the impact these rhetorics/texts/spaces have on our lives.

Assignments and Grading
Leading Class Discussion (2) 20% (10% each)
Contribution to Class Blog 30%
Class Participation 20%
Final Project 30%

Texts
To be determined, but possible texts include:

Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.
Burgess, Jean and Joshua Green. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. London: Polity, 2009
Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for Literacy. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008.
Jeanneny, Jean-Noel. Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press, 2008.
Kress, Gunther. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Murray, Joddy. Non-Discursive Rhetoric: Image and Affect in Multimodal Composition. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010.
National Writing Project. Because Digital Writing Matters. Sna Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2010.
Selber, Stuart. Multiliteracies for a Digital Age. Southern Illinois University Press, 2001.
Warnick, Barbara. Rhetoric Online: Persuasion and Politics on the World Wide Web. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2007.
Wysocki, Anne, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc. Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2004.

PROPOSED GRADUATE SEMINARS

FALL 2011

26-500 SCHOLARSHIP AND THE PROFESSION
(Four-week course)
Seminar 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)

26-525 TOPICS IN RENAISSANCE DRAMA
Seminar Conducted by Dr. Mark Johnston
Summer Term

SHAKESPEARE AND FETISH

Cultural historians like William Pietz and others argue that the concept of fetish originates in early modern European cross-cultural contact with the indigenous other. Taking the long and complex history fetish—including its significance for Marxist, Freudian, and anthropological criticism into account, this course will consider the significance of the obsessive focus on material objects and what Othello calls “ocular proof” in Shakespearean drama in order to interrogate the relationship between fetishism and the economic, cultural, and psychic work achieved by categorization and differentiation. Through the study of a selection of Shakespeare’s play texts that have drawn the attention of modern critics for their representations of fetishism, we will attempt to achieve a broader understanding of the phenomenon, closely attending to the polyvalent significance attributed to material signifiers and the diverse registers in which objects, parts, and practices signal meaning. How might we relate fetishism in the drama to the racial, religious, sexual, economic, technological, and political changes that were simultaneously occurring in early modern England? How and why does fetish, which ostensibly functions to demarcate boundaries, simultaneously blur and conflate registers of value? And what can the study of early modern English fetish in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries provide in terms of thinking about the cultural work performed by literature and drama generally?

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

Each student will be responsible for presenting two seminars based on the critical readings and two response papers based on the plays. Students will also submit a conference proposal and write a 10-12 page conference-length paper for presentation at a final colloquium.

Primary Texts
Shakespeare, William
A Midsummer Night’s Dream Othello
Twelfth Night, or What You Will
Macbeth
A Winter’s Tale

Secondary Readings
Apter, Emily and William Pietz, eds., “Introduction” to Fetishism as Cultural Discourse
(Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1993).
Dinshaw, Carolyn. “Eunuch Hermeneutics,” ELH 55.1 (1988): 27-51.
Ellen, Roy. “Fetishism,” Man, New Series 23.2 (1988): 213-235.
Freinkel, Lisa. “The Shakespearean Fetish” in Ewan Fernie (ed.), Spiritual Shakespeares
(New York and London: Routledge, 2005): 109-29.
“The Use of the Fetish,” Shakespeare Studies 33 (2005): 115-23.
Freud, Sigmund. “Three Essays on Sexuality” and “Fetishism” in The Pelican Freud
Library. Vol. 7: On Sexuality. Trans. James Strachey, Ed. Angela Richards
(New York, Middlesex and others: Penguin, 1977. Repr. 1981).
Garber, Marjorie. “Shakespeare as Fetish,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41.2 (1990): 242-250.
Harris, Jonathan Gil. “Shakespeare’s Hair: Staging the Objects of Material Culture,”
Shakespeare Quarterly 52.4 (2001): 479-91.
Jones, Ann Rosalind and Peter Stallybrass, “Introduction” to Renaissance Clothing and
the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000).
“Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe,” Critical Inquiry 28:1 (2001), 114-
132.
Katz, Leslie. “Rehearsing the Weird Sisters: The Word as Fetish in Macbeth” in Donald
Hedrick and Bryan Reynolds (eds), Shakespeare Without Class;
Misappropriations of Cultural Capital (New York: Palgrave, 2000).
Kearney, James. “The Book and the Fetish: The Materiality of Prospero’s Text,” Journal
of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32.3 (2002): 433-68.
Marx, Karl. “Chapter One” of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 1.
Trans. Ben Fowkes (New York and Toronto: Random House, 1977).
Mulvey, Laura. “Introduction” to Fetishism and Curiosity (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana UP,1996).
Parker, John. “What a Piece of Work is Man: Shakespearean Drama as Marxian Fetish,
the Fetish as Sacramental Sublime,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern
Studies 34.3 (2004): 643-72.
Pietz, William. “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” Res 9 (Spring, 1985): 5-17.
“The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish,” Res 13 (Spring, 1987):
23-45.
“The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa: Bosman’s Guinea and the Enlightenment Theory
of Fetishism,” Res 16 (Autumn 1988): 105-23.

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

DEATH AND THE VICTORIANS

Given shockingly high mortality rates due to disease, poverty, and hazardous modes of employment, the Victorians were surrounded by and fascinated with death. This fixation, evidenced in the form of such phenomena as elaborate mourning rituals and a wealth of material culture, inordinately lengthy elegies, and extravagant literary deathbed scenes, has been well documented and variously theorized by thanatologists of different stripes, including cultural critics, social historians, and psychoanalysts. It has been cogently argued, for example, that this necroculture, ruled over by a larger-than-life widow-monarch, was in mourning, in the face of an unsettling modernity, for lost cultural/religious certainties. Ironically, the Enlightenment attempt to strip death of its terror by way of its naturalization and medicalization, resulted in the creation of yet greater spiritual anxiety that, notably, included concerns for the integrity of the body/corpse. The desire for a “respectable funeral” and a “good”/“beautiful” death that yoked morality and mortality remained paramount throughout the period. Commencing with an overview of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century death/consolation manuals (ars moriendi) and the treatment of death by such writers as the graveyard poets, Gothic writers, and Romantic poets, this seminar will consider the two literary master narratives of dying and mourning in Victorian literature. With an eye to various theories about death and representation, we will discuss the intertextual relationships — technical and thematic — in the works under examination. In considering the politics and poetics of various representations of death and mourning, topics for discussion will include the roles of race, class, and gender; sex and death; death “the Leveller” as Big Business; death and inheritance; death, the supernatural, and the undead/undeath; death and the visual arts/visual technologies; the death of the author/reader; love and death; death and the divine/demonic; death denial, consolation, and acceptance; death of the Other/death of the self/individual; death of the child/childhood; murder and self-murder; the significance of genre choices; death and the development of such literary forms as the consolation/death manual, the elegy, the obituary, and what I call necro-porn (e.g. She and Dracula); and death, war, the Empire, and the construction of “Britishness.”

Assignments and Grading
Each student must present a 45-minute seminar on an assigned primary source. Written assignments consist of a theoretical critique, five 3-4 page critical commentaries on novels studied, a summary of the seminar presentation, and a final 15-page essay with annotated bibliography. Students are expected to come to the seminar prepared to provide feedback on the weekly readings and seminar presentations.

The grading breakdown is as follows
Theory critique — 10%
Five 3-4 page critiques on works other beyond the seminar focus— 35% (7% each)
Seminar Presentation and 1-page summary (due on the day of the presentation) — 20%
Essay, 15 pages, with annotated bibliography consisting of 4 entries — 25%
Participation, 10%, which involves some minor discussion assignments.

Primary Texts
Poems by Tennyson, Robert Browning, Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti, and Algernon Charles Swinburne
Short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, William Harrison Ainsworth, George MacDonald, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, and Margaret Oliphant.
Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848).
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1848).
Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (1848).
H. Rider Haggard, She (1887).
George Gissing, The Nether World (1889).
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897).
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899; Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine).

Secondary/Critical Texts
A coursepack of selected historical/cultural essays and theoretical/critical readings by such writers as Sigmund Freud, Geoffrey Gorer, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Elisabeth Bronfen.

Prerequisites
A previous course (or courses) in Romantic and/or Victorian literature.

26-550 LITERATURE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Seminar conducted by Dr. Susan Holbrook
Fall Term

PRISMATIC SELVES: AN INTERGENERIC STUDY OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The problem with autobiography, Gertrude Stein wrote, is that “you are of course never yourself.” Self-representation is a venture raising myriad questions about authenticity, memory, aesthetics. How do memory and narrative contour one another? How do assumptions about subjectivity, and about autobiography itself, impede the life writing of certain selves? How does the intersubjective process if identity formation register in memoir? To both complicate and facilitate some answers to such questions, this course will examine works produced across a number of genres—novels, poetry, essays, film and graphic novels—paying attention to specific modes, such as Confessionalism, documentary, and “uncreative writing.” We will investigate how authors negotiate the generic expectations governing each of these in order to forge life writing that often troubles or expands the very notion of self.

Assignments and Grading
3 short response papers 30%
In-class seminar 25%
Final Research Paper 25%
In-class participation 20%

Texts
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein
Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf
Ariel, Sylvia Plath
Seed Catalogue, Robert Kroetsch
Running With Scissors: A Memoir, Augusten Burroughs
My Life, Lyn Hejinian
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston
Diamond Grill, Fred Wah
Fidget, Kenneth Goldsmith
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel
Tarnation, Jonathan Coaoutte

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

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 2012
26-520 LITERATURE OF THE RENAISSANCE
Seminar conducted by Dr. Stephen Pender
Winter Term

EFFIGIATE MY SOUL TO ME: BODIES AND SOULS IN JOHN DONNE

Addressing God during his illness in late November, 1623, Donne wrote, “I know that in the state of my body, which is more discernible, than that of my soule, thou dost effigiate my Soule to me.” In their “intricate work,” Donne and his physicians probe his ailing body for symptoms, signs, and causes of his affliction; “we are not sure we are ill; one hand askes the other by the pulse, and our eye askes our own urine, how we do.” Although Donne is sure that every bone, every muscle “hath some infirmitie,” the heats and sweats of his sickness, his melancholy, and his loss of appetite conspire to conceal the causes of his illness both from him and from his “beholders.” Donne attempts to circumvent potential misprision by thickly describing his illness as affliction. “[A]ffliction,” he declares in 1625, “is my Physick.”
The deliberate intrication of sickness, self-scrutiny, scriptural wrangling, and semiotics typifies the Devotions (1624), a text that documents Donne’s “Humiliation” by the “furtherance of a vehement fever.” With the Devotions as our focus, this course will explore Donne’s thought about bodies and souls, sickness and affliction, in his poetry and prose, including his sermons. We will encounter Donne’s considerable erudition, his emerging Anglicanism, his attitudes to natural philosophy, and his conceptions of reading, writing, and history. We will pay particular attention to early modern medicine and philosophy, and their conception of emotion, in his and in his contemporaries’ work.

Assignments and Grading
In addition to diligent and engaged class participation, students are responsible for five pieces of work during the seminar:

[1] weekly response papers [maximum one, single-spaced page] to questions and issues related to the readings; [2] an brief analysis of a recent article on our topic [maximum two, double-spaced pages], in which you summarise and situate the author’s main arguments; [3] one or two oral reports [approximately twenty minutes in length]; [4] a conference paper presentation at a colloquium organised by the instructor; and [5] a fifteen to twenty page research paper of publishable quality, which may be developed and refined from the oral report.

The final grade will be calculated as follows:

Participation / response papers 15%
Article review 10%
Oral report 15%
Conference paper 20%
Research paper 40%

Texts
John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. Ed. Anthony Raspa. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Other texts to be announced.

Prerequisites
A course in early modern literature and / or self-directed reading in early modern intellectual history or literature. Some theoretical sophistication is expected.
 

26-550 LITERATURE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Seminar conducted by Dr. Thomas Dilworth
Winter Term

EARLY JOYCE: DUBLINERS AND A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN

Joyce has dominated world literature in the twentieth century. He is unsurpassed in the history of literature as an innovator in the use of language and as an experimenter with fictional forms. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are the works on which his reputation chiefly rests. (We will look at selections from those works.) The first is widely regarded as the great modernist novel but is aesthetically seriously flawed. The second is uncatagorizable work that may best be approached as poetry. Few are fully competent to read it since it involves puns in eight languages, but it is undoubtedly one of the great achievements in literature. If Joyce had written only Dubliners and A Portrait, however, he would be an important author. Dubliners is the most influential collection of stories in the language. Many of its stories are great works of art, rich in psycho-spatial atmosphere and other aspects of ‘significant form.’ They are models of what art should be, intrinsically unified form-content. A Portrait is a masterpiece in the genre of the novel and aesthetically a more successful work than Ulysses.

Assignments and Grading
1) Once during the term, each student will direct discussion of the work selected for that day. This direction consists of writing 1-2 pages of questions to ask the class, these submitted to the prof on the morning before class for preview and suggested changes, discussion then directed by the student-leader with interventions by the prof (10%). 2) The other students are responsible for quality of their participation, which consists of two written pages of best insights (submitted to prof. at start of class)—a finished draft based on notes and prior drafts, single-spaced, typed, font size 12, 1-inch margins with one line skipped between insights—and quality of contribution to discussion (90%). An example insight sheet will be provided.

Texts
(Required, available in University bookstore)

Dubliners. Penguin.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Penguin. Beware the Introduction and notes to this book by Seamus Deane. Worse than useless, they senselessly double the burden of reading and make students hate the book.

Prerequisites
willingness to reread throughout the week, to meditate analytically, to write and rewrite.

26-570 LITERARY GENRES: POETRY
Seminar conducted by Dr. Louis Cabri
Winter Term

COLOURLESS GREEN IDEAS SLEEP FURIOUSLY: POETRY AND LINGUISTICS

This course aims to introduce modernist and postmodernist poetry by way of linguistics and the “linguistic turn” (as Richard Rorty called it) in philosophy. The course will also overview basic concepts in linguistics by highlighting aspects that bear on the literary text. While the course will consider poetry from the linguist’s perspective, it will also consider linguistics from the poet’s perspective. Of special interest will be linguists who hypothesize a distinctly poetic language, and poets who have responded, not least critically, to such hypotheses.

Poets whose work we may examine include David Antin, Charles Bernstein, Nicole Brossard, Dennis Cooley, Clark Coolidge, Robert Grenier, Lionel Kearns, Peter Inman, Daphne Marlatt, Jackson Mac Low, bp Nichol, Steve McCaffery, Charles Olson, Joan Retallack, Laura Riding. Lisa Robertson, Ron Silliman, Jack Spicer, and Fred Wah, among others.

Issues in linguistics and in linguistic philosophy that the course may cover include meaning (semantics), minimal meaning-units (morphology), meaningful sounds (phonology), word form (lexicology), word order (syntax), as well as issues of nonsensicality, anti-linguistics, pragmatics, phonetics, the social (speech standards and registers, dialogism, dialect, code switching, slang, etc), mental grammar, performativity, formulaicity, language games, and embodiment.

Linguists, philosophers and literary critics we may study include Mikhail Bakhtin, Alice Becker-Ho, Noam Chomsky, Richard Cureton, Victoria Fromkin, Roman Jakobson, Julia Kristeva, George Lakoff, Ferdinand de Saussure, Daniel Tiffany, Reuven Tsur, Donald Wesling, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Alison Wray, among others.

Areas of literary criticism influenced by modern linguistics include stylistics, prosody, semiotics, and cognitive poetics, and these may factor in as well.

A packet of photocopies will be prepared for this course. As well, it may be required to purchase 2-6 books.

Assignments and Grading
Essay 20%
Project 15%
Responses (3 X 10%) 30%
Presentation 15%
Participation 20%

26-585 LITERARY GENRES: CRITICISM / CULTURAL STUDIES
Seminar Conducted by Dr. Nicole Markotić
Winter Term

DISABLING CHILDHOOD: REPRESENTATIONS OF DISABILITY IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

Short Description
In this seminar, we shall examine representations of disability in Children’s Literature. We’ll look at various cultural, historical, stylistic, and genre contexts, as well as at the creation of “children’s literature” as a genre category that – in itself – defined the genre boundaries of which tales were told for whom. This course will increase your ability to write and talk about literature written for children with critical insight and facility. You will be expected to prepare for class by reading all the assigned material, attending class, and participating fully in class discussions.

Course Outline
This course will focus on close analyses of representations of disability by writers of children’s fiction, poetry, oral storytelling, film, and works of criticism about children’s literature. We shall begin with a survey of the historical and literary development of literature written for children, and look at historical and cultural contexts for various bodily differences. Students will analyze and assess both acknowledged classics and contemporary works, and we shall pay particular attention to writers who in some way have developed or challenged the “normative” through their writing. Many children’s tales (this includes stories originally written for adults, but now directed at child audiences) centre around a disabled character deemed to be evil (the blind witch in Hansel and Gretel) or presented as pathetic (Cinderella’s step sisters), but few critics understand how completely tales designated as “for children” rely on a disabled character to complete the narrative or to sustain a moral at the end. For example, stories such as The Tin Soldier, The Little Mermaid, and Peter Pan perpetuate the notion of a normal body by demonizing or eliminating characters who possess not-so-normal bodies. By focusing on the social construction of embodiment, we shall, in this course, develop a foundational understanding of the conjoined fields of Disability Studies and Children’s Literature. In addition to theoretical and critical texts in disability studies, we will look at a number of children’s stories, films, and oral folktales in which disability plays a significant role. Our focus here will be on the ways that disability has served as prosthesis for representing social deviance, especially as such deviance is constructed within children’s worlds.

Assignments and Grading
The assignments in this course will include a short response paper (approximately 6 pp), worth 20%, a term paper (approximately 15 pp), worth 40%. Students will be asked to give a formal presentation during term, worth 20% of the course grade. Participation in class discussions will count as 20% towards the final grade.

Texts
Reading material may include the following books and films, as well as a course-pack of selected essays.

Picture Books and Children’s Films:
-Selections from: The Complete Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales
-Selections from: Charles Perrault’s Fairy Tales
-Dina the deaf dinosaur by C. Addabbo
-Rolling along with Goldilocks and the three bears by Cindy Meyers
-How Smudge Came by Gregory Nan
-Lost Thing by Shaun Tan
-Beauty and the Beast (1946)
-Escape to Witch Mountain (1975)
-Mulan (1998)
-Finding Nemo (2003)

Junior Reader and YA Books:
The Secret Garden by Francis Burnett
Stuck in Neutral by Terry Trueman
Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick
Stay away from Simon! by Carol Carrick
Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco Stork
The Order of the Poison Oak by Brett Hartinger
The Carnivorous Carnival: A Series of Unfortunate Events (Book 9) by Lemony Snicket
Small Steps by Louis Sachar
Kissing Doorknobs by Terry Spencer Hesser
Fruit by Brian Francis

Theory and Critical Texts (selected essays from the following):
Frank Arthur. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics
Lennard Davis. Enforcing Normalcy
Rosemarie Garland Thomson. Extraordinary Bodies
Peter Hollindale. Ideology and The Children’s Book
Herbert Kohl. Teaching the Unteachable: Experiment in Children’s Literature
Karin Lesnik-Oberstein. Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child
Robert McCruer. Crip Theory
David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis
Anne Pellowski. The World of Storytelling
Jacqueline Rose. The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction.
Maria Tatar. Hard Facts of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales
Diane Wolkstein. The Magic Orange Tree
Jane Yolen. Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie & Folklore in the Literature of Childhood
Jack Zipes. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales

PROPOSED GRADUATE SEMINARS
FALL AND WINTER 2011-12

26-591 /592 CREATIVE WRITING SEMINAR A and B
Seminars conducted by Dr. Karl Jirgens
Fall and Winter terms

GRADUATE CREATIVE WRITING SEMINAR:
The creative writing seminar is an advanced writing workshop focusing on process, development, and completion of new writing. This two-term course is designed to improve students' writing, editorial and publishing 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 preferred genre and in those genres which they would like to investigate. This course involves the theory and practice of advanced writing skills. Particular attention will be given to literary structure as it integrates with literary concept. Throughout the two semesters, students will be expected to prepare and present approximately 100 pages of high quality, polished (which means re-written, not first draft) prose, poetry, or mixed genre, to be submitted and critiqued regularly.

One portion of the class will serve as a manuscript workshop. Students should expect intensive reading and writing of each other’s works, and are expected to be prepared to discuss their colleagues’ writing applying a well-tempered critical approach. In addition weill be expected to read a series of texts by established authors as a means of learning about the techniques and stylistics of contemporary writing. A variety of texts by other authors will range from the traditional to the innovative, will be introduced by the instructor, but students will also be invited to bring in texts (in the broadest sense of that term) that are of interest to them. Workshop participation is fundamental to the course and students will develop skills in perception, pattern recognition, critical reading, and articulation of complex literary perspectives. These skills may enhance a range of career options in writing, publishing, editing and/or education.

Grades will be based on writing, oral and written abilities to critique, class participation, and formal presentations.

Assignments and Grading
On a rotating basis, students will regularly submit writing packages of their own work (max. 25 pp. double-spaced) for workshop review. Students will also be responsible for preparing thoughtful, detailed, and insightful written critiques of each others’ work. Ancillary assignments will also be required. In addition, students will be required to present two seminars.

Short Assignments: 20%
In addition to creative assignments, students will submit 5 short literary reviews.

Workshop and Written Contributions: 10%
Students are expected to participate in the weekly workshops actively, and must also present thoroughly articulated and critically useful single page response papers providing feedback to their fellow students each week (plus duplicate to the instructor).

Seminars: 20%
Students will contribute two 30-45 minute Seminars on contemporary literary texts.
The parameters of these Seminars will be arranged with student interests in mind.

Writing Portfolio: 40%
In addition to creative exercises assigned by the instructor, students will be required to submit a compilation of writing by the end of each semester of approximately 50 pages of text (double-spaced/per semester).

Class Project: 10%
There will be a group class-project at the end of each semester. Student will be expected to participate by organizing and presenting their works in a public forum, either through a publication of their own design, and/or a public presentation of their writing which could take a variety of forms including a live reading at a public venue, or a presentation of their works in some electronic or digital format (e.g.; radio, web-site, etc).

Required Texts
Students are supplied a list of texts in a course-pack to read as part of their course-work. These texts will be divided in two separate categories. One set will feature critical and theoretical perspectives on contemporary writing. The second set will feature examples of contemporary writing. These texts will provide the subject matter for the literary reviews expected in the course. In addition, text books will be required and may include but will not be limited to the following:
Primary Texts:
Henderson, Eric & Geoff Hancock. Short Fictions & Critical Contexts. (Oxford, 2010.)
Lodge, David. The Art of Fiction. (Penguin, 1992.)
Plus, Course Pack with assorted texts covering a range of essays and genres.

Secondary Texts:
Baldick, Chris. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. (Oxford, 1990.)

Prerequisites
Admission by portfolio submitted together with application to the department.
See Portfolio Submission link at the Department website, uwindsor.ca/english