Graduate Courses 2024-2025
ENGL 4313/5973 Adapting L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables
Instructor: Laura Robinson
Course description:
Since its publication in 1908, L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables has been reinterpreted numerous times in various media, starting with the American silent film in 1919 and most recently with several graphic novels around 2022 that racialize and reposition Anne, not to mention the controversial Netflix reboot, Anne with an E that debuted in 2017 and shored up a new fan base. Anne has also been translated (and reinterpreted) and adapted in different forms all over the world. Exploring musicals, theatre, film, television, as well as novel adaptations and allusions, and with reference to theories of adaptation, such as those by Linda Hutcheon, this course will trace the appearance of Anne on the literary scene and unpack why Anne’s story is consistently retold. The course will also explore issues of copyright, tourism, and economic interests, as well as Anne as a figure of girlhood and gender conflict in an age of rapidly-changing mores. Notably, 30 November 2024 is L.M. Montgomery’s 150th birthday with multiple celebrations, exhibits, and events planned in PEI, Canada, and around the world. Students will have the opportunity to potentially participate in and discuss these in real time.
English 4323/5023 The Many Keys of the Wild: the Inevitability of the Wild and Practical Instructions for How to Attend to It
Instructor: Lance La Rocque
Course description:
This course will focus on the poetry of American poet Gary Snyder, and Canadian Poets Nelson Ball, and Elena Johnson. We will explore their works as formal attempts to encounter what Jane Bennett calls “Vibrant Matter,” the active agency of non-human actors. Bennett’s text attempts to develop a language attuned to worlds outside and alongside the human. She writes that her “hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption” (ix). Enlarging upon this context, we will also look at Charles Olson’s essay “Projective Verse,” which, long before the rise of affect theory, argued for the energy of things and the removal of “the lyrical interference of the ego” (1950). The course will also compare the styles of these thing-poets with a selection of more narrative-style poetry to flesh out the difference of philosophy and effect. We will explore how Snyder, Ball, and Johnson offer unique methods to encounter otherness. Otherness in their poetry is connected to nature. But each poet complicates any civilised/wild binary, suggesting that the wild might irrupt in any environment, even the most concrete, traffic-ridden, over-developed urban centres.
Engl 4033/5113 Malory’s Morte Darthur: Text(s) and Contexts
Instructor: Kevin Whetter
Course description:
In this combined Master’s-Honours seminar we will read Sir Thomas Malory’s prose Arthuriad, Le Morte Darthur (completed 1469-70). Malory wrote at the end of a pan-European Arthurian tradition that included oral stories as well as texts written in Latin and French, verse and prose. Equally as important as Malory’s literary contexts are the historical ones: Malory fought on both sides of the Wars of the Roses in the 1460s: his favourite topic is armed combat, both because Arthurian knights regularly fight each other or their enemies to win glory and also because Malory lived through and participated in some of the bloodiest battles fought in the British Isles. This seminar will situate our reading of Malory’s Morte against such historical contexts as: warfare and chivalry; kingship; religion; and the role of women in chivalric culture, including Malory’s highly sympathetic portraits of the adulterous queens Isode and Gwenyvere.
ENGL4233/5813 The American Gothic
Instructor: Lisa Narbeshuber
Course description:
In this seminar, we will begin by distinguishing British from American gothic and consider the evolution of American gothic from the late nineteenth century to the twentieth century and beyond. We will cover a wide variety of forms and genres--novels, paintings, film, poetry, essays, and short stories. Authors covered will include Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, Truman Capote, Alfred Hitchcock, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, and William Gay. The course will explore how this popular genre, wedding terror and pleasure, transgresses rational thought, sexual normalcy, the nuclear family, and racial stereotypes. Focusing on those fringe elements of American society at the time and today, gothic authors—often marginalized figures in their own right—highlight the unspeakable, challenging the moral fiber of modern American culture and its traditions.