Summer 2023 Course Descriptions & Timetable

*Please note:

• Summer Course Timetable, scheduled times, delivery method, descriptions, reading lists, and/or locations are TBA and are subject to change.
• Department of English Graduate Course Enrolment via ACORN for Summer F courses opens on 3 April 2023. 
• Students can start enrolling in summer graduate English courses through ACORN on Monday morning starting at 6am EDT. 
• There isn't an ACORN waitlist for summer courses. Summer enrolment is on a first-come, first-served basis.
• May 22 Victoria Day - no classes on the Holiday

ENG1551HF
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales 
K. Gaston

Course Description

This course explores Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the context of several different critical approaches, such as historicism, formalism, intertextuality, and textural criticism.  We read The Canterbury Tales in their entirety, examining some of the interpretive issues with which recent Chaucer criticism has been most concerned, and considering relevant ancient and medieval sources and analogues.

Course Reading List

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales. Readings will also include secondary articles and essays as well as selected sources for Chaucer's poetry. (All reading will be in Middle English or Modern English translation).

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements

• Midterm Paper 20%

• Final Paper Proposal 5%

• Final Paper 45%

• Presentation 10%

• Class Participation 20%

**Previous work in Middle English (or permission of the instructor) is a pre-requisite for this class.**

Scheduling

Term: F-TERM (Summer Monday, May 8, 2023 to Monday, June 19, 2023. NB: Monday, May 22 is Victoria Day Holiday, and University is closed)

Date/Time: Mondays & Wednesdays, May 8, 10, 15, 17, 24, 29, 31, June 5, 7, 12, 14, 19.  Two-hour class from 10:00 am to 12:00 noon.   

Location: JHB 718 (Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George Street, 7th Floor)

Delivery: In-Person 

ENG5963HF CANCELLED
James Joyce: Modernism, Modernity, Mythology
G. Leonard

ENG6188HF
Land, Myth and Translation in a Time of Crisis
A. Most

Course Description

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer re-tells the Turtle Island and Garden of Eden creation stories, and imagines the fateful conversation that ensued when the two met. In this course, students will engage with Genesis 1-3 through the lens of the conversation Kimmerer proposes, asking how a reparative reading of this foundational cultural narrative might offer a strategy for meeting environmental crisis. By comparing different English versions of the Bible, students will explore how translation progressively stripped the language of Genesis 1-3 of its animacy and the story of its deep connection to land, enabling the myth to become a justification for colonization and environmental degradation. Then, utilizing apocryphal stories, Near Eastern mythology, ancient and medieval commentary from the Jewish and Christian traditions as well as ecocritical and translation theory, we will listen for echoes of an animate land-based cosmology present within the Biblical text. The course will culminate in an off-site workshop, where students will enact “re-story-ation,” drawing the re-animated biblical myth into conversation with the land itself.

Experiential Course Components: This is an experiential course which begins with six conventional class sessions on or near campus in May. Students will then have 10 days to work on material related to their final projects. On June 11, we will head to Bela Farm in Hillsburgh, ON for three nights and four days, returning in the afternoon on June 14. At the farm, students will engage in a variety of activities equivalent to six class sessions and culminating in a final presentation. These include: a fireside storytelling experience with a master storyteller, a full-day symposium with major scholars in the field of myth and translation, and two hands-on workshops (visual art and storytelling) related to course material.  Bela Farm is a beautiful 100-acre centre for creative responses to global environmental crisis located about an hour northwest of Toronto in Hillsburgh, ON. The farm has toilet and shower facilities, an indoor / outdoor kitchen (with fridge and running water) designed for immersive educational retreats, and a variety of indoor/outdoor classroom spaces. During our time at the farm, students will study, camp and cook meals together. Details of transportation, lodging and meals will be organized during the first week of class.

Course Reading List

Readings will include texts such as:
Martin Shaw, Scatterlings and Smoke Hole (selections)
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement
Richard Powers, “A Little More Than Kin,” Emergence Oct 2021
Genesis 1-3 (in three translations: KJV, JPS, and Everett Fox)
Ancient Near Eastern Myths; Gilgamesh, Inanna, Tiamat (translations TBD)
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (selected essays)
Thomas King, The Truth About Stories
Leanne Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back (selected essays)
Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (selections)
Mary Jane Rubenstein, Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (selected chapters)
Rachel Havrelock, “The Mother of Life and the Infertility of Eden,” in Eve: The Unbearable Flaming Fire.  and “Home at Last: The Local Domain and Female Power,” in The Bible and Feminism: Remapping the Field.  
Stephen Greenblatt, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve (Chapters 1-3)

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements

• Weekly Council Contributions  20%

• Class Participation 20%

• Final Project Written Component 40%

• Final Project Presentation Component 20%

Scheduling

Term: F-TERM (Summer May 2023 to June 2023) 

Date/Time: 

• Six two-hour class meetings, scheduled for Spadina House Gardens Pavillion on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10:00 am to 12:00 noon on May 16, 18, 23, 25, 30, June 1 all (6 x 2 hours in total). 

At Bela Farm:

• One three-hour meeting at Bela Farm after arrival on the afternoon on Sunday, June 11 (from 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm);

• one three-hour morning meeting on June 12 (from 9:00 am to 12:00 noon); 

• one three-hour afternoon meeting on June 12 (from 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm);

• one three-hour morning meeting on June 13 ( from 9:00 am to 12:00 noon),

• one three-hour afternoon meeting on June 13 (from 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm),

• and finally one three-hour morning meeting on June 14 (from 9:00 am to 12:00 noon).

Total of 6 two-hour classes and Spadina House Gardens Pavillion Tuesday and 6 three-hour classes for Bela Farm for a total of 12 class meetings.   

Location: Spadina House Gardens* Pavillion (back-up JHB 718) and Bela Farm, addresses TBA
Delivery: In-Person

ENG6519HF CANCELLED
Postcolonial Theory and the World Literature Debates
A. F. Raza Kolb

ENG6531HF
Trees
A. Ackerman

Course Description

Trees, writes botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, "are our teachers." This course looks at what trees teach in multiple ways. In creation myths and tales of metamorphosis of humans into trees, in meditations on snowy woods, in woodcarving, in a cozy fire, in paper itself, trees are sites of nature-culture. "[T]heir merely being there," John Ashbery archly suggests, "Means something." This course investigates the meaning of trees in diverse genres and traditions as well by walking through streets and parks, exploring trees in the environment we share. Most of the class will take place outside. The seminar will introduce students not only to eco-criticism, theories of wilderness and colonialism, but also to botany and the Wood-Wide-Web or "dendrocommunication." Stories of trees speak of settler-indigenous relations and of global warming. German forester Peter Wohlleben suggests that trees communicate "daily dramas and moving love stories" among themselves. Readings will range from Gilgamesh and Ovid's Metamorphoses to children's literature to modern poetry to two major novels of the past decade, Annie Proulx's Barkskins and Richard Powers's Overstory, which respond to climate change via tales of deforestation, elevating trees over human characters.

Course Reading List

Dr. Seuss, "The Lorax"; Shel Silverstein, "The Giving Tree"; Emily Dickinson, "Four Trees"; John Ashbery, "Some Trees"; Joyce Kilmer, "Trees"; Blake, "A Poison Tree"; DH Lawrence, "Letter from Town: The Almond Tree," "Trees in the Garden," WC Williams, "Winter Trees"; "The Spirit in the Tree: Story from the Zulu tribe of South Africa"; Philip Larkin, "The Trees," Sylvia Plath, "Winter Trees"; Frost, "Birches," "The Sound of the Trees"; Aldo Leopold, "Sand County Almanac"; Annie Proulx, Barkskins; Richard Powers, The Overstory; Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants; Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What they Feel, How they Communicate-Discoveries from a Secret World; Ralph H. Lutts, The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science and Sentiment; Timothy Leduc, A Canadian Climate of Mind: Passages from Fur to Energy and Beyond; William Cronon, ed. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature; Eduardo Kohn, "How Forests Think": Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human; Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements

• Informed class participation (20%)

• Tree Diary (30%)

• Creative or Research Presentations (20%)

• Final project (30%)

Scheduling

Term: F-TERM (Summer May 2023 to June 2023)
Date/Time: Tuesday and Thursdays, May 9, 11, 16, 18, 23, 25, 30, June 1, 6, 8, 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm (2 hours); Thursday, June 15, from 10:00 am to 12:00 noon (2 hours for final presentations) AND from 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm (3 hours for final presentations). 
Location: St. George Campus grounds (exact locations TBA); (Rm. JHB 718 as Backup room)
Delivery: In-Person