2025 Summer Courses

Graduate English summer courses are offered only during the F-Term, May-June.

Important Dates for Summer 2025

• ACORN enrolment for Summer F-Term courses opens: April 1
• 2025 Summer F-Term classes begin: May 5
• School of Graduate Studies final date to enrol in F-Term courses: May 12
• Victoria Day (no classes): Monday, May 19
• Final date to drop Summer F-Term courses without academic penalty: June 2

Please Note

• There is no ACORN waitlist for summer courses; summer enrolment is on a first-come, first-served basis
• Room JHB 718 is in the Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George Street, on the 7th floor
• Summer Course Timetable, scheduled times, delivery method, descriptions, reading lists, and/or locations may be subject to change

ENG5204HF  

Early Modern Romance

Walkden, A.    

Term: SUMMER F-TERM (May - June 2025)
Date/Time: Monday and Wednesday 11:00 - 1:00 | First class May 5 | No class Victoria Day, May 19
Location: Room JHB 718 (Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George Street)
Delivery: In-Person

Course Description:

The narrative form known as romance was both old and new for sixteenth-century readers. Stories of knight errantry, supernatural marvels, and sexual temptations were familiar from the medieval chivalric tradition, while the vernacular publication of the Greek romances, especially Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, had introduced new practices of ethnographical and suspenseful reading. Our seminar investigates how early modern English writers, responding both to the long and diverse histories of romance and to its more recent reconfiguring of readerly tastes, worked their own transformations on this most self-conscious and persistently popular of literary forms. Our purpose in this course will be twofold: to articulate the implicit narrative theories informing works that are famously dilatory, digressive, and apparently capable of infinite expansion; and to consider romance’s affinity with other modes and genres, epic and lyric, but also the period’s experiments with romance drama, its engagements with ethnographic and natural history, and its anticipations of contemporary fanfiction. As we explore these affinities, we will also be considering how the alternative environments and epistemologies of early modern romance work to frame the religious and racialized geographies of the Mediterranean basin, the African continent, the British islands, and the Atlantic world.

Course Reading List:

Heliodorus’s Aethiopica; Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe; Sidney’s Old Arcadia and selections from The New Arcadia; Spenser’s Faerie Queene, book 3 and selections from books 2 and 4; John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess; Mary Wroth’s Urania. Critical and conceptual readings by Walter Benjamin, Terence Cave, Simone Chess, Jeff Dolven, Kim F. Hall, Patricia Parker, Melissa Sanchez, Gordon Teskey, and others

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements

• Informal Discussion Posts - 15%
• Participation, including a short presentation -20%
• Experimental Essay - 20%
• Final Essay (12-15 pages) - 45%

ENG5503HF   

James Joyce: Modernism, Modernity, Mythology 

Leonard, G.        

Term: SUMMER F-TERM (May - June 2025)
Date/Time: Tuesday and Thursday 2:00 - 5:00 | First class May 6 
Location: Room JHB 718 (Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George Street)
Delivery: In-Person

Course Description:

Joyce's biographer, Richard Ellmann, once remarked "we are still learning to be Joyce's contemporaries." It's an observation Joyce might well have been pleased to hear if we judge from this note he sent to his publisher in an effort to get his first work, Dubliners, published: "I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass." A character in Ulysses remarks, "Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance." In a similar manner, Joyce's fiction has been the happy hunting ground of literary critics and theorists seeking to maintain their balance. No literary theory of the past 50 years has failed to touch down at some point on Joyce's work. As a result it is sometimes difficult to approach the fiction as something other than a paradigm of any number of methodologies. This seminar will not entirely avoid that fate, and student seminar presentations/discussions will be designed to interrogate the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches, and yet our primary question will be what did Joyce think he was doing in writing these stories and novels, and what does he appear to have accomplished in doing so? Orienting one's reading of a text through authorial intention has always been a problematic approach to say the least, and yet Joyce went out of his way, time and time again, to present himself as someone on a mission, someone who must not be stopped unless we seek "to retard the course of civilization." His character Stephen Dedalus is no less messianic: "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." Youthful hubris? Probably. But, given what Joyce accomplished, also pretty much on the mark. Accordingly, while we will encounter and review all the major approaches in this seminar, we will also maintain an interest throughout in "the reality of experience" Stephen set out to encounter, especially as it pertains to the formation of an aesthetic that would become modernism -- an aesthetic forged, in large part, in the "smithy" of what we now call modernity. More specifically, this "smithy" included the rise of advertising and commodity culture, the birth of a new Art form (cinema), and the corresponding explosion of form and content in futurism, dadaism surrealism, and impressionism. 

Course Reading List:

I.    MODERNITY 
Berman, Marshall. All that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity. 1987. 
Charney, Leo. Cinema and the invention of modern life. 
Felski, Rita. The gender of modernity 
Fornäs, Johan. Consuming media: communication, shopping and everyday life. 2007. 
Gillespie, Michael Allen. The theological origins of modernity. 
Jameson, Fredric. A singular modernity: essay on the ontology of the present, 2002. 
Leonard, Garry. “He's Got Bette Davis Eyes: James Joyce and Melodrama,” 
Joyce studies annual (Fordham University Press), 2008-01, Vol. 2008.
------------------.  "Our Father Who Art Not in Heaven”: Joyce's Pathetic Phallacy and Capitalist discourse in ‘Wandering Rocks’,” Joyce studies annual (Fordham University Press), 2023-24, Vol. 2023.
------------------.  “Hystericising Modernism: Modernity in Joyce,” Cultural Studies of James Joyce, 2003, Vol.15 (15), p.167-188
Misa, Thomas J. Modernity and Technology. 
Smart, Barry. Facing modernity: ambivalence, reflexivity and morality, 1999 

II.    THE FICTION OF JAMES JOYCE 
Attridge, Derek. The Cambridge companion to James Joyce. 
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959) 
Herr, Cheryl. Joyce's Anatomy of Culture 
Joyce, Stanislaus. My Brother's Keeper: James Joyce's Early Years 
Kershner, R.B. Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder 
Leonard, Garry. Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce. 
------------------. Reading Dubliners again: a Lacanian perspective 
North, Michael. Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern 

III.    MODERNISM: 
Armstrong, Tim. Modernism: a cultural history 
Caws, Mary Ann. Manifesto: a century of isms 
Caughie, Pamela L. Disciplining Modernism.
Kolocoroni, Vassiliki. Modernism: an anthology of sources and documents 
Levenson, Michael Harry. The Cambridge companion to modernism 
Leonard, Garry. “The City, Modernism, and Aesthetic Theory in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,"  Novel : a forum on fiction, 1995, Vol.29 (1), p.79-99.
------------------. “Soul Survivor: Stephen Dedalus as the Priest of the Eternal Imagination,” Joyce studies annual (Fordham University Press), 2015-01, p.3-27.
Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: a literary guide 
Stasi, Paul. “The Forms of Irish Modernism,” Modern fiction studies, 2022-01, Vol.68 (1), p.64-87.

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:

• Participation (6 weekly position papers, 500 words each) - 20%
• Twenty-Minute Presentations, followed by student-led discussion - 20%
• Final essay (20 pages, approximately) - 60%

ENG9101HF  (Cancelled April 2024)    

Old and New Materialisms 

Blake, L.

ENG9102HF 

Cripping Theatrical Representation

K. Williams

Term: SUMMER F-TERM (May - June 2025)
Date/Time: Monday and Wednesday 5:00 - 7:00 | First class May 5 | No class Victoria Day, May 19
Location: Room JHB 718 (Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George Street)
Delivery: Hybrid: most classes will meet entirely in person; some classes will meet entirely online (dates TBD) 

Course Description:

This course brings together disability theory and dramatic literature to investigate embodied constraint in the theatrical domain. Working with concepts of disability drawn from crip theory, we will consider the rubrics of access, mobility, capacity, and design within the physical environment of the theater, paying special attention to the construction of disability in dramatic representation. Theatrical practice transforms material limitation—from actor’s body to stage space to prop closet—into formal innovation. This course asks how theatrical affordances might shape our understanding of disability and uses theatrical renderings of disabling environments—from the figure of wounded withdrawal in Greek drama, to the early modern theater’s stark delineation of the matter of embodied constraint, to contemporary dramas of interdependence and care—to consider mimetic and prosthetic possibility in dramatic texts.

Course Reading List:

Readings from the course reflect recent work in crip theory/critical disability studies by Michael Davidson, Sara Hendren, Alison Kafer, Robert McRuer, Carrie Sandahl, Sami Schalk, Tobin Siebers, LaMarr Jurelle Bruce, and others. Dramatic and performance texts likely include William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus; Samuel Beckett, Endgame; Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie; Mike Lew, Teenage Dick; Kaite O’Reilly, peeling; Martina Majok, Cost of Living; Annie Baker, Infinite Life, Jjjjjerome Ellis, Aster of Ceremonies.

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements: 

• Perfect attendance and engaged participation in seminar discussions - 20%
• Short responses - 30%
• Final research paper (c. 6,000 words) - 50%