2026 Summer Courses

Summer Course Timetable, scheduled times, delivery method, descriptions, reading lists, and/or locations may be subject to change.

Important Dates for Summer 2025

• TBA

ENG1101H 

Maternal Responsibility, Sexual Trauma, and the Fiction of Alice Munro

Morgenstern, N.  

Term: TBA
Date/Time: TBA
Location: TBA
Delivery: TBA

Course Description:

On July 7, 2023 Andrea Robin Skinner published an article in The Toronto Star under the following heading: “My stepfather sexually abused me when I was a child. My mother, Alice Munro, chose to stay with him.” Skinner’s disclosure prompted a range of responses from Munro readers and scholars from those who declared that they would never read Munro again, to those who acknowledged that their relationship to Munro’s writing was substantially altered, to those who asked for time and space for reflection, to those who pointed out a double standard at work yet again.  As scholarly readers, what are we to make of a given writer’s biography and our shifting sense of the complexity of any individual life? Is this a question that we can answer theoretically, and how do we want to answer this question now? Munro has been a writer of great interest to feminist theorists and also to those concerned with questions of affect, narrative, and ethics. What, if anything, has now shifted?  In this course, we will read a selection of Munro’s fiction that spans her career. We will also read works by feminist and psychoanalytic theorists and by critics of Munro. How does Munro ask us to think about mothers, about the vulnerability of children, about gendered and sexual violence? What kind of “thinking” might her stories be said to do?   While the course will be focussed on close textual interpretation and the specificity of Munro’s oeuvre, I hope it will also provide more generally a productive space for reflection and dialogue. 

Course Reading List:

Selected stories by Alice Munro (TBD)

Other readings may include:

• Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”
• Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (selections)
• Ann Cvetkovitch, An Archive of Feelings (selections)
• J. Roger Kurtz, Trauma and Literature, Cambridge Critical Concepts (selections)
• Barbara Johnson, “Using People: Kant with Winnicott”
• Derek Attridge, “Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other”
• Dorothy Hale, The Novel and the New Ethics (selections)
• Alison Stone, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity (selections)
• Magdalene Redekop, Mothers and Other Clowns (selections)
• Amelia DeFalco and Lorraine York, Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements

• Seminar presentation - 30%
• Paper proposal - 10%
• Final Essay - 40%
• Class Participation - 20%

ENG5503H 

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 | Last Class June 12
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%

ENG6100H 

Eco-narratology

Newman, D.

Term: TBA
Date/Time: TBA
Location: TBA
Delivery: TBA

Course Description:

Eco-narratology is the application of narratological methods and concepts to ecocriticism. It attends to how narrative techniques and genres relate to anthropocentrism and obfuscates the impacts of human activity on the environment; it also explores the ways in which narrative texts can innovate and experiment to give voice (so to speak) to non-human organisms and natural systems. This course would serve as an exploration of modern and contemporary narrative literature's relationships with the animals, plants and ecosystems while also providing students with an introduction to the concepts and methods of narrative theory.

Course Reading List:

Fiction and narrative nonfiction by authors such as Claire-Louise Bennett, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Jim Crace, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas King, Ben Lerner, Daniel Mason, Jenny Offill, Samantha Schweblin, Jeff VanderMeer, Kurt Vonnegut, and Charles Yu.
Econarratological texts and related theory by scholars including Hannes Bergthaller, Astrid Bracke, Marco Caracciolo, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Miyase Christensen, Corinne Donly, Amitav Ghosh, David Herman, Erin James, Eric Morel, Timothy Morton, Rob Nixon and David Rodriguez.  Some scientific literature from ecology and environmental sciences.

Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements

• Participation - 20%
• Position paper - 25%
• Essay proposal - 20%
• Essay - 35%    

ENG9101H  (Cancelled April 2025)    

Old and New Materialisms 

Blake, L.