Graduate Course Listing

The Colloquium will bring together all students in the program with faculty, visiting scholars and experts (e.g., archivists, librarians, printers, publishers, editors, booksellers, book designers, researchers in various aspects of theories of publics) for an exploration of relevant historical, theoretical and practical issues. The Colloquium will be offered in fall semester.

Topics include research methods and resources; the nature and requirements of a research project; the presentation of the results of research in public forums; career development, academic and non-academic. At the end of the year, students will publicly present a paper; in most cases this will be a proposal for their Thesis or Major Research Paper or Internship. The Seminar will be offered in winter semester.

Explores philosophies and theories of publics through political, affective, and radical public texts. We will focus on concepts of publics in multiple historical contexts in order to put pressure on our ideas of what publics have been, what they are, and what they can be in the future.

This course will critically explore selected theoretical, empirical, and creative constructions, contestations and celebrations of Canadian culture(s). Course content ranges from the national to the local, examining cultural communities and identities, intellectual traditions, cultural policies, museums and galleries, and cultural expression in film, theatre and literature.

Cross-listed: CSID-5202H, CAST-6102H

What happens to the study of the materiality of texts when a screen replaces the paper or parchment, and the stability of the written or printed signs is no longer guaranteed? Topics include: paratexts and metadata, archival theory, the Digital Humanities, hypertexts, technology, and the book as fetish.

This course will explore practical and theoretical conflicts between public violence and its cultural artifacts, including literature, film, murals, sculpture and parades. Our focus will be on twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts, images and public displays from Ireland, usually relating to the Irish Republican Army. We will question why modern cultural formations and political structures condemn violence even as they rely on it; and we will ask what place public violence has in a modern culture defined by its faith in the possibility of reasoning and debating all conflicts away. (Excludes CUST-4512H.)

Cross-listed: CUST-5315H

This course explores the complex relationship between grief, creativity, and public protest. Through a combination of literary and theoretical texts and public art installations, we will examine how grief functions as both a personal and political act. What role do public memorials, protests, and cultural practices of mourning play in challenging state-sanctioned narratives of loss, erasure, and violence?

Approximately 50 pages, modeled on a scholarly journal article. It is supervised and assessed by a member of the English graduate faculty. The grade will be assigned by the supervisor and a second reader from the English graduate faculty.

This course examines theories of subjectivity that have informed work in cultural studies, media studies, and related disciplines. What is the relation between the desiring function of subjectivity and the forces of construction and production variously attributed to power, discourse, or society? How do we conceive of the limits of determination and of the possibility of freedom and agency?

Popular music started to attract scholarly attention in the 1940s. Most of that attention was negative. Since then, however, a vast amount has been written about the meaning, uses, perils, and possibilities of popular music. Philosophers, musicologists, ethnographers, anthropologists, sociologists, cultural theorists, and literary scholars have all weighed in. In this course we will consider (a selection of) their contributions to our understanding of popular music and its relationship to commodification, mass culture, political agency, technology, subcultural formations, memory and a range of other topics.

This course enables students to pursue topics of particular interest which are not presented in existing courses. It allows concentrated, integrated study on a topic or problem that is specifically relevant to a student's approved program. It enables the student and instructor the opportunity to explore shared interests.

Courses may be offered in a variety of areas as a way of introducing students to new subject matter, research techniques or methodologies. After one year, these courses will be reviewed for inclusion in the regular program curriculum.