SELECTED COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
ENGL 110: What can Literature do?: 21st Century Narratives and Counternarratives
Scientists use data—gathered through experimentation, for example, or measurement—to discover and interpret the world around them. What do literary scholars use? What kind of “data” is a graphic narrative, a novel, or a poem? And what can the study of literature tell us about how we interpret the world we live in? In particular, what might we learn from literature that we can’t learn by other means?
The texts on this course include local and global stories written in our current century. They will show us contemporary lives lived in different corners of the world—for example, a Pakistani university student in New York, an Ojibwe hockey player in Ontario. These are personal stories about public events, and they are the stories that have generally been less discovered, measured, or recorded. They reveal the sometimes invisible, even erased, narratives and lives that lurk behind the headlines or history books. They invite us to ask, who gets to speak and who may be silenced? What kind of knowledge does literature give us access to—and what should we do with that knowledge?
Possible texts include The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese, Injun by Jordan Abel.
ENGL 474: Poetry in Crisis or “The Hatred of Poetry”
This course welcomes poetry lovers, poetry haters, or those ambivalent poetry readers looking to graduate with more experience in the genre. We will consider how poems respond to crisis—public crises (eg. terrorism, war) and personal ones (e.g. sexual violence)—as we also consider whether the genre is, as some warn, itself “in crisis.” Our goal will be to consider poetry’s role in the 21st century and we will do this through close readings of select poems as well as through discussions of films, novels, and essays. Is poetry dead, as critics seem perpetually to declare? Where does it lurk, on what occasions does it emerge, and how does it function in our social and political landscapes? In the first year of Donald Trump’s U.S. presidency (a year in which Trump’s speeches have been called “inadvertent poetry” and the filmmaker Ethan Cohen has publically campaigned to be the poet laureate), is poetry an urgent antidote to a changing public discourse – or is it simply beside the point?