Course Title: Performance Generating Systems
Course Code: DRE347H5F
Instructor: Pil Hansen
Course Description: Performance generating systems are rule- or task-based dramaturgies that systematically set in motion a process of theatre or dance creation on stage. The resulting performance is not generated from the performers’ impulses, as in improvisation, but rather from the ways in which a system affects the performers’ perceptions and interactions. The performance does also not realize a script or repeat a score; instead of setting and rehearsing a compositional order, the systems challenge performers to respond to specific tasks in the moment and within constraints. The dramaturgical work with these systems necessitates a sharp shift in orientation from compositional possibilities and the experiences they offer audience members to the question of which kinds of creative interaction a system attracts.
Over six weeks, we will examine four-six performance generating systems. Working through them one by one, we will watch archival recordings, read theory and discussions of practice that can help us examine them, and analyze how these systems work. Aiming to build embodied knowledge onto this academic and dramaturgical foundation, we will test the systems in accessible and practical workshops led by the following experienced artists: actor Donna Goodhand (Stratford, Civilized Theatre, films), choreographer Ame Henderson (Public Recordings, Small Wooden Shoe), and dramaturg Pil Hansen (Vertical City, Kaeja d’Dance). Finally, students will be tasked to develop simple performance generating systems of their own. Practical acting, devising, or movement training is not required, but we will make use of your creative curiosity and/or skills.
Required Reading: NA
First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Examples of Performance Generating Systems will be drawn from the repertoires of the following companies: Public Recordings (ON), Theatre Replacement (BC), Forced Entertainment (UK), Civilized Theatre (ON), Kaeja d’Dance (ON), Deborah Hay (US), The Forsythe Company (GE), or Leaky Heaven Performance Society (BC).
Method of Instruction: Short introductions, archival screenings, discussion, group analysis, physical workshops, supervised group creation, in-class feedback.
Method of Evaluation: Drawn/written performance recipe, in-class creation and presentation, written report or analysis, and participation.
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Course Title: Effective Writing
Course Code: ENG100H5Y - L0101
Instructor: Cary DiPietro
Course Description: In this course, you will develop skills and strategies for writing effectively in university, including practice in the different modes of writing (narrative, description, exposition, argument) and in the stages of writing process (prewriting, drafting, revising, editing). The premise of this course, however, is that writing is always a contextual activity: mastery of basic written language and writing process will not guarantee that you will be an effective writer in every situation. Equal emphasis will therefore be given to situating writing process in relation to such activities as reading critically, analyzing a variety of written and non-written texts, self-directing inquiry, developing strategies for conducting research, and writing according to discipline-specific genres and conventions.
Required Reading: Jack Finnbogason and Al Valleau, A Canadian Writer’s Guide, Fourth Edition. Nelson Education, 2011. (ISBN 0-17-0650032-4)
First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Jack Finnbogason and Al Valleau, A Canadian Writer’s Guide, Fourth Edition. Nelson Education, 2011. (ISBN 0-17-0650032-4)
Method of Instruction: Lecture and peer group work.
Method of Evaluation: : In-class and peer-review exercises, five short essays, and final exam.
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Course Title: Effective Writing
Course Code: ENG100H5Y - L0201
Instructor: Andrew Lesk
Course Description: English 100 is designed to develop competence in writing expository and persuasive prose. It examines the principles of clear writing, and stresses the process of composition through numerous exercises. Frequent writing makes for better writing; students are encouraged to explore their own development as writers in all forms, but this course specifically will focus on academic writing. The course does not meet the needs of students primarily seeking to develop English language proficiency.
Required Reading: Writing Life (Van Rys et al) and What You See Is What You Write (Blank and Hume).
First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: TBA
Method of Instruction: Lecture, in-class workshops.
Method of Evaluation: Short Assignment 10%, Three Essays 20% each, Test 25%, Participation 5%
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Course Title: The Canadian Short Story
Course Code: ENG215H5S
Instructor: Daniela Janes
Course Description: This course examines the development of the short story in Canada from the nineteenth century to the present. We will explore the formal features of the short story and its critical contexts as we move through nearly two hundred years of Canadian short fiction. Readings will cover a range of styles and genres, including the detective tale, animal story, humorous sketch, local colour narrative, realist short story, First Nations orature, and the various formal experimentations of the twentieth century. Through our readings of canonical and non-canonical writers, we will chart the shifting themes and techniques of the short story form in Canada.
Required Reading: Readings will be drawn from two anthologies: Early Canadian Stories: Short Stories in English before World War I (ed. Misao Dean) and The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English (ed. Atwood and Weaver).
First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Moodie, Pickthall, Johnson (Dean).
Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion.
Method of Evaluation: in-class exercises (5%), two tests (50%), essay (35%), informed participation (10%).
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Course Title: Children’s Literature
Course Code: ENG234H5F
Instructor: Siobhan O'Flynn
Course Description: The stories we hear as children form the basis for our evolving understanding of literature and most broadly, of human interrelationships. We will consider key aspects such as the classic themes of maturation and escape, the construction and performance of gender, the significance of animal protagonists, children’s & YA serial fiction, and the often didactic function of children’s literature. We will also attend to the importance of historical and cultural contexts and the presence of “adult” concerns filtered (or not) through the presumably more limited perspective of children’s fiction and poetry. !
This course will also touch on: fan-culture’s engagement with children’s and YA literature, entertainment conglomerates & the battle for IP (fans won); merchandizing, media and digital extensions; pedagogy and new literary canons, amongst other topics.
Required Reading (a selection from the following): C. Perrault, Fairy Tales (texts online); Selections from The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales; The Thousand and One Nights (various tales); L. Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; B. Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit; A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh; J.K Rowling, Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban; M.T. Anderson, Feed; Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games; iPad book adaptations TBA (demoed in class).
First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Perrault; Grimm, Carroll
Method of Instruction: Lecture & Discussion, Multi-media presentations
Method of Evaluation: short assignments, 1 long essay, active participation, exam.
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Course Title: Detective Fiction
Course Code: ENG236H5S
Instructor: Mark Crimmins
Course Description: After a close inspection of several seminal modern detective stories by Edgar Allan Poe and a rigorous examination of Doyle’s masterpiece, The Hound of the Baskervilles, we will turn our attention to a series of detective novels that reinvent or reanimate the detective genre: Hammett's timeless classic of hard-boiled fiction, set in Sam Spade's San Francisco; recently deceased Colombian master Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s experimental venture in the genre; Henning Mankell's Wallander stories in The Pyramid; and a marvelously creative postmodern detective tale by Mark Haddon, which also functions as a playful intertext to The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Required Reading:
Poe: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter”; Doyle: The Hound of the Baskervilles; Hammett: The Maltese Falcon; Marquez: Chronicle of a Death Foretold; Mankell: The Pyramid; Haddon: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Poe, Doyle, Hammett.
Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion.
Method of Evaluation: 2 Short Essays (20% each)+2 Tests (25% each)+participation (10%).
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Course Title: Science Fiction
Course Code: ENG237H5S
Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard
Course Description: This course explores speculative fiction that invents or extrapolates an inner or outer cosmology from the physical, life, social, and human sciences. Typical subjects include AI, alternative histories, cyberpunk, evolution, future and dying worlds, genetics, space/time travel, strange species, theories of everything, utopias, and dystopias.
Required Reading:
- Richard Matheson, I am Legend.
- Collins, The Hunger Games.
- Other novels and texts texts to be announced.
First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Matheson, I am Legend
Method of Instruction: Lecture; Discussion
Method of Evaluation: Essay, Test and Exam
Website: Portal
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Course Title: Critical Approaches to Literature
Course Code: ENG280H5F
Instructor: Siobhan O'Flynn
Course Description: Why? Why do we use critical approaches to literature? What are critical approaches to literature? What is their value? How do you know which literary approach to use? Is there a ‘right’ reading?
This course will introduce students to a number of the key critical essays on the function of literature and literary analysis. Course material will include formative, influential texts from a range of periods: classical Greece, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the Victorian, Modernist, and Postmodernist periods.
As summer courses are intense, each class will be structured with a lecture and discussion in the first half. In the latter half of the class, we will workshop ‘readings’ of pre-set texts. Students will be expected to have read the assigned material before each class.
Required Text: The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism, Second Edition.
First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Plato, Aristotle, Sidney
Method of Instruction: Lecture & Discussion, workshops
Method of Evaluation: short assignments, 1 long essay, active participation, exam.
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Course Title: Jane Austen and her Contemporaries
Course Code: ENG323H5F
Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard
Course Description: A study of selected novels (and fiction) by Austen and her contemporaries as Lewis, Radcliffe, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Edgeworth, Scott, and Shelley, in the context of the complex literary, social, and political relationships of that time.
Required Reading: (available at the UTM bookstore)
Austen, Northanger Abbey
Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Austen, Emma
Lewis, The Monk
Parsons, The Castle of Wolfenbach
(note the Austen novels are all broadview editions, with critical material in the appendixes that is an important part of the course).
First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Lewis, The Monk; Austen, Northanger Abbey
Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion
Method of Evaluation: Essay, Test and Exam
WEBSITE: Portal
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Course Title: Contemporary British Fiction
Course Code: ENG329H5S
Instructor: Mark Crimmins
Course Description: In this course we will examine four major works of Contemporary British Fiction and a number of small, experimental texts that will be handed out at class. We will start with Anthony Burgess’s dystopian masterpiece, A Clockwork Orange, then move on to Julian Barnes’s brilliantly postmodern novel, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters. Our post-millennial readings will include Zadie Smith’s second novel, The Autograph Man, and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. Interspersed with these readings will be shorter experimental fictions that will be handed out at class.
Required Reading: Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange; Julian Barnes: A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters; Zadie Smith: The Autograph Man; Ian McEwan: On Chesil Beach.
First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Burgess, Barnes, McEwan.
Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion
Method of Evaluation: 2 short papers (20% each)+2 tests (25% each)+participation (10%).
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Course Title: Topics in Canadian Literature: Canadian Literature and the Great War
Course Code: ENG358H5S
Instructor: Daniela Janes
Course Description: As we approach the centenary of the start of the First World War, this seminar will give students the opportunity to take stock of how the war is represented in Canadian literature, including poetry, fiction and drama. The course will begin with historical readings about the war to ensure that all class members are approaching the course with a shared body of knowledge, and will supplement this historical context with theoretical readings on war writing, trauma, and memory. Some of the issues that we will encounter this term include the role of the war in the Canadian cultural imagination, its relationship to nation building and articulations of national identity, the tensions between memory and forgetting (especially as represented in the figure of the shell-shocked soldier), the home front and gendered experiences of war, and the consequences of mythologizing or demystifying war. This course will provide a timely and topical opportunity for students to engage with the literary legacy of the Great War and craft their own interpretations of these seminal texts.
Required Reading: Ranging across genres and years, our texts will include canonical and non-canonical poetry by authors including John McCrae, Robert Service, Helena Coleman, Frank Prewett, and F.G. Scott; drama, including John Gray and Eric Peterson’s Billy Bishop Goes to War and David French’s Soldier’s Heart; and novels including L.M. Montgomery’s Rilla of Ingleside, Timothy Findley’s The Wars, Jane Urquhart’s The Stone Carvers, and Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road.
First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: poetry by McCrae, Service, Coleman (course reader).
Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion.
Method of Evaluation: two tests (40%); response paper (15%); essay (35%); informed participation (10%)
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Course Title: Contemporary American Fiction
Course Code: ENG365H5Y
Instructor: Ira Wells
Course Description: An eleven-year-old pop-music megastar plays to arenas packed with screaming girls and discovers that he is a disposable artistic commodity. A “disastrously overweight” Dominican-American ghetto nerd worries that he is cursed and unlovable. A 53-year-old cancer patient considers suicide because he fears burdening his family and friends. A man and a woman prefer to divulge their most intimate details via text message, even while sitting directly across the table: “Nvr met my dad. Dyd b4 I ws brn.” A father and son struggle to evade cannibals and the seductions of suicide in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. A fourth-year English major finds herself falling in love at the exact moment when the literary theory she’s reading seems to be deconstructing the very idea of love.
This class is about contemporary America and the stories it tells itself. We’ll investigate some of the signature themes, anxieties, and aesthetic preoccupations of recent American fiction. Alongside close readings of some of the most significant and provocative texts of our time, we’ll think about things like gentrification, hipsterism, the fame machine, drugs, depression, boredom, terrorism, and America’s continual cultural investments in visions of the apocalypse. We’ll also wonder about the fate of literacy and reading in an age of texting, sexting, and slacktivism.
Reading to Include: George Saunders, Tenth of December (2013); Teddy Wayne, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (2013); Jennifer Egan, A Visit from The Goon Squad (2011); Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (2011); Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007); Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)
First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: George Saunders, Tenth of December; Cormac McCarthy, The Road; Teddy Wayne, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine.
Method of Evaluation: Response paper (15%); class presentation (15%); term test (25%); essay (35%); participation (10%.
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