Courses

A seminar in the reading and writing of literary nonfiction and in the development of a critical appreciation of its various forms. The course focuses on life writing in terms of its literary forms, as the authors’ responses to their culture, and as texts within which identity is shaped and altered by the intentional acts of their writers. Chosen texts demonstrate the art of life writing, as well as other paradigms for its interpretation and its literary and cultural influence. Such forms as (auto)biography, memoir, letters, diaries, travel and nature writing, and personal essays will provide the models for students’ exploration of this genre. Examples are drawn from writers such as C.S. Lewis, Thomas Merton, E.M. Forster, George Orwell, Michael Ondaatje, Annie Dillard, Kathleen Norris, Flannery O’Connor, John Bunyan, Virginia Woolf, and others who form part of the literary canon of such writing.

Examines representative works of twentieth century American literary prose and the development of its themes in various historical, political, and socio-cultural contexts, including the major wars and social upheavals in which American society has been involved in the last one hundred years. Students examine the major themes and values that comprise a canon of literature which addresses the literary movements characterized by realism and naturalism and the contexts of modernism and postmodernism to which literature has responded in the American tradition. American literature and its contributions to the discussions on religion, morality and Christianity, and the relationship between the three, are engaged.

Literature has been at the centre of the human story from its beginnings as recorded in ancient sacred texts to its current study as cultural narrative with transformative and transcendent possibilities for interpretation and creativity. This course will explore literary themes integral to the pursuit of Christian spirituality, past and present. The movement to interdisciplinary interpretation and literary hermeneutics demands that students, as readers of text, understand the role that Christian thought and aesthetics have played in their influencing of contemporary literature. In understanding that role, human spirituality is being considered as one of the integral aspects of this enterprise; Christian spirituality offers foundational vantage points from which to participate in this ongoing task of creativity and engagement in the human condition.

A survey of English literary texts reflecting changing conceptions of and attitudes toward nature across time and place. Using an ecocritical framework, students will integrate and apply a variety of literary theories to diverse texts that explore relationships among human and non-human beings and the environment, with attention given to issues of creation theology, rural and urban landscape, conservation, sustainability, and environmental justice.

A study of poetry, its forms, conventions, and innovations in its development during the twentieth century, with particular representation from the American tradition.

This course takes up the study of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Parliament of Fowls, and Legend of Good Women. Care is taken to develop a good reading knowledge of Chaucerian Middle English. The literary, social, economic, political, and spiritual principles in Chaucer’s texts, and the aesthetic techniques employed to shape them, will be situated within the historical and cultural contexts of Ricardian, or late fourteenth-century, England. Chaucer wrote for a populace that had confronted decimating plagues as well as social, economic, and religious upheaval. The course draws out the competing medieval voices that emerge in the works composed in this context, which often articulate searing critiques of a complex, disorderly, patriarchal, violent, and humorous medieval world.

A study of the diverse and complex ways that gender is represented and gendered identities are expressed in poetry, drama, fiction, and/or creative nonfiction. Literature studied will come from a range of historical periods and cultural contexts, and from a range of communities, including racialized and queer communities. The representation and expression of gender in literature will be considered in relation to other overlapping social variables, such as class, religion, race, age, sexual orientation, and dis/ability.

Focuses on the rich and varied visionary and mystical literature of the early, high and late Middle Ages, including the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux, Richard of St. Victor, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Richard Rolle, the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, and Meister Eckhart. The influence of early theologians and philosophers (such as Origen, Plotinus, and Augustine) on these mystics is considered in detail, as is the influence of the medieval mystics on mystical thinkers of Renaissance Europe (including Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross). This course also seeks to read the ontological and epistemological elements of medieval mysticism through the filter of modern philosophical paradigms.

A survey of European drama and prose classics from the thirteenth to the twentieth century, this course explores and critically evaluates the shift in worldviews from Dante's Christian humanism to Kafka's and Camus' modern existentialist view of human existence. In order to provide depth to our analysis of the works and to highlight the significance of the shift in worldview, the works will be discussed in their historical, philosophical, and cultural contexts, in combination with close reading and various theoretical interpretative approaches.