All available Fourth Year Peterborough Campus Course Descriptions for the 2024-25 Academic Year can be found below.
If any of the course descriptions you are looking for are not available, please consult the 2024-25 Academic Timetable to determine if the course is being offered.
If any of the course descriptions you are looking for are present in the timetable with no description below, please consult the Academic Calendar for all information presently available.
Fall 2024
4209H (E. Bruusgaard)
Materiality and the Text
While we might think that we simply read a book, book historians argue that the material form a text takes – cover, errata, dedications, paper, marginalia, etc. – affects how we read and interpret it. 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? This course will examine how a text progresses from the creator to the consumer in a digital environment. Topics for discussion will include paratexts and metadata, archival theory, fan fiction, copyright and intellectual ownership, and the constantly shifting landscape of born-digital texts.
4301 (C. Eddy)
Advanced Studies in American Literature: American Horror
Why is contemporary American culture saturated with horror? Our fourth-year seminar asks this question by exploring the prevalence of the horror genre in American television and film, including the American television series True Blood and The Walking Dead. During the course, we will examine some of the archetypal figures of horror – the zombie, the vampire, the alien, the werewolf – as fantasy typologies that help us to theorize contemporary culture. What role does the vampire perform – racial anxiety, fears about immigration, nostalgia for a vanished past? What does the zombie tell us about consumer culture and our bodies?
4801H (S. Brown)
Advanced Studies in Genre: What’s Love Got to Do With It?
We’ll read ONE novel, Clarissa, abridged (Broadview Press). And I won’t expect you to read all of it. Clarissa follows the affair of an 18-year old and her dashingly dangerous lover. Good girl meets bad boy; YA novel turned film noir. Or Grease meets Hamlet. Written as letters between the two main characters and their BFFs, there’s a sexual assault, a suicide, a murder. You’ll each be assigned characters whose letters you’ll read and parts you’ll play. Seminars will be like a Coroner’s Jury, sorting out truths and motivations from evidence in the letters. Also, as part of our ‘love motif,’ we’ll begin each seminar listening to and reflecting upon a late-20th-early-21st-century love ballad. Etta James? Amy Winehouse? Taylor Swift? Mine’s The Shangri-Las.
4857H (A. Loeb)
The Play’s the Thing!: Stage Production Workshop
This course offers students practical experience in making theatre happen. Students in this course will work with the Electric City Players on their production of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, playing at Market Hall, January 30 - February 1, 2025. In consultation with the instructor, students will identify an area of interest in the development of the show (including but not limited to acting, stage management, marketing and promotion, social media content production and management, costume design, lighting design, sound design, set design and construction, educational outreach, etc.) and will work to develop that aspect of the production. Along the way, students will identify and develop strategies for making theatre relevant and entertaining to contemporary audiences, engaging with the community beyond the university, and thinking critically about the place of theatre in our current cultural landscape. Registration in this course will be limited and requires the permission of the instructor. Please contact andrewloeb@trentu.ca for more information.
Winter 2025
4501H (J. Anderson)
Advanced Studies in Canadian Literature
This seminar introduces the Black Canadian literary canon as a body of literature that confronts the tendency toward the absented presence of Black people in Canada. The seminar will engage Black cultural production including slave narratives, fiction, manifestos and poetry. These literatures will stage an encounter with the lived experiences of Black Canadians from enslavement to the present. As a liberatory project the course explores the literary contributions of Black Canadians to the Black radical tradition and highlights Canada’s longstanding participation in Black liberation struggles. The course interrogates the ways in which Black Canadian authors stake claims on being, knowledge and power while grappling for subject status, belonging and acknowledged citizenship.
4601H (C. Eddy)
Advanced Studies in Critical Approaches to Literature: Objects and Emotions
Objects and Emotions examines two recent theoretical movements in contemporary cultural theory and philosophy: affect theory and speculative realism, new materialisms, or object-oriented ontology. In affect theory, attachments, bodily sensations, and emotions are explored as forces beyond conscious knowing. Returning to a materiality that is of the body but not strictly corporeal, one that is unfolding in time and space rather than static, affect theorists reimagine questions of bodily ontology. In object-centred theories, the object is analyzed apart from human consciousness and human use-value and viewed as having an existence and potential intentionality beyond human comprehension.
4651H (S. Chivers)
Crip Theory
How does disability shape authorship? Crip theory, which combines queer and disability cultural theory, will be our guiding framework as we explore expected and surprising answers to that question. Given the topic, we will continually consider accessibility as it pertains to literature and learning. Topics include Crip Time, Disability Justice, Black Disability Studies, Decolonizing Disability Studies, and Crip Making. The central text for the course is Crip Authorship: Disability as Method edited by Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez (Open Access—no need to purchase any texts for the course). Assignments include Reading Notes, Seminar Engagement, Project, and Reflection.
4803H (L. MacLeod)
Advanced Studies in Modern Poetry: Talking About Your Feelings To Strangers or Building Things With Words? Confession and Craft in Modern Poetry
William Wordsworth claimed that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” while TS Eliot argued that “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion […] not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” WH Auden contended that “a poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.” For Wordsworth, emotion “spontaneously” authenticates itself. For Eliot and Wordsworth, poetry is a very specific, technical, linguistic, practice; emotion is, at best, secondary. The course traces the degree to which “craft” does or doesn’t factor in 20th Century Poetry.
4851H (R. Winger)
Advanced Seminar in Creative Writing
Concentrating on literary prose, poetry, and/or creative non-fiction, this course requires student writers to engage actively in the creation of new works, peer discussions, critiques, and analyses of assigned literary readings. All writing for the course must be created for the literary page rather than the stage, microphone, or gallery.