As an academic discipline, English emerged less than 200 years ago, establishing itself on a set of assumptions about authors, art, and literary movements. It posited literature as a category of written works conforming to specific aesthetic principles and organized within identifiable national traditions and autonomous historical periods. In general, critical practice focused on canonical texts and authorial corpuses, presupposing particular value judgments about literary worth.

In recent decades, the erosion of these value judgments has transformed the underlying assumptions into a set of debates in their own right, and such debates call attention to the historical processes through which literary canons are formed. As a result, the research methodology in English studies has changed in subtle yet important ways: whereas many critics once saw their goal to be the mastery of a tradition, that is, the comprehension of canonical authors and their works, contemporary critics seek to uncover the social, cultural, and political work that the very notion of “the literary” accomplishes. This current tendency to approach literature and the literary as historically constructed terms means that we need to know more about how people have defined literature in different times and places, and how these definitions have influenced questions about authorship, reading habits, aesthetic evaluation, and different modes of production and circulation.

Carleton’s PhD program recognizes the shaping power of cultural context for understanding the production of literature. It accommodates the rich inquiry opened up by book history, an interdisciplinary movement which investigates the book as a sociological object embedded in material practices, technological apparatuses, and everyday narratives. Studying social conditions across the spectrum of manuscript, print, and digital cultures enables us to understand how each historical moment constructs author, text, and reader differently. Carleton’s PhD encourages students to explore issues of literary production, circulation, and reception, and to consider the ways in which readers and writers modify their consumption of texts according to various social circumstances.

And yet, as the title of the PhD program is meant to suggest, literature not only is produced by culture, but also produces culture. Traditional scholarship regarded literature as interacting with the world in a narrowly mimetic fashion. With the advent of critical theory, the discipline of English studies now acknowledges literature’s involvement in producing and reproducing ideology. We cannot divorce the question of literature’s material conditions from its contribution to politics and the social imaginary--the ways in which a culture constructs subjectivity through gender, race, and class. Carleton’s PhD encourages students to interrogate literature’s complicity in and resistance to power relations, whether on a national, colonial, or global level.

The goals of PhD program are to develop our students’ research agendas and to nourish their work within the theoretical, critical, and historical study of the production of literature. Our program facilitates these two goals by fostering a supportive environment where our students interact with faculty as well as their peers. In the first year, students take the equivalent of 4 half-year courses of their choosing in addition to required seminars. During this exploratory period, they have the time to engage with the cultural and historical contexts necessary for their dissertation topic. Their comprehensive examination in year two also helps them to establish a sense of their field—the area of literary history in which their primary research will be conducted.

At the end of second year, students complete a doctoral research project, which introduces them to the challenges of researching and composing a scholarly paper of publishable length and quality. This requirement affords our students the opportunity to grapple with primary and secondary resources on a small scale germane to their dissertation, so by the time they come to writing the dissertation proposal they will already have a sophisticated grasp of the methods and habits vital for successful scholarly work.

Our program’s second goal of situating the students’ research projects within the production of literature enables them to see how their work contributes to larger critical dialogues in the discipline. In first year, the required two-term seminar, ENGL 6000, exposes students to the debates, concepts, and terminology arising from the history of the book, manuscript and print culture, and electronic media. In second year, the required seminar ENGL 6001 continues the dialogue on the production of literature by engaging with practical and theoretical issues related to research inquiry.

The doctoral program is structured to enhance students’ intellectual development as they move through the degree. The first year, which is entirely course work, is organized around a two-term required course that will explore different theoretical and historical aspects of the production of literature. In the second year, students complete one comprehensive exam credit and one research project credit. The first is a four-hour sit-down exam in the candidate’s declared area of expertise. The second is a research project that requires the student to write an essay of publishable length and defend it orally. These two credits will normally be completed near the beginning and end of the second academic year, respectively. By this time too, students will fulfill the language requirement by having taken a reading course in a language related to their research. Students will ordinarily submit their dissertation proposal in the fall term of their third year. All doctoral candidates will be required to complete 10 credits to qualify for the degree.

YEAR ONE
ENGL 6000: Doctoral Seminar (1 credit)--a required 1.0 credit course that must be taken in the first year of the program. This course explores the major theoretical issues and critical debates in the Production of Literature.

Coursework (2 credits)--selected from among the Department’s 5000 and 6000 level courses. With departmental approval, students may take 1.0 credit outside the English Department. All courses will be completed by the end of April.

YEAR TWO
ENGL 6900: Comprehensive Examination (1 credit)--ENGL 6900 will be completed by November (the beginning of Year Two). The exam will focus on the student’s primary field along with relevant critical issues.

ENGL 6001: Proseminar (.5 credits)--a required 0.5 credit course (offered over two terms) that examines English Studies from varying professional and disciplinary perspectives in order to assist students as they progress through academia.

ENGL 6901: Doctoral Research Project (1 credit)--completed by July. It will comprise of an essay of publishable length and quality as well as an oral examination.

YEARS THREE AND FOUR
Dissertation Proposal--submitted in September (Beginning of Year Three). As part of the proposal process, the student will participate in a discussion with his or her Dissertation Supervisory Committee.

ENGL 6909: Dissertation (4.5 credits)--The completion of the dissertation will include an oral examination.

Carleton offers various kinds of financial assistance, which only continuous full-time graduate students are eligible for. The main types of funding include the following:

Teaching Assistantships: Each successful applicant will be considered for a teaching assistantship. A teaching assistantship provides part-time employment for two terms each year for up to five years.

Internal Funding: The two most common scholarships, each based on academic merit, are the Graduate Faculty Scholarship and the Entrance Scholarship, for which incoming students do not need to submit an application. These scholarships may be held concurrently with a teaching assistantship and, in the case of students entering with external funding, there is no claw-back system. New PhD candidates are also urged to check out the funding available to Carleton graduate students online in the awards database at Carleton’s Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research website.

Graduate Student Travel Grants: Each year PhD students may apply for conference or research travel funds through the department, the faculty, and the Graduate Student Association.

External Funding: When admitted to the program, students who hold external funding are eligible for full internal funding. Those who enter the program without external funding will receive guidance to make them competitive in applying for it. The department is committed to working with students as they craft applications for scholarships and fellowships, particularly OGS and SSHRC.

The PhD Guidebook gives a detailed overview of the program, its administration, its timeline, and its resources. It is an invaluable resource for students as well as faculty members. You can download it here.*

But the ultimate authority on all of Carleton’s programs is the current version of Carleton's Graduate Calendar.

*N.B. Direct link to PDF. Requires Acrobat Reader to view, or similar application capable of opening and viewing PDFs. Please visit the Adobe website to download the latest version of Acrobat Reader for your computer.

Applicants will normally hold a master’s degree in English (or the equivalent) with at least an A- average (10 GPA).

For more information on admission requirements and how to apply to our MA program, please see the department's main page.