Department of English Language and Literature

Dunton Tower 1812
Telephone: 788-2310
Fax: 788-3544

The Department

Chair of the Department: R.B. Lovejoy

Departmental Supervisor of Graduate Studies: L.T.R. McDonald

The Department of English Language and Literature offers programs of study leading to the M.A. degree in English language and literature. Additional information may be obtained by consulting the departmental supervisor of graduate studies.

Qualifying-Year Program

Applicants who hold a general (pass) B.A. degree with at least a high honours standing (normally B+), with a major in English language and literature, may be admitted to the qualifying-year program. Normally, these students will be required to complete four or five full courses (or the equivalent) in English, as determined by the department, and to maintain a high honours standing (normally B+) before being considered for admission into the master's program.

Master of Arts

Admission Requirements

The minimum admission requirement for the master's program is an honours B.A. (or the equivalent) in English language and literature, with at least a high honours standing (normally B+), and including at least five of the following:

• history of the English language or general English linguistics
• Old English or Middle English
• Renaissance literature
• drama (including Shakespeare)
• Restoration and eighteenth-century literature
• Romantic and nineteenth-century literature
• twentieth-century literature
• Canadian literature

Possession of the minimum entrance standing is not in itself, however, an assurance of admission into the program.

Program Requirements

Each candidate will select one of the following program patterns:

• The equivalent of two full-credit courses in English, selected from those at the 500 level (excluding English 18.598), plus English 18.505, Bibliography and Scholarly Methods, and a master's thesis; an oral examination on the thesis will be required. A prospectus for the thesis must be submitted to the graduate committee by December 1 after registration in September, or at the end of three months for any other registration
• The equivalent of three full-credit courses in English selected from those at the 500 level (excluding English 18.599), plus English 18.505, Bibliography and Scholarly Methods, and a research essay; an oral examination on the research essay will be required

Each program is designed to be completed within the three-term academic year. Each program is of equal status.

Guidelines for Completion of Master's Degree

Full-time master's candidates are expected to complete all requirements in twelve months or three terms of registered full-time study. Part-time master's candidates are expected to complete their degree requirements within an elapsed period of six calendar years after the date of initial registration.

All candidates are required to demonstrate a reading knowledge of one language other than English, approved by the Department.

Academic Standing

A standing of B- or better must be obtained in each course counted towards the master's degree.

Graduate Courses*

• English 18.502F1
  Contemporary Literary Theory
  Topic for 1995-96: Bakhtin and Derrida
  This course will explore the filiations between the writings of these two major figures in terms of language, ethics, and the literary through close study of selected primary texts. It will also deal with the historical provenance of poststructuralism in terms of the Sophistic tradition from the pre-Socratics to Nietzsche and Peirce.
• English 18.503F1
  Feminism/s: The Literary Dimension
  Topic for 1995-96: Body Politics
  This course will examine configurations and recent reconfigurations of body politics and representations. It will focus on the construction and the contructedness of sexuality and desire, and will discuss the implications for contemporary feminist theories. Classes will concentrate on discursive formulations of body politics, and will examine prevalent theoretical positions on the subject.
• English 18.504T2
  Literature, Contact, and Empire in Colonial and Post-Colonial Societies
  Topic for 1995-96: The Fourth World and the Edge of Empire
  This course will study the emergence of indigenous literatures in the modern world. Attention will focus primarily on texts from Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, but some works by South African and Latin-American writers will also be discussed, as will some works by non-indigenous writers. Among the authors included in the reading list are: Sally Morgan, Hyllus Maris (Australia); Witi Ihimaera, Keri Hulme (New Zealand); Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, Alice Walker (U.S.A.); Wilma Stockenstrom (South Africa); Marquez (Columbia).
  (Also offered as Comparative Literary Studies 17.554)
• English 18.505F1
  Bibliography and Scholarly Methods
  An introduction to analytical and descriptive bibliography, editing, research methodology and professional concerns. The course is graded Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory.
• English 18.534F1
  Renaissance Drama
  Topic for 1995-96: Shakespeare
  A study of a selection of Shakespeare's plays with a focus on questions of ideology, gender, and class. Plays will include The Taming of a Shrew, Twelfth Night, Henry IV, 1 & 2, Measure for Measure, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, A Winter's Tale, and The Tempest.
• English 18.542W1
  Eighteenth-Century Studies
  Topic for 1995-96: Eighteenth-Century Tragedy
  A study of eighteenth-century tragedy from Dryden's All for Love to Home's Douglas, with an emphasis on the changes in the nature and style of these works from their Elizabethan and Jacobean predecessors.
• English 18.553W1
  Nineteenth-Century Fiction
  Topic for 1995-96: Dickens
  A study of the major novels of Charles Dickens, including Sketches by Boz, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, and Great Expectations.
• English 18.561F1
  Twentieth-Century Poetry
  Topic for 1995-96: Lowell and Larkin: a Cross-Cultural Comparison
  A comparison of the work and careers of Robert Lowell and Philip Larkin in the framework of their historical positions in American and British poetry. Particular attention will be paid to their attitudes to Anglo-American modernism. An attempt will be made to attain a focus on differences in development of American and British poetry in the mid-twentieth century. Texts by Lowell, Larkin, and Alvarez.
  (Also offered as Comparative Literary Studies 17.522)
• English 18.566F1
  Twentieth-Century Literature
  Topic for 1995-96: Studies in Post-World War II British Fiction
  This course will consider selected novels within the contexts of postmodernism as delineated in Brian McHale's Postmodern Fiction and Linda Hutcheon's A Poetics of Postmodernism. Novelists to be studied include B.S. Johnson, Lawrence Durrell, Iris Murdoch, John Fowles, Christine Brooke Rose, Peter Ackroyd, Doris Lessing, and Julian Barnes.
• English 18.568S1
  Twentieth-Century Studies
  Topic for Summer 1995: Literature of the Apocalypse and the End
  The course will concentrate on a group of texts that confront the persistent human compulsion to declare the End. Yeats, David Jones, and Beckett will be studied.
  Also offered at the undergraduate level as 18.468, for which additional credit may be precluded (check with the Department).
• English 18.571W1
  American Poetry
  Topic for 1995-96: Post-World War II American Poetry
  This seminar examines the development of American poetry through the 1960s to the 1990s. Poems will be considered in the light of literary movements and the theory found in the critical writings of these poets.
• English 18.573W1
  American Fiction
  Topic for 1995-96: Social Transgression in the American Novel
  This course will look at writers such as Hawthorne, Wharton, James, Cather, and Morrison with a specific emphasis on adultery.
• English 18.581W1
  Canadian Poetry
  Topic for 1995-96: Postmodernism and the Politics of Location: Contemporary Canadian Women Poets
  This course will engage texts by Canadian writers from diverse social contexts who appropriate postmodern aesthetics and strategies of critique for specific projects of feminist cultural intervention. Questions of identity politics raised by constructions of voice, among other poetic strategies, will be integral. Inquiry into the relationships between power, knowledge-formation, social agency, and poetics will also be relevant.
• English 18.582W1
  Ethnicity, Multiculturalism, and Canadian Literature
  Topic for 1995-96: Inter-Ethnic Relations
  A study of Canadian literature in relation to theoretical and critical issues posed by ethnicity and other aspects of Canadian cultural diversity.
• English 18.583F1
  Canadian Fiction
  Topic for 1995-96: Contemporary Canadian Novels
  The course will concentrate on Canadian writing of the last twenty to thirty years, exploring it with reference to the concept of ideology, within the contexts of Marxist, feminist, and postmodernist literary theories.
• English 18.587S1
  Selected Topics in Canadian Literature
  Topic for Summer 1995: Canadian Modernist Movement
  This seminar will concern itself with an examination of the work and related activity of five Canadian poets and one editor/critic whose writing and literary enterprise may be said to be broadly representative of the Canadian Modernist Movement. Seminar discussion is expected to include not only the poetry of these writers, but also their literary activism, which drew them into criticism, editing and publishing, and an ongoing critique of Canadian society and its cultural and social values. Poets to be studied are F.R. Scott, A.J.M. Smith, Dorothy Livesay, W.W.E. Ross, John Sutherland, and Louis Dudek.
  Also offered at the undergraduate level as 18.487, for which additional credit may be precluded (check with the Department).
• English 18.589F1
  Colonial Discourse and Native Literatures in Canada
  Topic for 1995-96: Explorers, Settlers, Poets, and Other Invaders: the Representation of Native Peoples in the Early Literature of English Canada
  This course will focus primarily on the formation of the dominant discourse which emerged in Canada, through an examination of texts and images produced by assorted early visitors, missionaries, settlers, colonists and "literary" writers. This is not a course about the real First Nations (or their literatures) except as they are the objects of this discourse; it is concerned, rather, with imaginary "Indians" and the construction of various eurocentric myths and stereotypes which have prevailed in Canada and other settler societies. Visual images as well as written texts are part of the interdisciplinary field of representation which will be considered in this course.
• English 18.591F1
  Selected Topic
  Topic for 1995-96: Rhetorical Theory and Criticism
  This course will investigate the history of rhetoric and rhetorical education in the English tradition and the concept of rhetoric as a means of understanding literary and non-literary English.
• English 18.593W1
  English and Cultural Studies
  Topic for 1995-96: The Language of Empire
  The course will examine the literature of imperialism during the period 1880-1918, focusing on militarist, missionary, and adventure discourses.
• English 18.594W1
  Special Studies in Dramatic Literature
  Topic for 1995-96: Masculine Performances
  This course will examine the work of several major dramatists, including Pinter, Shepard, Mamet, Genet, and Tremblay, against a background of theory which reads gender in a performative mode. Related issues in film and the visual arts will help to frame our inter-disciplinary approach which will include readings in anthropology and history.
• English 18.598F2, W2, S2
  Research Essay
• English 18.599F4, W4, S4
  M.A. Thesis

Undergraduate Courses

Graduate students may take the equivalent of one full-credit course at the senior undergraduate level.

Other Disciplines

Graduate students may take the equivalent of one full-credit course in a related discipline. The following courses may be among those of special interest: **

Comparative Literary Studies

• 17.401 Foundations of Comparative Literary Studies
• 17.402 Theories of Literature
• 17.501 Problems in the Theory of Literature I
• 17.502 Problems in the Theory of Literature II

Other Universities

Graduate students may take the equivalent of two full-credit courses at another university or other universities. Students are especially reminded that the University of Ottawa offers a wide range of graduate courses which may be completed (under the general two full-course credit ruling) for credit at Carleton.

Courses Not Offered in 1995-96

• 18.500 Literary Criticism
• 18.518 Old Norse
• 18.528 Middle-English Studies
• 18.531 Renaissance Poetry
• 18.532 Seventeenth-Century Poetry
• 18.537 Renaissance Authors
• 18.538 Renaissance Studies
• 18.548 Studies in Romanticism
• 18.551 Nineteenth-Century Poetry
• 18.558 Nineteenth-Century Literature
• 18.563 Twentieth-Century Fiction
• 18.564 Twentieth-Century Drama
• 18.567 Twentieth-Century Authors
• 18.576 American Literature
• 18.578 Studies in American Fiction
• 18.585 Canadian English
• 18.591 Selected Topic