English Language and Literature

Dunton Tower 1812
Telephone: 520-2310
Fax: 520-3544

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 (3 year) 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 4.0 or 5.0 credits 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 credits in 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:

• 2.0 credits in English, selected from those at the 500-level (excluding English 18.598), plus English 18.505, 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
• 3.0 credits in English selected from those at the 500-level (excluding English 18.599), plus English 18.505, 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 credit counted towards the master’s degree.

Graduate Courses

Not all of the following courses are offered in a given year. For an up-to-date statement of course offerings for 1998-99, please consult the Registration Instructions and Class Schedule booklet published in the summer.

F,W,S indicates term of offering. Courses offered in the fall and winter are followed by T. The number following the letter indicates the credit weight of the course: 1 denotes 0.5 credit, 2 denotes 1.0 credit, etc.

English 18.500F1 or W1
Literary Criticism

A study of specific topics or particular areas of literary criticism.

English 18.502F1
Contemporary Literary Theory

Topic for 1998-99: Approaches to Theory and Literary Studies. This course examines contemporary approaches to theory and literary studies. The first half of the semester is devoted to an overview of current theoretical approaches to literature, and the second half focuses on the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault.

English 18.503F1
Feminism/s: The Literary Dimension

Topic for 1998-99: Spectacles and Spectators.
An examination of the configurations and discursive constructions of various cultural “spectacles,” such as certain murder trials, disease outbreaks, sexual scandals, and violence in (and out of) sport. The performance of race and gender in popular culture and how these performances influence cultural assumptions and expectations are considered.

English 18.504W1
Literature, Contact, and Empire in Colonial and Post-Colonial Societies

Topic for 1998-99: Explorations, Settlement, and the Cant of Conquest. An investigation of some essential European and North American documents relating to the dispossession of Native peoples from the Caribbean to the Arctic, together with the emergence of a radical critique by various Native and non-Native thinkers (Colombus, Montaigne, Cartier, Defoe, Hearne, Cooper, Jameson, Thompson, and others).

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 18.518F1 or W1
Old Norse

Topic may vary from year to year.

English 18.528F1 or W1
Middle-English Studies

A study of selected portions of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales from the perspective of Bakhtinian literary theory. The Miller, the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner and the Host will be among those elements of the work examined in the light of the ludic and carnivalesque and on grotesque realism. Familiarity with Rabelais and His World and The Dialogic Imagination will be involved in the course.
Also offered at the undergraduate level, with different requirements, as English 18.428«, for which additional credit is precluded.

English 18.531F1 or W1
Renaissance Poetry

Topic may vary from year to year.

English 18.532F1 or W1
Seventeenth-Century Poetry

A study of selected seventeenth-century poets.

English 18.534F1
Renaissance Drama

Topic for 1998-99: Politics and the English Renaissance Stage. A study of the popular drama of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Marston, Webster, and Tourneur, and the court drama of Peele, Jonson, Shirley, and Carew.

English 18.537F1 or W1
Renaissance Authors

A study of selected Renaissance authors.

English 18.538F1 or W1
Renaissance Studies

Topic may vary from year to year.

English 18.542W1
Eighteenth-Century Studies

Topic for 1998-99: Swift, Pope and Johnson: Depictions of Friendship and Gender. An examination of the writings of Swift, Pope, and Johnson with respect to the concept of friendship and the depiction of gender. Works are examined from historical, biographical, and psychological points of view.

English 18.548F1
Studies in Romanticism

Topic for 1998-99: The “Fantastic” in Romantic Literature. An examination of the fantastic element in some key texts of Romantic literature. The emphasis is on imaginative structures and on the romantic exploration of the mysterious, the exotic, and the forbidden.

English 18.551W1
Nineteenth Century Studies

Topic for 1998-99: Gender and Genre in Victorian Poetry. A study of works written between 1830 and 1870 in terms of gender representation in relation to generic modalities, exploring the thesis that poets of the period — Tennyson, the Brownings, the Rossettis, Arnold, Clough — confronted a crisis in gender ideology that problematized the lyric.

English 18.553F1 or W1
Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Topic may vary from year to year.

English 18.558F1 or W1
Nineteenth-Century Literature

Topic may vary from year to year.

English 18.561F1 or W1
Twentieth-Century Poetry

Topic may vary from year to year.

English 18.563F1 or W1
Twentieth-Century Fiction

A study of selected twentieth-century writers.

English 18.564F1 or W1
Twentieth-Century Drama

Topic may vary from year to year.

English 18.566W1
Twentieth-Century Literature

Topic for 1998-99: A Surly and Twisted Lot: Media in the British Novel. A study of the portrayal of the media as a reflection of society and its values in the twentieth century British novel, starting with Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop and completing the survey with Fay Weldon’s Darcy’s Utopia and Martin Amis’s The Information.

English 18.567F1 or W1
Twentieth-Century Authors

A study of twentieth-century authors of fiction.

English 18.568F1 or W1
Twentieth-Century Studies

Topic may vary from year to year.

English 18.571F1
American Poetry

Topic for 1998-99: Modern American Poetry.
A study of the formative poetry and poetics of several major modern American writers, including: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Alan Ginsberg.

English 18.573F1 or W1
American Fiction

Topic may vary from year to year.

English 18.576F1 or W1
American Literature

Topic may vary from year to year.

English 18.578F1 or W1
Studies in American Fiction

Topic may vary from year to year.

English 18.581F1 or W1
Canadian Poetry

Topic may vary from year to year.

English 18.582F1
Ethnicity, Multiculturalism, and Canadian Literature

Topic for 1998-99: 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 1998-99: Contemporary Canadian Novels.
The course concentrates 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 18.585F1 or W1
Canadian English

Topic may vary from year to year.

English 18.587S1
Selected Topics in Canadian Literature

Topic for Summer 1998: The Canadian Modernist Movement. 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. Poets studied include F.R. Scott, A.J.M. Smith, Dorothy Livesay, W.W.E. Ross, John Sutherland, and Louis Dudek.

English 18.589F1 or W1
Colonial Discourse and Native Literatures in Canada

Topic may vary from year to year.

English 18.590F1 or W1
Selected Topic

Topic may vary from year to year.

English 18.591F1
Selected Topic

Topic for 1998-99: Poetics of Expressiveness.
A study of the origins of theme-text poetics, an explication of the major components of the theory, and a practical application of the poetics to a selected work of literature. The main texts are: A.K. Zholkovsky, Themes and Texts: Toward a Poetics of Expressiveness and Yury Shcheglove and A.K. Zholkovsky, Poetics of Expressiveness: A Theory and Applications. Additional readings may include works by Saussure, Eisenstein, and certain Russian formalists. Also offered at the undergraduate level, with different requirements, as English 18.490«, for which additional credit is precluded.

English 18.593W1
English and Cultural Studies

Topic for 1998-99: Performing Bodies and Voices.
A consideration of the juncture of literature and popular culture in the twentieth-century American and Canadian contexts. An examination of fusional blues lyric, Beat poetry, folk lyrics, performance art, comic book testimony, rap, Native and gay theatre, spoken word poetry, and dub poetry.

English 18.594F1 or W1
Special Studies in Dramatic Literature

Topic may vary from year to year.

English 18.598F2, W2, S2
Research Essay

English 18.599F4, W4, S4
M.A. Thesis

Undergraduate Courses

Graduate students may take the equivalent of 1.0 credit at the senior undergraduate level.

Other Disciplines

Graduate students may take the equivalent of 1.0 credit in a related discipline. The following courses may be among those of special interest:

Comparative Literary Studies

This is not a complete list of all acceptable options. Students should contact the supervisor of graduate studies or the chair of the Department for approval if there are other courses they wish to take which are not on the list.

Other Universities

Graduate students may take the equivalent of 2.0 credits 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 2.0 credit ruling) for credit at Carleton University.