Teaching: Current
ENG6304: Critical Methods
University of Ottawa
This graduate methods seminar is a course in a kind of thinking usually labelled “theory,” which often, at first, sounds intimidating and like something you might not know how to read or do. However, in Professing Literature, Gerald Graff makes the point that “there is a sense in which all teachers of literature are ‘theorists’ and have a stake in theoretical disputes” (2). This course builds on Graff’s argument that theory is relevant to everyone who studies or even just enjoys literature. By the end of this course, students should recognize that critical theory addresses many of the same concerns and offers many of the same rewards that drew us to literature itself in the first place: the ability to think more clearly and deeply about the world around us and our own potential contributions to that world.
ENG3164: AdV poetry WRiting
University of Ottawa
This course is designed to equip students with the technical and philosophical prowess required to both craft and read poetry with the utmost closeness and care. We will be discussing traditional forms at some length, but we will be reading poetry and theory that is at the cutting edge of linguistic experimentation. It is my hope that these two seemingly disparate discussions will come together to form the intellectual and artistic sensibilities necessary to produce the beginnings of sophisticated, daring, and ultimately publishable contemporary poetry. Students will learn along the way to become a sophisticated reader and critic of current poetry, able to examine it through multiple interpretive and philosophical lenses.
ENG3111: POETICS
University of Ottawa
This is a class in theoretical poetics, which is the study of poetry as a specific domain of literature, with its own concepts, histories, and practices. It is not a course on writing poetry, nor it is a course on interpreting specific poems—though we may find ourselves doing a little of both as part of our exploration of the idea of poetry as manifested at different times and by different groups. Because poetry, for reasons we will explore in class, has been at the heart of definitions of ‘the literary’ as such for most of the last few hundred years, we will also spend some time reading and thinking about definitions of literature more broadly, and what is sometimes referred to as the ‘aesthetic’. Our emphasis will be on 20th century developments, but we will occasionally dip back into the 18th and 19th centuries before jumping forward to more contemporary discussions. The majority of our readings will be speculative works of criticism and theory—some written by poets advocating for their particular way of doing things, others written by philosophers and literary theorists espousing particular concepts or approaches. We will also be reading a few representative works of poetry that demonstrate the ideas expressed in the theoretical works.
Teaching: Previous
ENG7330: Genre trouble
University of Ottawa
The study of genre is most often tackled in the context of, or indeed simply as, the rise of the novel. While it is doubtless true that the upheavals of literary form that characterized the 18th century paved the way for our current sense of literary genre, this course will emphasize the degree to which genre, as a series of normative categories, always already exists in a troubled relationship to itself, unsettled and unsettling. In particular, and in Lauren Berlant’s terms, genre as a “zone of expectations” constantly threatens to absorb the writer (their life, their individual expression) into its own social fixedness. Negotiations between writer and genre, thus, take place across all manner of literary forms, shifting their foci in response to those expectations. This graduate seminar will endeavor to look at those contemporary sites where the frisson of such negotiation is at its most apparent: at texts, in other words, which in their melancholic or utopian striving, overflow the boundaries of their genres. Along the way, we’ll also take a hard look at our roles as critics—roles, it might be said, whose function is to maintain the very boundaries that our objects of scrutiny want to escape.
ENG2124: Second-Year Seminar
University of Ottawa
THEME: The Aliens Within
Excellent communicators move the world. Many people will try and convince you that the ability to communicate, through either writing or speaking, is a natural talent—some have it, some do not. This is a lie. While some people do have natural aptitude for writing or speaking, anyone, once equipped with sound understanding of persuasive and compositional principles, can communicate effectively. The goal of this course is to help you to become an even stronger, more confident, and more flexible writer and reader. This course in particular will help you become a better writer by thinking about aliens.
ENG3305: advanced CNF
University of Ottawa
This course will continue to train you to read and write literary nonfiction -- a troublesome genre whose primary vehicle is an equally troublesome thing we call "the essay." We will begin, thus, by asking what exactly it is we're up to here. We'll keep asking that over the course of the term. To move towards answers, both in our reading and writing, we will practice “close reading for craft,” attending to persona, point of view, and voice; problems and questions; coherence, connection, and concision; defamiliarization; and public significance in the essays we read.
ENG4397: The rectangle
University of Ottawa
This fourth-year workshop explores the possibilities inherent in one of the more generically-vexing forms of creative writing: the paragraph. Capable of containing entire stories and essays as well as experiments in the lyric, the paragraph-as-genre has both a rich history and an exciting present, and can offer creative writing students a wealth of new ways to explore and play with language. Over the course of our readings in this class, we will develop a kind of negative theory of the line—a theory, in other words, about what happens in the line’s absence, or in the line’s presence as delineated by the shape of the page.
ENG394: Literary THeory
Washington College
An upper-level survey in major trends in 20th-century theories of literature. Literary theory, as a genre, asks myriad versions of several fundamental questions: what is literature? How do we know it when we see it? How does it differ from other forms of thought and writing? What causes literature, and what are literature’s effects?
ENG394: JUnior seminar
Washington College
This course provides insight into central methodological issues within the field of literary studies, with the primary goal of giving students an understanding of the diversity of methods that characterizes literary criticism as well as the ability to develop sophisticated research topics. The course’s main question is, in effect, “what does literary study look like today?” but this question raises many others, such as what literary study should look like, what literary critics can do with texts, what texts do to literary critics, and how we can conceive of criticism as both a vocation and as a transferable skill.
ENG453: Poetry Workshop
Washington College
An upper-level workshop in which students learn and practice a myriad of traditional poetic forms while also reading recent experimental poetry. These two seemingly disparate practices are designed to come together in order to foster the intellectual and artistic sensibilities necessary to produce sophisticated, daring, and ultimately publishable contemporary poetry.
ENG222: Intro to Poetry
Washington College
What makes a poem "happen"? In this course, students examine the tools of poetry: the words of the poem (diction); employments of repetition, image, symbol, and comparison (i.e. metaphor or juxtaposition); the form the poem takes (received forms, metrical forms, etc); the tradition the poem responds to (Romanticism, Modernism, Imagism, etc) and more. Coursework focuses on building interpretations and identifying the engines of poetry. We'll ask and answer, "How do these things work?"
ENG2301: Intro CW
University of Ottawa
Introduction to Creative Writing is a blend of reading discussion and workshop designed to introduce students to the writing of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. The syllabus is divided into units, each focusing on one of those three genres, as well as a final unit on the art of revision. This overview will expose students to what is specific and special about each genre or mode of writing. The course covers the fundamentals of craft and composition, and delves into the work of a wide variety of accomplished and influential contemporary Anglophone writers.
FYS101: Science fiction
Washington College
The theme of this First-Year Seminar is American science fiction and identity. Like all literature, science fiction reflects the values of the culture in which it’s produced. But because it explores alternative realities, science fiction can oftentimes incorporate cultural change more quickly than other genres, and sometimes seems to influence how new ideas develop. How do new speculations about what humans can do, in other words, inform changing ideas about what we are?
ENG4185: Beyond the Pale
University of Ottawa
When we think about “experimental” literature, we often think of work by white men: David Foster Wallace, Ezra Pound, Vladimir Nabokov, Christian Bök. This class aims to reconfigure our sense of formally and intellectually adventurous writing to include a wide-ranging body of work by authors with marginalized identities. Minoritized writers are often overlooked in histories of innovative and avant-garde writing; as critics have pointed out with increasing frequency, the history of the avant-garde is a deeply exclusionary one, one that has until quite recently foreclosed the possibility that writing about “identity” and literary innovation could go hand in hand. In contrast, the writers whose work we will read in this course continually try and subvert or expand our notions of what it means to write into, around, or from marginalized standpoints.
This list is partial; I have also taught classes ranging from composition to food writing at Penn State and Yale. For a complete listing of my teaching experience, please contact me for a CV.