ENG202: British Literature in the World I (to 1800)
In this course we survey nearly a millennium of British literary history. On our journey we encounter some of British literatures major writers, as well as some of its anonymous or forgotten ones. We situate some major formal and generic movements within their historical and cultural moment and consider their position within the transnational pre-modern world. We ask, why does literary style change over time? What influences dictate style? And who decides what counts in the British literary canon? By taking a historicist perspective to these questions we discover both interconnectedness and contingency in the canon we have inherited. This course is a required course for English Majors.
Guest Lectures
Guest lecturing (between 3 to 8 classroom hours) for first year surveys, such as ENGA01, ‘What is Literature?’; composition (ENG101, ‘Effective Writing’); and senior seminars (ENG312, ‘Blame Chaucer’). I have lectured on queer bodies in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, manuscript production and transmission, writing and disability, and modes of knowing outside of the academe.
Manuscript Workshops
I teach manuscript workshops both in the classroom and in situ at the Fisher Rare Books and Manuscript Library for students in the University of Toronto tri-campus system. Both scenarios include experience handling and using books and other materials to enliven and deepen the study of medieval literature. Students come away with an understanding of the manuscript production process that enriches their reading, and often leads to further study. In the Fisher library they encounter the multiplicity of text technologies available to medieval writers around the world and consider the ways these technologies were transmitted across geographical and temporal space. They establish that literary production was also indebted to and influenced by these networks, placing their reading within a complex global setting. In the classroom students work with facsimiles towards similar aims, but they also get the opportunity to try out some medieval writing technologies for themselves. Working with quills and ink they discover the labour involved in medieval literary production, and return to poems like Chaucer’s ‘Words unto Adam’ with a renewed interest in the tensions and values such texts belie.
“This station really combined all these aspects and also allowed us to experience the activity first hand which made it so much more fun. There was a piece of parchment for us to touch and even a book to look at... I had an interesting conversation with the person running the station and he told me and a few others about the way people would write on the parchment, how the parchment was used...and even how historians would preserve old scriptures in museums. I loved getting a chance to actually do calligraphy with a feather quill and ink because it really helped me appreciate the time and dedication people put into writing these things.”
“During the workshop I gave a try at writing a few letters in calligraphy and I found it quite mind opening and entertaining. I understood that characteristics of how words are written add to the meaning of the message but only when I tried writing in calligraphy I understood the depth of how many characteristics there are. For example, even a small stroke in the letter can add meaning to the word. ”
Student using a quill to work on an ink outline from a fourteenth-century German model sheet.