2024-25 Courses

This page gives some basic information about my Fall 2024 and Winter 2025 courses, including the tentative book lists (these will be updated once I have actually placed the book orders). The page will be updated intermittently; check back as the relevant term approaches for the latest information. Brightspace sites will be available to registered students prior to the start of each term. If you have questions about any of my courses that aren’t answered here, don’t hesitate to email me. Contact information for all members of the department can be found here.

FALL 2024

English 1015, How Literature Works

In this section of English 1015 we will study a range of literary works that illustrate the power of language, when artfully deployed, to surprise, move, anger, persuade, and entertain us. We will pay close attention to how good writers use literary and rhetorical strategies to further their ideas and achieve their effects–to how literature works, not just how it makes us feel or what it makes us think about. You will be challenged to engage actively and critically with our texts through debate, discussion, and writing of your own. The course objectives are, first, to enhance your love of reading, and second, to provide you with the skills, vocabulary, knowledge and experience to express and support well-informed opinions about what you read, whether in or out of class.

Required Textbooks

The Broadview Introduction to Literature (2nd Edition) – Poetry 

The Broadview Introduction to Literature (2nd Edition) – Short Fiction

• You will need these books right away and then throughout the term. Some handouts will be provided of the readings for the first two weeks, to allow time for you to get your copies, but for both practical and copyright reasons you must (and should) buy legitimate versions of the readers as soon as possible. Both volumes are available as either paper or electronic books; they are reasonably priced and constitute the entire course content, so you should not try to get by without them.
• Our assigned readings will include explanatory and instructional sections from the textbook as well as stories, poems, and essays. This material cannot be found outside of the Broadview editions.

Note About Assessment

In this section of English 1015 we will be using an assessment model called “specifications grading.” Detailed information will be provided at the beginning of term and we will talk often about how this model works and why we are using it. One implication of this assessment model is that you cannot succeed in the course without working steadily all term – including both in-class and take-home assignments.

English 3032, The 19th-Century British Novel from Dickens to Hardy

In this class we will study British novels from the second half of the nineteenth century. Drawing on the now-established traditions of the novel, authors during this period found ways to revise or challenge its conventions by experimenting with fictional forms, techniques, and subjects. The pressing issues of social and personal reform that motivated earlier Victorian fiction continued to inspire great, moving and innovative writing by novelists such as Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, both of whom are represented on the (now confirmed) reading list. Our novels this term will all tell stories of women in trouble — or women who are trouble! We will open with Dickens’s greatest novel, Bleak House, followed by George Eliot’s first full-length novel, the massive bestseller Adam Bede. Then we will read an example of the scandalous genre known as ‘sensation fiction,’ Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, before concluding with Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the subtitle of which — “A Pure Woman” — was a gauntlet thrown down before his judgmental contemporaries.

Some of our readings are long; you should be prepared to put in the time to read them attentively. Your effort will be heartily repaid in both pleasure and insight. Regular, well-informed, and enthusiastic class participation will be encouraged; regular, well-informed, and meticulous writing will be required.

A detailed syllabus and schedule for English 3032 will be available for registered students on Brightspace by the end of August. If you have any questions about the course in the meantime, please feel free to email me (Dr.Maitzen@Dal.Ca).

English 3032 Book List*

Dickens, Bleak House
George Eliot, Adam Bede
Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret
Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles

I have ordered all of these books in the Oxford World’s Classics editions (also available as e-books for free through the Dal library). It is not essential that you have the assigned editions, although it does make it easier for you to find examples we are discussing in class and you would benefit from the good notes and other apparatus they include. You should certainly choose reliable scholarly editions – Oxford, Penguin, Norton, or Broadview are best. Cheap editions may have textual errors and usually also have no helpful annotations, introductions, or appendices. 

WINTER 2025

English 2040, Mystery and Detective Fiction

From historical to clerical, from academic to urban, from culinary to equestrian, from regional American to vintage English—today, mystery and detective fiction comes in every imaginable variety. In this course we will look at the origins of the genre in the 19th century and then trace some of its developments in the 20th century. We will consider formal issues, such as the conventions, limits, and possibilities of a genre premised on secrets and lies; we will look at what these fictions say, directly or indirectly, about meaning, knowledge, law, justice, gender, society, and morality; and we will ponder the ethics of finding crime entertaining.

The book list will be confirmed by September; a detailed syllabus and schedule will be available for registered students on Brightspace by the end of December.

Tentative Book List (not yet confirmed)

Selected short fiction (handouts or e-texts)
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (Oxford World’s Classics)
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (Oxford World’s Classics)
Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (any edition is fine)
Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (Vintage)
Dorothy B. Hughes, The Expendable Man (NYRB Classics)
Sjowall and Wahloo, The Terrorists (Vintage)
Katherena Vermette, The Break

English 4465 / English 5465, Victorian Women Writers

Until September, permissions for all 4000-level seminars are handled by the English Department office. Please contact MaryBeth MacIsaac (mbmacisaac@dal.ca) for information about registering for English 4465.

Henceforward Charlotte Brontë’s existence becomes divided into two parallel currents—her life as Currer Bell, the author; her life as Charlotte Brontë, the woman. (Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, 1857)

The notion that a woman’s identity as a woman conflicted with her identity as a writer underlay most 19th-century discussions of women’s writing and infected the work of most women writers of the period with a particular species of self-consciousness. Many Victorian women writers, such as Marian Evans (George Eliot), struggled to be considered simply as writers, with no categorizing modifier, and adopted male pseudonyms or published anonymously as the best means to this end. Other writers, such as Mrs. Gaskell, were best known by their married names, as if fending off accusations that they had ceased to be truly womanly when they ventured into print. Both naming strategies confirm how profoundly gender mattered (or was presumed to matter) to personal and authorial identity in the world of Victorian literature. The title and structure of this seminar asserts some commonality among the work of very different women writers based on just this recognition that even the denial of gender is an admission of the difference it makes. However, although we will assume that all Victorian women writers were in some respects in a common situation as they put pen to paper, we will keep alive the question of whether or in what respects gender matters to writing, to reading, and to criticism as we study their works. Our reading list includes autobiographical and biographical writing as well as fiction and poetry, all highlighting questions about what it meant to live and to write as a woman in the Victorian period. This mix of genres in our reading list will also allow us to look beyond the traditional generic divisions of Victorian literature courses to examine our writers’ use, adaptation, or subversion of generic conventions.

This course is being offered in both an undergraduate and a graduate version simultaneously. Students enrolled in English 5465 will do additional readings and meet different requirements than students enrolled in English 4465. Full details will be available closer to the beginning of the course itself.

Tentative Book List (common readings for both 4465 and 5465)

• Custom Course Reader (selections from Robinson, ed., A Serious Occupation; Hamilton, ed., Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors; Stephenson, ed., 19th-Century Stories by Women)
• Margaret Oliphant, Autobiography (Broadview)
• Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bronte (OUP)
• Charlotte Bronte, Villette (OUP)
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (OUP)
• George Eliot, Middlemarch (OUP)

A detailed syllabus and schedule for English 4465/ 5465 will be available for registered students on Brightspace by the end of December. If you have any questions about the course in the meantime, please feel free to email me (Dr.Maitzen@Dal.Ca).

Updated March 8, 2024