Winter 2025 Graduate Courses

ENGL 7206: Writing Fiction – The Supernatural Novella

Professor Lisa Moore

Mondays, 19:00–22:00

Image: Photograph by Lisa Moore 

I believe everyone has the capacity and the very human need to tell stories. In this course we will pay attention to the techniques that allow for the very best expression of these stories. The genre of the supernatural allows us to explore our fears and regrets, chasms of loss and the liminal spaces that allow us to question the essence of being human, of being alive, how we might exist differently, what it might mean to be dead, or in between.

We will explore those things that make us toss and turn at night, the private horrors that we hold at bay during the business of our daily lives; the fears that grow out of the ordinary grind, the news, the dead seagulls that dotted the sidewalks of St. John’s several months back, like omens, perhaps part of the avian flu that caused thousands of seabirds to die off at the Cape St. Mary’s bird sanctuary. Harbingers of climate crisis. The haunted houses of resettlement, or the boarded-up strip malls that are both present and absent at once; abandoned zombie mines leeching arsenic without clean up or proper shut down; the debris of decommission oil rigs; the churches of Newfoundland up for sale – all the haunted gothic castles of modernity. The hints of uncanny horrors that run rampant across contemporary human experience, as well the ways in which the spirit world, metaphorical or otherwise, might guide us or provide sanctuary. We will think about sanctuary, the idea of the sacred, the hallowed, and haunted. 

This semester we will be exploring the novella – a long short story or a short novel, normally considered to be between 20,000 – 60,000 words. This form will allow for the charged, undiluted intensity offered by the short story form along with some of the best freedoms of the novel – the ability to develop protagonists more fully, to populate the story with strong secondary characters, to create a whole and immersive world, and to allow for secondary plot lines, tangents, and thematic asides. This foray into the novella will allow us to experiment with the techniques required to sustain tension and unity over a longer form than the short story. As with novels or short stories, we will be bringing strict attention to composition, on the level of overall plot, the paragraph and even the word.

ENGL 7785: Narrative and Comics

Dr. Nancy Pedri

Tuesdays, 13:00–16:00

Image: Winsor McCay's Little Sammy Sneeze strip.

Narration and Comics considers established and emerging storytelling techniques of both multimodal and purely visual graphic narratives. We will pay particular attention to the unique grammar of the comics medium to ask how graphic narrative responds to the conventions of narrative and genre. To better understand how this form of storytelling structures perception and knowledge, an examination of a variety of graphic narratives—each with a unique storytelling style—will be informed by recent work in narrative theory (narratology), visual cultural studies, and the growing field of comics studies.

ENGL 7333 Culture Jamming: The Art of Ideological Disruption

Dr. Bradley Clissold

Wednesdays, 12:00-15:00

THE ART OF IDEOLOGICAL

            D I S R U P T I O N

This graduate course explores the critical history of political and social activism through adversarial media practices, and offers participants opportunities to perform creative acts of linguistic, textual, and media resistance on select types of found hegemonic cultural communication (from magazine advertisements, film posters, and tourist postcards to public health brochures, product instruction manuals, and newspaper articles). In particular, we will study the media activism and disruptive ideological tactics of artists like Barbara Kruger, Negativland, Adbusters, Billboard Liberation Front, Guerrilla Girls, Banksy, Genesis P-Orridge, Marcel Duchamp and other twentieth-century Surrealists, as well as fictional figures in literature and film, who effectively repurpose found media and culture jam accepted codes of cultural representation. We will also investigate the origins of the term “culture jamming” and its various audio/visual/textual détournement practices, examine the theoretical works of important thinkers on the subject, and research the coopting of such subversive media tactics by contemporary corporate capitalism. 

For more information, please contact Dr. Bradley D. Clissold (bradleyc@mun.ca).

ENGL 7450: Indigenous Voices: Reading for All My Relations/Wahkohtowin

Dr. Michelle Porter

Thursdays, 13:00–16:00 

Image: Métis beadwork

Indigenous Voices: Reading for All My Relations/Wahkohtowin invites student to journey into the stories of a range of Métis literature. Students will learn to read the stories of the Métis Nation of Western Canada with attention to relationality—the author’s, the story’s and their own—and in doing so will develop the tools to learn how to approach and read the stories of other Indigenous Nations after the class is over. Students will read fiction, nonfiction and poetry by storytellers including Katherena Vermette, Richard Van Camp, Maria Campbell and others.