Reflections Seminars: Winter 2025
First Semester Students
Gender Justice Now!
- Mari Heywood (Humanities) and Lorne Roberts (English)
- Tuesday 11:30 – 2:30 & Friday 11:30-2:30
- CREDITS: Humanities 345-102 and English 603-102
- Pre-requisites: Humanities 101 and English 101
This paired course explores the topic of justice, and in particular gender justice, as it appears in contemporary Humanities and in English writing. By considering our own experiences and by engaging with others, we delve into histories, beliefs and practices through the lenses of intersectionality, power and privilege, and social construction, amongst other critical and methodological frameworks.
In Humanities, in light of feminist backlash worldwide, and very recently with our neighbours to the South, we explore how to frame gender justice when people centre and uphold patriarchal norms and practices. We examine gender in its economic, social and cultural dimensions that often lead to unequal power structures. We turn to specific examples, such as frameworks of the so-called “Middle East” that focus on “saving Muslim women”, countering narratives of ‘orientalism’ and ‘occidentalism’ (Edward Said, Laura Nader, Lila Abu-Lughod) with people’s lived experiences. We study activist works by American feminist abolitionists (Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore) and legal scholars (Catharine A. MacKinnon, CEDAW/Op-CEDAW of United Nations) considering advice by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie that “we should all be feminists”. In addition to these specific examples, other majority-world voices are included, and students select their own projects, and have the opportunity to gain perspective and think critically about gender justice worldviews and actions that are meaningful to them. Students learn about their own and others’ ideas of justice by witnessing and participating in a variety of activities, and artforms, and perhaps with special guests.
In English, gender and justice are often linked through the theoretical frameworks of post-colonialism, feminism, and eco-criticism, all three of which examine literature (and culture) from the perspective of underrepresented or marginalized voices. Intersectionality—the meeting of social identities and related systems of oppression—allows us to consider the ways in which these three critical frameworks see various forms of marginalization as inextricably related, since it is often observed that the mindset of conquest and domination that drives colonization carries with it a view of women and nature as “others,” to be exploited for the colonizer’s own purpose or gain. In considering any one critical framework, then, space for the others naturally follows. Through works of fiction and poetry by Indigenous authors such as Leanne Simpson, Alicia Eliott, and Katherena Vermette, essays by early feminist author Virginia Woolf, and fiction by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, among others, we explore the ways gender and justice intersect, and how these overlap with perspectives on nature and the racialized “other.” Through readings, discussions, and creative and academic writing, we apply these perspectives to works of literature and to our analysis of them.
Let’s Get Hysterical: The Woman in White and Psychoanalytic Theory
- Erica Harris (Humanities) and Gina Granter (English)
- Tuesday 8:30-11:30 & Friday 8:30-11:30
- CREDITS: Humanities 345-102 and English 603-102
- Pre-requisites: Humanities 101 and English 101
The Woman in White, published serially in 1859-60, is widely held to be among the first and greatest of what became known as sensation novels. Novels of sensation are those that appeal to the senses and are intended to make readers’ hair stand on end: mystery, crimes of passion and calculation, hauntings, mistaken identity, and the uncanny are regular features of this genre. Sensation novels put us in touch with our bodies, our intuitions, our animality, and the limits of rationality.
The Woman in White invites us to think about the idea of ‘sanity’: is there a clear boundary between people who are ‘sane’ and those who are not? Who decides? The novel was written in the same period that saw the creation of the mental asylum in Europe and a particular fascination on the continent with the mental health of women who were presenting in doctor’s offices in increasing numbers with worrying symptoms such as paralysis, aphasia (the inability to speak), and loss of consciousness without obvious physical cause. What was going on with these women? Could their illness be related to the stifling expectations placed upon them by Victorian society?
According to 19th century doctors, who were exclusively male, these women were suffering from a disease called ‘hysteria’, which they learned to treat using a new therapeutic technique they called the “talking cure” – the forerunner of modern talk therapy. These same doctors held that women’s creativity was limited to reproduction, which is why they were considered inferior writers. The Woman in White and other sensation novels by writers such as Ellen Wood and Mary Elizabeth Braddon offered readers direct access to women’s perspectives on these issues and the resentment they felt about being confined in their gender roles. Critics at the time variously hailed these counter-cultural literary works as groundbreaking and as trash.
“Hysteria” is a label that is no longer used today, but it had a real impact on the lives of the women who were diagnosed with it. In this class, we will read Collins’ novel in its entirety–all 500+ pages–in instalments that will essentially align with its serialization, and ponder the question of what leads us to create and dissolve categories of illness and how these changes affect us legally, politically, and socially.
Fourth Semester Students
Dante and Milton
- Jean Coléno (Humanities) and Anna Lewton-Brain (English)
- Wednesday and Friday 11:30-2:30
- CREDITS: Humanities Ethics 345-BXH and English Literary Themes 603-BXE
- Pre-requisites: Humanities 101 & 102 and English 101, 102 & 103
This paired Humanities and English course introduces students to two of history’s most influential poets: Dante Alighieri and John Milton.
The Humanities portion of this paired course will begin by examining two influential ethical theories: utilitarianism (a modern ethical theory which will be contrasted with Dante’s views) and virtue ethics (an older ethical theory that had a profound impact on Dante’s views). Students will then explore Dante’s masterpiece, The Divine Comedy. The majority of the Humanities course will be devoted to a close study of this work, which gives an influential presentation of virtue ethics as well as a detailed presentation of the late Medieval Christian mindset. Students will read all of the Inferno section of The Divine Comedy, along with briefer excerpts from the other two sections, Purgatory and Paradise.
The English portion of the course will focus on the life and poetry of John Milton, arguably, the greatest poet in the English language (more revered even than Shakespeare!). In the first part of the course, we will read a selection of Milton’s lyric poems, including “L’Allegro”, “Il Penseroso,” and “Lycidas” in the context of 17th-century writing, politics, and religion, and students will consider Milton’s personal vocational calling to become a poet in light of their own sense of vocation, calling, and purpose. The second half of the class will be devoted to reading Milton’s magnum opus, Paradise Lost.
Throughout the semester, connections will be made between the Humanities and English portions of the paired course. Reading two of the greatest religious epics side by side will involve a journey to the underworld of sorts—Dante and Milton aren’t easy poets to read at first—but, like the narrators of their epics, we will not stay stuck in hell, but will learn to “soar / Above th’Aonian Mount”, to fly like the angels through the heavenly spheres. Having read these masterpieces will change you, and you will carry them with you, their images, ideas, and music, for the rest of your life, as you recognize their abiding and powerful influence in all spheres of cultural production, from literature, to art, to philosophy.
Questions? Contact Gabrielle Bernardin, Reflections Administrative Assistant: at gbernardin@dawsoncollege.qc.ca or by MIO.
