Undergraduate Course Offerings

ENGL 100 700/6.0 Introduction to Literary Study

Online course

Instructors: TBA
Offered: Fall and Winter Terms
Units: 6.0

Description: This class introduces you to the four main literary genres: fiction, poetry, drama, and the essay. It is also designed to improve your writing skills, and to develop your knowledge of literary terms and critical techniques as a foundation for further literary study. Why study literary genre? “We need poems and stories and novels and plays, as well as essays,” replies the great American writer Scott Russell Sanders. “Each genre offers us paths through the dark woods of this life, and we need all the paths we can find.”

Upon successful completion of this course, you should be able to do the following:

1. Identify and explain the hallmarks of the four main literary genres.
2. Identify, analyse, and employ the language of literary analysis when discussing texts (this language includes terms such as metaphor, irony, pathos, parody, rhetoric, and ideology).
3. Demonstrate a basic understanding of key critical theories (such as psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, and queer theory).
4. Evaluate the importance of gender, class, race, and geographical location such as categories for literary analysis.
5. Show a sound knowledge of grammar, punctuation, diction, and syntax.
6. Compose original arguments that evaluate, analyse, and synthesize primary and secondary texts, and that do so within a structural framework that includes a thesis statement, strong topic sentences, textual evidence, and a compelling conclusion.

Note: This course is not open to first year on-campus students.

Exclusion: No more than 6.0 units from: ENGL 100/6.0, ENGL 110/6.0, ENGL 112/6.0, ENGL 160/6.0.

ENGL 100/6.0 Introduction to Literary Study

Instructors: Laura Murray (ENGL 100 001), Molly Wallace (ENGL 100 002), John Pierce (ENGL 100 003)
Offered: Fall and Winter Terms
Units: 6.0

Description:

From the Arts & Science Calendar: An introduction to literary study, with an emphasis on the formal analysis of a diverse range of poetry and prose. Specific content and approach vary from section to section, but all sections share the goals of developing sensitivity to genre, cultivating writing skills, and providing students with a set of literary terms and critical techniques as a foundation for further literary study.

Note: Enrolment preference is given to first-year students.

Exclusion: No more than 6.0 units from: ENGL 100/6.0, ENGL 110/6.0, ENGL 112/6.0, ENGL 160/6.0.

ENGL 160/6.0 Modern Prose Fiction

Instructor: Robert May
Offered: Fall and Winter Terms
Units: 6.0

Description: This course is designed to promote interest in and appreciation for modern and contemporary prose fiction by introducing students to a selection of the most influential short stories and novels of the twentieth century. The course will provide students with a vocabulary for reading and discussing twentieth-century works of prose, and it will explore some of the most important themes, ideas, and preoccupations in modern and contemporary prose fiction. American, British, Canadian, and world authors will be represented.

Requirements: Evaluation methods will include written assignments, class attendance and participation, periodic quizzes, and a final exam.

Note: Enrolment is limited to students not registered in an ENGL Plan, and preference is given to upper-year students. This course may not be used as a foundation for an ENGL Plan or a prerequisite for upper-year ENGL courses.

Exclusion: No more than 6.0 units from: ENGL 100/6.0, ENGL 110/6.0, ENGL 112/6.0, ENGL 160/6.0.

ENGL 200 001/6.0 History of Literature in English

Instructor: Ruth Wehlau
Offered: Fall and Winter Terms
Units: 6.0

Description: This course will provide an overview of the predominantly British and Anglo-Irish literary tradition from the Anglo-Saxon period up to and including contemporary literature in English from around the world. The aim of the course is to introduce students to the major works and literary movements of this tradition within their historical context, to consider the reception of these works, and to examine the changes in the understanding of literature and its place in the world that occur throughout more than a thousand years of writing in English. To this end we will investigate a variety of issues: orality vs. literacy, the rise of the novel, the Romantic movement, and post-colonialism, among others. Works to be read include prose, poetry and drama by writers such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen and Wordsworth.

Requirements: Essays, in-class quizzes, exam.

Note: This course is required for all English Majors, Medials, and Minors. Enrolment preference is therefore given to English Majors, Medials, and Minors.

Exclusion: No more than 6.0 units from ENGL 110/6.0, ENGL 200/6.0.

ENGL 200 002/6.0 History of Literature in English

Instructor: Gwynn Dujardin
Offered: Fall and Winter Terms
Units: 6.0

Description: This survey course introduces students to the history of literature in the English language, from early writings from the Anglo-Saxon period to contemporary works from around the English-speaking world. Organized around canonical works representative of periods in literary history (e.g., medieval, Victorian, contemporary), the course traces developments in the definition of English as a literary language, the status and role of the writer in society, and the ways literature circulates in oral, material, and digital forms.

Note: This course is required for all English Majors, Medials, and Minors. Enrolment preference is therefore given to English Majors, Medials, and Minors.

Exclusion: No more than 6.0 units from ENGL 110/6.0, ENGL 200/6.0.

ENGL 223/3.0 Selected Women Writers II

Instructor: Asha Varadharajan
Offered: Winter Term
Units: 3.0

Description: In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf wonders, “who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?” This course introduces you to fiction, poetry, and drama by twentieth-century and twenty-first century women writers who have sought both to “measure” and to heal the division between poet’s heart and woman’s body that Woolf so eloquently describes. We will concern ourselves with the global diversity of feminine Anglophone literary traditions across categories of genre, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and geography. We will explore how women writers adapt and alter masculine literary influences to both scandalous and sobering effect. Finally, we will consider how they trace the effects of the radical social, economic, technological and cultural transformations of the modern world on time, reality, and psyche.

Requirements: 2 essays and several voluntary and assigned participation exercises.

Note: Students registered in a Gender Studies Plan may take this course without the usual prerequisite of ENGL 100.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Equivalency: ENGL 265/3.0.

ENGL 231/3.0 Special Topics in Genre I

Introduction to the Postcolonial Novel

Instructor: Taryn Beukema
Offered: Winter Term
Units: 3.0

Description: The novel occupies a privileged position in studies of postcolonial literature; despite the novel’s deeply rooted history within European literary traditions, many postcolonial writers have chosen it as their preferred aesthetic form/genre. This course will address the following questions: Are postcolonial novelists a part of, or products of, the tradition of the European novel? Is the novel a suitable form within which to situate postcolonial narratives? How have postcolonial novelists appropriated and/or rejected the various conventions of this supposedly European form? In what ways are these postcolonial novels writing back against/to the Imperial centre? This course will focus on twentieth-century novels from Africa and South Asia; while this is a wide geographical basis from which to operate, it will provide students with a broad range of culturally and historically situated texts to engage with and explore important issues within postcolonial studies. Students will be continually introduced to various critical and conceptual tools necessary for the productive reading of postcolonial texts. Authors to be studied may include: Tsitsi Dangarembga, J.M. Coetzee, Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy, Bapsi Sidhwa, Khushwant Singh, Salman Rushdie.

Requirements: Evaluation will be based upon weekly reading responses, a term paper, and a final exam.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

ENGL 237/3.0 Children’s Literature

Instructor: Rupayan Roy
Offered: Fall Term
Units: 3.0

Description: This course will introduce students to various aspects of children’s literature as a field of academic study. Early in the term, we will address the historical development of literature for young readers, including both adolescents and younger children. As the course progresses, we will focus on forms and genres encompassed by the label “children’s literature,” the question of what exactly constitutes a work for children, and the ways in which texts for young readers engage with larger historical and socio-political contexts. We will also examine whether particular texts are seeking to target both adults and young readers, as well as the extent to which texts endorse and/or challenge popular notions about the nature of childhood.

In terms of fiction, our list of readings will feature a mix of fairy tales, fantasy, and realism. The syllabus will include (but won’t be limited to) Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. We will also cover other elements of children’s culture; these will include songs, poems, the role of illustrations in children’s books, and even the history and nature of Sesame Street. Overall, this course will aim to help students develop their close-reading skills, their ability to compare/contrast texts, and their confidence in exploring children’s works in relation to form, genre, history, and ideology.

Requirements: Students will write an essay, in-class quizzes, an in-class reading response, and a final exam.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Note: Also offered as an online course. The required readings and thematic focus of the correspondence section of this course are substantially different from those in the on-campus section of the course.

Equivalency: ENGL 207/3.0.

ENGL 237 700/3.0 Children’s Literature

Online course

Instructor: Heather Evans
Offered: One section in the Fall Term, another in the Winter Term
Units: 3.0

Description: This course takes as its focus the history of children’s literature in Britain from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, with an emphasis on nineteenth-century works for children. The first half of the course concentrates largely on texts included in the anthology, From Instruction to Delight and on John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, and is designed to survey the development of a literature shaped specifically for children from its beginnings to the golden age of the nursery in the mid-nineteenth century. The last half of the course will explore one dominant genre in children’s literature of the twentieth century—fantasy—and will include works by writers such as George MacDonald, Oscar Wilde, J. M. Barrie, Beatrix Potter, Russell Hoban, Roald Dahl, Philip Pullman, and J. R. R. Tolkien. Central to our study will be an examination of the construction of childhood across the centuries; consideration of the intersections and relationships between literature, politics, philosophy, commerce, religion, economics, art, and other cultural sites; and an investigation of the dynamic between literature written for adult audiences and books read by children. As we work through our course we will interrogate hackneyed clichés and popular assumptions such as that the primary function of books read by children (past or present) is to stimulate the imagination of the child; or that children’s literature is simplistic, conservative, or moral; or that children are naturally sweet, innocent little angels.

Requirements: Two short essays (15% and 25%), active participation in online discussions (10%), and a final exam (50%).

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Note: Also offered as an on-campus course. The online and in-class sections are substantially different in reading list and thematic focus; it is not possible to switch from one to the other after Open Enrolment.

Equivalency: ENGL 207/3.0.

ENGL 256/6.0 Shakespeare

Online course

Instructor: TBA
Offered: Fall and Winter Terms
Units: 6.0

Description: This online English course is a study of Shakespeare’s plays in relation to the social, intellectual, and political climate of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods and with reference to theatrical production.

The principal objective of this course is to help you gain confidence in reading and understanding Shakespeare’s plays. Because Shakespeare’s plays are written in a largely unfamiliar idiom and literary form, and because they are the product of specific historical circumstances, the course will give equal emphasis to the development of analytical skills and to acquiring a working knowledge of the social, political, and theatrical milieu in which Shakespeare wrote.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Note: Also offered as an on-campus course. The required readings and thematic focus of the correspondence section of this course are substantially different from those in the on-campus section of the course.

Exclusion: No more than 6.0 units from ENGL 256/6.0 (formerly ENGL 226/6.0), ENGL 257/3.0 (formerly ENGL 227/3.0), ENGL 258/3.0 (formerly ENGL 228/3.0)

Equivalency: ENGL 226/6.0.

ENGL 257/3.0 Elizabethan Shakespeare

Shakespeare and Identity

Instructor: Ian Maness
Offered: Fall Term
Units: 3.0

Description: This course will examine six of Shakespeare’s plays written during the Elizabethan Era (1558–1603), with a special emphasis on how they represent the relationship between language and power. The plays will be explored in their context not only as literary works but also as works of commercial public theatre. We will consider the different forms language can take—private and public, spoken and written, educated and uneducated, sacred and secular—and the way in which Shakespeare depicts language as the basis of political authority, social class, religious affiliation, national or cultural identity, gender, and morality. The course will also provide a broad overview of the theatrical genres in which Shakespeare worked in the early portion of his career.

Studied plays will likely include two of his histories, Richard III and 1 Henry IV; two comedies, The Merchant of Venice and As You Like It; and two tragedies, Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet.

Requirements: One short essay analyzing a speech, one longer comparative essay, and a final exam.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Exclusion: No more than 6.0 units from ENGL 256/6.0 (formerly ENGL 226/6.0), ENGL 257/3.0 (formerly ENGL 227/3.0), ENGL 258/3.0 (formerly ENGL 228/3.0)

Equivalency: ENGL 227/3.0.

ENGL 258/3.0 Jacobean Shakespeare

Instructor: Julia Gingerich
Offered: Winter Term
Units: 3.0

Description: This course will examine six of Shakespeare’s later plays written following the accession of King James I in 1603, with particular emphasis on the ways in which these works represent the relationship between language, power, and performance. In particular, we will consider the darker turn of these later works and address the significance of madness, illusion, ambiguity, deception, slander, prophecy, and cursing. The course will consider Shakespeare’s plays as performance, as literary (printed) work, and as cultural/historical document, and examine Shakespeare’s developments in genre, theme, and character in three of the major dramatic genres of his later career: problem comedy, tragedy, and romance. In addition to addressing how these late plays relate or respond to his earlier works, the course shall consider performance conditions, dramaturgical traditions, literary sources, generic conventions, and the social, religious and political context of Jacobean England. Due to the importance of language and rhetoric in Shakespeare’s texts, a great deal of our approach will focus on close reading to examine his language as closely as his content. The plays studied include: Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, The Tempest, and The Winter’s Tale.

Requirements: Evaluation will be based upon in-class reading responses, a short paper, a term paper, and a final exam.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Exclusion: No more than 6.0 units from ENGL 256/6.0 (formerly ENGL 226/6.0), ENGL 257/3.0 (formerly ENGL 227/3.0), ENGL 258/3.0 (formerly ENGL 228/3.0)

Equivalency: ENGL 228/3.0.

ENGL 271/3.0 Issues and Themes: Special Topics I

Victorian Literature and Photography

Instructor: Carla Manfredi
Offered: Fall Term
Units: 3.0

Description: Victorian literature emerged during a period of dizzying social, ideological, cultural and technological change. This course explores the fascinating and ever-changing relationship between photography and literary realism during this era. Through close readings of photographs by Oscar Rejlander, Henry Peach Robinson and Julia Margaret Cameron, writings about photography, and fiction by Henry James (The Real Thing), Alfred Tennyson (Idylls of the King), Amy Levy (The Romance of the Shop), Richard Marsh (The Beetle) and Grant Allen (The Episode of the Bertillon Method) we will grapple with ideas such as: how did photography impact the Victorian understanding of “realism” and “surrealism”? How do photographs affect ideas of time, space and perspective? What is the visual imagination? Finally, by the end of this course students will have gained insight into the lively, surprising culture of early photography.

Requirements: Participation, an in-class midterm, one essay, and a final exam.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

ENGL 272/3.0 Issues and Themes: Special Topics II

The Modernist Novel and the Question of Identity

Instructor: Andrew Bingham
Offered: Fall Term
Units: 3.0

Description: The Modernist period in literature, roughly 1890–1950 for our purposes, was a time of huge and stunning revolutions in artistic form and content. As Europe and America experienced change and upheaval in many areas of life—technological, political, sexual, religious, and cultural—Modernist novelists sought to depict how these changes affected personal and communal identity in a time of widespread uncertainty.

This course will address a number of questions: how does Modernist novelistic form allow for deeper, or more hesitant, ways of understanding what it means to be a person in a particular place and time? What are the particular struggles and challenges regarding identity (both individual and communal) that these novelists face and answer in their own way? In the midst of uncertainty, how do novelists anticipate the future? The Modernist novel, with its capacious and remarkably adaptive spirit, depicts and engages with these changes and traumas in a way particular to its form: by focusing on the concrete experiences of individuals and groups struggling to make sense of how external events impact and shape the internal and relational aspects of personal identity.

Novels and essays by the following authors may be included: Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Witold Gombrowicz, and Samuel Beckett.

Requirements: One short essay and one long essay, 4 short responses to weekly readings, and a final exam.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

ENGL 274/3.0 Literature and War

Instructor: Patricia Rae
Offered: Winter Term
Units: 3.0

Description: The purpose of this course will be to train students in the close analysis of the literature of war written in English, and to leave them with critical concepts and terminology useful for their subsequent study of English literature. The texts studied will include poetry and memoirs from two very different twentieth-century conflicts, the First World War (1914–1918) and the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Authors will include Vera Brittain, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Ivor Gurney, George Orwell, Margot Heinemann, John Cornford, Tom Wintringham, Norman Bethune, Edwin Rolfe, and Langston Hughes. We will consider how the poems and memoirs represent and perform various kinds of “war work”: fighting and healing; recruiting and mourning; witnessing and commemorating; protesting and fighting for peace. We will also reflect on the role these texts play both in constructing and in critiquing “collective” and “historical” memory and national identity and on why the role of British, American and Canadian volunteers in Spain is so little known by comparison with the sacrifices of their counterparts in World War I.

The method of course delivery will be a combination of lectures and instructor-led discussion. Students will be asked to focus on literary form as well as content: they will learn to identify and define relevant literary genres and devices and to discuss the psychological, social and political purposes they serve. They will also become familiar with some of the discourses linking texts to other cultural practices: for example, with recruitment propaganda, popular songs, representations of war in painting, sculpture, or war memorials, and the institutions of commemoration. We will pay special attention to the practices surrounding Remembrance Day on November 11.

Advance Preparation: Students will be expected to have read and be conversant with the following poems, which were touchstones for many of the soldier poets of the Great War: Milton’s “Lycidas,” Shelley’s “Adonais,” Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” and “Tintern Abbey,” Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.” They may also wish to begin reading Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, a long and wonderful memoir of love and loss in the Great War.

Requirements: Evaluation will be based on reading quizzes, a few short research assignments, a term paper, and a final exam. Exceptional class participation will earn bonus points.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

ENGL 278/3.0 Literature and Place

Toronto in Contemporary Canadian Literature

Instructor: Petra Fachinger
Offered: Winter Term
Units: 3.0

Description: “Being Canadian demands a constant effort of the imagination, a working definition of the country that must be conjured out of the ether on consecutive mornings. What exactly is this place called Canada? Does it even exist? How? What does it mean to be a citizen when patriotism is so problematic? What does it mean to be a country at all? Our good fortune is not because of us, but it is ours nonetheless. In Canada, the happy accident, we have space—and space, as in the story of Death the Iglulingmiut told—allows for peace” (Noah Richler, This Is My Country, What’s Yours? (455)).

National mythology and critical discussions about Canada’s culture and literature have privileged both the wilderness and the small town as quintessential to Canadian experience. During the last three decades, however, representations of Canadian space and identity construction have shifted to urban environments, mainly Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. Of these urban centres, Toronto has come to generate the largest and most diverse corpus of urban fiction.

This course will focus on representations of Toronto’s contemporary urban reality as portrayed in Canadian short stories, novels, and plays. It will trace the development of literature set in Toronto from multicultural to diasporic and transnational, and will examine how representation of the transnational city has stimulated new narrative and dramatic modes. We will explore how identity formation processes are linked to the creation of urban space and vice versa and how the texts reflect ways in which differences of race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, and generation shape the construction and perception of space.

The course, which will combine lecture with instructor-led discussion, will train students in the close analysis of contemporary urban fiction and drama, and will familiarize them with critical concepts of urban, diasporic, and transnational studies. We will likely include texts by Dionne Brand, David Bezmozgis, Catherine Bush, Austin Clarke, Cherie Dimaline, Maggie Helwig, Sheila Heti, Kyo Maclear, Anne Michaels, Andrew Moodie, Michael Ondaatje, Russell Smith, Drew Hayden Taylor, and M. G. Vassanji.

Requirements: Evaluation will be based on reading quizzes, a term paper, and a final exam.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Equivalency: ENGL 208/3.0.

ENGL 284/3.0 Issues and Themes in Canadian Literature I

Canada’s Confederation Writers

Instructor: Robert May
Offered: Fall Term
Units: 3.0

Description: A survey of English-language Canadian poetry and short stories written between Confederation and the First World War. Writers to be studied include Isabella Valancy Crawford, William Wilfred Campbell, Charles G. D. Roberts, Archibald Lampman, Bliss Carman, and Duncan Campbell Scott. “Lyrical in tone and romantic in attitude,” Northrop Frye writes, this influential group of writers composed poetry and prose of a quality and standard not before seen in Canada, laying the groundwork for the explosion of Canadian literature to come in the twentieth century.

Requirements: Evaluation methods will include two essays, one final examination, and class participation.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

ENGL 285/3.0 Issues and Themes in Canadian Literature II

Kids These Days: Literature, Media, and Youth Culture

Instructor: Jennifer Hardwick
Offered: Winter Term
Units: 3.0

Description: Few populations face as much scrutiny and curiosity as youth. Are they vulnerable or dangerous? Slackers or revolutionaries? Should they be protected? Persecuted? Admired? Pitied? Are they a consumer category or a political category? In short, how does society see “kids these days,” and how do they see themselves?

This course will look at cultural material for, about, and by youth in order to address these (and other) questions. Literature and will be paired with theory, film, music, advertisements, and new media texts (blogs, tweets, youtube videos etc.) in order to better understand the social, political, cultural, and economic roles of youth in contemporary Canadian society. Possible texts include Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill, Richard VanCamp’s The Lesser Blessed, Degrassi High, Direction Youth Service’s Another Slice, Courtney Summer’s Some Girls Are and music by John K. Samson, Avril Lavigne, and Broken Social Scene.

Requirements: Students will be evaluated on contributions to an online learning community, one short paper, one long paper, and a final exam.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

ENGL 290A 001/3.0 Seminar in Literary Interpretation

Moby-Dick

Instructor: Glenn Willmott
Offered: Fall Term
Units: 3.0

Description: This seminar course introduces students to the analytic interpretation of narrative fiction, and specifically to close reading the novel. Seminar discussion will be emphasized. Course requirements are designed to teach and test basic literary analytic skills rather than full literary argument development and essay composition. Our required readings will comprise critical work on novel form, such as George Hughes’s Reading Novels (2002), and a novel, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, or the Whale (1851).

Requirements: Ten reading quizzes (45%), four short writing assignments (40%), and a final examination (15%).

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Note: Available only to English Majors and Medials who chose their English plan after May 2011, for whom it is a required course.

ENGL 290A 002/3.0 Seminar in Literary Interpretation

Instructor: TBA
Offered: Fall Term
Units: 3.0

Description: To follow.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Note: Available only to English Majors and Medials who chose their English plan after May 2011, for whom it is a required course.

ENGL 290A 003/3.0 Seminar in Literary Interpretation

Middlemarch

Instructor: Chris Bongie
Offered: Fall Term
Units: 3.0

Description: This seminar will be organized around George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), famously referred to by Virginia Woolf as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” The primary emphasis of the course will be on cultivating close reading skills through intensive study of this classic nineteenth-century novel. Additional readings will include biographical material on Eliot as well as literary criticism devoted to Victorian literature in general and to Middlemarch in particular.

Requirements (provisional): One 8–12 page essay, several short assignments (including oral presentation), reading quizzes, class participation, and excellent attendance.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Note: Available only to English Majors and Medials who chose their English plan after May 2011, for whom it is a required course.

ENGL 290B 001/3.0 Seminar in Literary Interpretation

Reading Tolkien Reading Beowulf

Instructor: Ruth Wehlau
Offered: Winter Term
Units: 3.0

Description: As a medievalist, Tolkien borrowed freely from sources he was familiar with, including the Old English language and the epic Beowulf. This course will involve a close reading of Beowulf, as well as an introduction to the style, language and ethos of Old English poetry. We will then consider Tolkien’s own reading of Beowulf, looking at both his critical commentary on the poem and Beowulf (and the Old English language) as an element of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. The class will conclude with a study of the second book of the trilogy, The Two Towers, in which the kingdom of Rohan (based on the Anglo-Saxons) is described.

Requirements: Essays, class presentation, class participation, exercises, exam.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Note: Available only to English Majors and Medials who chose their English plan after May 2011, for whom it is a required course.

ENGL 290B 002/3.0 Seminar in Literary Interpretation

Milton’s Paradise Lost

Instructor: Christopher Fanning
Offered: Winter Term
Units: 3.0

Description: A close reading of the 12 books of Milton’s 1674 epic in the context of great critical statements on the poem from the Restoration to the present. Course goals: To develop skills in analyzing poetry, assessing and applying criticism, expressing ideas about literature in written and oral formats. Texts: The Norton Critical Edition of Paradise Lost (ed. Gordon Teskey, 2005).

Requirements (subject to change): Class participation, a seminar, two or more short written assignments, an exam.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Note: Available only to English Majors and Medials who chose their English plan after May 2011, for whom it is a required course.

ENGL 290B 003/3.0 Seminar in Literary Interpretation

Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer

Instructor: Margaret Pappano
Offered: Fall Term
Units: 3.0

Description: This course will involve a close study of Chaucer’s long poem, beginning with an intensive introduction to Middle English. The course will include practice in close reading, a study of responses to the poem from different critical perspectives, such as historicist, feminist, psychoanalytic, and also a study of the poem’s literary sources and manuscript context.

Requirements: Active participation in class discussion, short quizzes, 4–5 short essays, one longer essay, final exam.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Note: Available only to English Majors and Medials who chose their English plan after May 2011, for whom it is a required course.

ENGL 292/6.0 Introduction to Literary Criticism and Theory

Instructor: Mark Jones
Offered: Fall and Winter Terms
Units: 6.0

Description: Introductory survey of literary theory from Plato and Aristotle to the twentieth century. ENGL 292 treats “theories” not primarily as methods for critical practice but as ways of (re-)envisioning how literature functions—from basic assumptions (e.g., that writing is representation, that authors control meaning) to more polemical claims (e.g., that “poetry should not mean, but be”). Its organization is both chronological and topical. The fall syllabus moves from Plato and Aristotle into key topics associated with both, such as representation, genre, narrative, and pragmatics. It then treats theories concerning two major functions of criticism, evaluation and interpretation. The winter syllabus focuses more exclusively on modern theory and criticism, especially formalism, Marxism, and discourse theory. Short stories, sonnets, ballads, and other short poems are introduced throughout to illustrate theories and critical practice.

Requirements: Eighty-percent attendance is required to pass. Other requirements include regular course preparation, occasional in-class quizzes, one or two essays each term, and a final 3-hour exam.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Note: Enrolment preference is given to Majors and Medials.

ENGL 306/6.0 The Northern World: Vikings and Saxons

Instructor: Scott-Morgan Straker
Offered: Fall and Winter Terms
Units: 6.0

Description: There are strong connections between the literatures of the medieval Saxons and the Vikings, but languages can act as a barrier to the texts: not everyone is willing to learn Old English and Old Norse in order to read them. By studying these texts in translation, we will remove that barrier and explore the culture of the medieval north. The English selections will include an assortment of historiographic, religious, and heroic texts, culminating in a complete reading of the most famous Anglo-Saxon text, Beowulf. Several fundamental themes will emerge from these readings, including heroism, social and political power, and the portrayal of women. Many of these texts focus on what it means to be a human being in the historical world; we will examine this question in a variety of texts and genres. We will also compare different translations of individual texts to assess the politics and prejudices implicit in the translators’ decisions. The Norse selections may include the finest of the sagas of the Icelanders (Njáls saga, Egils saga), an account of the Viking exploration of the New World (Eiríks saga rauða), an overview of Norse mythology (from Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda), and the quasi-mythological dragon-slaying epic Völsunga saga. Students of British literature are accustomed to thinking of the connections between English texts and continental influences, chiefly from France and Italy. This course will supplement those connections with a set of connections that is no less familiar equally powerful and sophisticated: the northern world.

Requirements: One essay and one shorter assignment per term, a presentation, participation, and an exam.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

ENGL 321/6.0 Renaissance Poetry and Prose

Instructor: TBA
Offered: Fall and Winter Terms
Units: 6.0

Description: To follow.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Exclusion: No more than 6.0 units from: ENGL 221/6.0, ENGL 321/6.0.

ENGL 330/6.0 Restoration and 18th-Century Literature

Instructor: Christopher Fanning
Offered: Fall and Winter Terms
Units: 6.0

Description: This course surveys the variety of writing produced by men and women between 1660 and 1800, paying attention to the development of poetic forms and other characteristic modes of literary expression (e.g., prose fiction) and exploring the philosophical and social-cultural ideals and realities of the period. Questions to be considered: How did the period itself view literature and literary history? Who should write poetry and what are the appropriate topics and forms of literature? What is the nature of authorship in a print culture? What aesthetic, social and political concerns are reflected in the characteristic discourses of the period—satire, sensibility, and the sublime?

This course will operate by lecture and discussion in roughly equal parts.

Requirements: In-class writing, term papers, and a final examination.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Equivalencies: ENGL 241/6.0, ENGL 341/6.0.

ENGL 340/6.0 Romantic Literature

Instructor: Robert Morrison
Offered: Fall and Winter Terms
Units: 6.0

Description: This course explores the poetry, politics, and cultural transformations of the Romantic period (1789–1834). It focuses on the six major poets—William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats—but also considers the work of essayists such as Thomas De Quincey and Leigh Hunt, and terror fiction writers like Mary Shelley and James Hogg.

Requirements: Two formal essays, twelve unannounced quizzes, a participation grade, and a final exam.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Equivalencies: ENGL 250/6.0, ENGL 350/6.0.

ENGL 349/6.0 19th-Century Transatlantic Literature

Instructor: Chris Bongie
Offered: Fall and Winter Terms
Units: 6.0

Description: This course will explore cultural transactions between Europe and the Americas from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, with special attention to the transatlantic dimension of literary movements such as melodrama and realism. A variety of genres will be considered (including poetry and drama), but the predominant focus will be on the development of the novel as a (transatlantic) genre over the course of the century. We will sketch out a history of the nineteenth-century novel that takes us from the “domestic” fiction of Jane Austen (Mansfield Park) to the proto-modernist narratives of Joseph Conrad (Nostromo). In addition to Austen and Conrad, six other novelists will be studied: Victor Hugo, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Martin Delany, George Eliot, Henry James, and Machado de Assis. Slavery and its abolition provides a primary thematic focus of the first half of the course, while the second half will pay special attention to the tenets and contradictions of the realist aesthetic that dominated nineteenth-century novelistic production. Required readings will also include some recent theoretical work on transatlantic culture (such as Paul Gilroy on the Black Atlantic).

Requirements (provisional): One essay, approx. six shorter writing assignments, final exam, class participation, and excellent attendance.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

ENGL 375/6.0 American Literature

Reading the Past

Instructor: Yaël Schlick
Offered: Fall and Winter Terms
Units: 6.0

Description: This survey of American literature will include poetry, drama, and prose fiction and will proceed roughly chronologically (from the 1880s to the contemporary moment), exploring social, historical, cultural, as well as aesthetic issues. We will read the works of canonical authors like Mark Twain and Robert Frost, but will also explore recent American writing by the likes of Charles Yu and Lydia Davis.

Requirements: Two term essays (25% each), participation (10%), quizzes (10%), final exam (30%).

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Exclusion: No more than 6.0 units from ENGL 375/6.0; ENGL 470/6.0.

ENGL 380/6.0 Literature and Culture in Canada

Multiculturalism and Its Discontents

Instructor: Sam McKegney
Offered: Fall and Winter Terms
Units: 6.0

Description: Through much of the 20th century critical commentators lamented the absence of a distinctly Canadian literary tradition, deriding Canadian literatures for their derivativeness (of British, French, or American literatures) and mourning the absence of a solid national identity many believed ought to have been solidified through stories. As Earle Birney writes, “it’s only by our lack of ghosts / we’re haunted” (296). By the 1980s and 90s, Canadians and Canadian literatures appeared to have adopted, almost by consensus, an ethos of multiculturalism that came to be treated as the Canadian tradition, an indicator of national distinctiveness and a rubric for decoding the meaning of Canadian identity. Now in the early second decade of the new millennium, ubiquity of multiculturalism has come to fade, infiltrated by other markers of national distinctiveness. This course seeks to interrogate and historicize this development through an intense study of Canadian novels, poems, short stories, plays, films, and critical writings from the past half-century.

The first half of the course is designed to provide students with a thorough understanding of the discourse of multiculturalism as it has risen to prominence since the ground-breaking policies of the Trudeau government in the 1960s and 1970s and further to assist students in historicizing the place of multiculturalism in the evolution of literary production in this country. The matrix of relationships among culture, tradition, race, ethnicity, and artistic production will be addressed in readings and classroom discussions. Emphasis will be placed on how the discourse of multiculturalism invokes the language of tradition to forge (or at least articulate) a new Canadian tradition. Students will engage such questions as:

• Is Canada multicultural? If so, how? politically? socially? ideologically?
• How has the re-articulation of Canada as multicultural fundamentally altered national identity (or national identities)?
• How are disparate traditions fostered in a multicultural literary environment, and how are they circumscribed?
• What impact does the reification of a multicultural ethos have on the flourishing and/or ghetto-ization of immigrant communities?

The second half of the course will probe the potential limitations of strictly cultural readings of texts by foregrounding other key identity concerns from sexuality to gender to class to age. Building from the Fall Term, the Winter Term will require students to gauge relationships among multiculturalism, postmodernity, sexuality, class, and age in the creation and reception of Canadian literatures; further it will probe the impact of such relationships on Canadian identities. Authors studied may include Rawi Hage, Joy Kogawa, Michael Ondaatje, David Chariandy, George Elliott Clarke, and Heather O’Neill.

Requirements: Essays and an exam.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

ENGL 385/6.0 Literature and Modern Media

Instructor: Glenn Willmott
Offered: Fall and Winter Terms
Units: 6.0

Description: A study of the relationships between print literature and other media from the early 20th century to the present, comprising (i) both the representation of modern media in literature and of print literature in the arts of modern media, (ii) the influence of modern media on literary form, and (iii) adaptation of literary works in modern media. The course aims to explore how the advent of popular mass media in the twentieth century, especially audio-visual and computer media, affected the role, perception, and form of literature. Readings will include critical writers such as McLuhan and Manovich, and works such as The Big Sleep, Ulysses, The War of the Worlds, The Hunger Games, and JPod.

Requirements: 2 or 3 writing assignments (50%), a final examination (50%), and a participation adjustment applied to the final grade (up to +/- 5%).

Counts Toward: Consult the table

ENGL 411/3.0 Topics in Medieval Literature I

Medieval Drama

Instructor: Margaret Pappano
Offered: Fall Term
Units: 3.0

Description: This course concentrates on drama and dramatic traditions from medieval England, covering liturgical drama, the morality play, the saint play, civic cycle drama, the royal entry, and university drama. In addition to studying the dramatic texts, students will explore the performance conditions and relevant cultural contexts in order to gain a fuller understanding of the work of drama in the period. Covering approximately five centuries, the course charts the changes in representational practices from early monastic drama to the impact of the Reformation on performing sacred material.

Requirements: Students will have the opportunity to participate in a performance. Other requirements include participation in class discussion, one short essay, one longer essay, a class presentation, and a final exam.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Exclusion: No more than 6.0 units from ENGL 312/3.0, ENGL 313/3.0, ENGL 411/3.0, ENGL 412/3.0.

ENGL 420/6.0 Studies in Renaissance Literature I

Tudor Literature

Instructor: Gwynn Dujardin
Offered: Fall and Winter Terms
Units: 6.0

Description: This course studies the development of English literary culture from the arrival of the printing press in London in 1576 to the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603. We will consider ways that texts invoke, describe, appease or defy the monarchs and mythologies of the House of Tudor. In launching our inquiry with the beginning of print culture, however (roughly a decade before Henry of Lancaster defeats the recently exhumed Richard III), we will nonetheless explore other ways that English authors define themselves, their writing, and their reading audiences. Literary texts will include drama, poetry, and prose, and juxtapose familiar, canonical authors such as Shakespeare to other cultural media.

Requirements: Assignments will include modes of writing, such as the keeping of a commonplace book and a creative exercise, which are based on ways that sixteenth-century authors learned how to write; research projects in book history using sixteenth-century publications held at the W. D. Jordan Special Collections library; a group-based seminar presentation; and a formal essay incorporating literary and non-literary primary sources.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

ENGL 440/6.0 Studies in Romanticism

Instructor: Robert Morrison
Offered: Fall and Winter Terms
Units: 6.0

Description: The texts of the Regency (1811–1820) are often subsumed within the larger concerns of British Romanticism. But there is distinctive Regency architecture, art, fashion, and furniture. Is there a distinctive Regency literature? This course examines a wide ranging series of texts produced during this remarkable decade—including essays by William Hazlitt; novels by Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, and Walter Scott; and poetry by Lord Byron—and asks what styles, contexts, characteristics, and modes of expressions might belong specifically to Regency writing.

Requirements: Two formal essays, twelve unannounced quizzes, a participation grade, a seminar presentation, and a final exam.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

ENGL 441/3.0 Topics in Romanticism I

Poetry and Poetics of William Blake

Instructor: Mark Jones
Offered: Fall Term
Units: 3.0

Description: Introductory seminar in the poetry and poetics of William Blake. The syllabus emphasizes shorter “illuminated” works including the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Book of Thel, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and The Book of Urizen, but also includes manuscript lyrics, the emblem book “For the Sexes: the Gates of Paradise,” and works in prose.

Requirements: Eighty-percent attendance is required to pass. Other requirements include regular preparation and participation, one individual or group seminar facilitation, one or more essays (2500 words total), and a final (2-hour) exam.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Exclusion: No more than 6.0 units from ENGL 353/3.0, ENGL 354/3.0, ENGL 441/3.0, ENGL 442/3.0.

ENGL 442/3.0 Topics in Romanticism II

Poetry and Poetics of William Blake

Instructor: Mark Jones
Offered: Winter Term
Units: 3.0

Description: Introductory seminar emphasizing Lord Byron’s unfinished masterpiece, Don Juan, but beginning with a survey of his earlier achievements in forms including lyric, closet drama, and verse romance. Emphasis is on close and intertextual reading of the works in connection with Byron’s other great creation, the Byronic character.

Requirements: Eighty-percent attendance is required to pass. Other requirements include regular preparation and participation, one individual or group seminar facilitation, one or more essays (2500 words total), and a final (2-hour) exam.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Exclusion: No more than 6.0 units from ENGL 353/3.0, ENGL 354/3.0, ENGL 441/3.0, ENGL 442/3.0.

ENGL 451/3.0 Topics in Victorian Literature I

Women and Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture

Instructor: Maggie Berg
Offered: Fall Term
Units: 3.0

Description: This course will explore the connections between women and animals in Victorian fiction in the context of nineteenth-century human and animal rights. Because the rise of animal rights was concurrent with the rise of women’s rights, we will consider early feminists’ contributions to the movement for the protection of animals and the anti-vivisection campaigns. We will situate the novels in the light of Victorian anxieties about the human- animal divide by reading short selections of both Victorian and contemporary theory. We will also consider the visual art of the period as an indication of how people thought about human-animal relations.

Texts will include The Animals Reader; Anna Sewell, Black Beauty; Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey; Wilkie Collins, Heart and Science; Virginia Woolf Flush.

Requirements: Class participation, a short oral presentation, a presentation of an illustration or painting, a term paper, and a short final examination.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Exclusion: No more than 6.0 units from ENGL 358/3.0, ENGL 359/3.0, ENGL 451/3.0, ENGL 452/3.0.

ENGL 456/3.0 Group II: Special Topics II

At Table with the Victorians: The Literature of Food and Food in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Instructor: Heather Evans
Offered: Winter Term
Units: 3.0

Description: This course will offer an introduction to the history and literature of nineteenth-century gastronomy, the art of fine dining. Treating the long nineteenth century as a grand literary banquet, we will whet our appetites on gastronomic treatises by writers such as Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière, William Kitchiner, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, and Thomas Walker, and nibble our way through tasty essays, fiction and poems penned by both epicurean and abstemious writers, such as Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Lewis Carroll, Elizabeth Gaskell, Christina Rossetti, and Sarah Grand. Along the way, we will snack on Victorian cookbooks and stir up issues such as vegetarianism, famine, the emergence of the restaurant, women cooks, tippling, temperance, and the importance of tea.

Requirements: One seminar presentation, one term paper, active participation and a final exam.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

ENGL 464/6.0 Literary Modernism

British and American Literary Modernisms

Instructor: Patricia Rae
Offered: Fall and Winter Terms
Units: 6.0

Description: During the first half of the twentieth century many writers and artists experimented radically with form in an effort to confront their inheritance from the nineteenth-century and “make it new” (Ezra Pound). This course will explore those experiments, looking at both literary and visual texts from several modernist movements (including Symbolism, Impressionism, Futurism, Imagism, Vorticism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism). Our approach will be interdisciplinary and comparative, as we consider how similar literary and visual works realize the principles set out in the movements’ manifestos. Over the course of the year, we’ll ask questions about the historical and social circumstances fuelling the modernist movements and also about the potential of their experiments to shape where history and society are headed. What influence did the Great War have on literary experimentation and what role did it play in its aftermath? Were modernist methods useful in confronting the grave challenges posed by the Great Depression and the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s? What was the relationship between avant-garde experiments and developments in popular culture?

Writers considered will include Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, H. D., T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, and George Orwell. Students will be given the opportunity to do creative projects reflecting the principles articulated in modernist manifestos, if they so desire.

Requirements: Two essays (one short, one long and possibly involving creative writing), two group presentations, final exam.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Equivalency: ENGL 366/6.0.

ENGL 466/3.0 Topics in Modern/Contemporary Canadian Literature I

Canadian Short Story Collections

Instructor: Tracy Ware
Offered: Fall Term
Units: 3.0

Description: In Canada, short fiction remains vital though sometimes overshadowed by the novel. This course will investigate the ways in which five authors arrange their stories into books: at one end of the spectrum, a sequence of stories may have the same protagonist and setting, as in Margaret Laurence’s A Bird in the House; at the other extreme, a miscellaneous collection may be most notable for the diversity of its stories. Somewhere in between come the typical books of Alistair MacLeod and Alice Munro, with their recurring themes and strong sense of place. In addition to A Bird in the House, we will read MacLeod’s The Lost Salt Gift of Blood, Munro’s Runaway, Rohinton Mistry’s Tales From Firozsha Baag, and Margaret Atwood’s Moral Disorder.

Requirements: One term paper, one seminar presentation, a mid-term examination, and a final examination.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Exclusion: No more than 6.0 units from ENGL 385/3.0, ENGL 386/3.0, ENGL 466/3.0, ENGL 467/3.0.

ENGL 467/3.0 Topics in Modern/Contemporary Canadian Literature II

Hockey[,] Literature and Myths of Nation

Instructor: Sam McKegney
Offered: Winter Term
Units: 3.0

Description: Hockey has a steady grip on the Canadian national imaginary. The game has been conceived as a breeding ground for social cohesion and civic virtue, as a source of national unity and pride, and, in poet Richard Harrison’s words, as a tool through which to make meaning out of winter. Yet the dominant mythologies that paint hockey as binding Canadians both to each other and to the landscape they inhabit serve simultaneously to entrench highly problematic paradigms of gender, sexuality, race, and language that exclude as well as include. This course interrogates the role of hockey in fomenting and disrupting discourses of Canadian nationhood, while examining how depictions of the country’s national winter sport serve to police Canadian identity by classifying certain behaviours as licit and valorized and others as illicit and aberrant. We will consider topics like gender, sexuality, nationalism, embodiment, economics, regionalism, environmentalism, militarism, and violence while studying novels, poetry, life-writings, media representations, song lyrics, and films by artists like Lynn Coady, Dave Bidini, Richard Harrison, Randal Maggs, and Tomson Highway.

Requirements: The course will include an oral component and will culminate in a major written assignment.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Exclusion: No more than 6.0 units from ENGL 385/3.0, ENGL 386/3.0, ENGL 466/3.0, ENGL 467/3.0.

ENGL 470/6.0 Studies in Modern/Contemporary American Literature

“The Souls of Black Folk”: African American Literature and Culture

Instructor: Asha Varadharajan
Offered: Fall and Winter Terms
Units: 6.0

Description: This course will take a multi-faceted approach to African American literature and culture in order to define a “black aesthetic” in all its complexity and contradiction. We will study multiple genres and mediums and attend to both oral and written composition and performance in order to reveal the interplay of tradition and innovation in African American literature and culture. These are likely to include slave narratives, poetry, drama, fiction, spirituals, jazz, blues, rap, hip hop, art (including performance pieces), folk tales like Brer Rabbit and Tar Baby, film, and humour (including minstrelsy). Because this course moves beyond an exclusive focus on literature, we will pay particular attention to historical contexts, political movements, and economic factors that determine and inflect cultural expression. Wherever appropriate, we will examine critical and philosophical interventions on the question of race, miscegenation, passing, and sexuality as well as “white” representations of blackness that “black” artists reformulate. If time permits, some reference will be made to the African Canadian and “Black British” experience.

Requirements: 2 major research projects, 1 multi-media/creative assignment, assigned forms of participation, and a final exam.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Exclusion: No more than 6.0 units from ENGL 375/6.0, ENGL 470/6.0.

ENGL 471/3.0 Topics in Modern/Contemporary American Literature I

Poetry 1900 to 1950

Instructor: Yaël Schlick
Offered: Fall Term
Units: 3.0

Description: ENGL 471/3.0 and 472/3.0 can be taken together or separately. English 471 will cover American poetry from 1900 to 1950. English 472 will cover American poetry from 1950 to the present. For both seminars, our focus will be on American poetry’s voices, schools, polemics, and histories. The mainstay of these semester-long courses will still be an examination of works by well-known figures like Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery. But we will also study lesser-known poets and discuss the various manifestos and anthology introductions that attempt to come to terms with just what constitutes American poetry and what might be its quintessential voice(s) or direction(s).

Requirements: A term essay (30%), a seminar presentation (20%), class participation (20%), and a final exam (30%).

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Exclusion: No more than 12.0 units from ENGL 367/3.0, ENGL 368/3.0, ENGL 377/3.0, ENGL 378/3.0, ENGL 471/3.0, ENGL 472/3.0.

ENGL 472/3.0 Topics in Modern/Contemporary American Literature I

Poetry 1950 to the Present

Instructor: Yaël Schlick
Offered: Winter Term
Units: 3.0

Description: ENGL 471/3.0 and 472/3.0 can be taken together or separately. English 471 will cover American poetry from 1900 to 1950. English 472 will cover American poetry from 1950 to the present. For both seminars, our focus will be on American poetry’s voices, schools, polemics, and histories. The mainstay of these semester-long courses will still be an examination of works by well-known figures like Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery. But we will also study lesser-known poets and discuss the various manifestos and anthology introductions that attempt to come to terms with just what constitutes American poetry and what might be its quintessential voice(s) or direction(s).

Requirements: A term essay (30%), a seminar presentation (20%), class participation (20%), and a final exam (30%).

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Exclusion: No more than 12.0 units from ENGL 367/3.0, ENGL 368/3.0, ENGL 377/3.0, ENGL 378/3.0, ENGL 471/3.0, ENGL 472/3.0.

ENGL 476/3.0 Topics in Postcolonial Literatures I

Narrative, Embodied Suffering, and Health: Public Health and Diagnosing Bodies “Politic”

Instructor: Rosemary Jolly
Offered: Fall Term
Units: 3.0

Description: This seminar comprises an introduction to applied narrative studies. We shall look at what narrative can—and cannot—“do” for writers, readers, speakers and listeners. To achieve this goal, we in no way jettison the idea of the aesthetics of narrative, but contextualize it as the quality of the interaction between specific narratives, authors, and readers/listeners. Rather than taking a cosmopolitan postcolonial view that both assumes and constructs reading as inherently constitutive of, and good for, positive human relations, this course looks at narrative from the perspective of its role in both constructing and undermining health—the health of humans, non-human animals, and ecological well-being.

Our primary materials will include fictional texts, testimony drawn from the South African and Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and the Australian Apology and Northern Territory intervention, interview transcripts and focus group research transcripts from my CIHR-funded research into gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS, and narratives constructed by the seminar participants themselves.

Our primary goal will be to conclude the seminar with an understanding of how participants can consciously and intentionally use the critical skills they’ve developed in analyzing texts in ways that can actually interact with what we tend to call “the real world.” By the end of the term you will have had the opportunity to develop an understanding of narrative’s capacity for playing key roles in both destruction and creative well-being.

This primary goal is comprised of a set of skills we hope to develop together in the seminar, namely:

• The importance of critical reading/listening skills in understanding the testimony of vulnerable and victimized subjects of the state
• An understanding of the role narrative can play in diagnosing human and non-human ill-being
• When and how to make our own storytelling a conscious and explicit process, in research vs. therapy vs. critical responses to narrative
• When it is healthy to make another’s storytelling processes explicit to them, and how to do this ethically
• The capacities and incapacities of literary theory relating to postcolonialism, trauma studies, and critical gender and race theory from the perspective of an applied narrative studies framework
• The role of our bodies in narrative performance: how and what do our bodies mean?

We shall be getting up and moving in the classroom on a regular basis, so wear comfortable clothing. While we shall be dealing with disturbing material, we shall also be discussing our responsibilities, both to ourselves and to others, when doing so, beforehand and during the work. While distress can be a significant aspect of learning, fun and play are too: I hope to offer you the opportunity to play responsibly! Do join me.

Requirements: Students—or rather, co-learners—will be asked to do seminar presentations in (randomly assigned) pairs. You will also be asked to compose a short essay (6pp) with a multi-media component involving representations of bodies performing narratives. You will also be asked to submit a longer essay of 12pp maximum. Finally, you will be given a reflective, take home “test” that you will have one week to complete. This test will be designed to meet each individual student’s interests and will form an extension of the thinking that went into their long paper.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Exclusion: No more than 6.0 units from ENGL 383/3.0, ENGL 384/3.0, ENGL 476/3.0, ENGL 477/3.0.

ENGL 481/3.0 Topics in Indigenous Literatures I

Introduction to Indigenous Literature in Canada

Instructor: Sam McKegney
Offered: Fall Term
Units: 3.0

Description: As the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission completes the final year of its initial mandate, this course considers the role of Indigenous literatures in imagining conditions in which variously identified Indigenous and settler constituencies might “reconcile” in the shadow of genocidal legacies. Recognizing that commitments not simply to truth but indeed to justice are integral to a reconciliation process capable of engendering non-hegemonic solidarities across Turtle Island, this course analyzes the evocative capacity of literary art to, in the words of Daniel Heath Justice, “imagine otherwise” and to pursue alternative horizons of possibility for Indigenous empowerment, sovereignty, and non-exploitative relations with the other-than-human world. The course will begin by examining literary traditions of the Indigenous nations on whose traditional land Queen’s University sits—the Haudenossaunee, the Huron/Wendat, and the Algonquin. It will then range outward to analyze important literary works from a variety of Indigenous intellectual traditions across Turtle Island. We will look at poetry, oratory, drama, novels, short fiction, political writing, and critical work from authors like E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), Leslie Marmon Silko, Beth Brant, Sherman Alexie, Gregory Scofield, Tomson Highway, and Richard Van Camp.

Requirements: Course assignments will likely include oral teachings, response papers, and a major written assignment.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Exclusion: No more than 6.0 units from ENGL 381/3.0, ENGL 388/3.0, ENGL 481/3.0, ENGL 482/3.0.

ENGL 482/3.0 Topics in Indigenous Literatures II

Aboriginal and Chinese Canadian Connections in Contemporary Canadian Fiction

Instructor: Petra Fachinger
Offered: Winter Term
Units: 3.0

Description: This seminar is inspired by Rita Wong’s “Decolonizasian: Reading Asian and First Nations Relations in Literature.” The seminar discussion will focus on textual relations between Aboriginal and Chinese Canadian fiction within the context of alternative configurations of imagined community and cross-cultural relations. Themes that we will explore include traumatized memory, decolonization, adoption, sexualities, and the role of popular culture. Narrative modes to be examined include the gothic, storytelling, trickster aesthetic, and pop culture. Texts likely to be included are Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony, Larissa Lai’s When Fox Is a Thousand, Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café, Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach, Gregory Scofield’s Thunder through My Veins, Ruby Slipperjack’s Silent Words, Drew Hayden Taylor’s The Night Wanderer, Richard van Camp’s The Lesser Blessed, Paul Yee’s Money Boy, and Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill.

Requirements: Lots of reading, one seminar presentation, a midterm exam, and one term paper.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Exclusion: No more than 6.0 units from ENGL 381/3.0, ENGL 388/3.0, ENGL 481/3.0, ENGL 482/3.0.

ENGL 486/3.0 Group III: Special Topics I

Food for Thought

Instructor: Molly Wallace
Offered: Winter Term
Units: 3.0

Description: From the debates about genetically modified foods to the ascendance of the “slow food” movement to the media coverage of the “obesity epidemic,” food is on the national and international agenda as never before. This course will investigate representations of contemporary food, from production to consumption, focusing on questions of identity, ethics, aesthetics, ecology, and politics. Course texts may include selections from Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, Michele Obama’s American Grown, as well as literary texts like Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and J. M. Coetzee’s Eating Animals.

Requirements: Active participation in discussion, one group presentation, short response papers, a final paper, and a final exam.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

ENGL 487/3.0 Group III: Special Topics II

Gender and Muslim Identities in Diasporic Writing

Instructor: Margaret Pappano
Offered: Fall Term
Units: 3.0

Description: This course focuses on the corpus of writing by Muslim women in English, produced either in or for the diaspora. The course will include theoretical writing about gender, immigration, race, and religious identity in order to inform our reading of literary texts about Muslim identities and experience in North American and European contexts. The course will grapple with representations of Muslims in popular media, addressing the headscarf and niqab debates, as well as issues related to how Muslim identities are aligned with specific discourses of sexuality, gender, violence, and citizenship. Authors include Leila Aboulela, Nafisa Haji, Umm Juwayriyah, Mohja Kahf, Ahdaf Soueif, Amina Wadud as well as several films.

Requirements: Participation in class discussion, one short essay, one long essay, final exam, class presentation.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

ENGL 488/3.0 Group III: Special Topics III

T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf

Instructor: Gabrielle McIntire
Offered: Winter Term
Units: 3.0

Description: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf were almost exact contemporaries (born in 1882 and 1888, respectively), readers and critics of each others’ work, and close friends for over twenty years. Although they are rarely considered together as a pair, Eliot and Woolf exemplify some of the most fascinating contestations at the heart of literary modernisms: aesthetic and formal innovation, cultural critique, gender troubling, and explorations of the sacred and the secular after “the death of God.” Together we will consider some of the striking correspondences and affinities that exist in Eliot and Woolf’s poetic, aesthetic, and thematic preoccupations as we read Eliot’s major poetry from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” through “Gerontion,” The Waste Land, “Ash Wednesday,” and Four Quartets, and engage with several of Woolf’s most important novels, including To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Waves.

Requirements: 25% 2500-word term paper, 20% seminar presentation, 15% group presentation, 10% active and engaged participation and attendance, 30% final exam.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

ENGL 491/3.0 Topics in Literary Interpretation I

How to Write About Africa

Instructor: Asha Varadharajan
Offered: Fall Term
Units: 3.0

Description: This seminar will look at the historical evolution of the colonial and anti-colonial imagination of Africa with specific reference to focalization, voice, genre and mode, tropes, typology, and stereotypes, and the complex relations between writing and the (de)construction of difference. The emphasis is on fiction and travelogue, but there may be occasion to consider drama and performance, and other aspects of oral/aural, visual, and digital cultures.The texts under consideration will include some of the following options: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Maria Edgeworth’s “The Grateful Negro,” the writings of Henry Stanley and Mary Kingsley, Heart of Darkness, Redmond O’Hanlon’s No Mercy: A Journey into the Heart of the Congo, Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, and the interventions of African and Caribbean writers, critics, and historians such as Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, Binyawanga Wainaina, V. S. Naipaul, V. Y. Mudimbe, Achille Mbembe, and Mahmood Mamdani.

Requirements: Bi-weekly short assignments, assigned forms of participation, 1 major research project.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

ENGL 492/3.0 Topics in Literary Interpretation II

Reading Subjectivity

Instructor: Maggie Berg
Offered: Winter Term
Units: 3.0

Description: Most of us believe we have an essential, or core, self, but poststrucuralist theory has challenged this idea. We will examine a selection of theorists who argue that the individual is a function of language, and consider the implications of this construction of the self. We will ask how we know who we are and to what degree we possess agency.

We will examine selections from the work of Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, and others. We will also read Tom Chatfield, How to Thrive in a Digital Age.

Requirements: Class participation, an oral presentation, a term paper, and a short final examination.

Counts Toward: Consult the table

ENGL 590/3.0 Honours Essay

Instructor: Various
Offered: Winter Term
Units: 3.0

Description:

From the Arts & Science Calendar: A critical essay of at least 7500 words on a topic of the student’s choice, written under the supervision of a faculty member. For additional information, students should consult the Department, preferably in the spring of their third year. Open only to students in the final year of a Major or Medial Plan in English.

A prospectus for the essay signed by two supervisors must be submitted to the chair of undergraduate studies by the beginning of winter term; the essay should be submitted by March 10. For more information, see ENGL 590/3.0: Rules Governing the Writing of the Honours Essay (PDF).

Counts Toward: Consult the table

Prerequisite: To be eligible to write the Honours Essay, a student must have permission of the Department, and a minimum GPA of 3.5 in at least 24.0 previous English units. The 3.50 GPA requirement may be waived in exceptional cases by request of the essay’s faculty supervisor.

CWRI 293/3.0 Creative Writing in Prose

Instructor: Carolyn Smart
Offered: Fall Term
Units: 3.0

Description: A workshop course focusing on the writing and editing of short fiction, novels, and memoir. Students attempt several approaches to the writing of creative prose and complete the course with a formal submission for publication in a magazine. There are lectures on editing and publishing.

Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor, based on writing samples.

CWRI 294/3.0 Creative Writing in Poetry

Instructor: Carolyn Smart
Offered: Winter Term
Units: 3.0

Description: A workshop course focusing on the writing and editing of poetry. Students attempt several forms of poetry and complete the course with a formal submission for publication in a magazine. There are lectures on editing, publishing, and public performance.

Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor, based on writing samples.

CWRI 295/3.0 Creative Writing I

Instructor: Carolyn Smart
Offered: Fall Term
Units: 3.0

Description: A practical creative writing workshop, concentrating on short fiction and poetry.

Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor, based on writing samples.

CWRI 295 700/3.0 Creative Writing I

Online Course

Instructor: Carolyn Smart
Offered: Winter Term
Units: 3.0

Description: An online introduction to the art of composing fiction and poetry. Students submit independent creative work to the instructor and to their classmates for feedback and read and respond to their classmates’ writing. All writings and course materials are shared electronically via web site and e-mail. The course is designed to help students write regularly and to enjoy writing. By sharing work in progress, students learn from and support one another and develop critical judgement. They also practice computer and internet skills and become comfortable working online.

Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor, based on writing samples.