2014-2015 English Course Descriptions

Course Title: Narrative

Course Code: ENG110Y5Y

Instructor:

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Chester N. Scoville

Course Description: The construction of narratives is one of the most important ways in which human beings think: it is both a central form of cultural expression and a basic method of comprehending the world around us. This course will explore the elements of narrative such as plot, story, narrative discourse, focalization, gaps, paratexts, and framing. By the end of this course, students will gain a solid grounding in literary and cultural analysis, which they can then use in further English studies or in practically any other discipline they may choose to pursue.

Required Reading: We will be reading numerous examples of literary and other texts demonstrative of the basic concepts of narrative, including Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (selected), James’s Turn of the Screw, Joyce’s “The Dead,” Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, King’s The Truth About Stories, Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress, and Schoemperlen’s “Red Plaid Shirt.”

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
James Joyce, “The Dead”
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Method of Instruction: Large lecture for two hours once a week, followed by an hour of tutorial

Method of Evaluation: There will be two short essays, as well as periodic quizzes, and a final exam. Participation in the tutorials will also be evaluated.

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Course Title: Literature For Our Time

Course Code: ENG140Y5Y

Instructor: Daniela Janes

Course Description: This course introduces students to some of the major works of twentieth and twenty-first century fiction, poetry, and drama, drawn from a range of national literatures. Our focus will be textual and contextual: throughout the year we will build our sense of the formal elements of the texts we encounter, and we will examine the way literature reflects and responds to contemporary social, political and aesthetic concerns. One of the goals of this course is to develop students’ knowledge of literary terms and methodologies, and to build skills in critical reading and writing as preparation for further studies in literature and other disciplines.

Required Reading: We will read a selection of authors drawn from The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth Century and After as well as several stand-alone texts. Authors covered during the first term will include Conrad, Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Becket, Orwell, and Auden (all available in the Norton). Please note that the UTM Bookstore will have copies of The Norton Anthology in a shrink-wrapped package with Achebe’s Things Fall Apart included at no additional charge.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Joyce, “Araby” and “The Dead.”

Method of Instruction: Lectures (2 hours per week) and tutorials (1 hour per week)

Method of Evaluation: Several writing assignments which will include close readings and essays, midterm test, final exam, and tutorial participation.

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Course Title: Reading Poetry

Course Code: ENG201Y5Y

Instructor: Brent Wood

Course Description: This course introduces students to the theory and history of poetry in English from the age of Marlowe and Shakespeare right up to the late twentieth century. The dimensions and elements of poetry are explored early in the course, with emphasis on rhythm, diction, metaphor, and image. The course then moves through the canon of Anglo-American poetry from the Elizabethan period to the second World War, and concludes with later twentieth-century poetry focusing on feminism, multiculturalism and performance. Students will be required to study instructional material in the textbook in addition to the poems themselves. Memorizing, discussing, and reading poems aloud are all integral to the course.

Required Reading: Arp/Johnson. Perrine's Sound and Sense : An Introduction to Poetry, 14th Edition

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
Poetic rudiments in the first half of Perrine’s Sound and Sense.

Method of Instruction: Lecture, discussion

Method of Evaluation: Essay, multiple short assignments, class participation, midterm and final exams.

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Course Title: British Literature, Medieval to Romantic

Course Code: ENG202Y5Y

Instructor:

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Chester N. Scoville

Course Description: A historical survey of eight centuries of literature in the British Isles. We will be studying major writers in their contexts, and exploring how the history of ideas intertwines with the history of literary forms and genres. Topics will include changing attitudes about gender and relationships; attitudes about the foreign and unknown; the relationship of civilization to the natural world; and the changing face of social class. Texts/authors studied will include Beowulf, Marie de France, Chaucer, Herrick, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Behn, Pope, Johnson, Austen, Wordsworth, and Keats.

Required Reading: All readings will be taken from The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, second edition.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation
“The Seafarer”
“The Wife’s Lament”

Method of Instruction: Large lecture for two hours, followed by a one-hour tutorial

Method of Evaluation: There will be two short essays, as well as periodic quizzes, and a final exam. Participation in the tutorials will also be evaluated.

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Course Title: British Literature: Victorian to Contemporary

Course Code: ENG203Y5Y

Instructor:

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Daniel Wright

Course Description: This course will introduce you to major works of British literature (poetry, prose fiction, and drama) from the dawn of the Victorian period in 1837 to the dawn of our own twenty-first century. This was a period of remarkable and rapid social change: the Victorian period and the early twentieth century saw the expansion of British industrialization and imperialism, the rapid growth of urban centres, new forms of class mobility, and changing ideas about gender and sexuality, and a cataclysmic World War; since then, we’ve seen another World War, decolonization, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the impact of rapid and often controversial advances in science and technology, and a newly international conception of English literature.

For the most part, we will work chronologically, in order to situate our readings within their historical and cultural contexts. But the narrative of history doesn’t always move in a straight line, and so our course is primarily organized around the literary forms and movements that define the period we’ll be studying. Topics will include poetic forms and genres such as the lyric and the dramatic monologue; the cultural dominance of the novel (and on the other hand the shrinking audience for poetry); and literary modes and movements such as realism, aestheticism, modernism, and postmodernism.

Required Reading:
Most readings will be drawn from The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. E (The Victorian Era) and Vol. F (The Twentieth Century and After). We will also read the following novels:

Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1838)
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005)

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Tennyson

Method of Instruction: A mixture of lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation: Writing skills assignments; essays; final exam; participation

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Course Title: The Novel

Course Code: ENG210Y5Y

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

Course Description: An historical survey of the novel to the present day. We will pay particular attention to issues of genre, as well as relevant biographical, historical and cultural contexts in which the novels were produced. The course is intended to 1) familiarize students with selected major works in the novel tradition; 2) expand interpretative skills through a range of comparative and cultural studies approaches; and 3) focus on honing close reading, and critical writing and thinking skills. All three serve to help with other courses, to broaden your historical sense of literature, and to polish critical and interpretative skills.

Required Reading: (provisional as of 22 May, 2014)
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Matthew Lewis, The Monk (1796)
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1817)
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations (1861)
George Eliot, Silas Marner (1861)
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891)
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
Richard Matheson, I am Legend (1954)
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969)
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)
Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (2008)
[a graphic novel]

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Novels will be read in the order listed above

Method of Instruction:  Lecture and Discussion

Method of Evaluation:  Essays, tests, final exam, and presentations

WEBSITE: Portal

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Course Title: The Canadian Short Story

Course Code: ENG215H5F

Instructor:

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Colin Hill

Course Description: This course introduces students to some of Canada’s best short fiction. We will discuss short stories by a diverse assortment of writers who engage the cultural conditions of modern Canada. Topics will include, but are certainly not limited to, modernism, urban / rural tensions, the artist figure, gender, Canadian postmodernism and postcolonialism, multiculturalism, psychological and spiritual self-discovery, and Canadian social, cultural, regional, and national identity. Students will be expected to attend regularly and to complete readings thoughtfully and on time, are also strongly encouraged to participate in class discussions. This course aims to build knowledge and appreciation of Canadian short fiction and to introduce students to a wide range of theoretical, critical, and literary-historical approaches relevant to the study of Canadian and other modern and contemporary literatures.

Required Reading (tentative):
A course anthology containing all of the required readings will be available at the UTM bookstore. Stories will appear in the anthology in the same order that they will be covered in class. Stories covered will be by a range of authors including some of the following: D. C. Scott, Seton, Leacock, Wilson, Knister, Callaghan, Ross, Watson, Gallant, Laurence, Findley, Munro, Clarke, MacLeod, Atwood, King, Vanderhaeghe, Mistry, Bissoondath, Robinson, Bezmozgis, Thien

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Scott, Seton, Leacock

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation:
Participation 10%
Mid-term test 25%
Final Exam 35%
Term Paper 30%

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Course Title: Shakespeare

Course Code: ENG220Y5Y

Instructor:

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Holger Syme

Course Description: We will study eleven of Shakespeare’s plays, from all phases of his career as a professional playwright and from all the major genres he worked in: comedy, history, tragedy, and “romance.” The course will contextualize these plays historically and culturally, exploring early modern notions of, for instance, governance, religion, and gender and sexuality. We will pay particular attention to Shakespeare’s works as plays written for and within a specific set of theatrical conventions. The ways in which these texts have been received and transmitted over time (in print, on stage, on the screen) will also be a major theme of our discussions.

Required Reading: Titus Andronicus, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, King Lear, Macbeth, The Tempest.

Text: Preferably a recent edition of the collected works (Norton, Riverside, Longman) or recent single-text editions (Oxford, New Cambridge, Arden, New Folger); you MUST use an annotated text. References in lecture will be to the Norton Shakespeare, 2nd edition.

First Three Texts: Titus Andronicus, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Merchant of Venice.

Method of Instruction: Lecture, small-class tutorials with intensive discussion

Method of Evaluation:
Participation (20%), regular announced quizzes (15%), close reading exercise (10%), film review essay (10%), 5-7 page essay (20%), 7-9 page essay (25%).

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Course Title: Children’s Literature

Course Code: ENG234H5S

Instructor: Siobhan O'Flynn

Course Description: The stories we hear as children form the basis for our evolving understanding of literature and most broadly, of human interrelationships. We will consider key aspects such as the classic themes of maturation and escape, the construction and performance of gender, the significance of animal protagonists, children’s & YA serial fiction, and the often didactic function of children’s literature. We will also attend to the importance of historical and cultural contexts and the presence of “adult” concerns filtered (or not) through the presumably more limited perspective of children’s fiction and poetry. ! This course will also touch on: fan-culture’s engagement with children’s and YA literature, entertainment conglomerates & the battle for IP (fans won); merchandizing, media and digital extensions; pedagogy and new literary canons, amongst other topics.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
C. Perrault, Fairy Tales (texts online); Selections from The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales; The Thousand and One Nights (various tales); L. Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; B. Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit; A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh; J.K Rowling, Harry Potter& The Prisoner of Azkaban; M.T. Anderson, Feed; Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games; John Green, The Fault in Our Stars; iPad book adaptations TBA (demoed in class).

Films (TBD): Frozen or Maleficent (depending on availability)

Method of Instruction: Lecture & Discussion, Multi-media presentations

Method of Evaluation: Short assignment(s), essay, in-class presentation, active participation, exam.

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Course Title: The Graphic Novel

Course Code: ENG235H5F

Instructor:

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Chester N. Scoville

Course Description: The graphic novel, comic books, sequential art – whatever its name, this popular but long-marginalized art form has been rapidly gaining cultural respectability. Over the past twenty years, artists and writers in this medium have departed from its traditional subject matter to create graphic autobiographies, journalism, political analyses, philosophical arguments, and histories, as well as revisiting, critiquing, and reinventing such familiar subjects as magic, science fiction, and the superhero. This course will examine the range of the current graphic novel, focusing on the medium’s rhetoric, narration, and socio-political range.

Required Reading: We will be reading such alternative graphic texts as Alison Bechtel’s Fun Home, Joe Sacco’s Journalism, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Seth’s It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken, as well as some mainstream comics such as G. Willow Wilson’s Ms. Marvel. We will also use such resources as Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics as theoretical and historical background.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
McCloud, Understanding Comics
Seth, It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken
Bechtel, Fun Home

Method of Instruction: Lecture with discussion

Method of Evaluation: There will be several short writing assignments, leading up to a substantial final essay. There will also be a final exam, and some in-class quizzes.

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Course Title: Detective Fiction

Course Code: ENG2365F

Instructor: Mark Crimmins

Course Description: After a close inspection of several seminal modern detective stories by Edgar Allan Poe and a rigorous examination of Doyle’s masterpiece, The Hound of the Baskervilles, we will turn our attention to a series of detective novels that reinvent or reanimate the detective genre: Hammett's timeless classic of hard-boiled fiction, set in Sam Spade's San Francisco; recently deceased Colombian master Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s experimental venture in the genre; Chester Himes’s wonderful Harlem detective story, featuring his unforgettable duo of Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones; Henning Mankell's Wallander stories in The Pyramid; and a marvelously creative postmodern detective tale by Mark Haddon, which also functions as a playful intertext to The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Required Reading: Poe: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter”; Doyle: The Hound of the Baskervilles; Hammett: The Maltese Falcon; Marquez: Chronicle of a Death Foretold; Chester Himes: The Heat’s On; Mankell: The Pyramid; Haddon: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Poe, Doyle, Hammett.

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion.

Method of Evaluation: 2 Short Essays (20% each) + 2 Tests (25% each) + participation (10%).

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Course Title: Fantasy and Horror

Course Code: ENG239H5F

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

Course Description: This course explores speculative fiction, the magical, the supernatural, and the horrific. Subgenres may include alternative history, animal fantasy, epic fantasy, the Gothic, fairy tales, magic realism, sword and sorcery and vampire fiction.

Required Reading: (provisional as of 22 May 2014)
J. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
Graham Joyce, Some Kind of Fairy Tale
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
Richard Matheson, I am Legend
Course Pack

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: TBA

Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion

Method of Evaluation: Essays, tests, and exam

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Course Title: American Literature

Course Code: ENG250Y5Y

Instructor: Ira Wells

Course Description: “The American community,” according to one cultural historian, “had a beginning at a particular moment in history, in contrast with traditional communities that, far from having a precise historical origin, rose out of the bottomless darkness of time.” America, in other words, is not only a nation but a conscious undertaking—a political, economic, and cultural construction. It is also a literary construction, one based on written texts available to all and open to revision. Starting with Puritan sermons and ending with the immigrant narrative of a “disastrously overweight ghetto nerd,” we will familiarize ourselves with the major writers, literary movements, and critical debates in American letters. We will pay particular attention to recurring symbols (such as the frontier), character types (such as the “American Adam” and the “frontiersman”), and mythologies (such as Algerian “self-made man”) in works from a wide range of genres and periods. Our encounters with these authors will reveal illuminating reciprocities not only between their literary works, but between literary and cultural events: in other words, “America” is not the safe contextual background for these works, but a rhetorical battleground of internally contending ideas and values.

Text Likely to Include:
Baym, et. al, The Norton Anthology of American Literature Volumes A and B
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts
Richard Wright, Native Son
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

All books are available at the UTM Bookstore

Method of Evaluation: Two essays (8-10 pages, 20% each for a total of 40%); one mid-term test (15%); Final Exam (35%); and Class Participation (10%).

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Course Title: Canadian Literature

Course Code: ENG252Y5Y

Instructor: Daniela Janes

Course Description: This course introduces students to the breadth and diversity of Canadian literature through an examination of poetry, fiction, non-fiction prose, and drama. We will have the opportunity to consider a range of topics, including the representation of place, identity, and history; the figure of the artist; gender; modernism; postmodernism; and postcolonialism.

Required Reading: selections from Moss and Sugars, Canadian Literature in English (Vol. 1 and Vol. 2); De Mille, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder; Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables; Ross, As For Me and My House; Atwood, Surfacing; Gray, Billy Bishop Goes to War; Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion; King, Green Grass, Running Water; Martel, Life of Pi.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Exploration narratives by Hearne, Thompson and Franklin (in Moss and Sugars).

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion.

Method of Evaluation: mid-term test (15%); two essays (40%); final exam (35%); participation (10%).

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Course Title: Literature and the Environment

Course Code: ENG259H5F

Instructor:

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Stanka Radović

Course Description: One important aspect of a literary text is its representation of a particular setting or space. The characteristics of this literary space can tell us as much about a literary work and its historical context as any other dimension of the text such as its structure or style, narrator, protagonists, or major themes. Recently, the study of “environmental criticism” has marked a great resurgence of critical interest in literary space and environment. In this course, we will explore the significance of space and environment (both natural and urban) in 20th century literature. Our particular focus will be the ways in which select literary texts use the environment to tell us something more or something unexpected about the topics they treat.

Required Reading: Ralph Waldo Emerson “Nature”; Henry David Thoreau Walden; Robert Frost Collected Poems; Rachel Carson The Silent Spring (excerpts); Daphne du Maurier Rebecca; Margaret Atwood Surfacing; V.S. Naipaul Enigma of Arrival (Chapter 1: “Jack’s Garden”); China Miéville The City and the City.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Emerson, Thoreau, Frost.

Method of Instruction: Lectures and class discussions.

Method of Evaluation: Two essays, one mid-term test, class participation.

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Course Title: Colonial and Postcolonial Writing

Course Code: ENG270Y5Y

Instructor:

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Stanka Radović

Course Description: Postcolonial literature, emerging in the second half of 20th century, often focuses on the idea of giving voice to the cultures and histories that have been silenced by European colonialism. Salman Rushdie describes this as the postcolonial authors’ effort of “writing back to the centre” in order to decolonize literature itself. In this course, we will focus on various textual examples of the way Europeans depicted the non-European “Other” and the way this “Other” (the savage, slave, or alien) responded to the exclusionary dimensions of the western canon (a body of literature understood as having universal value). We will look at select examples of postcolonial writing in order to understand what “counter-discourse” or “oppositional literature” might mean in the history of Anglophone literary production.

Required Reading: Rushdie, “The Empire Writes Back”; Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism; Kincaid, A Small Place; Ngugi, Decolonizing the Mind; Macauley’s Minute on Indian Education; Brontë, Jane Eyre; Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; Coetzee Foe, Forster, A Passage to India; Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Selvon, The Lonely Londoners; NourbeSe Philip, Zong!

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Rushdie, Césaire, Kincaid

Method of Instruction: Lectures and class discussions.

Method of Evaluation: Two essays, two tests, class participation, final exam.

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Course Title: Diasporic Literatures of Toronto

Course Code: ENG271H5S

Instructor: Siobhan O'Flynn

Course Description: Toronto has been called the world’s most multicultural city. Canada’s 2011 National Household Survey estimated that 2,537,410 foreign-born individuals live in the Toronto census metropolitan area (CMA), accounting for 46% of the total CMA population and making this the largest percentage of any CMA in the country. With almost half of Toronto’s citizens tracing direct connections back to other countries around the globe and over 200 languages spoken in the GTA, Toronto is THE the Diasporic City in Canada. This course will examine: - how novelists have represented the diasporic experience of different ethno-cultural communities, across different times and socio-cultural contexts;
- how literature can function as a window into lives and cultures that may seem initially foreign;
- how literature can support what we will discuss in terms of ‘diaspora dialogues’

Required Reading:
Michael Ondaatje, 1987, In the Skin of a Lion
Vassanji, M.G., 1991. No New Land
Michaels, Anne, 1996. Fugitive Pieces
Brand, Dionne, 2002. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes on Belonging
Brand, Dionne, 2005. What We All Long For
Lam, Vincent, 2006. Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures
David Chariandy, 2007. Soucouyant
Anthony De Sa, 2008. Barnacle Love
Rabindranath Maharaj, 2010. The Amazing Absorbing Boy

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
Michael Ondaatje, 1987, In the Skin of a Lion
Vassanji, M.G., 1991. No New Land
Michaels, Anne, 1996. Fugitive Pieces

Method of Instruction: Lecture, Discussion.

Method of Evaluation: short assignments, essay, informed participation, exam

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Course Title: Critical Approaches to Literature

Course Code: ENG280H5S

Instructor: Sundhya Walther

Course Description: Critical theory is often viewed in an instrumental way, as something to be applied to literary texts in order to produce an interpretation. In this course, we will examine critical works as texts in themselves, paying close attention to the intersections between formal techniques and ideas. Starting with Marxist analysis, we will perform a thorough exploration of some of the most important schools of criticism, including psychoanalysis, structuralism, poststructuralism, feminism, postcolonialism, deconstruction, queer theory, and posthumanism. Assignments will emphasize detailed appreciation of and engagement with critical arguments. While we trace the chronological development of theory through its key moments, we will also continually interrogate the importance of critical theory to the study and appreciation of cultural texts, using examples from literature, visual art, and film.

Required Reading:
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2nd edition), selections

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Eliot; Barthes; Eagleton

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation:
Participation 10%
Close Reading Assignment 25%
Thesis Paragraph 5%
Final Essay 35%
Final Exam 25%

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Course Title: Chaucer

Course Code: ENG300Y5Y

Instructor:

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Alexandra Gillespie

Course Description: This course will introduce students to the works of the fourteenth-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer: the bawdy Canterbury Tales told by the Miller and Wife of Bath, the love songs of Troilus, the other-worldly visions of the House of Fame, riddling poems for a London audience, and elegant texts penned for the English court among them. Students will learn to work with Chaucer’s Middle English closely and to locate his texts in their literary, historical, and modern critical contexts.

Required Reading:
Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson, 3rd end (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: “Chaucers Wordes to Adam”; Canterbury Tales – General Prologue and Knight’s Tale

Method of Instruction: Lectures

Method of Evaluation: Weekly close reading exercises; 4pp. essay plan; 8 pp. essay

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Course Title: Poetry and Prose, 1600-1660

Course Code: ENG304Y5Y

Instructor:

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Liza Blake

Course Description: With the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603 came an end to the “Golden Age” of Elizabethan literature, and the inauguration of a rich and complicated era of intellectual, poetic, and political history. Old and new ways of thinking and being came to a clash in the seventeenth century, as interactions with the Americas became more frequent (and more fraught); advances in science and cosmology forced people to rethink the natural world and their place in it; politics and theology crashed against one another in new and unexpected ways; and the monarchy was abolished (with the execution of King Charles I), and then reinstated. We will read deeply in frank, often erotic love poetry quite different from the Elizabethan poetry that preceded yet created it; in social and political satire; in metaphysical poetry that combines philosophy and verse; in utopic fiction where authors imagine new societies and worlds from scratch; and in political philosophy and poetry. The class, and the ideas traced throughout the year, will culminate in a detailed and intensive reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost in full. Other authors to be covered include Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughn, Traherne, Jonson, Lanyer, Bacon, Cavendish, Herrick, and Marvell.

Required Reading:
Seventeenth-Century British Poetry, 1603-1660
Milton, Paradise Lost
Cavendish, The Blazing World and Other Writings
Three Early Modern Utopias
(Additional texts will be made available in a course pack or online.)

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Donne (selected lyrics), Carew, Marvell

Method of Instruction: Lecture, discussion

Method of Evaluation: weekly close-readings, three papers, take-home exam, active participation

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Course Title: Poetry and Prose, 1660-1800

Course Code: ENG306Y5Y

Instructor:

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Terry Robinson

Course Description: The long eighteenth century—the period comprising 1660-1800—was a time of major cultural, economic, and political shifts, many of which were key in shaping life as it is lived today. It witnessed industrialization and urbanization, the burgeoning of print culture, the rise of the middle class and consumerism, the emergence of the “public sphere,” colonial and mercantile growth, the expansion of the British empire, colonial unrest and revolutionary upheaval, new attitudes regarding sex and gender, and fresh approaches to seeing and knowing. It was also a pivotal literary period, and in this class, we will engage with contemporary issues as they were manifested in and through a variety of genres: diaries, letters, elegies, odes, sonnets, satires, verse epistles, essays, novels, and more. We will thus consider relationships between content and form, message and medium, with an eye towards the way in which individual genres reflect historical and artistic concerns over subject matter, audience, and style. Through our reading of a range of authors as diverse as Anne Finch, Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Margaret Cavendish, John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Charlotte Smith, Mary Leapor, and Olaudah Equiano, we will discover not only the degree to which eighteenth-century life and literature were inextricably intertwined but also the degree to which literature vitally fueled and shaped debates over nation, class, and culture.

Required Reading: I will provide a full list of required texts on the first day of class. All texts will be made available a the UTM Bookstore or on Blackboard.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Daniel Defoe, Gulliver's Travels; Olaudah Equiano, Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; Charlotte Smith, from Elegiac Sonnets

Method of Evaluation: Informed participation; quizzes, test(s) and/or exam; essays.

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Course Title: Romantic Poetry and Prose

Course Code: ENG308Y5Y

Instructor:

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Daniel White (F), Chris Koenig-Woodyard (S)

Course Description: This course provides a general survey of the poetry and prose of the British Romantic period (roughly from 1780 to 1830). You will thus become familiar with the astonishing literary output of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, the canonical Romantic poets to whom we owe many of our assumptions about the nature of poetry, the imagination, and artistic creativity. The literature of this period, however, also draws our attention to the revolutions that gave birth to our modern political order, the movement to abolish the slave trade, the advent of feminist thought and the emergence of women writers as a major cultural force, and the radical experiments with form through which numerous writers responded to the colonial enterprise. We will explore these aspects of Romantic culture through an intense encounter with both canonical and non-canonical works, written in a wide range of genres and styles.

Required Reading:
Poetry and prose by A.L. Barbauld, W. Blake, E. Burke, Byron, S.T. Coleridge, W. Cowper, W. Godwin, J. Keats, H. More, M. Robinson, P.B. and M. Shelley, C. Smith, M. Wollstonecraft, and W. Wordsworth, among others

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Selections by John Locke, Edmund Burke, William Gilpin, to be followed by poems of sensibility (by Hannah More, Helen Maria Williams, William Cowper)

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation:
First term: three quizzes (10%), term paper (20%)
Second term: two term papers (25% each)

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Course Title: Topics in Medieval Literature: Piers Plowman and the Medieval Plowman Tradition

Course Code: ENG312H5S

Instructor:

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Chester Scoville

Course Description: William Langland’s Piers Plowman was the most popular work of English poetry in the fourteenth century; revised three times, quoted by peasants and revolutionaries, inspiring a host of imitations, it was a central statement of politics, piety, and morality for its contemporaries. We will conduct an examination of this challenging and powerful poem, situating it in its context and exploring how it ramified through English vernacular culture at the end of the Middle Ages.

Required Reading:
Our text of the poem will be the Norton Critical Edition, edited by Elizabeth Robertson and Stephen H. A. Shepherd. In addition to the critical writings found therein, we will also use The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman, edited by Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Langland, Cole, Galloway.

Method of Instruction: Some lecture, with a focus on class discussion and close interpretations of the poem.

Method of Evaluation: This course will use numerous small assignments to lead up to a substantial final essay. Participation will be an important component, as will group presentations. There will be no final exam.

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Course Title: Topics in Early Modern Literature: Science and Fiction in the English Renaissance

Course Code: ENG313H5F

Instructor:

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Liza Blake

Course Description: This course will consider the changing and slowly developing categories of science and fiction as they grow, develop, intersect, and divide in the English Renaissance. The “Scientific Revolution” was a major event in seventeenth-century England, but this course will begin much earlier, tracking the long, awkward, and uneven development of scientific and philosophical modes of knowledge across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The readings of the course will come almost entirely from Renaissance literary texts, and we will focus closely on the ways that English Renaissance literature thinks about, responds to, and shapes changing understandings of the natural world. We will read drama, poetry, and prose, and by the end of the class we will see how scientific writing grows out of literary writing, even as it takes some pains to differentiate itself from literary writing in a number of ways.

Required Reading:
Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
The Metaphysical Poets, ed. Colin Burrows
John Milton, Paradise Lost
Francis Godwin, The Man in the Moon
Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis and the Great Instauration
Margaret Cavendish, Paper Bodies
(Additional texts will be made available in a course pack or online)

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus; William Shakespeare, The Tempest; John Donne, “An Anatomy of the World”

Method of Instruction: Lecture, discussion

Method of Evaluation: 3 papers, take-home exam, daily writing exercises, active participation

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Course Title: Women Writers, 1660-1800

Course Code: ENG314H5F

Instructor:

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Terry Robinson

Course Description: In this course, we will read the poetry, dramas, novels, and prose works of a wide array of eighteenth-century women writers including Anne Finch, Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Maria Edgeworth, Hannah More, Helen Maria Williams, and Mary Wollstonecraft. We will draw our attention to the emergence of women writers as a major cultural force and to the advent of feminist thought, examine changing codes of gender and sexuality, think through women's engagement with social issues such as abolition and educational reform, and gain insight into the historical and critical frameworks surrounding eighteenth-century women and their groundbreaking literary productions.

Required Reading:
Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology. Ed. Roger Lonsdale. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Aphra Behn, The Rover; Eliza Haywood, Fantomina; Elizabeth Inchbald, The Massacre.

Website: Blackboard.

Method of Evaluation: Informed participation; weekly quizzes; test(s) or exam; term paper.

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Course Title: Drama 1660-1800

Course Code: ENG314H5S

Instructor:

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Terry Robinson

Course Description: In this course, we will explore the long arc of British dramatic literature as it extends from the Restoration era through the time of the French Revolution. We will examine a range of plays in a variety of genres (comedy, tragedy, pantomime, farce, ballad opera, and proto-melodrama) by authors such as Wycherley, Dryden, Behn, Centlivre, Gay, Lillo, Garrick, Sheridan. We will also become familiar with eighteenth-century theater history, including the advent of women performers, the age’s most famous (and infamous) actors, the Licensing Act, the popularization of Shakespeare, the spectacular effects of changing playhouse construction, and critical controversies. Over the course of the semester, as a whole, we will gain insight into the brilliant, sensuous, and ever-changing world of eighteenth-century theater.

Required Reading:
The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Drama, Concise Edition. Ed. J. Douglas Canfield and Maja-Lisa von Sneidern. Broadview Press, 2003.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: William Wycherley, The Country Wife; John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera ; Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal

Website: Blackboard.

Method of Evaluation: Informed participation; weekly quizzes; test(s) or exam; term paper.

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Course Title: Growing Up in the Victorian Novel

Course Code: ENG315H5F

Instructor:

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Daniel Wright

Course Description: What does it mean to grow up? What compromises are involved in trading childhood for adulthood? On the other hand, what does one gain by trading immaturity for experience? Because these are universal questions, we seem to have an endless appetite for stories of youthful misadventures, moral education, sexual awakening, paths not taken—in short, the painful losses and immeasurable gains of leaving adolescence behind.

In this course, we’ll survey several examples of what literary critics usually call the Bildungsroman (the German word for “the novel of development”), and in doing so, we’ll trace some of the formal and thematic conventions that make this a distinctive genre while also identifying the experiments and innovations that make the genre plastic, historically specific, and ever-changing. Because this course is focused on the Victorian period, we’ll also learn about how historical conditions (increasing class mobility, changing conceptions of sexuality and gender, the reach of colonialism) contributed to the development of this novelistic subgenre at this place and time.

Required Reading: (subject to change)
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1849-50)
Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853)
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895)
E. M. Forster, Maurice (written 1913, published 1970)

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Dickens, Brontë, Eliot

Method of Instruction: A mixture of lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation: Essays; regular quizzes; participation

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Course Title: Jane Austen and her Contemporaries

Course Code: ENG323H5S

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

Course Description: A study of selected novels (and fiction) by Austen and her contemporaries as Lewis, Radcliffe, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Edgeworth, Scott, and Shelley, in the context of the complex literary, social, and political relationships of that time. There are two rationales for this course: to introduce students to the novels of Jane Austen; and to place these texts in historical and cultural contexts as we pay attention to literary matters. The goals of the course are: 1) to provide an overview of Austen’s novels; 2) to develop a critical, cultural, historical eye and vocabulary for unpacking aesthetic, literary, and social issues related to the courses texts; and 3) to analyze a growing knowledge of Austen’s novelistic practices through written assignments.

Required Reading: (provisional as of 22 May, 2014)
Austen, Northanger Abbey
Parsons, The Castle of Wolfenbach
Lewis, The Monk
Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Austen, Mansfield Park
Austen, Emma
NOTE: The Austen and Lewis novels are broadview editions, with critical material in the appendixes that is an important part of the course.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Reading order is as listed above.

Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion

Method of Evaluation:  Essay, Test and Exam

WEBSITE: Portal

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Course Title: Modern Fiction to 1960

Course Code: ENG328Y5Y

Instructor:

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Mark Levene

Course Description: Through representative works of the period, this course will explore many of the literary, philosophical, and historical aspects of “high” modernism in Anglo-American culture: for instance, the revolutionary changes to the nature of plot and character, the relation between narrative complexity and implied limits to personal knowledge, and the effect of WWI on imaginative conceptions of both time and place. Advance reading of the first few texts is strongly recommended.

Required Reading: Henry James, What Maisie Knew; James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night; D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love; Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust; William Faulkner, Go Down Moses; Graham Greene, The Quiet American.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: James, Joyce, Conrad

Method of Instruction: Lecture/discussion.

Method of Evaluation: 2 essays, each 25%; term test 10%; class participation 10%; final examination 30%.

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Course Title: Drama to 1603

Course Code: ENG331H5F

Instructor:

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Leslie Thomson

Course Description: In this course we will study English drama from the medieval period to the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603. We will read morality and miracle plays, comedies, tragedies, and tragicomedies written during of one of the great periods of western drama. As well, because of the material and the time covered, we will be able to consider some of Shakespeare’s early plays in their historical and literary contexts. Since all these plays were written in an age very different from our own, we will discuss the ideas and beliefs that the playwrights and their audiences would have shared. But our main focus will be on the plays as plays—that is, structured dramatic works consisting of both dialogue and stage directions, written to be performed on an early modern stage. While no special expertise is required to take this course, some previous study of drama will be an asset. In addition, you must be prepared to read a play a week throughout the course and to participate regularly in class discussion.

Required Reading: “Man’s Disobedience and the Fall of Man,” “Abraham and Isaac,” “The Second Shepherd’s Play,” Everyman; Heywood, The Play Called the Four PP; Mr. S, Gammer Gurton’s Needle; Sackville and Norton, Gorboduc (all in Medieval and Tudor Drama, ed. John Gassner); Lyly, Endymion; Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy; Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, part 1; Doctor Faustus; Anon., Arden of Faversham (all in English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology); Shakespeare, Richard II, As You Like It, Troilus and Cressida.

Texts will be available in the UTM Bookstore and I strongly suggest that you buy and use the two anthologies listed here for the non-Shakespearean plays. Oxford editions of the Shakespeare plays will be available at the bookstore, or you can use the Norton Shakespeare edition of all Shakespeare’s plays and poems. You must bring a text of the relevant play to every class.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: as listed above.

Method of Instruction: Lecture/discussion.

Method of Evaluation: Close-reading test (20%), 2500-word essay (25%), “think-pieces” (10%), informed participation (10%), final 2-hour exam (35%).

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Course Title: Drama 1603 to 1642

Course Code: ENG335H5S

Instructor:

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Leslie Thomson

Course Description: In this course we will study English drama written between the accession to the English throne of King James I in 1603 and the closing of the theatres in 1642. We will read comedies, tragedies, and tragicomedies written in one of the great periods of western drama. As well, because of the material and the time covered, we will be able to consider some of Shakespeare's late plays in their historical and literary contexts. Since all these plays were written in an age very different from our own, we will discuss the ideas and beliefs that the playwrights and their audiences would have shared. But our main focus will be on the plays as plays—that is, structured dramatic works consisting of both dialogue and stage directions, written to be performed on an early modern stage. While no special expertise is required to take this course, some previous study of drama will be an asset. In addition, you must be prepared to read a play a week throughout the course and to participate regularly in class discussion.

Required Reading: Jonson, Volpone; Anon./Middleton(?), The Revenger’s Tragedy; Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle; Middleton, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside; Webster, The Duchess of Malfi; Middleton and Rowley, The Changeling; Ford, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (all in English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology); Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Othello, The Winter’s Tale.

Texts will be available in the UTM Bookstore and I strongly suggest that you buy and use the Norton anthology for the non-Shakespearean plays. Oxford editions of the Shakespeare plays will be available at the bookstore, but you can also use the Norton Shakespeare edition of all Shakespeare’s plays and poems. You must bring a text of the relevant play to every class.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Measure for Measure, Volpone, The Revenger’s Tragedy.

Method of Instruction: Lecture/discussion.

Method of Evaluation: Close-reading test (20%), 2500-word essay (25%), “think-pieces” (10%), informed participation (10%), final 2-hour exam (35%).

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Course Title: Modern Drama to WWII

Course Code: ENG340H5F

Instructor: Lawrence Switzky

Course Description: Dramatists at the end of the nineteenth century inherited a series of conventions about how to represent action and thought on stage. This course is about the wild, inventive, beautiful strategies they discovered to upend those conventions in order to give a fuller picture of human life and consciousness; to respond to radical social, political, and technological changes from the 1860s through the 1940s; and to incorporate developments in literature, painting, music, photography, and film into the repertoire of theatrical creation.

Among other topics, we will consider the reciprocal influence of modern psychology and modern drama; naturalism and other attempts to place “real life” on stage; experiments in representing gender, sex, and sexuality in the theatre; and the creation of new genres, from the Total Work of Art to plays of ideas to “happy tragedies” to epic theatre to the Theatre of Cruelty. Film clips and live performances will help us to envision how these plays were staged in their own time and how they have been reimagined throughout the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.

Required Reading: Richard Wagner, Tristan and Isolde; Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People and The Wild Duck; August Strindberg, Miss Julie; Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard; Pig Iron Theatre, Chekhov Lizardbrain; Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession; J. M. Synge, Riders to the Sea; W. B. Yeats, “The Land of Heart’s Desire” and “The Dreaming of the Bones”; Luigi Pirandello, Henry IV; Susan Glaspell, “Trifles”; Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh; Bertolt Brecht, Man Equals Man; Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double; short Futurist and Dadaist plays and selected manifestos

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Wagner, Ibsen, Strindberg

Method of Instruction: Lectures, discussions, presentations

Method of Evaluation: Performance Project (20%); Short Scene Analysis (15%); Midterm (15%); Final Paper/Project (25%); Participation (15%); Reading Quiz (10%)

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Course Title: Modern Poetry to 1960

Course Code: ENG348Y5Y

Instructor: Richard Greene

Course Description: This course will examine British, American and Irish poets from 1900-1960, including Hardy, Hopkins, Yeats, Frost, Pound, Eliot, Moore, Stevens, “H.D.”, and Auden. While considerable attention will be paid to broad developments in literary history, the chief focus of the course will be on the reading of individual poems. It is hoped that students will learn not merely to discuss modern poetry in terms of theme and technique, but that they will learn to enjoy it.

Required Reading:
Selections from: Jahan Ramazani et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, 3rd ed. Volume 1: Modern Poetry.
Students may use any edition of the assigned texts.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Hardy, Hopkins, and Housman

Method of Instruction: Lectures and discussion

Method of Evaluation: Three in-class essays (50%) and two term papers (50%).

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Course Title: Canadian Drama

Course Code: ENG352H5S

Instructor: Daniela Janes

Course Description: In this course we will read a selection of Canadian drama across its history, paying attention to the material conditions of production as well as formal developments and stylistic innovations. Students will be exposed to a variety of forms, including history, tragedy, satire, drama and comedy, and will be given a sense of the shape and development of Canadian theatre.

Required Reading: Students will read a variety of plays, ranging from one-act plays to more substantial works. The course reader covers nineteenth- and twentieth-century plays, including works by Nicholas Flood Davin, Sarah Anne Curzon, Merrill Denison, Herman Voaden, Len Peterson, and Lister Sinclair. Other readings will be drawn from Jerry Wasserman, ed., Modern Canadian Plays, Vol. 1 (5th Edition). Playwrights to be studied include George Ryga, Michel Tremblay, David French, John Gray, Sharon Pollock, Ann-Marie MacDonald and Tomson Highway.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Plays by Davin, Curzon, Denison (course reader).

Method of Instruction: : Lecture and discussion.

Method of Evaluation: two essays (60%), two tests (30%), informed participation (10%).

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Course Title: Canadian Poetry

Course Code: ENG354Y5Y

Instructor: Brent Wood

Course Description: This course introduces students to a wide range of Canadian poetry in English from the early twentieth century up to the present day. A knowledge of poetics as established in ENG201Y Reading Poetry will be useful though not a pre-requisite. In the first term we will read collected works from Don McKay, Margaret Atwood, Phyllis Gotlieb and Al Purdy, and study the songs of Leonard Cohen. In the second term we will work through Trehearne’s anthology of Canadian poetry from 1920-1960, covering major poets from E.J.Pratt to Phyllis Webb. Students should be prepared to read poems aloud, memorize, discuss and make presentations.

Required Reading: Canadian Poetry from 1920-1960. Ed. Brian Trehearne.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
Gotlieb, Red Blood, Black Ink, White Paper; Purdy, Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets; Atwood, Selected Poems 1966-1976.

Method of Instruction: Lecture, discussion

Method of Evaluation: Essays, presentations, participation, midterm and final exams.

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Course Title: New Writing in Canada

Course Code: ENG357H5F

Instructor: Colin Hill

Course Description: A course on some of the best fiction published in Canada in the twenty-first century. We will read novels / short-story collections by contemporary Canadian writers who write from diverse perspectives about Canada and the world at large. As we work to discern the “new directions” of Canada’s fiction in the twenty-first century, our topics will include (but are not limited to) the role of the artist in contemporary Canada, language, gender, Canadian postmodernism and post-colonialism, multiculturalism, psychological and spiritual self-discovery, historiography, and Canadian social, cultural, regional, and national identity.

Required Reading (tentative):
1. David Bezmozgis, Natasha and Other Stories
2. Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly
3. Alice Munro, Dear Life
4. Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero
5. Judy Fong Bates, Midnight at the Dragon Cafe

One or two other titles TBA

Students may use any edition of the assigned texts.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Bezmozgis, Gibb, Munro

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation:
Participation 10%
Mid-term test 30%
Final Exam 30%
Term Paper 30%

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Course Title: Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Course Code: ENG363Y5Y

Instructor: Ira Wells

Course Description: Over the course of the nineteenth century America evolved from a largely rural, agrarian, and (in the South) slave-based society into the most industrialized, cosmopolitan, and liberal nation in the world. This course tracks the imaginative re-invention of American culture through the seminal authors and texts of the century. Alongside major works from a variety of genres (including speeches, slave narratives, essays, short stories, poetry, and novels), we’ll explore the national trauma of slavery and the Civil War, the rise of consumer culture, the invention of “literature,” geographic expansion and the “closing of the frontier,” and the eventual consolidation of national narratives. Emphases will include the formal properties of the works in question, the ways in which literature and politics respond to and reconfigure one another, and the emergence of new models of selfhood and identity formation.

Texts Likely to Include:
Baym, et. al, The Norton Anthology of American Literature Volumes B and C
James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (Oxford)
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Oxford)
Henry James, The American (Oxford)
William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (Oxford)

All books are available at the UTM Bookstore

Method of Evaluation: Two 8-10 page essays (25% each); class presentation (15%); term test (25%); participation (10%).

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Course Title: 20th Century American Literature

Course Code: ENG364Y5Y

Instructor: Alexandra Rahr

Course Description: This course on the literature of the 'American Century' begins with W.E.B. Du Bois's declaration that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line," and ends with Michael Chabon's post-9/11 expansion of America's borders in The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Reading works of fiction and drama, poetry and essays, genre fiction as well as canonical literature, we will examine some of the key motifs of the 20th Century: political extremism, mass domestic migration, and extravagant consumerism. Throughout the course, we will investigate how American literature constructs both the nation and the citizen in an era of expanding political, military, economic and cultural power.

Required Reading (Not a complete list): William Faulkner, Old Man; Richard Wright, Black Boy; Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man; Arthur Miller, The Crucible; Eudora Welty, The Optimist's Daughter; Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried; Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
W.E.B. DuBois The Souls of Black Folk
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion.

Method of Evaluation: Two essays; two tests; informed participation.

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Course Title: Contemporary American Fiction

Course Code: ENG365H5F

Instructor: Mark Crimmins

Course Description: This course will examine a plethora of fictions by a wide range of contemporary American authors. Our readings will include two long works of fiction and an anthology of short stories featuring work by many of Contemporary American Fiction’s most widely admired short story writers. For our longer selections we will read Maxine Hong Kingston’s postmodern adaptation of one of the four great classical Chinese novels, Tripmaster Monkey; and David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion. We will also examine some flash fictions by authors who excel in this from, including Donald Barthelme, Jamaica Kincaid, Ann Beattie, Rick Moody, Sandra Cisneros, and Lydia Davis. Our short story selections will include innovative and influential fictions by Jhumpa Lahiri, Sherman Alexie, Percival Everett, Raymond Carver, Annie Proulx, Ursula LeGuin, Lorrie Moore, and T. C. Boyle, David Wong Louie, Ann Spence, and others.

Required Reading (tentative): Kingston: Tripmaster Monkey; Wallace: Oblivion; Shreve and Nguyen: 30/30: Thirty American Stories from the Last Thirty Years.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:  Kincaid; Moody; Cisneros.

Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion.

Method of Evaluation: Two short essays (20% each); two tests (25% each); participation (10%)

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Course Title: History of Literary Theory

Course Code: ENG380H5F

Instructor: Mark Crimmins

Course Description: This course will look at the history of ideas about literature: what it is or should or shouldn’t be; what it attempts to do; what its values are; etc. Focusing on the historical perspective, we will start with Plato, Aristotle, and Horace, and continue, from the Classical theories of the Greeks and Romans to the Medieval and Renaissance periods, Neoclassical and Romantic Periods. From here we will look at Victorian theories of literature before passing on to a plethora of Twentieth Century schools of criticism and theory, including Feminist, Marxist, Psychoanalytic, Formalist, Structuralist and Postsructuralist theories, along with schools of criticism and theory, such as Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Theory, that have evolved from these currents of thought. Overall, we will examine the history of literary theory as a dialogue between philosophers, critics, and theorists over the ages and into our own time.

Required Reading (tentative): The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Plato, Aristotle, Horace.

Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion.

Method of Evaluation: Two short essays (20% each); two tests (25% each); and participation (20%)

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Course Title: Video Games and Narrative

Course Code: ENG415H5F

Instructor: Lawrence Switzky

Course Description: Video games can contain or present stories. But thinking of games as narratives like short stories, novels or plays might distract us from the expressive possibilities of gaming that are not shared by other media: the creation of a rule-bound world that responds dynamically to a player’s actions, for instance. The first half of this seminar will consider how some novels and plays work like games; how games have evolved complex and often non-verbal means of conveying narratives; and whether narrative in fiction, theatre and film can or should be a model for storytelling in games. Our discussions in the second half of the course will focus on the recent preoccupation with moral choice as a form of player agency in narrative games. Do video games provide us with innovative ways of testing our values or do they desensitize us to real-world moral dilemmas? By asking us to make difficult, often painful choices that foreclose other options in a game, are we no longer “playing” in any traditional sense?

This seminar will ask students to consider video games, which will be played in and outside of class, through a variety of theoretical approaches. Students will be expected to have a general grounding in literary theory and to participate vigorously in class discussions. Students must also have access to a personal computer that can download and play games from Steam, a digital game distribution platform.

Reading:
Course reader of essays on narrative theory and video game criticism
Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (novel)
Jennifer Haley, Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom (play)
Jesper Juul, The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games (theory)

Playing: (Please note: students of the course will be able to access all these games, free of charge, on a designated gaming computer at the library)
Mike Bithell, Thomas Was Alone (game)
Blendo Games, Thirty Flights of Loving (game)
Jonathan Blow, Braid (game)
The Fullbright Company, Gone Home (game)
Galactic Café, The Stanley Parable (game)
Key and Kanaga, Proteus (game)
Minority Media, Papo y Yo (game)
Necrophone Games, Jazzpunk (game)
Lucas Pope, Papers, Please (game)
Telltale Games, The Walking Dead: Season 2 (game)
Various short games from Anna Anthropy, Pippin Barr, Chris Cornell, Molleindustria, Porpentine, Zoe Quinn, and others

Texts/Authors to be Studied: :Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”; Mazapán, “You Have to Burn the Rope” (Flash game); Molleindustria, “Every Day the Same Dream” (Flash game); Porpentine, Ultra Business Tycoon III (Twine game); Espen Aarseth, “The Book and the Labyrinth” from Cybertext—Perspectives on Ergodic Literature; Janet Murray, “Agency” in Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace

Method of Evaluation: Participation (20%); Presentation (10%); Game Proposal (20%); Prospectus and Annotated Bibliography (15%); Final Paper/Project (35%)

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Course Title: Advanced Studies: New Wine, New Skins: Contemporary Canadian Poetry and the Struggle with Form

Course Code: ENG424H5S

Instructor: Richard Greene

Course Description: An examination of a group of Canadian poets in mid-career, including George Elliott Clarke, Karen Solie, and Carmine Starnino. Following a generation of poets that placed relatively little value on the tight construction of poems either in fixed forms or free verse, a new crop of poets has come to maturity in Canada for whom the rigours of craft are of paramount concern. This course will attempt to understand their achievements.

Required Reading:
TBA.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Clarke, Solie, and Starnino.

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion.

Method of Evaluation: : Two tests worth 25% each and a term-paper worth 50%.

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Course Title: Advanced Studies: David Foster Wallace

Course Code: ENG436H5F

Instructor: Ira Wells

Course Description: David Foster Wallace was the most important literary figure of his generation, a writer of staggering intelligence who also managed to forge intense emotional bonds with his readers. Wallace could write incisively (and often hilariously) about an astonishing range of subjects, from the soul-crushing atmosphere of cruise ships to the history of infinity to an afternoon at the state fair (“Wherein our reporter gorges himself on corn dogs and exchanges unpleasantries with tattooed carnies”). Perhaps his greatest contribution, however, lies in his exploration of the American geography of addiction. While Wallace’s own (sometimes nightmarish) encounters with alcohol, television, drugs and sex at times severely encumbered his artistic aspirations, his finest works transmute those experiences into a sustained, penetrating examination of some of America’s signature cravings, fixations, and dependencies. Alongside close readings of David Foster Wallace’s most important works—including his novels, essays and short stories—we’ll think about issues like depression, anxiety, mindfulness, recovery, and how we construct meaning from experience. We’ll consider the unsettling adjacency of artistic creativity and mental illness. And we’ll linger over the small miracles of wonder and beauty that Wallace retrieves from the wreckage of postmodern consumer culture—moments of compassion and unity, “on fire with the same force that lit the stars.”

Required Reading:
The Broom of the System (1987)
Infinite Jest (1996)
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)
Oblivion (2004)
Consider the Lobster (2006)

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Lobster, Broom, Interviews

Method of Instruction: --

Method of Evaluation: Seminar Presentation (20%); Seminar Response (10%); Essay Prospectus (15%); Research Essay (40%); Informed Class Participation (15%)

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Course Title: Advanced Studies: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Course Code: ENG461H5F

Instructor: Alexandra Gillespie

Course Description: In this course we will read just one poem slowly and closely: the greatest surviving Middle English romance - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (in which Gawain, a knight from the young King Arthur’s Camelot, embarks on a risky adventure involving a giant green man with a large sword, a far-off castle, a seductive married woman, her husband’s hunting expeditions, a girdle, a pentangle, and the magic of Morgan le Faye).

We will read the text in Middle English with the assistance of modern translations. The first part of each class will be based on students’ close reading of a selected passage of a text.

We will also use the class as an opportunity to survey modern criticism on Sir Gawain and its anonymous author, the Gawain-poet. Each week two students will be asked to prepare short presentations on topics of particular concern to critics. These topics will represent different theoretical and scholarly approaches to the poem, to Middle English studies, and to literature more generally. Topics will include: medieval scribes and the manuscript of Sir Gawain; historicisms new and old; authorship and anonymity; medieval religion; form and aesthetics; ecologies; and gender and sexuality.

Required Reading:
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J.R.R. Tolkein, Norman Davis, and E.V. Gordon (Oxford, 1968).
Selected translations and articles – provided to students online.

Method of Instruction: Seminar discussion.

Method of Evaluation:
Weekly reading assignments: 20%
Seminar presentation: 20%
Seminar participation: 10%
Essay plan: 10%
Essay: 40%

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Course Title: Advanced Studies: Shakespeare’s Major Tragedies

Course Code: ENG462H5S

Instructor: Leslie Thomson

Course Description: This study of Shakespeare’s five great tragedies will focus on tragedy as a genre and on how Shakespeare used the conventions of that genre to create a particular experience for the audience. Emphasis will be on close analysis of the plays as texts written for performance on the early modern English stage. Topics will include: early modern theories of tragedy, the tragic protagonist, tragic structure, the manipulation of playgoer response, tragedy and love.

Required Reading:
Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra. Oxford editions of the plays will be available in the UTM bookstore. No other editions are acceptable. A list of supplementary reading materials will be provided.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: as listed above.

Method of Instruction: Informal lecture; student questions/answers; general discussion.

Method of Evaluation: Close-reading test (25%); prepared questions and answers (10%); essay outline (10%), annotated bibliography for essay (15%); essay (30%); regular attendance and informed participation (10%).

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Course Title: Advanced Studies: James Joyce’s Ulysses

Course Code: ENG472H5S

Instructor: Mark Levene

Course Description: We will have about 24 hours of class time to talk about Joyce’s creation of roughly 20 hours on June 16, 1904, which is the overt period the narrative covers. The covert centuries within that day will also shape the seminar’s discussions.

Required Reading: Ulysses

First Texts/Authors to be Studied: Ulysses

Method of Instruction: Seminar

Method of Evaluation: two essays, seminar presentation(s), participation.

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