2015-2016 English Course Descriptions

Course Title: Narrative

Course Code: ENG110Y5Y

Instructor:

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Chester N. Scoville

Course Description: This course will introduce the student to the study of narrative, sometimes known as “narratology.” The lectures will introduce concepts of narrative and apply them to a variety of texts; the tutorials will provide critical discussion of these concepts and texts. By the end of the course, students should be able to demonstrate a critical understanding of the concepts of narratology and their applicability to a broad range of phenomena. As an introductory English course, ENG110 will also focus on student writing and analytical techniques, so that students may begin to master the art of the scholarly essay. By the end of the course, students should be able to construct and present analytical arguments in forms appropriate to literary studies and other humanistic disciplines.

Required Reading:

  • Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories
  • Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
  • Seth, Clyde Fans part 1
  • Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
  • Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
  • A CSPI course pack, containing the following texts:
    • Ernest Hemingway, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”
    • Ursula K. LeGuin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
    • Diane Schoemperlen, “Red Plaid Shirt”
    • Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”
    • Thomas King, “’You’ll Never Believe What Happened’ Is Always a Great Place to Start”
    • Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”
    • Raymond DiSanza, “On Memory, Forgetting, and Complicity in ‘The Cask of Amontillado’”
    • James Joyce, “The Dead”

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Hemingway, LeGuin, Schoemperlen

Method of Instruction: Two-hour lectures once weekly, one-hour tutorials weekly.

Method of Evaluation: Two essays along with a preliminary essay proposal; two tests on critical reading and integration of sources; quiz on academic integrity; participation in tutorials; final exam.

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Course Title: Traditions of Theatre and Drama

Course Code: DRE/ENG121H5F

Instructor: Timothy Youker

Course Description: A theatre history and dramatic literature course surveying plays and performance styles from the Ancient Greeks to the 18th Century, with an emphasis on Western works. We will examine plays as products of their own times—works shaped by specific historical moments, belief systems, and theatrical economies—while also trying to understand what they offer to contemporary readers and performers. Essay assignments will emphasize close reading, critical thinking, and formal analysis, while presentation assignments require students to engage in practical experimentation with pre-modern performance styles.

Note: DRE121 and ENG121 are the same course. Whether you register for DRE or ENG does not affect the content or requirements.

Required Reading: Selections from The Broadview Anthology of Drama Volume 1 and the Penguin Japanese No Drama collection, both available at the UTM bookstore; other readings to be made available on Blackboard. Attendance of a production at Theatre Erindale may also be required.

First Three Texts to be Studied: Aeschylus, Plautus, Zeami

Method of Instruction: Lectures and tutorial sections

Method of Evaluation: One short and one medium-length essay; group presentation; 5 short scheduled quizzes and a final exam to test retention of course content.

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Course Title: Literature For Our Time

Course Code: ENG140Y5Y

Instructor: Daniela Janes

Course Description: 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, 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 Romantics

Course Code: ENG202Y5Y

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

Course Description: An introduction to influential texts that have shaped the British literary heritage, covering approximately twelve writers of poetry, drama, and prose, from Chaucer to Keats (from the Middle Ages to the Romantics), with attention to such questions as the development of the theatre, the growth of the novel form, and the emergence of women writers.

Required Reading (available at the UTM bookstore; broadview anthologies are bundled together):

A] Broadview Anthology of British Literature, volumes 1-4:
1 Medieval Period
2 Renaissance
3 Restoration
4 Romanticism
ISBN: 978-1-55402-203-8

B] William Shakespeare, Othello. Penguin. Ed. McDonald. ISBN 978-0-14-071463-0

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
Beowulf
The Wife’s Lament
Marie de France, Lanval

Method of Instruction: Lecture; Discussion; and Tutorial

Method of Evaluation: Tests, Essays, Tutorial Participation, Final Exam

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Course Title: Rhetoric

Course Code: ENG205H5S

Instructor:

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Chester N. Scoville

Course Description: A historical survey of the major theorists of rhetoric from the ancient world to the present day, including such writers as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Ramus, Vico, Spencer, I. A. Richards, Kenneth Burke, Wayne Booth, Jacques Derrida, and Stanley Fish. We will explore the roots of rhetoric in Athenian political culture, trace its development through Roman law and medieval religion and literature, and consider some of its modern and postmodern varieties. Along the way, we will see the centrality in Western thought of the study and practice of persuasive speech and writing, and its relationship to politics, science, history, literature, and more.

Required Reading: Readings will be a combination of coursepack material, internet sources, and texts available from the UTM bookstore, such as Timothy Borchers’s Rhetorical Theory: An Introduction.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Borchers, Dissoi Logoi, Plato

Method of Instruction: This course will be held in one of UTM’s new Active Learning Classrooms [ALC]. The ALC is designed as a highly interactive learning environment based on group work, problem-solving, and task accomplishment; the course’s mixture of (some) lectures and (much) in-class participation will reflect and take advantage of this design.

Method of Evaluation: Weekly short exercises based on traditional rhetorical exercises; midterm test; participation, final paper.

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Course Title: The Short Story Collection

Course Code: ENG214H5S

Instructor: Daniela Janes

Course Description: In this course we will read a selection of short story collections drawn from a variety of national literatures. In our analysis we will consider the individual stories, the relationships between the stories, and the dynamics of each collection. In lectures and discussions, we will engage with formal and theoretical questions about short story collections, as well as examining the history and development of the genre.

Required Reading: Students will read six short story collections: James Joyce, Dubliners; Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time; Alice Munro, Who Do You Think You Are?; Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber; Rohinton Mistry, Tales From Firozsha Baag; and Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Dubliners, In Our Time, Who Do You Think You Are?.

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion.

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

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Course Title: The Canadian Short Story

Course Code: ENG215H5F

Instructor: Daniela Janes

Course Description: This course examines the development of the short story in Canada from the nineteenth century to the present. We will explore the formal features of the short story and its critical contexts as we move through nearly two hundred years of Canadian short fiction. Readings will cover a range of styles and genres, including the detective tale, animal story, humorous sketch, local colour narrative, realist short story, First Nations orature, and the various formal experimentations of the twentieth century. Through our readings of canonical and non-canonical writers, we will chart the shifting themes and techniques of the short story form in Canada.

Required Reading: Readings will be drawn from two anthologies: Early Canadian Stories: Short Stories in English before World War I (ed. Misao Dean) and The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English (ed. Atwood and Weaver). We will also read several single author collections.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Moodie, Johnson, Scott (Dean).

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion.

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

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Course Title: Shakespeare

Course Code: ENG220Y5Y

Instructor:

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Liza Blake

Course Description: In this course, we will read eleven plays by William Shakespeare. We will read across the major dramatic genres and subgenres of revenge tragedy, comedy, history, tragedy, and romance, examining issues of textual and theatrical inheritance, feminism, perceptions of the body, power relations, and negotiations across different economic classes. Lecture will frame plays historically, culturally, and theatrically, while also paying attention to the way Shakespeare has been remediated in textual editing, performance, and modern culture more widely.

Required Reading: 11 plays, likely (though this list may change): Titus Andronicus; Much Ado About Nothing; Anthony and Cleopatra; Coriolanus; Othello; Richard III; 1 and 2 Henry 4; King Lear; Merchant of Venice; The Tempest

As we will be reading so many of the plays, I recommend purchasing the Norton Shakespeare (ISBN 978-0393934991), which will give you all 36 of Shakespeare’s plays and his poetry in one package. No matter what, the editions you use must have clearly marked acts, scenes, and line numbers as well as notes at the bottom of the page or in the margins (or on the facing page in the case of the Folger editions of Shakespeare). Older editions of the Norton Shakespeare (ISBNs 978-0393929911 or 978-0393970869 – you are much more likely to find these used and cheap than the brand new one), Arden (for individual plays only), New Cambridge, or New Folger are all consistently reliable for Shakespeare texts; for any other publisher you should check with me before purchasing texts. If you plan to buy individual playtexts please wait to do so until I have finalized the lineup of plays and posted the syllabus on the Blackboard site in the middle of the summer.

References in lecture will be to the new Norton Shakespeare (3rd edition, not based on the Oxford edition), the ISBN for which is given at the top of the paragraph above.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Titus Andronicus, Much Ado About Nothing, Anthony and Cleopatra.

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

Method of Evaluation: Participation and active discussion; close reading exercise; review essay; scene performance; announced quizzes; shorter and longer paper

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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.

Required Reading (a selection of the following): 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
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).

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Perrault; Grimm, Carroll

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

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

Method of Evaluation: Short assignment(s), essay, active participation, exam.

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Course Title: The Graphic Novel

Course Code: ENG235H5F

Instructor: Colin Loughran

Course Description: In “The Graphic Novel,” students will explore the validity of Scott McCloud’s definition of comics as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence.” By reading a variety of texts from the prehistory of comics to the present, we’ll consider a number of questions that have been raised as comics have drawn attention from scholars: what distinguishes the “graphic novel” from “comics” or, to use Will Eisner’s term, “sequential art”? Are comics best described as a subgenre, genre, or medium? In what ways can comics be rightly considered literature? We’ll read examples of mainstream and “underground” comics in detail, discussing topics like the rise and fall of the Comics Code Authority and censorship in America, the co-mingling aesthetics of North American, European, and Japanese traditions, and the ways in which contemporary graphic novels explore issues of race, gender, and nationality.

Required Reading: Moore and Gibbons, Watchmen; Spiegelman, Maus; Bechdel, Fun Home; Satrapi, Persepolis; Ware, Jimmy Corrigan; Vaughan, Pride of Baghdad

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Moore and Gibbons, Watchmen; Spiegelman, Maus; Bechdel, Fun Home

Method of Instruction: Lecture

Method of Evaluation: Essays, response papers, group presentations

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Course Title: Detective Fiction

Course Code: ENG236H5F

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; two detective novellas by Japan’s Edogawa Ranpo; 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; Ranpo: Black Lizard and Beast in the Shadows; 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: ENG239H5S

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:
J. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
Graham Joyce, Some Kind of Fairy Tale
Richard Matheson, I am Legend
Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead Volume 1: Days Gone Bye (ISBN 978-1582406725)
Readings posted to the PORTAL
Other texts to be announced in December 2015

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Todorov, Beowulf, The Hobbit TBA

Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion

Method of Evaluation: Essays, tests, and exam

WEBSITE: Portal

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Course Title: American Literature

Course Code: ENG250Y5Y

Instructor:

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Melissa Gniadek

Course Description: In the Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman proclaims the United States to be “not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations.” In this course we will explore some of the many “Americas” implied by Whitman’s “teeming nation of nations” in poems as well as travel narratives, essays, short stories, novels, and images. And we will necessarily ask what it means to study “American literature” today.

We will begin with accounts of first encounters between “New” and “Old” worlds and end with contemporary novels that deal with issues like immigration, identity, and the environment in ways that will help us to look back over the literature of the previous centuries. In the intervening weeks we will develop an understanding of the major periods and literary movements of American literary history. Along the way we may encounter authors including Mary Rowlandson, Hannah Foster, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James, Zitkala-Sa, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and Leslie Marmon Silko. As we explore many Americas and many American literatures we will think about how particular themes (such as travel, captivity, and ideas of utopia/dystopia) and literary forms and genres can be traced through various texts, as well as how developments in print culture (such as the rise of magazines and story papers) shaped American literature in various historical periods.

Required Reading:
Texts May Include:
The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Concise Edition
John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity”
Anne Bradstreet poems
Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God
Phillis Wheatley poems
Sarah Kemble Knight, The Journal of Madam Knight
Hannah W. Foster, The Coquette
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Short stories by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe
Poems by Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson
Herman Melville, Benito Cereno
Henry James, Daisy Miller: A Study
Zitkala-Sa, “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” and “School Days of an Indian Girl”
Langston Hughes poems
Richard Wright, Native Son
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Cormac McCarthy, The Road

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Selections from Columbus, Journal of the First Voyage to America; indigenous oral accounts; Cabeza de Vaca, La Relación

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation: Short writing assignments, essays, midterm test, active participation.

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Course Title: Canadian Literature

Course Code: ENG252Y5Y

Instructor:

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Colin Hill

Course Description: This course is an introduction to some of Canada’s best fiction, poetry, and drama from pre-confederation to the present. Our writers are from diverse backgrounds and engage the cultural conditions of their evolving country from various perspectives. Class topics will include (but are not limited to) exploration and immigration narratives, Canadian literary history and development, realism, modernism, urban / rural tensions, the artist figure, gender, Canadian postmodernism and postcolonialism, multiculturalism, psychological and spiritual self-discovery, and Canadian social, cultural, and national identity.

Required Reading: TBA

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: TBA

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation: Participation; mid-term test, final exam, two essays

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Course Title: Literature and the Environment

Course Code: ENG259H5F

Instructor: Alexandra Rahr

Course Description: From Wordsworth's idealized refuge to Whitman's ecstatic sublime to Carson's pesticidal dystopia, depictions of nature range from edenic to nightmarish. This course will interrogate how humanity constructs 'nature,' viewing it variously as sanctuary, as Other and as violently hazardous. We will also examine the consequences of these interpretations, considering for instance how Manhattan's Central Park revises not only the pastoral landscape but also the city itself. In doing so we will engage with the vexed nature of environments -- both built and 'natural' -- including the suburban landscape of Mississauga in which this course takes place.

Required Reading: (Subject to change): William Wordsworth, 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud'; Ralph Waldo Emerson 'Nature'; Henry David Thoreau 'Walking'; Walt Whitman 'Song of Myself'; Rachel Carson The Silent Spring (excerpts); Gary Snyder 'Trail Crew Camp at Bear Valley, 9000 Feet. Northern Sierra—White Bone and Threads of Snowmelt Water'; William Blake 'And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time'; Paul Goldberger, The Skyscraper (excerpts); Dave Eggers Zeitoun; Margaret Atwood The Year of the Flood.

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

Method of Instruction: Lectures and class discussions.

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

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Course Title: Critical Approaches to Literature

Course Code: ENG280H5S

Instructor:

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Mari Ruti

Course Description: This course examines classic texts of literary and aesthetic theory that every student of literature should know. Although it makes a couple of significant forays into earlier eras, it focuses on key moments of twentieth century criticism. However, it is not designed to provide a historical overview but rather to foreground themes, questions, and concerns that remain pertinent to contemporary literary study. We will consider the complex relationship between reader and text; the value, purpose, relevance, and pleasure of literature; the criteria of aesthetic judgment; the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime; the poetics and challenges of interpretation; as well as the often quite heated politics of criticism, including feminist, ethnic, and postcolonial challenges to the Western canon.

This course poses the following questions: What is the purpose of studying literature? What does literature give us? How does it relate to our social and political world? Does it refine our minds? Allow us to feel more deeply or authentically? Help us live more meaningful lives? In what ways do we as readers participate in the production of meaning? What, if any, is our responsibility as readers? Is there a relationship between beauty and justice? What constitutes the distinctiveness of literature (in comparison to other sites of cultural production)? What is the significance of what the text hides, represses, or leaves out? What constitutes readerly or interpretative generosity? Does the author’s race, gender, or nationality impact literary production? Who gets to decide what counts as literature? And why does this matter?

Required Reading:
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text
Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination
Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just
There will be a coursepack of shorter readings, including essays by Sartre, Kant, Burke, and Wilde

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Frye, Sartre, Kant

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation:
2 in-class tests: 25%
5-7 page paper: 40%
Class discussion: 10%

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Course Title: Chaucer

Course Code: ENG300Y5Y

Instructor:

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Alexandra Gillepsie

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: Women Writers 1660-1800

Course Code: ENG307H5F

Instructor:

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Terry F. Robinson

Course Description: The periods of the Restoration and eighteenth century witnessed the rise of the professional woman writer. In this course, we will read and analyze the poetry, drama, and prose works of an array of notable female authors c.1660-1800. We will draw our attention to the emergence of women writers as a major social and aesthetic force and to the advent of feminist thought. In the process, we will think through changing codes of gender and sexuality, examine women’s complex engagement with issues such as the marriage market, class division, nationhood, abolition, and educational reform, and consider how contemporary cultural and literary frameworks influenced eighteenth-century women writers and their groundbreaking productions.

Required Reading: Poetry and prose by Margaret Cavendish, Anne Finch, Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Maria Edgeworth, Hannah More, Helen Maria Williams, and Mary Wollstonecraft, among others.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Margaret Cavendish, The Convent of Pleasure; Anne Finch, “The Introduction”; Eliza Haywood, Fantomina

Method of Instruction: Lecture, Discussion

Method of Evaluation: Active and Informed Participation; Quizzes; Essays

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Course Title: Romantic Prose and Poetry

Course Code: ENG308Y5Y

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard (F)/Daniel White (S)

Course Description: This course provides a general survey of the poetry and prose of the British Romantic period (1789-1832). We will be interested in exploring intersections of literature, history, culture, science, politics, among other fields.

Required Reading (all texts available at UTM bookstore):
The Longman Anthology of British Literature. “The Romantics and their Contemporaries.” Volume 2A. Editors: Damrosch et al. 5th edition
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (broadview) Matthew Lewis, The Monk (broadview) Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (broadview)

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Williams, Paine, Burke, Blake

Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion

Method of Evaluation: Tests, Quizzes, Exams, Essays

WEBSITE: Portal

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Course Title: Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Books I-III

Course Code: ENG313H5F

Instructor:

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Liza Blake

Course Description: This course will be an intensive study of the first three books of Spenser’s allegorical chivalric epic The Faerie Queene, printed in the 1590s at the height of Elizabethan literature. Spenser’s wildly ambitious and wildly eclectic project combined: ambitions of writing the first English epic; a love for antiquated diction and spelling; a revival of the already-outdated medieval genre of chivalric romance (valiant knights on quests rescuing damsels etc.); and, most interestingly, a perverse tendency to allegory. We will read the first three books of this massive project slowly and carefully, but out of order: we will start, after some preliminary readings, with Book III, the book that tackles the project of allegorizing Queen Elizabeth herself. We will enrich our reading of Spenser with excerpts from texts that will shine light on Spenser’s project: Sidney’s Defense of Poesy, Spenser’s “Letter to Raleigh” and Raleigh’s reply; poems and speeches by Queen Elizabeth; Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas; Malory’s chivalric romances; and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Required Reading: Spenser’s Faerie Queene, in an annotated copy. You should order either the Hackett Faerie Queene, in three parts (ISBNs 978-0872208070; 978-0872208476; and 978-0872208551), or, if you think you might like to explore more of the poem, the Longman Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton (ISBN 978-1405832816). Though it is possible to find the text of the FQ online, you do not want to read this poem without help, so please do invest in one of these two annotated versions.

Additional texts will be provided in a course pack or online.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Spenser’s “Letter to Raleigh” explaining his intentions for The Faerie Queene; poetry by Raleigh; poetry by Queen Elizabeth

Method of Instruction: Lecture, discussion

Method of Evaluation: Three papers, three quizzes, short writing exercises, participation

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Course Title: Victorian Lyric

Course Code: ENG315H5F

Instructor:

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Daniel Wright

Course Description: This course will survey the poetry of the Victorian era with a focus on a single, complex, ever-shifting genre: the lyric poem. As we work through this varied poetic canon and encounter the work of the major Victorian poets, we’ll pursue several broad questions: In a historical period dominated by the very long serialized novel and its massive social scope, how does the lyric poem—a genre of brevity and individual interiority—persist, and why? How do Victorian lyric poets imagine and construct the literary history of lyric that precedes them, from the enormous influence of Sappho to the more immediate precedent of the Romantic poets? We’ll find that while Victorian poets took part in this long lyric tradition, they also mounted a critique of the fundamental assumptions of the genre: assumptions about the transparency of the self to others; about the communication of affective and contemplative experience; about the individual and her embeddedness in, or disconnection from, a social world; about moral virtues such as sincerity, authenticity, consistency, and self-examination; and about sexuality, erotic life, and the expressiveness of the body. Poets may include Barrett Browning, Browning, Tennyson, Brontë, Arnold, C Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti, Swinburne, Hopkins, Levy, Yeats, Michael Field, Hardy, and Housman.

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: TBD

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation: Essays, short writing assignments, active participation

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Course Title: Fiction before 1832 (2015-16)

Course Code: ENG322Y5Y

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

Course Description: This course focuses on the novel during the 18th century (1700-1789) and Romantic Period (1789-1832). As we pay attention to the rise of the novel as a form, we will also pay attention to a wide range of thematic and cultural issues—race, politics, science, technology, and gender (to name a few)—that shape the contents of the novels.

Required Reading: All of the novels are editions by the publisher broadview and will be shrink-wrapped together in bundles of four novels—at a discount (four novels for the price of three). The broadview editions are essential to the course: The introductions and appendixes in these volumes will be indispensable, tying into (and together) our lectures and the course assignments.

Package 1:
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe 1-55111-935-8
Swift Gulliver's Travels 1-55111-979-X
Haywood, Adventures of Eovaai 1-55111-197-7
Cleland, Memoirs of a Coxcomb 1-55111-568-9
Package ISBN 978-1-4881-0154-0
Price $66.95

Package 2:
Lennox, Sophia 1-55111-641-3
Walpole, Castle of Otranto 1-55111-304-X
McKenzie, Man of Feeling 1-55111-468-2
Lewis, The Monk 1-55111-227-2
Package ISBN 978-1-4881-0156-4
Price $55.85

Package 3:
Austen, Pride and Prejudice 1-55111-028-8
Austen, Northanger Abbey 1-55111-479-8
Shelley, Last Man 1-55111-076-8
De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater 1-55111-435-6
ISBN 978-1-4881-0157-1
Price $51.85

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Jonathon Swift, Gulliver's Travels, Haywood, Adventures of Eovaai

Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion

Method of Evaluation: Essays, Tests, Exam

WEBSITE: Portal

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Course Title: Austen and Her Contemporaries

Course Code: ENG323H5F

Instructor:

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Terry F. Robinson

Course Description: Jane Austen's novels have long been valued for their ability to offer readers a respite from the tension and weight of worldly cares. With their focus on the rural and the domestic, they can seem to provide a buffer against cultural and socio-political turbulence. As a result, they have often been and are read separately from their historical context. Recent criticism, however, has challenged such an approach. By reading a selection of Austen's novels alongside the publications of other contemporary writers, such as Edmund Burke, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Walter Scott, we will situate her work within the complex literary, social, and political realities of her time.

Required Reading: Novels by Jane Austen, alongside the poetry and prose of contemporary authors.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey; selection from Ann Radcliffe, from The Mysteries of Udolpho; Edmund Burke, selection from A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

Method of Instruction: Lecture, Discussion

Method of Evaluation: Active and Informed Participation; Group Presentation; Quizzes; Essays

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Course Title: Victorian Realist Novels

Course Code: ENG325H5S

Instructor:

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Daniel Wright

Course Description: Realist novels are filled with ordinary people confronting ordinary problems: growing up, loving (and maybe marrying), working, protesting, dying, thinking, and living ethically. The continuing popularity of these kinds of narratives is due, in part, to the legacy of the Victorian era, in which the realist novel (the novel that portrays the world “as it really is”) found its form. In this course, we’ll survey several of the major novels of nineteenth-century Britain, with a focus on how they deploy (and often bend, defy, or experiment with) the aesthetic conventions of realism.

Required Reading: (subject to change)
Jane Austen, Emma (1814)
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1860-61)
George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-72)
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891)

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

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation: Essays, short writing assignments, active participation

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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: Contemporary British Fiction

Course Code: ENG329H5F

Instructor: Mark Crimmins

Course Description: In this course we will examine four major works of Contemporary British Fiction and a number of small, experimental texts that will be handed out at class. We will start with Julian Barnes’s brilliantly postmodern novel, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters before going back to the early Sixties to explore Anthony Burgess’s dystopian masterpiece, A Clockwork Orange. Our post-millennial readings will include Zadie Smith’s second novel, The Autograph Man, and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. Interspersed with these readings will be shorter experimental fictions that will be handed out at class.

Required Reading:
Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange; Julian Barnes: A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters; Zadie Smith: The Autograph Man; Ian McEwan: On Chesil Beach.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Barnes, Burgess, Smith.

Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion

Method of Evaluation: 2 short papers (20% each)+2 tests (25% each)+participation (10%).

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Course Title: Early Drama

Course Code: ENG330H5F

Instructor:

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Chester N. Scoville

Course Description: The drama of the late Middle Ages in England is among the most sophisticated forms of pre-modern cultural expression. Drawing from the common religious culture of the medieval period as well as from the localized conditions of its production, medieval drama gives us a rare glimpse of the full range of lived experiences of its time and place. Its study is endlessly shifting and surprising, as modern scholars, actors, and audiences interpret and reinterpret the few remaining fragments of what was once a much more populated field. This course will give students an introduction to the some of its major texts, focusing on the York Cycle, and to the scholarly and dramaturgical issues that surround them.

Required Reading:
The York Corpus Christi Plays, ed. Clifford Davidson
The Conversion of Saint Paul, ed. Chester N. Scoville
Mary Magdalene, ed. Chester N. Scoville
Coursepack with secondary articles and other materials

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Conversion of Saint Paul, York Plays, Mary Magdalene

Method of Instruction: This course will be held in one of UTM’s new Active Learning Classrooms [ALC]. The ALC is designed as a highly interactive learning environment based on group work, problem-solving, and task accomplishment; the course’s mixture of (some) lectures and (much) in-class participation will reflect and take advantage of this design.

Method of Evaluation: Frequent in-class exercises followed by written reports on results; midterm test; group dramaturgical/critical project; final essay.

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Course Title: Drama 1660-1800

Course Code: ENG337H5S

Instructor:

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Terry F. Robinson

Course Description: In this course, we will explore the arc of British dramatic literature, as it extends from the Restoration through the Georgian Era. We will examine a range of plays in a variety of genres (comedy, tragedy, farce, ballad opera, closet drama) by authors as diverse as Wycherley, Behn, Dryden, Rowe, Steele, Gay, Lillo, Garrick, Goldsmith, and Baillie. In the process, we will consider how these dramas resonate with and comment upon intersecting concerns of gender, economics, politics, and national identity. We will also become familiar with theater history, including the advent of women performers, the age’s most famous (and infamous) actors, the Licensing Act, the popularization of Shakespeare, the aural and spectacular effects of changing theatre construction, and critical controversies. While the principal mode of investigation will involve analysis of the plays, we will also pay close attention to the material conditions of performance, as theatres grew from makeshift spaces for the social elite to vast, purpose-built venues able to accommodate thousands of spectators. Central to the course, then, is the notion that these plays are meant to be performed on stage. Overall, we will gain an appreciation for and insight into the brilliant, sensuous, and ever-shifting world of long eighteenth-century theatre.

Required Reading:
Dramas by William Wycherley, Aphra Behn, John Dryden, Nicholas Rowe, Richard Steele, John Gay, George Lillo, Oliver Goldsmith, and Joanna Baillie

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: William Wycherley, The Country Wife; Aphra Behn, The Rover; John Dryden, All for Love, or the World Well Lost

Method of Instruction: Lecture, Discussion

Method of Evaluation: Active and Informed Participation; Group Presentation; Quizzes; Essays

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Course Title: Modern Drama Since World War II

Course Code: ENG341H5F

Instructor:

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Lawrence Switzky

Course Description: This course surveys British, American and Anglophone drama in a dizzyingly changing world, from 1945 to 2015. We will focus in particular on how plays from this era pair radically different registers of experience: the protected world of domestic interiors and the outer world of catastrophic events; the mundane present and the eventful past; the pursuit of love and the pursuit of science. We will approach plays as texts that can be read and as blueprints for events in time and space. We will also examine the influence of social and political developments on dramatic form and content, from the Cold War and the atomic age through the sexual revolution, from post-colonialism through the AIDS crisis to the technologically mediated culture of today. Assignments will encourage both critical and creative engagements with these plays.

The movements and topics we will consider include: the Theatre of the Absurd and its philosophical foundations; the Angry Young Men; tragedies of sympathy and comedies of menace; plays as games and sets of rules; the uses and abuses of violence on stage; In‐Yer‐Face theatre; plays about nation, race, gender, and heritage; and the influence of globalization on playwriting. Readings will be selected from plays by Samuel Beckett, John Osborne, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Adrienne Kennedy, Harold Pinter, Edward Bond, Athol Fugard, Wole Soyinka, Roberto Athayde, Tom Stoppard, Sam Shepard, Tony Kushner, Suzan‐Lori Parks, Sarah Kane, Caryl Churchill, and Jackie Sibblies Drury.

Required Reading:
One-act and full-length plays will include Beckett, Endgame; Osborne, Look Back in Anger; Williams, The Night of the Iguana; Albee, “The Zoo Story”; Kennedy, “Funnyhouse of a Negro”; Pinter, The Homecoming; Bond, The Sea; Stoppard, Arcadia; Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman; Athayde, Miss Margarida’s Way; Fugard, Master Harold…and the Boys; Shepard, True West; Kushner, Angels in America; Parks, Topdog/Underdog; Kane, Blasted; Churchill, Far Away; Drury, We Are Proud to Present a Presentation… Many of these plays will be made available in a course reader or online.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Beckett, Osborne, Williams

Method of Instruction: Lectures and discussions

Method of Evaluation: Attendance and Participation (15%); two exams (20% each, 40% total); performance project (15%); Final Paper (30%)

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Course Title: Contemporary Drama

Course Code: ENG342H5S

Instructor: Martin Julien

Course Description: In this course, we will examine ten plays – all composed in English – from Britain, Canada, and the United States. All but one, (the groundbreaking and germinal 1979 opus Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill), have been written within the last twenty years, and all have received multiple and notable productions internationally. It would be foolhardy to say that these works are exhaustively “representative” of the scope of drama over the last several decades, but they nevertheless provide a useful and stimulating framework through which to explore some of the major themes and formal experiments that are on display in contemporaneous dramatic writing.

Required Reading:
“The Goat or, Who is Sylvia?” (Edward Albee), “Rice Boy” (Sunil Kuruvilla), “August: Osage County” (Tracey Letts), “Age of Arousal” (Linda Griffiths), “Cloud Nine” (Caryl Churchill), “The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God” (Djanet Sears), “Brand New Ancients” (Kate Tempest),“The Pillowman” (Martin McDonough). “Homebody/Kabul” (Tony Kushner), “Crave” (Sarah Kane) (1998)

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: “The Goat or, Who is Sylvia?” (Edward Albee), “Rice Boy” (Sunil Kuruvilla), “August: Osage County” (Tracey Letts)

Method of Instruction: Lecture, with intensive discussion. Multi-media presentations.

Method of Evaluation: Participation (15%), short writing assignments (30%), formal essay 3000-4000 words (25%), final exam (30%)

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Course Title: Canadian Fiction

Course Code: ENG353Y5Y

Instructor:

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Colin Hill

Course Description: An exploration of some of Canada’s best modern and contemporary fiction, with a focus on the development of the Canadian novel. We will discuss texts by a diverse assortment of writers who engage the cultural conditions of Canada from the late nineteenth century to the present. Topics will include, but are not limited to, modernism, realism, urban/rural tensions, the artist figure, gender, Canadian postmodernism and postcolonialism, multiculturalism, psychological and spiritual self-discovery, various “schools” of Canadian literary theory, and Canadian social, cultural, and national identity.

Required Reading:
James DeMille, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder; Irene Baird, Waste Heritage; Sinclair Ross, As For Me and My House; Hugh MacLennan, Two Solitudes; Sheila Watson, The Double Hook; Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers; Margaret Atwood, Surfacing; Margaret Laurence, The Diviners; Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion; Timothy Findley, Not Wanted on the Voyage; Shyam Selvadurai, Funny Boy; Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: DeMille, Baird, Ross

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation: Mid-term test, Final Exam, two essays, participation, informal group projects

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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 ENG 201 Y Reading Poetry will be useful though not a pre-requisite. In the first term we will read a selection of poems from the late 1960s through to today with particular focus on contemporary female poets, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, and book-length narratives. 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, make presentations, and attend a poetry slam.

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

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Various contemporary female poets, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen

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: ENG357H5S

Instructor: Siobhan O'Flynn

Course Description: Focussing on new writing published after 2000, this course examines emerging and continuing trends that have come to define Canadian writing in a global context. We will consider the novel, short stories (the collection and in isolation), life writing, essays, graphic novels, and creative non-fiction, as well as new forms and platforms for digital/online writing. Critical ideas we will likely touch upon are postmodernism, postcolonialism, multiculturalism, ecocriticism, geografictione, historiography, fiction-theory, and small press experimentation. Working from the perspective of contemporary writing today, we will reconsider questions of canonicity in Canadian writing and explore how notions of a canon are being redefined.

Required Reading:
Buffy Cram, Radio Belly
Patrick De Witt, The Sisters Brothers
Richard Greene, Boxing the Compass
Johanna Skibsrud, The Sentimentalists
Kim Thuy, Ru
Richard Van Camp, Godless but Loyal to Heaven: Stories
Richard Wagamese, Indian Horse
Lawrence Hill, The Book of Negroes

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: TBA

Method of Instruction: lecture/discussion/presentations/workshop

Method of Evaluation: short assignment; essay; participation/presentation; exam

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Course Title: Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Course Code: ENG363Y5Y

Instructor:

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Melissa Gniadek

Course Description: The nineteenth century was a period of tremendous change for the United States as territorial expansion, industrialization, and urbanization altered the geography, economics, and politics of the nation. In the middle of the century, the American Civil War posed a threat to the nation’s very existence, but the tensions at the heart of the war began much earlier and their aftershocks continued to reverberate in the post-war period. In this course we will explore how these concerns are reflected in the literature of the period. We will read widely across a range of canonical and lesser-known texts, considering these historical contexts as we probe important subgenres of nineteenth-century literature including sensation and sentiment. We will trace aspects of these literary traditions as they appear across a variety of texts, including slave narratives, essays, short stories, poetry, and novels. In the process, we will gain an understanding of major literary periods and movements across the period between the American Revolution and the beginning of the twentieth century. Authors read over the course of the year may include Charles Brockden Brown, Hannah Foster, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, George Lippard, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Francis Harper, Charles Chesnutt, and Theodore Dreiser.

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: TBD

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation: Short writing assignments, essays, midterm test, active participation.

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Course Title: 20th-Century American Literature

Course Code: ENG364Y5Y

Instructor: Geoffrey Hamilton

Course Description: This course examines a broad selection of 20th-century literature by American authors. We begin by looking at several short stories produced near the beginning of the century, move on to representative examples of Modernist poetry, then to prose works by Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner. In January we turn to a survey of African-American literature with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as the centerpiece, and then to a consideration, culminating in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, of the formation and legacy of prominent national mythologies. The significance of various formal experiments, and of attempts to re-imagine individual and group identity, will be among our primary concerns throughout the year.

Required Reading:
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume 2: 1865 to the Present
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-paper”; James, “The Beast in the Jungle”; Crane, “The Open Boat”

Method of Instruction: Lecture/Discussion.

Method of Evaluation: 3 essays, participation, mid-term exam, final exam.

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Course Title: Postcolonial and Transnational Discourses

Course Code: ENG370H5S

Instructor: Kaelyn Kaoma

Course Description: This course focuses on theorizations of postcoloniality and transnationality through readings of fictional and non-fictional texts. We will read classic literary works much-discussed in postcolonial studies as well as more recent entries into the canon, while grounding ourselves in key texts from postcolonial and transnational theory. In addition to the course's cornerstone discourses of postcolonialism and transnationalism, we will also discuss such concepts as diaspora, hybridity, the Other, mimicry, Orientalism, and Afropolitanism. Some geographical breadth has been attempted, with texts from Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, and North America, in an attempt to introduce students to a wide range of writers from different parts of the world, with different postcolonial and transnational experiences. By the end of the course, students should have familiarized themselves with major thinkers and concepts in postcolonial theory, developed an ability to critically engage with these discourses, and be able to apply them to literature.

Required Reading: Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions; Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah; Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place; Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things; Eden Robinson, "Queen of the North"; selected theoretical readings from Fanon, Said, etc.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Dangarembga, Salih, Adichie

Method of Instruction: Lecture, discussion

Method of Evaluation: TBA

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Course Title: Literature & Psychoanalysis

Course Code: ENG384H5S

Instructor:

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Mari Ruti

Course Description: An introduction to psychoanalysis for students of literature, this course considers major psychoanalytic ideas through close readings of selected texts by Freud and related thinkers. The course also considers applications of Freud by examining a selection of literary texts and films that engage psychoanalytic theory. Themes of special interest include the uncanny, identity formation, the repetition compulsion, the return of the repressed, love, loss, mourning, melancholia, fetishism, the “male gaze,” the “mirror stage” (Lacan), trauma, abjection, mortification, creativity, and sublimation. We will also pay particular attention to the textual unconscious, and the symptomatic residue that this unconscious generates. We will be doing deconstructive reading with a Freudian twist, looking for what sticks out, signifies in excess, glides from view, resists containment, doesn’t fit, or seems to fit too well in the texts and films under scrutiny. In the process, we will also learn what a sophisticated grasp on Freudian theory can contribute to our understanding of everyday life, particularly to what is difficult or painful about this life.

Required Reading:
Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny
E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Tales of Hoffmann
David Henry Hwang, M Butterfly
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
In addition, a number of shorter essays will be assigned.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Freud, Hoffmann, Hwang

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation:
2 in-class tests: 25%
5-7 page paper: 40%
Class discussion: 10%

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Course Title: Video Games and Narrative

Course Code: ENG415H5S

Instructor:

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Lawrence Swtizky

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 and on the extent to which games can—and should—influence our practices and beliefs (about gender, empathy, and violence in particular). 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, including narratology, ludology, political game theory, values-based criticism, information theory, and gender studies. Students will be expected to have a general grounding in literary theory and to participate vigorously in class discussions.

Required Reading:
Course reader of essays on narrative theory and video game criticism

Dennis Cooper, God Jr. (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. This roster of games is likely to change depending on the release and availability of new titles)

Mike Bithell, Thomas Was Alone (game)

Blendo Games, Thirty Flights of Loving (game)

Jonathan Blow, Braid (game)
Dontnod Entertainment, Life is Strange (game)

The Fullbright Company, Gone Home (game)

Galactic Café, The Stanley Parable (game)

Key and Kanaga, Proteus (game)


Necrophone Games, Jazzpunk (game)

Lucas Pope, Papers, Please (game)

Yager Development, Spec Ops: The Line (game)
Various short games from Anna Anthropy, Pippin Barr, Chris Cornell, Molleindustria, Porpentine, Zoe Quinn, and others; games about world politics developed by the BBC, Auroch Games, and the Guardian Newspaper

First Three 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, “All I want is for all of my friends to become insanely powerful” (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 Instruction: Discussions, brief lectures, student presentations, playing

Method of Evaluation: Attendance and Active Participation (20%); Presentation of a Critical Essay (10%); Game Proposal (15%); Final Paper/Project (30%); Brief Response Papers (25%)

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Course Title: Alice Munro

Course Code: ENG424H5F

Instructor: Mark Levene

Course Description: This seminar will explore Alice Munro’s work because it is “interesting,” to use a word she herself favors in explaining the recurrence in her stories of certain deeply complex subjects, such as adultery and storytelling itself. An implication of “interesting” is that our discussions will have no set ideological or methodological prism. They will centre on close readings of entire volumes (supplemented by other stories from the body of her work) with a view to the possibilities she creates in the short story form, among them the layering of stories within stories, transformed “epiphanies,” narrative pauses and parentheses, and shifts in both chronology and voice. Where possible, the seminar will draw upon ties between Munro’s fiction and stories by Chekhov and Joyce, Trevor and O’Connor, and others.

Required Reading: Lives of Girls and Women, The Moons of Jupiter, The Progress of Love, Open Secrets, Too Much Happiness.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: As above.

Method of Instruction: Seminar discussion, seminar reports, lecture.

Method of Evaluation: 2 essays, due October date TBA and November date TBA, 35% each; test 10%; seminar and *participation 20%. The cost of delays in submitting essays is 2% a day.

*Participation: This element will be a composite of attendance, responses to questions posed in class, and a single seminar presentation. If the test is missed for documented medical reasons, it can be taken on another, agreed-upon date. Policy regarding academic integrity is set out in the “University of Toronto Code of Behaviour in Academic Matters,” Section B. Please Note: Essays submitted as e-mail attachments will not be accepted. E-mail protocol will be discussed in class.

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Course Title: Advanced Studies: Minimalism in the 1980s

Course Code: ENG436H5F

Instructor: Mark Crimmins

Course Description: While none of the major practitioners of what came to be known as minimalism seemed to particularly like the term, this course will examine four major and a number of minor works that continue to represent the minimalist aesthetic as it was formulated by critics. We will focus on the decade during which minimalism flourished, the 1980s. Our principal texts will be four works that were published in that decade: Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Ann Beattie’s The Burning House, Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, and Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine. In our discussions we will also explore the phenomenon of minimalism in non-literary arts, such as music, painting, and architecture. We will also explore some contemporary forms of short fiction that represent, perhaps, a sort of neo-minimalism.

Required Reading:
Raymond Carver: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love; Ann Beattie: The Burning House; Jay McInerney: Bright Lights, Big City; Nicholson Baker: The Mezzanine.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Carver, McInerney, Beattie

Method of Instruction: seminar discussion, lecture

Method of Evaluation: Seminar presentation: 20%; Seminar write-up: 10%; Paper thesis, outline, bibliography: 15%; 2500-word research paper: 40%; participation: 15%.

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Course Title: 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: Frankenstein’s Reading

Course Code: ENG472H5S

Instructor: Daniel White

Course Description: Anyone who reads Frankenstein and considers how the Creature acquires language will immediately be struck by the sheer intertextual energy of the novel. In this course, we will read Frankenstein, and then we will read all the texts that the Creature reads in Frankenstein (selections from or the entirety of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Volney’s The Ruins of Empires, and Plutarch’s Lives) along with many of the other works that Mary Shelley weaves into her tale (Genesis, Ovid, Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Percy Shelley’s “Mutability” and “Mont Blanc,” Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, etc.). Then we will read Frankenstein again. Time permitting, we may also watch one or two twentieth-century film adaptations, such as the 1931 James Whale production with Boris Karloff and/or Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 version with Robert De Niro.

Required Reading: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and other works listed above.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Frankenstein, selections from Genesis, selections from Paradise Lost

Method of Instruction: Seminar discussion

Method of Evaluation: Two tests (25% each), one 8-10 pp. term paper (30%), participation (20%)

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Course Title: The Sensation Novel, Then and Now

Course Code: ENG473H5S

Instructor: Daniel Wright

Course Description: At the turn of the 1860’s, a new, controversial kind of novel burst onto the English literary scene with the publication of Wilkie Collins’s bestselling The Woman in White: accused of “preaching to the nerves,” its only goal the satisfaction of a “diseased appetite” for the thrilling anxiety of suspense, the “sensation novel” and its wild popularity changed the shape of the novel as we know it. Along with Collins, the genre was popularized by the work of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Ellen Wood. These writers represented a familiar, modern, ordinary world, and yet tinged that world with the horror of the gothic, crafting intricately plotted mysteries that hinged upon mistaken identities; dark secrets; adultery, bigamy, and murder; nightmares and other altered mental states; and, as Henry James put it, “those mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors.” In this course, we’ll read the major examples of this nineteenth-century genre by Collins, Braddon, and Wood, before concluding with two contemporary re-workings of the sensation novel.

Required Reading: (subject to change)
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859-60)
Ellen Wood, East Lynne (1861)
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (2002)
Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train (2015)
Selected theoretical and critical essays

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Collins, Wood, Braddon

Method of Instruction: Seminar discussion

Method of Evaluation: Essays, short writing assignments, active participation

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