NOTE: The course descriptions on this webpage are subject to change at the course instructors’ discretion; they are intended to give students choosing courses a clearer idea of the reading material and the kinds of assignments they might expect in each course.
First Year Courses: ENG110Y5Y | ENG121H5F | ENG122H5S | ENG140Y5Y | 2nd Year Courses | 3rd Year Courses | 4th Year Courses
Course Title: Narrative
Course Code: ENG110Y5Y
Instructor:
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.
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Traditions of Theatre and Drama
Course Code: ENG121H5F
Instructor: David Jansen
Course Description: This course introduces students to a selection of major works in world drama, from antiquity through to the late nineteenth century. Across this span of time and culture, we will examine original performance practices and conditions, considering these plays within their respective historical and cultural contexts, while also examining current theatrical manifestations. A primary goal of the course will be to help students develop their ability to closely read, interpret, and write about plays, not only as literary texts but also as blueprints for performance.
Required Reading:
We will examine plays by Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Hrosvitha, Zeami, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Calderón, Molière, Behn, Congreve, Lessing, Büchner, and Gilbert. Most of these plays can be found in The Bedford Introduction to Drama, 7th edition, Lee A. Jacobus, ed., 2013. Additional texts will be made available in course pack or online.
First Three Texts to be Studied: Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex; Euripides’ The Bacchae; Seneca’s Thyestes.
Method of Instruction: Lectures/discussion (2 hours per week) and tutorials (1 hour per week)
Method of Evaluation: One short (10%) and one medium-length essay (20%), four short quizzes (20%), final exam (35%), engaged participation(15%).
Back to 2016-2017 Time Table
Course Title: Modern and Contemporary Theatre and Drama
Course Code: ENG122H5S
Instructor: David Jansen
Course Description: This course introduces students to a selection of major works in world drama, from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Like its companion course, DRE/ENG121, we will examine original performance practices and conditions, considering these plays within their respective historical and cultural contexts, while also examining current theatrical manifestations. Some of the topics discussed will be naturalism, the epic theatre, feminist, post-colonial, and postdramatic theatre. A primary goal of the course will be to help students develop their ability to closely read, interpret, and write about plays, not only as literary texts but also as blueprints for performance.
Required Reading: We will examine plays by Ibsen, Wilde, Chekhov, Brecht, Miller, Beckett, Bond, Churchill, Kane, Crimp, Parks, Mouawad, and Cardinal. The majority of the plays can be found in The Bedford Introduction to Drama, 7th edition, Lee A. Jacobus, ed., 2013. Additional texts will be made available in course pack or online.
First Three Texts to be Studied: : Ibsen’s A Doll House; Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest; Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
Method of Instruction: Lectures/discussion (2 hours per week) and tutorials (1 hour per week)
Method of Evaluation: One short (10%) and one medium-length essay (20%), four short quizzes (20%), final exam (35%), engaged participation (15%).
Back to 2016-2017 Time Table
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, tests, final exam, and tutorial participation.
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Second Year Courses: ENG201Y5Y | ENG202Y5Y | ENG203Y5Y | ENG205H5S | ENG210Y5Y | ENG215H5F | ENG220Y5Y | ENG234H5S | ENG235H5F | ENG236H5F | ENG239H5S | ENG250Y5Y | ENG252Y5Y | ENG259H5F | ENG270Y5Y | ENG280H5S |1st Year Courses | 3rd Year Courses |4th Year Courses
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 components of 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.
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: British Literature, Medieval to Romantic
Course Code: ENG202Y5Y
Instructor:
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: Weekly lecture for two hours, weekly tutorial for one hour.
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.
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: British Literature: Victorian to Contemporary
Course Code: ENG203Y5Y
Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard
Course Description: A survey of influential texts that have shaped the British literary heritage, covering poetry, drama, and prose from the Victorian period (1832-1900) to the 21st century. The course is intended to
- familiarize students with selected major works of the history of British literature;
- expand interpretative skills through a range of comparative and cultural studies approaches; and
- 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 Textbooks (available at UTM bookstore in late August 2016):
1) A bundle of Broadview texts which is only available at the UTM bookstore)
1a) Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 5: Victorian Era, 2nd ed.
1b) Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Vol 6: 20th Century, 2nd ed.
1c) Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
1d) Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Price: $94.95 ISBN 978-1-4881-0345-2
Individual Texts
2) David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks ISBN 978-0-676-97932-9
3) Alan Moore, V for Vendetta ISBN 978-1-4012-0841-7
4) George Eliot, Silas Marner ISBN 978-0-14-143975-4
Recommended Texts:
1) A good glossary; such as The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. (Ed. Murfin and Ray) Bedford.
2) A good dictionary: Oxford English Dictionary: http://www.oed.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
Browning “My Last Duchess”
Eminem “Stan”
George Eliot, Silas Marner
Method of Instruction: Lecture, Discussion, Group Work
Method of Evaluation: Essay, test, and final exam
WEBSITE: Portal
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Rhetoric
Course Code: ENG205H5S
Instructor:
Course Description: An introduction to the major concepts and theories of rhetoric from the ancient world to the present day. 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.
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Dissoi Logoi, Plato, Aristotle
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.
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: The Novel
Course Code: ENG210Y5Y
Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard
Course Description: A survey for the novel from its early history 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:
1) Bundle of broadview texts (available only at UTM bookstore)
1a) Austen, Pride and Prejudice
1b) Shelley, Frankenstein
Price: $21.52 ISBN 978-1-4881-0346-9
2) Bundle of broadview texts (available only at UTM bookstore)
2a) Dickens, Great Expectations
2b) Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles
2c) Stoker, Dracula
2d) Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Price: $36.68 ISBN 978-1-4881-0347-6
Individual texts:
3) Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale ISBN 978-0-7710-0879-5
4) Collins, The Hunger Games ISBN 978-0-439-02352-8
5) Eliot, Silas Marner ISBN 978-0-14-143975-4
6) Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman ISBN 978-0-316-29116-3
7) McCarthy, The Road ISBN 978-0-307-38789-9
8) Mitchell, Cloud Atlas ISBN 978-0-345-80747-2
9) Morrison, Beloved ISBN 978-1-4000-3341-6
10) Moore, V for Vendetta ISBN 978-1-4012-0841-7
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Shelley, Frankenstein; Dickens, Great Expectations
Method of Instruction: Lecture, Discussion, and Group work
Method of Evaluation: Essays, tests, final exam, and presentations
WEBSITE: Portal
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: The Canadian Short Story
Course Code: ENG215H5F
Instructor:
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: 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: Grove, Leacock, Sime, Knister, Page, Richler, Laurence, Wiebe, Atwood, Kogawa, Bissoondath, Mistry, Brand, Coupland, King, Dakar, Munro, Robinson, Bezmozgis
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Grove, Leacock, Sime
Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion
Method of Evaluation:
Participation 10%
Mid-term test 25%
Final Exam 35%
Term Paper 30%
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Shakespeare
Course Code: ENG220Y5Y
Instructor: TBA
Course Description: TBA
Course Title: Children's Literature
Course Code: ENG234H5S
Instructor: Siobhan O'Flynn
Course Description: TBA
Course Title: The Graphic Novel
Course Code: ENG235H5F
Instructor:
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 Seth’s It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken, Benjamin Rivers’s Snow, and Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant, as well as some mainstream comics such as G. Willow Wilson’s Ms. Marvel. Where We will also use such resources as Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics as theoretical and historical background. We will maintain a focus on, but will not be limited to, comics and graphic novels by artists and writers in the GTHA.
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
Seth, It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken
Rivers, Snow
Beaton, Hark! A Vagrant
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: There will be several short writing assignments, leading up to a substantial final essay. Much of the work in class will be done in teams; participation in group work will therefore also be evaluated.
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Detective Fiction
Course Code: ENG236H5F
Instructor: Margaret Herrick
Course Description: From the Victorian boarding houses of London to the mean streets of Los Angeles, this course follows on the heels of the detective. The course is designed to introduce students to both the English and American canons and to some postcolonial and postmodern iterations. We’ll trace the detective’s epistemologies and his or her negotiations of race, gender and nationality. We’ll query the importance of the detective’s style, flashy or understated, sexy or agonized. We’ll examine what it means to ‘solve’ a crime, what it means to get justice and how/if it is possible to find out the truth. Finally, of course, we’ll think about narrative, about literary form and about the complicated relationship between the reader and the detective.
Required Reading:
Paul Auster’s City of Glass
Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution
Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep
Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles
P.D. James’ An Unsuitable Job for a Woman
Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Man in the Crowd” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach
Fred Vargas’ The Chalk Circle Man
House Season 3, Episode 24 “Human Error”
Sherlock Season 2, Episode 2 “The Hounds of Baskerville”
Elementary Pilot
Devil in a Blue Dress screenplay by Walter Mostly, directed by Carl Franklin
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Poe, Conan Doyle, Chabon
Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion
Method of Evaluation:
Participation (10%)
First Essay (25%)
Final Essay (35%)
Final Exam (30%)
Back to Registrar's Time Table
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
Stoker, Dracula
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: Beowulf, The Hobbit, The Hunger Games
Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion
Method of Evaluation: Essays, tests, and exam
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: American Literature
Course Code: ENG250Y5Y
Instructor:
Course Description: In the Preface to the 1855 edition of , Leaves of GrassWalt 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 the year with accounts of first encounters between “New” and “Old” worlds and end with a contemporary novel that will help us to look back over the literature of the previous centuries. In the intervening weeks we will develop an understanding of major periods and movements within American literary history. Along the way we will encounter authors including Mary Rowlandson, Hannah Webster Foster, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Zitkala-Sa, William Faulkner, and Leslie Marmon Silko. As we explore various Americas and 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:
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
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
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, two essays, midterm test, final exam, active participation.
Back to Registrar's Time Table
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; 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; 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: Lectures and class discussion.
Method of Evaluation: close reading and essays, test and exam, in-class work and informed participation.
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Literature and the Environment
Course Code: ENG259H5F
Instructor: New Instructor TBA - new description TBA
Course Description: TBA
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Colonial and Postcolonial Writing
Course Code: ENG270Y5Y
Instructor:
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.
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Critical Approaches to Literature
Course Code: ENG280H5S
Instructor: J. Daniel Elam
Course Description: TBA
Third Year Courses: ENG302Y5Y | ENG305H5S | ENG308Y5Y | ENG311H5S | ENG315H5F | ENG316H5S | ENG323H5F | ENG329H5F | ENG330H5F | ENG335H5S | ENG340H5F | ENG342H5S | ENG349H5S | ENG353Y5Y | ENG357H5S | ENG358H5F | ENG360H5F | ENG364Y5Y | ENG365H5S | ENG370H5F | ENG371H5F | ENG384H5S | ENG389Y5Y |1st Year Courses | 2nd Year Courses | 4th Year Courses
Course Title: Poetry and Prose, 1500-1600
Course Code: ENG302Y5Y
Instructor: Tristan Samuk
Course Description: The beginning of the English Renaissance is conventionally dated to 1485, the year of Henry VII’s accession to the throne. Over the next century of Tudor rule, England underwent a period of change unlike anything since the Norman invasion. By the time of Elizabeth I’s death in 1603, the country’s political, religious, economic, social, and aesthetic landscape had been radically transformed. During the sixteenth century, that is, England became modern. In this course, you’ll be introduced to the cultural, historical, and religious context of the period through a range of texts, including lyric poems, epics, pastorals, satires, essays, plays, and works of prose fiction. We’ll begin by examining the early influence of humanist and continental literature on texts like More’s Utopia and the poetry of Skelton, Wyatt, and Surrey. We’ll also discuss the impact of the Reformation on vernacular writing. The majority of the course, however, will concentrate on the literature of the reign of Elizabeth, especially the works of Sidney, Bacon, Nashe, Donne, Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare. We’ll also read the first three books of Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene. Although the course will emphasize major historical and cultural themes such as education, religion, urban life, nationhood, individuality, and epistemology, the primary goal of the course is to make you a better reader. With that in mind, the assignments and lectures will focus on helping you develop practical strategies for approaching the linguistic and poetic complexities of early modern English literature.
Required Reading:
Stephen Greenblatt ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume B, 9th ed. (Norton, 2012).
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche (Penguin, 1987).
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
Sidney, Skelton, More
Method of Instruction: Lectures
Method of Evaluation: Short essay (15%), term test (20%), long essay (25%), final exam (30%), participation (10%)
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Swift, Pope and their Contemporaries
Course Code: ENG305H5S
Instructor: Matthew Risling
Course Description: This course will explore parody and satire of the early eighteenth century, across different literary genres. Our central focus will be the great satirists of the era, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift. We will examine major works, such as Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, alongside contemporary writings of Susanna Centlivre, John Gay, Eliza Haywood, and others. We will examine various techniques of parody and satire, ways in which authors imitated and adapted existing genres, and the social-political importance of humour in an increasingly literate culture. Lectures will contextualize our readings alongside key cultural themes such as colonialism, ‘science’ and education, party politics, and shifting gender norms.
Required Reading:
Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World (Penguin Classics, 1994)
Susanna Centlivre, The Basset Table (Broadview, 2009)
John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (Oxford World’s Classics, 2013)
Eliza Haywood, Fantomina and Other Works (Broadview, 2004)
Alexander Pope, Major Works (Oxford World’s Classics, 2009)
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Oxford World’s Classics, 2008)
Other readings will be available online through Blackboard and/or the UToronto Library system.
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
John Dryden: “A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire” (Blackboard)
Henry Fielding: Preface to Joseph Andrews (Blackboard)
Susanna Centlivre: The Basset Table
Method of Instruction: A mixture of lecture and discussion.
Method of Evaluation: Participation (in-class and online), short essay, term paper, final exam.
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Romantic Poetry and Prose
Course Code: ENG308Y5Y
Instructor:
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)
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Medieval Literature
Course Code: ENG311H5S
Instructor: Jessica Lockhart
Course Description: “We find written (and scholars know this well) songs of the harp, composed about wondrous things. Some are of war, some of grief, some of joy and delight; some are of treachery and guile, of old adventures from days past. Some tales are of jokes and obscenity, and there are many about the Otherworld.” –– Sir Orfeo, c. 1325AD.
How do medieval works of literature understand themselves? How do they intervene in the societies that produced them? With this broad framework we will draw primarily on the surviving poetry of the Anglo-Saxons, the Welsh and Irish, and the Middle English, to explore medieval engagements with what Sir Orfeo terms ‘wondrous things’ –– in their world and the world(s) beyond. Genres we will encounter include history and battle poems, wisdom poetry and magic spells, fabliaux and comic poetry, saint’s life, cycle play, elegy, and romance.
Required Reading: We will primarily work from The Broadview Anthology of British LIterature: The Medieval Period (3rd edition); other sources may be online editions, or short excerpts posted to Blackboard or distributed over email.
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Deor, The Wanderer, Y Gododdin
Method of Instruction: lecture and discussion; students will be expected to be active participants.
Method of Evaluation:
short assignments and quizzes, term essay, class participation, exam.
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Thomas Hardy
Course Code: ENG315H5F
Instructor:
Course Description: Thomas Hardy’s career spanned genres (he was a prolific writer of novels, poems, and short stories) and literary periods (from the Victorian to the modern), and for that reason his work defies easy categorization. In this course, we’ll try to grapple with the variety of Hardy’s work by surveying three of his major novels in addition to a selection of short stories and poems. Topics of discussion will include: Hardy’s place in the history of the realist novel; his struggles against censorship and public criticism for his frank depiction of sexuality and his ongoing critique of the institution of marriage; the connections and differences among Hardy’s uses of the novel, short fiction, and lyric poetry; form, language, and technique; Hardy’s engagement with the literary traditions of the pastoral, the elegy, the love poem, the marriage plot, and the bildungsroman; humans and animals; misogyny and feminism; landscapes, landmarks, and ruins.
Required Reading: Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
------, The Woodlanders (1887)
------, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891)
------, Jude the Obscure (1895)
------, Selected short stories
------, Selected poems
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Thomas Hardy: “Hap,” “Neutral Tones,” Far from the Madding Crowd
Method of Instruction: Lecture and class discussion
Method of Evaluation: Two short essays, midterm quiz, final exam, engaged participation
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Textual Transformations in the Digital Age
Course Code: ENG316H5S
Instructor: Anna Wilson
Course Description: This course is part traditional English literature course, part digital humanities course (with a substantial computing component, although no prior experience with programming or the use of archiving software is required). This course looks at the ways in which digital technologies are transforming texts, reading, and readerships. We will read texts whose meaning is inflected by their digital format, whether this be their production and circulation within a particular online community, or their use of the digital medium to expand the idea of a ‘text’. Examples of this will include fanfiction, webcomics, viral Tumblr posts and tweets, and computer games. We will also learn about the use of digital tools to read, study, and preserve texts, including text-mining tools and online archiving tools. Learning to use some of these tools will be part of the final assignment.
PLEASE NOTE: No previous experience is required with coding, programming, or use of archiving softwares. However, comfort and familiarity with computers - the kind that comes through regular use of the internet and/or word processing softwares - will be a distinct advantage.
Required Reading: We will be reading or sampling a wide variety of short digital texts, and also a number of articles and blog posts about digital texts, all available online. We will also learn to use the archiving and presentation software Omeka. Omeka is available for free online. All instruction in its acquisition and use will be given in class.
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied: TBA.
Method of Instruction:Lectures, discussion, supervised computing workshops.
Method of Evaluation:
One medium-length essay assignment; one final project; participation; final exam. The final project - which students will do partially in class with instructor supervision - will involve creating an online presentation or archive using Omeka, a free software.
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Austen and Her Contemporaries
Course Code: ENG323H5F
Instructor:
Course Description: In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Jane Austen revolutionized the English novel, and in this course, we’ll immerse ourselves in her work, reading five of her major novels in order to understand how and why she intervened so boldly and definitively in the history of this literary genre, and how we continue to feel her influence today. Austen wrote at a time when the novel was a young genre still in search of a clear set of criteria to distinguish it from other long prose narrative genres, and in this course we’ll locate Austen’s work within this situation of flux, paying attention to her formal and thematic innovations: her focus on the ordinary and the everyday as part of the development of novelistic realism; her techniques of characterization and the representation of psychological interiority, including what we now call free indirect discourse; and her shaping of the familiar narrative structures of the marriage plot and the bildungsroman. While Austen is a product of her own historical moment, she also continues to be incredibly popular, her novels widely read and still the object of countless adaptations from fiction to film to YouTube. While we situate Austen in the historical moment out of which she wrote, we’ll also find opportunities to attend to her continuing relevance today.
Required Reading:
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811)
------, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
------, Mansfield Park (1814)
------, Emma (1815)
------, Persuasion (1818)
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park
Method of Instruction: Lecture and class discussion
Method of Evaluation: Two short essays, midterm quiz, final exam, engaged participation
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Contemporary British Fiction
Course Code: ENG329H5F
Instructor: TBA
Course Description: TBA
Course Title: Early Drama
Course Code: ENG330H5F
Instructor:
Course Description: In the beginning of the York play The Fall of the Angels, God steps forward and declares his power and his timelessness: “I am maker unmade, all mighte es in Me[!]” The appearance of a self-confident and enthusiastic supernatural character was not unusual in medieval drama, which afforded a number of opportunities for the everyday world of medieval England to open into other worlds. Metrically adventurous, theatrically complicated, gleefully metatheatrical, and socially critical, medieval drama in all its forms explores the aesthetic, philosophical, religious, social, and satirical possibilities of theater. This course will serve as an introduction to medieval drama in all its variety, including Biblical plays, conversion plays, moral plays, and interludes. The course will focus especially on medieval dramatic texts in performance, including both their original performance conditions and modern performance possibilities.
Required Reading: Greg Walker. Medieval Drama: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000. ISBN 0631217274
(Additional texts will be made available in a course pack or online.)
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Biblical drama from York, Chester, and N-Town
Method of Instruction: Lecture, discussion
Method of Evaluation:Two papers, three substantial quizzes, scene performances, participation
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Drama from 1603 to 1642
Course Code: ENG335H5S
Instructor: Denis Yarow
Course Description: This course will survey English drama written between 1603, when James I succeeded Elizabeth to the throne, and the closing of the theatres in 1642, during Charles I’s reign. What happened to the theatre of early modern England after the death of Queen Elizabeth? We will read a series of plays by representative playwrights of the period such as Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster as well as the later Shakespeare in an effort to trace the major themes and developments of that theatre. The lectures will provide historical and social contexts for each play, but we will also consider the formal and theatrical qualities of the play texts, reading them with a view to their dramatic possibilities. Along the way, we will discuss issues of gender, sexuality, and race, the role of religion and secular authority, representations of violence, and questions of genre, especially in relation to tragic, comedic, and tragi-comedic forms. Prior knowledge of Renaissance drama and Shakespeare will be valuable, but it is not essential. An active interest in the theatre and dramatic literature, however, is vital.
Required Reading: You will be expected to read twelve plays for this course, about one per week.
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Shakespeare (Othello), Jonson (Volpone), Middleton?/Anon. (The Revenger’s Tragedy)
Method of Instruction: Lectures, followed by class discussions
Method of Evaluation: one short paper, one long paper, two tests/exams, participation
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Modern Drama to World War II
Course Code: ENG340H5F
Instructor: Rachel McArthur
Course Description: A survey of dramatic texts covering the period from the end of the nineteenth century to the Second World War, this course will consider what makes drama “modern.” In attempting to answer this question, we will examine not only the content and context of the plays themselves but also the role of things like genre, performance history, publication and adaptation in the development of both “modern drama” as a category and of our reading of the texts that make up that category.
Required Reading: Required texts may include Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Susan Glaspell’s Trifles, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston’s Mule Bone, J.M Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author and Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh.
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler (1891)
George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1902)
Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion
Method of Evaluation: Final essay (with proposal), class participation, reading quizzes, in-class test and final exam.
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Contemporary Drama
Course Code: ENG342H5S
Instructor: Cassandra Silver
Course Description: TBA
Course Title: Contemporary Poetry
Course Code: ENG349H5S
Instructor:
Course Description: This course will examine some of the most accomplished and influential poetry of the past fifty years. Included in the course are poets from England, Ireland, Wales, the United States, Canada, and Trinidad. It is hoped that by grappling with the themes and techniques in these works, students will come to understand and to enjoy contemporary poetry.
Required Reading: Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy, eds. The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th ed. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2005.
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Richard Wilbur.
Method of Instruction: Lectures and discussion.
Method of Evaluation: Three in-class essays (20% each) and term-paper (40%)
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Canadian Fiction
Course Code: ENG353Y5Y
Instructor: Brent Wood
Course Description: This course focuses on English-Canadian novels from the middle twentieth century onward by many of Canada’s best-known writers from across the country, including Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, and W.O. Mitchell. Our study will include several books featuring young protagonists. We will examine the ways in which writers manipulate perspective, incorporate mythology, and blur borders between fantasy and reality for the purposes of psycho-social commentary.
Required Reading: Ten novels.
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
W.O. Mitchell, How I Spent My Summer Holidays
Barbara Gowdy, Falling Angels
Nino Ricci, Lives of the Saints
Method of Instruction: Lectures and discussion.
Method of Evaluation: Exams, multi-stage essays, participation.
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: New Writing in Canada
Course Code: ENG357H5S
Instructor: TBA
Course Description: TBA
Course Title: Topics in Canadian Literature: Canadian Literature and the Great War
Course Code: ENG358H5F
Instructor: Daniela Janes
Course Description: This course will give students the opportunity to take stock of how the First World War is represented in Canadian literature, including poetry, fiction and drama. Some of the issues that we will encounter this term include the role of the war in the Canadian cultural imagination, its relationship to nation building and articulations of national identity, the tensions between memory and forgetting (especially as represented in the figure of the shell-shocked soldier), the home front and gendered experiences of war, and the consequences of mythologizing or demystifying war. This course will provide a timely and topical opportunity for students to engage with the literary legacy of the Great War and craft their own interpretations of some seminal Canadian texts.
Required Reading: Ranging across genres and years, our texts will include canonical and non-canonical poetry by authors including John McCrae, Robert Service, Helena Coleman, Frank Prewett, and F.G. Scott; drama, including John Gray and Eric Peterson’s Billy Bishop Goes to War and David French’s Soldier’s Heart; and novels including L.M. Montgomery’s Rilla of Ingleside, Charles Yale Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed, Timothy Findley’s The Wars, and Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road.
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
poetry by McCrae, Service, Coleman (course reader).
Method of Instruction: Lectures and discussion.
Method of Evaluation: two tests (40%); essay proposal and annotated bibliography (10%); research essay (35%); informed participation (10%); in-class exercises (5%).
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Early American Literature
Course Code: ENG360H5F
Instructor:
Course Description: When you think of early seventeenth-century literature you might first imagine Shakespeare, who died in 1616, or perhaps John Donne, who died in 1631. You probably don’t think of the Americas, but these same decades saw increasing European contact with the “New World” and writing that emerged from that contact. For example, the Jamestown settlement was established in the English colony of Virginia in 1607. Governor John Winthrop famously brought a group of Puritans to Massachusetts Bay in 1630. Such events and the writings surrounding them produced the early American literary traditions that we will explore in this course, even as we recognize traditions that existed in the Americas before European contact.
In Early American Literature we will approach the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries with a focus on the geographies that would become the United States, though we will also acknowledge the contingency of borders and boundaries in this pre-national period. We will consider literature emerging from a range of contexts, from journeys of exploration and conquest to the extra-legal world of piracy to the religious world of New England Puritans. We will read a variety of genres, including captivity narratives, poetry, journals, sermons, and even one of the seduction novels popular in the years after the American Revolution. We will work to develop a sense of some of the earliest literatures emerging from what is now the U.S. And we will think about how some of the narratives that emerged during this period have evolved into the present.
Required Reading:
The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume A, Beginnings to 1800
Unca Eliza Winkfield (pseudonym), The Female American
Hannah Foster, The Coquette
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Indigenous oral traditions; Selections from Christopher Columbus’ Journals; John Smith, from The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles
Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion
Method of Evaluation: Short writing assignments, essay, final exam, active participation.
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Twentieth-Century American Literature
Course Code: ENG364Y5Y
Instructor: Nabeela Sheikh
Course Description: This course will examine American Literature in a variety of genres (novels, short stories, play, and poetry) from the early 1900s up to the end of the twentieth century.
Required Reading: Novels/plays may include
Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman
Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar
Allen Ginsberg’s Howl
Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City
Phillip Roth’s American Pastoral
Short stories and poetry, as well as critical and theoretical works, will be posted to the course website and/or available via Course Reserves.
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied: May be Lewis’s Main Street, Fitzgerald’s Gatsby and short works (from Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer), which will be posted to the course website.
Method of Instruction: Interactive lecture, discussion/participation, group presentation
Method of Evaluation: May include quizzes, in-class essay exam, group presentation, take-home essay
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Contemporary American Fiction
Course Code: ENG365H5S
Instructor: Nabeela Sheikh
Course Description: This course will map the Progress of the American Individual as represented in Literature from the latter half of the 20th century up to the present. We will examine the changing nature of “character” in society and how it influenced changes to “characterization” in literature. We will look at social conformity of the 1950s; social protests of the 1960s and 70s; the affluence and decay of the 1980s and 90s; the fearful apprehension of the encroaching naughts; and beyond that, the acknowledgement of terror as an aspect of everyday life. Ultimately, we will consider whether the “grand narratives” of Progress, Truth, Beauty, Justice, and most of all, the “American Dream” set up the Individual for a great Fall, and whether his “denarration” will set him free or merely reveal that he was never “there” in the first place.
Required Reading: Some works we may examine in this course are
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City
Donna Tartt’s The Secret History
Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club
Phillip Roth’s American Pastoral
Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto
Don DeLillo’s Zero K or Falling Man
Short stories and poetry, as well as critical and theoretical works, will be posted to the course website and/or available via Course Reserves. Short readings will include some or all of the following:
Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and/or America
Joan Didion’s Slouching towards Bethlehem
John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse”
Ray Carver’s “Cathedral”
Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (excerpt)
Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son (excerpts)
Ursula K. Leguin’s “The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas”
Jumpa Lahiri’s “Sexy”
Mary Gaitskill’s “The Other Place”
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Short works by Ginsberg, Didion, and Barth.
Method of Instruction: Interactive lecture, discussion/participation, group presentation
Method of Evaluation: May include quizzes, in-class essay exam, group presentation, longer take-home essay
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Postcolonial and Transnational Discourses
Course Code: ENG370H5F
Instructor: Anissa Talahite-Moodley
Course Description: Colonialism, postcolonialism, globalization and transnational migration have created a "contact zone" (Pratt) between cultures that has radically changed the ways in which we understand our sense of identity. Whether it is viewed as a source of creativity or as a cause of conflict and fragmentation, the idea of interacting cultures, nations and communities is a theme that runs through a large part of contemporary literature, cinema and other cultural forms. This course examines some of its manifestations by looking at a selection of fictional and non-fictional works, along with visual and cinematographic representations, that reflect these preoccupations. We will read texts that cover different geographical and cultural locations ranging from South Asia, the Middle East to Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and North America. Our focus will be on how these texts subvert colonial iconography and ethnocentric notions of absolute "truth" inherited from the past while engaging with narrative strategies that tend to privilege the multiplicity, plurality, diversity and non-linearity of experience. Discussions will focus on issues such as migration, travel, belonging, memory, hybridization and multilingualism, and the diverse ways in which they have shaped and continue to shape our postcolonial and transnational cultural landscape.
Required Reading: Maria Campbell's Halfbreed, Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup, Leila Sebbar's Sherazade, Michael Ondaatje's The Cat's Table, and selected theoretical readings as well as short stories that will be posted on Blackboard.
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Campbell, Gordimer, Sebbar.
Method of Instruction: Lectures and class discussions.
Method of Evaluation: two papers, one test, class participation, final exam.
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Rotten English: World Englishes and Postcolonial Literature
Course Code: ENG371H5F
Instructor: J. Daniel Elam
Course Description: When we talk about 'English' we tend to only think of a single, global language. On the contrary, many writers and thinkers have argued that there are multiple Englishes -- especially from countries that emerged from colonial rule. In this course, we will read books in 'Global Englishes', 'Rotten Englishes', and 'Bad Englishes', focusing especially on texts from South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, as well as Scottish-, Irish-, and Welsh-English hybrids that have emerged in the twentieth century. We will discuss the politics of 'proper English' as well as the politics of 'Rotten English'. The course will serve both as an introduction to postcolonial literature, but with a focus on 'English' as its basis.
Texts will include novels, short stories, and poetry.
Course Title: Literature and Psychoanalysis
Course Code: ENG384H5S
Instructor: Thomas Laughlin
Course Description: Psychoanalysis has often used literature as a testing ground for its theories, treating the literary text as an extension of the human psyche and a reservoir of unconscious thoughts and desires. The wager of psychoanalytic literary theory is that the study of literature can tell us something about the functioning and structure of the psyche and its secrets. What exactly literature reveals about the psyche, however, is highly contested. This course explores the competing psychoanalytic theories of interpretation that have been brought to bear on such canonical works of literature such as Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” E. T. A. Hoffman’s The Sandman, and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. In the process, students will be introduced to different strands of psychoanalytic literary theory, particularly those stemming from Freud and Lacan and the Poststructuralist and Feminist critiques of these two figures.
Required Reading: All required readings will be available from the UTM bookstore or online via Blackboard
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming”; Henry James’s The Turn of Screw; Edmund Wilson, “The Ambiguity of Henry James”
Method of Instruction: lectures and class discussion
Method of Evaluation: 2 reading reports; 2 essays; participation
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Creative Writing
Course Code: ENG389Y5Y
Instructor:
Course Description: A workshop in writing fiction and poetry. Students will be expected to write poetry (in strict forms and free verse) and narrative prose. They will submit their work on a regular basis for group discussion. Admission to the course is limited. Students should submit a 10-page portfolio of their best creative writing (not academic essays) to the professor in advance of registration, and he will choose those most likely to benefit from the work-shop.
Required Reading: William Strunk and E.B White, The Elements of Style. James Wood, How Fiction Works.
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied: The Elements of Style
Method of Instruction: Seminar and discussion.
Method of Evaluation: Tests and small assignments, 20%; class participation, 30%; portfolio submitted at the end of the course, 50%.
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Fourth Year Courses: ENG426H5F | ENG436H5S | ENG461H5S | ENG462H5F | ENG472H5F1st Year Courses | 2nd Year Courses | 3rd Year Courses
Course Title: Multiculturalism and Canadian Literature
Course Code: ENG426H5F
Instructor:
Course Description: This course will explore the representation of multicultural experience and identities in Canadian literature, and issues affecting the production and reception of “ethnic” Canadian writing, through a reading of texts by writers such as Pauline Johnson, A. M. Klein, Roy Kiyooka, Joy Kogawa, Wayson Choy, Evelyn Lau, David Bezmozgos, Austin Clarke, Makeda Silvera, Shyam Selvadurai, Judy Fong Bates, Rohinton Mistry, Neil Bissoondath, Thomas King, and others. Our seminars will consider creative and critical texts by a diverse selection of Canadian writers in various relevant critical, cultural, social, theoretical, and political contexts. Topics for discussion will include but are not limited to multiculturalism as a government policy, canonization, the “material production” of Canadian literature, gender, racism, postcolonialism, and how recent multicultural writing in Canada presents a challenge to established notions of our national literature. Students will be expected to attend regularly and to complete readings thoughtfully and on time. Students are also required to participate in the seminar discussions.
Required Reading:
Selections from Making a Difference: An Anthology of Ethnic Canadian Writing, (ed. Smaro Kamboureli) and 2 or 3 novels, TBA.
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied: TBA
Method of Instruction: Seminar discussion; short lecture segments; student seminar presentations.
Method of Evaluation: Short seminar presentation (20%); mid-term writing assignment (25%); research paper (40%); participation (15%).
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Postcolonial Magic Realism
Course Code: ENG436H5S
Instructor:
Course Description:In this seminar, we will explore the origins and meaning of “magic realism” within postcolonial literary tradition. “Magic realism” is a visual and literary style that challenges our expectations about reality, questioning what is real, what is fantastic and how they might be used to expose one another. In postcolonial literature, this style serves to address political and ethical questions that postcolonial nations must face in the aftermath of their liberation from the European colonizer. Issues of spatial occupation and liberation, social justice, individual and communal identity, revenge and haunting, traumatic past and collective memory, political upheaval and utopian future are all part of this literary style. In order to examine the significance of these topics in postcolonial literature, we will read literary and theoretical texts that foreground the uneasy marriage between reality and imagination in the context of political inequality.
Required Reading:
Seymour Menton Magic Realism Rediscovered 1918-1981, Sigmund Freud “The Uncanny,” Joanne P. Sharp Geographies of Postcolonialism, Lois Parkinson Zamora et al. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children, Toni Morrison Beloved, Janet Frame Living in the Maniototo, Bessie Head Maru, Witi Ihimaera The Whale Rider, Simone Schwarz-Bart The Bridge of Beyond. )
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
Sigmund Freud’s “The Uncanny” (provided by the instructor), selections from Seymour Menton’s Magic Realism Rediscovered 1918-1981 (provided by the instructor) and selections from Joanne P. Sharp’s Geographies of Postcolonialism (available from the UTM bookstore).
Method of Instruction: TBA
Method of Evaluation: TBA
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Course Code: ENG461H5S
Instructor:
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%
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: What’s Metaphysical about Metaphysical Poetry?
Course Code: ENG462H5F
Instructor:
Course Description:This course will investigate the relationship between literature and philosophy by reading and thinking about metaphysical poetry, a set of playfully philosophical poems written in roughly the first half of the seventeenth century. This category began as an insult, when John Dryden said of John Donne, “He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts.” But who says poetry is not allowed to speculate? We will read through these beautiful poems slowly and carefully, and will track their complicated philosophical and logical arguments as they unfold. We will also read secondary criticism on metaphysical poetry, and the course will culminate in a research paper.
Required Reading:
A selection of seventeenth century metaphysical poetry, including poems by John Donne, George Herbert, John Suckling, Katherine Phillips, Abraham Cowley, Margaret Cavendish, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughn, and Thomas Traherne.
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied: “Air and Angels” by John Donne, “The Flea” by John Donne, T.S. Eliot on metaphysical poetry
Method of Instruction: Seminar Discussion
Method of Evaluation: Weekly short close readings; seminar participation; final paper proposal; final paper
Back to Registrar's Time Table
Course Title: The Gothic!
Course Code: ENG472H5F
Instructor:
Course Description:The Gothic is excessive (thus the exclamation point). This course will explore Gothic poetry, prose, and drama in order to come to terms with some of the strange excesses of British Romantic writing, starting with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and ending with James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). We will ask questions such as: How did the Gothic emerge out of the late eighteenth-century literature of sensibility, and how did it then contribute to the rise of the Romantic movement? What are the politics of the Gothic during the years of the French Revolution and its aftermath? How is the Gothic central to what we think of as the Romantic imagination? What does the Gothic contribute to Romantic writing’s self-critique, its skepticism about its own political and aesthetic values as well as the correspondences between them? How does the Gothic criticise and/or defend the period’s social structures of rank, class, and gender? Students who have taken ENG308Y, Romantic Poetry and Prose, will get the most out of this course, but anyone willing to learn about Romanticism and wander along some if its weirder byways is welcome.
Required Reading:
Readings may include but will not be limited to Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764); Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); Lewis, The Monk (1795); Austen, Northanger Abbey (1798; 1818); Coleridge, “Christabel” (1816) and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1817); Byron, Manfred (1817); Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818); P.B. Shelley, The Cenci (1819); Hogg, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
First three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764); Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); Lewis, The Monk (1795)
Method of Instruction: Seminar discussion (willingness to participate actively in class discussion will be absolutely essential)
Method of Evaluation:
Two reading quizzes (20% each), one 8-10 pp. term paper (40%), participation (20%)
Back to Registrar's Time Table