2019-2020 English Courses and Descriptions

*The Course Schedules below are subject to change, pending enrolment pattern changes. Detailed course descriptions by instructors are also subject to change.


First Year Courses


 

Course Title: Effective Writing

Course Code: ENG100H5F | Lecture M/W/F 9-10

Instructor: Prathna Lor

This course provides practical tools for writing in university and beyond. Students will gain experience in generating ideas, clarifying insights, structuring arguments, composing paragraphs and sentences, critiquing and revising their writing, and communicating effectively to diverse audiences. This course does not count toward any English program.


Course Title: Effective Writing

Course Code: ENG100H5S | Lecture M/W/F 9-10

Instructor: Jessica Henderson

This course provides practical tools for writing in university and beyond. Students will gain experience in generating ideas, clarifying insights, structuring arguments, composing paragraphs and sentences, critiquing and revising their writing, and communicating effectively to diverse audiences. This course does not count toward any English program.


Course Title: How to Read Critically

Course Code: ENG101H5F | Lecture W/F 12-1 | Tutorials W 1-2, W 3-4, F 1-2, F 3-4

Instructor: Jessica Henderson

This foundational course serves as an introduction to a wide range and variety of methods for literary and textual analysis, giving students a set of interpretive tools they can use to analyze texts in English classes and beyond. Emphasis will be on developing close, attentive reading skills as ways of thinking not just about, but through texts, and on deploying these skills effectively in essays and discussions. The class will draw on literary works from a variety of countries, centuries, genres, and media. We recommend that students considering a Specialist, Major, or Minor in English take this course.


Course Title: How to Research Literature

Course Code: ENG102H5S | Lecture T/R 12-1 | Tutorials T 1-2, T 3-4

InstructorDaniela Janes

This foundational course serves as an introduction to conducting research for English courses at the university level. Skills taught will be: reading and engaging with arguments about literature; incorporating the arguments of others into your own; locating and evaluating secondary sources; and conducting primary research. The class will draw on literary works from a variety of countries, centuries, genres, and media. The class will normally culminate in a longer research paper, developed over the course of the semester. We recommend that students considering a Specialist, Major, or a Minor in English take this course.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

Course Description: ENG102 is a foundational course that will prepare students to conduct research in their undergraduate English courses. By focusing on the process of developing arguments about literature, and supporting these arguments with scholarly research, this course will help students learn the skills needed to find their own voice within the scholarly conversation. We will focus on locating and evaluating secondary sources; reading and engaging with arguments about literature; and incorporating the arguments of others into our own writing. This course also reinforces the close reading skills students develop in other introductory English classes.

Selected Major Readings: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818 edition); F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart; Katherine O. Acheson, Writing Essays About Literature.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Acheson, Shelley, Fitzgerald.

Method of Instruction: Lecture (2 hours per week) and tutorial (1 hour per week)

Method of Evaluation: Scaffolded assignments (proposal, annotated bibliography) leading to the final research essay, critical engagement test, final exam, weekly writing exercises in tutorial, engaged participation in tutorial.


Course Title: Introduction to World Literatures

Course Code: ENG105H5F | Lecture M 11-1 | Tutorials M 1-2, M 3-4

Instructor: Anjuli Raza Kolb

Students will learn about contemporary creative writing in English from around the world. The course will cover the work of some famous writers, such as Toni Morrison or J.M. Coetzee, and also new and emerging authors, from Canada to New Zealand to Nigeria.

Exclusion: ENG140Y5

Detailed Description by Instructor:

An eighteenth-century diplomat once referred to the British colonies as a “vast empire on which the sun never set,” and at the time, he was right: under the guise of “companies” and settlements, Britain controlled an enormous portion of the globe for nearly three centuries, from the Caribbean to South Asia, from Oceania to Africa to North America. One outcome of this vast empire was the creation of a rich and diverse literary tradition in the English language—now called Anglophone literature—from far-flung places around the globe. This course will introduce students to select works of global Anglophone literature in the twentieth century, and consider the ways in which writers from around the world have used a variety of literary forms, such as the bildungsroman, national allegory, and testimony, to participate in and reshape conversations about culture, language, history, globalization, aesthetics, and politics. Readings will include novels, poetry, short stories, and film by writers including Kipling, Kincaid, Danticat, Achebe, Rushdie, Pramoedya, Conrad, Dangarembga, Roy, Adichie, and others. The course will expose students to a variety of global English idioms, as well as literary traditions from, or in conversation with, non-Western countries.

Selected Major Readings: Rudyard Kipling, Kim; Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy; Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun; Salman Rushdie, Shame; Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Child of All Nations; Derek Walcott, Omeros; Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Rudyard Kipling, Kim; Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy; Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart.

Method of Instruction: Lecture and weekly tutorial.

Method of Evaluation: Two reading quizzes, one midterm paper, one final paper.


Course Title: Narrative Literature and the Story

Course Code: ENG110H5S | Lecture R 9-11 | Tutorials R 11-12, R 1-2

Instructor: Prathna Lor

This course explores the stories that are all around us and that shape our world: traditional literary narratives such as ballads, romances, and novels, and also the kinds of stories we encounter in non-literary contexts such as journalism, movies, myths, jokes, legal judgments, travel writing, histories, songs, diaries, biographies.

Exclusion: ENG110Y5


Course Title: Traditions of Theatre and Drama

Course Code: ENG121H5F | Lecture M/W 10-11 | Tutorials M 11-12, M 1-2

Instructor: Holger Syme

An introductory survey of the forms and history of world drama from the classical period to the nineteenth century in its performance context. May include later works influenced by historical forms and one or more plays in the Theatre Erindale schedule of production. May include a research performance component. This course is also listed as DRE121H5.

Exclusion: ENG125Y1


Course Title: Modern and Contemporary Theatre and Drama

Course Code: ENG122H5S | M/W 11-12 | Tutorials W 12-1, W 2-3

Instructor: Jacob Gallagher-Ross

An introductory survey of the forms and history of world drama from the late nineteenth century to the present in its performance context. May include film adaptations and one or more plays in the Theatre Erindale schedule of productions. May include a research performance component. This course is also listed as DRE122H5.

Exclusion: ENG125Y1

Detailed Description by Instructor:

Picking up where DRE121 left off, this course is an introduction to selected plays, aesthetic theories, and performance techniques from the nineteenth century to (roughly) the present. We’ll watch theatre artists contend with the dominant philosophical ideas, aesthetic values, and political realities of their time, as they attempt to create artworks capable of responding to—or even creating—a modern world. While doing so, they transformed the molecular structure of theatre, pulling apart traditional ways of understanding narrative, illusion, and character—destroying the old, to make way for the new.

Selected Major Readings: A range of modern and contemporary plays, manifestos, and contextual materials.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Ibsen, A Doll's House, TBA

Method of Instruction: Lecture, class discussion, discussion-based tutorials.

Method of Evaluation: Final exam, short papers, creative project, class and tutorial participation. .

Go to: [ FIRST YEAR COURSES | SECOND YEAR | THIRD YEAR | FOURTH YEAR ]

SECOND YEAR COURSES

[ ENG201Y5Y | ENG202H5F | ENG203H5S | ENG203H5S | ENG213H5S | ENG215H5F | ENG223H5S | ENG234H5S | ENG235H5S | ENG236H5F | ENG237H5F | ENG238H5F | ENG239H5S | ENG251H5F | ENG252Y5Y | ENG259H5S | ENG269H5F | ENG274H5S | ENG275H5S | ENG276H5S | ENG277H5F | ENG279H5F | ENG280H5F | ENG289H5S | ENG291H5F ]

Course Title: Reading Poetry

Course Code: ENG201Y5Y | Lecture T 3-5, R 3-4

Instructor: Brent Wood

An introduction to poetry, through a close reading of texts, focusing on its traditional forms, themes, techniques, and uses of language; its historical and geographical range; and its twentieth-century diversity.

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in ENG101H or ENG102H5 or ENG110H5 or ENG140Y5 or DRE/ENG121H5 and DRE/ENG122H5 may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

Students will read and discuss a selection of poems from the age of Shakespeare to spoken-word poems of the present day, attending to the wide-ranging cultural influences on North American writing in English. Students will learn the basic elements of poetry, then study poems on the subjects such as desire, spirit, intoxication, mythology and gender. Discussing and reading poems out loud are integral components of the course.

Selected Major Readings: As prepared by instructor

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: N/A

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation: Short critical assignments, essays, tests, exam, class discussion.


Course Title: British Literature in the World I: Medieval to Eighteenth-Century

Course Code: ENG202H5F | Lecture W/F 10-11 | Tutorials W 12-1, W 2-3

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

This course serves as an introduction to influential texts that have shaped British literary history from Beowulf and Chaucer to Shakespeare, from Milton and Behn to Burney. Students will focus on questions such as the range and evolution of poetic forms, the development of the theatre and the novel, and the emergence of women writers. The course will encourage students to think about the study of English literatures in relationship to history, including the history of world literatures.

Exclusion: ENG202Y5
Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in ENG101H or ENG102H5 or ENG110H5 or ENG140Y5 or DRE/ENG121H5 and DRE/ENG122H5 may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

ENG 202 surveys the history of British literature through the Old English epic Beowulf, which dates to 700-1000 BCE. The poem is simultaneously enigmatic and canonical, and while tracking its 1,200-year long journey to the present day, we will use it as a critical lens to view and explore British literary history and the nature of literary study. We do not know who wrote the poem (or precisely when), or its readership, and for close to 600 years (from the 12th to late 18th century) it was virtually unread and unknown. Now Beowulf is central to the canon of British literature, and this course focuses on the poem’s rise from cultural obscurity to ubiquity. As the grandparent of The Hobbit, Harry and Potter, and Game of Thrones, to the Predator series of movies (and others), and to numerous comic books and video games, Beowulf is woven into the fabric of the fantasy genre as we know it today.

In our discussions, we will be guided by the questions of two critics: “Why did the phenomenon of Beowulf happen at all?” (Leo Spitzer) and “What are the cultural questions to which Beowulf is an answer?” (John D. Niles). Thus, we will:

  1. Examine the publication, translation, adaptation, and illustration of the poem as a story and as a textual object from its composition in the 10th century to the present day;
  2. Address literary matters that emerge from its transmission and reception history, exploring issues of orality and literary, poetics, genre, language, and ideas about authorship and readership;
  3. Consider the text from multiple critical and theoretical perspectives as we discuss gender, politics, race, and class, alongside matters of cultural and national identity; and, finally,
  4. Explore the very nature of literary study. The early 19th century sees the first modern English translations of Beowulf, as well as the rise of English literature as a field of university study. The poem, then, allows us to consider canonisation and periodization, and the history and nature of literary study.

Required Reading: (available at Amazon and the UTM Bookstore)
These are not expensive texts! You must have the course text with you when attending lectures and tutorials.

  1. Beowulf: A Verse Translation. A Norton Critical Edition. 2nd edition. Norton ISBN: 978-0-393-27053-2
  2. Beowulf: Facing Page Translation. 2nd edition. Broadview ISBN 978-1-55481-113-7

Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion, Presentations

Method of Evaluation: Essays, tests, presentations and/or exam


Course Title: British Literature in the World II: Romantic to Contemporary

Course Code: ENG203H5S | Lecture M/W 2-3 | Tutorials M 3-4, W 3-4

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

An introduction to influential texts that have shaped British literary history from the Romantic period to the present, covering developments in poetry, drama, and prose, from William Wordsworth to Zadie Smith and beyond. The course will address topics such as revolution and war; the increasing diversity of poetic forms; the cultural dominance of the novel; romanticism, Victorianism, modernism, and postmodernism; feminism; colonialism and decolonization; the ethnic and cultural diversity of Anglophone literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; literature and sexual identity; the AIDS epidemic; and technology and the digital age. The course will encourage students to think about the study of English literatures in relationship to history, including the history of world literatures.

Exclusion: ENG203Y5 Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in any 100-level ENG or DRE course (except ENG100H5) may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

ENG 203 surveys the history of British literature from the Romantic period to the present day through the lens of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, published in 1819. From Shelley’s inception of the text to the present day, we use Frankenstein to frame discussions of aesthetics, literary criticism, technology, politics, culture, race, history, and philosophy. The text—and its creature in particular—are ubiquitous: they are part of the very fabric of popular cultural and we will examine how the novel has been transmitted and adapted during its 200-year history, meeting (or challenging) the cultural and political desires of readers. Thus we will:

1) Examine the publication, translation, and adaptation of the novel as a textual object from its composition to the present day. Frankenstein takes many forms and we will read novels, poetry, plays, as well as consider films, tv shows, comic books and graphic novels, and video games—among other forms;

2) Address literary matters that emerge from the novel’s transmission and reception history, exploring issues of genre, language, and intertextuality, and ideas about authorship and readership;

3) Consider the text from multiple critical and theoretical perspectives as we discuss gender, politics, race, and class, alongside matters of cultural, racial and national identity; and, finally,

4) Explore the very nature of literary study. The Romantic period, the literary time period in which Shelley writes, sees the early rise of English literature as a field of university study. The novel, then, allows us to consider canonisation and periodization, and the history and nature of literary study.

Required Reading: (available at Amazon and the UTM Bookstore)

1. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. 3rd Ed. MacDonald and Scherf. Broadview. ISBN: 9781554811038
2. Victor LaValle, Destroyer. BOOM! Studios ISBN: 978-1684150557
3. Other Texts TBA 3. Material posted on Quercus

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Coleridge, “Christabel”; Shelley, Frankenstein;

Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion, Presentations

Method of Evaluations: Essays, tests, tutorial participation, presentations and/or exam

WEBSITE: Quercus


Course Title: The Short Story

Course Code: ENG213H5S | Lecture W 3-5, F 3-4

Instructor: Daniela Janes

This course explores shorter works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers. Special attention will be paid to formal and rhetorical concepts for the study of fiction as well as to issues such as narrative voice, allegory, irony, and the representation of temporality.

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in ENG101H or ENG102H5 or ENG110H5 or ENG140Y5 or DRE/ENG121H5 and DRE/ENG122H5 may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.


Course Title: The Canadian Short Story

Course Code: ENG215H5F | Lecture T 11-12, R 11-1

Instructor: Colin Hill

An introduction to the Canadian short story, this course emphasizes its rich variety of settings, subjects, and styles.

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in ENG101H or ENG102H5 or ENG110H5 or ENG140Y5 or DRE/ENG121H5 and DRE/ENG122H5 may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

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 Readings (tenative): 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: Leacock, Sime, Grove, Knister, Page, Richler, Laurence, Wiebe, Atwood, Kogawa, Bissoondath, Mistry, Brand, Coupland, King, Dakar, Munro, Robinson, Bezmozgis, and possibly others.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Leacock, Sime, Grove

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion

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


Course Title: Introduction to Shakespeare

Course Code: ENG223H5S | Lecture M/W 11-12 | Tutorials M 12-1, M 2-3

Instructor: Holger Syme

This course explores shorter works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers. Special attention will be paid to formal and rhetorical concepts for the study of fiction as well as to issues such as narrative voice, allegory, irony, and the representation of temporality.

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in ENG101H or ENG102H5 or ENG110H5 or ENG140Y5 or DRE/ENG121H5 and DRE/ENG122H5 may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.


Course Title: Children's Literature

Course Code: ENG234H5S | Lecture W 9-10, F 9-11

Instructor: Siobhan O'Flynn

A critical and historical study of poetry and fiction written for or appropriated by children, this course may also include drama or non-fiction and will cover works by at least twelve authors such as Bunyan, Stevenson, Carroll, Twain, Alcott, Nesbit, Montgomery, Milne, Norton, and Fitzhugh.

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in ENG101H or ENG102H5 or ENG110H5 or ENG140Y5 or DRE/ENG121H5 and DRE/ENG122H5 may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.


Course Title:Comics and the Graphic Novel

Course Code: ENG235H5S | Lecture W 1-2, F 1-3

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

An introduction to the writing and sequential art of comics and graphic novels, this course includes fictional and nonfictional comics by artists such as Will Eisner, Art Spiegelman, Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Julie Doucet, Marjane Satrapi, Chester Brown and Seth.

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in ENG101H or ENG102H5 or ENG110H5 or ENG140Y5 or DRE/ENG121H5 and DRE/ENG122H5 may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.


Course Title: Detective Fiction

Course Code: ENG236H5F | Lecture T 11-1, R 12-1

Instructor: Daniela Janes

At least 12 works by such authors as Poe, Dickens, Collins, Doyle, Chesterton, Christie, Sayers, Van Dine, Hammett, Chandler, Faulkner, P.D. James, Rendell.

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in ENG101H or ENG102H5 or ENG110H5 or ENG140Y5 or DRE/ENG121H5 and DRE/ENG122H5 may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

Course description: This course introduces students to the British and American form of the detective story. With a dual focus on close reading of primary texts and theoretical approaches to the genre of the detective narrative, this class provides students with the opportunity to build their familiarity with the conventions that characterize the form and the innovations that challenge it. Students will develop their understanding of periods and styles of detective fiction, and will be able to pose informed arguments in their coursework. As we examine narrative constructions of criminality and detection, we will also consider how the genre of the detective story positions its protagonist as a reader.

Required Readings:
Edgar Allan Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Stories; Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles; Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep; Agatha Christie, A Murder is Announced; Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time; Michael Chabon, The Final Solution; Steph Cha, Follow Her Home. Students will also view Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Short stories by Poe.

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion.

Method of Evaluation: essays, tests, and informed participation.


Course Title: Science Fiction

Course Code: ENG237H5F | Lecture M/W/F 11-12

Instructor: TBA

This course explores speculative fiction that invents or extrapolates an inner or outer cosmology from the physical, life, social, and human sciences. Typical subjects include AI, alternative histories, cyberpunk, evolution, future and dying worlds, genetics, space/time travel, strange species, theories of everything, utopias, and dystopias.

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in ENG101H or ENG102H5 or ENG110H5 or ENG140Y5 or DRE/ENG121H5 and DRE/ENG122H5 may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.


Course Title: Fantasy Literature

Course Code: ENG238H5F | Lecture M 9-11, W 9-10

Instructor: Tom Laughlin

This course focuses on fantasy literature, film, and television, and draws on a wide range of critical, cultural, and theoretical approaches. As it explores the magical and supernatural, it may consider such genres as alternative histories, animal fantasy, epic, fairy tales, magic realism, and swords and sorcery. Authors and texts covered will survey the history of fantasy across American, British, and Canadian literature, and may include Beowulf, Carroll, Gaiman, Le Guin, Lewis, Martin, Ovid, Rowling, Shakespeare, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Swift, and Tolkien.

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in ENG101H or ENG102H5 or ENG110H5 or ENG140Y5 or DRE/ENG121H5 and DRE/ENG122H5 may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.


Course Title: Horror Literature

Course Code: ENG239H5S | Lecture M/W/F 12-1

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

A critical and historical critical introduction to gothic literature, film, and television covering such authors as Carter, King, Lovecraft, Matheson, Poe, Rice, Shelley, Stevenson, and Stoker. The course draws on diverse critical and theoretical approaches as it examines a wide range of national and cultural contexts. It focuses on the gothic in broad terms and such concepts and issues as fear, horror, terror, the monstrous, the mythological, and the supernatural.

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in ENG101H or ENG102H5 or ENG110H5 or ENG140Y5 or DRE/ENG121H5 and DRE/ENG122H5 may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

This course explores horror literature. We are particularly interested in the monstrous—monsters and monstrosity, especially vampires, zombies, and ghosts. As we consider the aesthetics of terror, horror, the gothic, the uncanny, the abject, and fear, we will explore issues of gender, race, genre, science, and religion.

Required Readings:
(available at the UTM Bookstore in January, or at links provided):

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein 978-1-55481-103-8
Richard Matheson, I am Legend 978-0-312-86504-7
Bram Stoker, Dracula 978-1-55111-136-0
Pornsak Pichetshote and Aaron Campbell, Infidel 978-1-5343-0836-7
LaValle, Destroyer 978-1684150557
Octavia Butler, Fledgling 978-0446696166
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House 978-0143039983

Texts on Quercus

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Gillman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”; Keevil, “The Herd”; Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”—all available on Quercus in January

Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion; Film Screenings (on Jan 16 and Feb 6—6pm, CC1080)

Method of Evaluation: 3 essays (with a creative writing option) and exam


Course Title: Introduction to American Literature

Course Code: ENG251H5F | Lecture M 11-1, W 11-12

Instructor: Anna Thomas

An introductory survey of major works in American literature, this course explores works in a variety of genres, including poetry, fiction, essays, and slave narratives.

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in ENG101H or ENG102H5 or ENG110H5 or ENG140Y5 or DRE/ENG121H5 and DRE/ENG122H5 may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

This survey course with a focus on 19th -and 20th-century American writing will consider questions of genre and tradition. Students will be able to identify major themes and figures in the American literary tradition, and will become acquainted with a range of writings that have come to define the American literary canon. At the same time, we will put pressure on the categories of this canon, and throughout the course we will examine other potential organizations of literary production by doing case studies of particular structures, including "The Ship," "The Plantation," "The Settlement," "The School," and "The Railroad." These case studies will open out to comparative and transhistorical readings of American literatures.

Selected Major Readings: Course reader: The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Ninth Edition

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Indigenous oral traditions; selections from Roger Williams; Olaudah Equiano The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (selections)

Method of Instruction: Lecture and tutorial

Method of Evaluation: Weekly posts, essays, final exam


Course Title: Canadian Literature

Course Code: ENG252Y5Y | Lecture T 9-10, R 9-11

Instructor: Daniela Janes

An introductory survey of major Canadian works in poetry, prose, and drama from early to recent times.

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in ENG101H or ENG102H5 or ENG110H5 or ENG140Y5 or DRE/ENG121H5 and DRE/ENG122H5 may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

Course description: This course introduces students to the breadth and diversity of Canadian literature through an examination of novels, short stories, poetry, non-fiction prose and drama. Students will read a selection of Canadian literature across its history, paying attention to formal developments and stylistic innovations. We will consider how the nation is shaped through stories, and how national narratives are constructed, challenged, and rewritten.

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; King, Green Grass, Running Water; Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves.

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

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion.

Method of Evaluation: close reading, essays, test, final exam, in-class exercises and informed participation.


Course Title: Literature and Environmental Criticism

Course Code: ENG259H5S | Lecture T 11-1, R 11-12

Instructor: Stanka Radovic

This course is an introduction to the field of ecocriticism: the study of literary writing about nature and of literature's role in thinking about environment. Students will read work by prominent theorists of the field and by major literary writers such as Shakespeare, Marvell, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, Dickens, Hardy, Pratt, Lawrence, Frost, and Atwood.

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in ENG101H or ENG102H5 or ENG110H5 or ENG140Y5 or DRE/ENG121H5 and DRE/ENG122H5 may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

This course will explore environmental criticism by focusing on climate change fiction, popularly known as "cli-fi." In recent years, the polarizing political debate about the nature and extent of climate change has resulted in increased popular awareness about the importance and fragility of our environment. Scientific, technological, economic and political concerns that fuel this discussion have also been reflected in climate fiction. More often than not, this type of fiction takes a dystopian and speculative perspective on the relationship between humans and their physical environment. We will examine the ways in which climate fiction imagines environmental crisis and what it has to contribute to the larger debate about the environment. Scholarly texts and works of fiction will help us engage climate change and environmental degradation as central to the ways we imagine our future and reconsider our past on this planet.

Selected Major Readings:
Timothy Clark The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Environment; Mark Maslin Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction; J.G. Ballard The Drought; Octavia Butler Parable of the Sower; Cormac McCarthy The Road; Paolo Bacigalupi The Water Knife; China Mieville Un Lun Dun

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Timothy Clark The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Environment; Mark Maslin Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction; J.G. Ballard The Drought

Method of Instruction: Lectures and class discussion

Method of Evaluation: Essays, class participation, book reports


Course Title: Queer Writing

Course Code: ENG269H5F | Lecture M 11-1, W 12-1

Instructor: Daniel Wright

Introducing a lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer tradition in literature and theory, this course may explore texts from a variety of historical periods, from the classical to the contemporary. It will focus on a variety of genres, potentially including poetry, drama, fiction, criticism, and popular culture.

Exclusion: ENG273Y1
Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in ENG101H or ENG102H5 or ENG110H5 or ENG140Y5 or DRE/ENG121H5 and DRE/ENG122H5 may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

In this course, we’ll read a selection of novels in order to investigate the relationship between the novel form and queerness. In short, we’ll ask: why the queer novel (as opposed to memoir or poetry or drama)? What opportunities does the novel afford queer writers as they tell stories of sexuality and gender, liberation and the pressure of social norms? We’ve always had novels about individuality, growing up, and transformation; and the novel has always been understood as a particularly elastic and roomy genre, which can play host to a multitude of voices and points of view. How do modern narratives of queer and trans identity make use of these features of the novel form in unique ways? And where and how do queer and trans stories seem to exceed the limitations of novelistic form, doing new things with a traditional genre?

Selected Major Readings:
Novels and short stories likely to include:
Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt, or, Carol
James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room
Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet
jia qing wilson-yang, Small Beauty
Rabbih Alameddine, The Angel of History
Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You
Monica Arac de Nyeko, "Jambula Tree"

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Highsmith, Baldwin, Waters

Method of Instruction: lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation: Essays, in-class writing, participation, final exam


Course Title: Literatures of Immigration and Exile

Course Code: ENG273H5S | Lecture M 3-5, W 3-4

Instructor: Raji Soni

In this course we will study literary and non-literary texts in English from the nineteenth century to the present day that come from colonial and postcolonial contexts and that speak to the experience of those affected by colonization, immigration, exile, war, and globalization. Students will be introduced to postcolonial theory and questions about race, ethnicity, religious difference, and diasporas in Anglophone literary studies. They may study texts by Conrad, James, Beckett, Joyce, Rhys, Pound, Ionesco, Nabokov, Koestler, Brodsky, Naipaul, Achebe, Kundera, Skvorecky, Rushdie, Gallant, Sebald, Ondaatje, Danticat, Ali, and Nafisi.

Exclusion: ENG253Y5, ENG270Y1, ENG270Y5, ENG272H5
Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in ENG101H or ENG102H5 or ENG110H5 or ENG140Y5 or DRE/ENG121H5 and DRE/ENG122H5 may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.


Course Title: Indigenous Literatures

Course Code: ENG274H5S | Lecture M 9-11, W 10-11

Instructor: Daniela Janes

An introduction to Indigenous literature with emphasis on writers from Canada's First Nations. Readings will be considered in the context of global aboriginal cultures and oral traditions. Texts may include fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction by writers such as Sherman Alexie, Jeannette Armstrong, Michael Dorris, Tomson Highway, Basil Johnston, Thomas King, Lee Maracle, Daniel David Moses, Eden Robinson, Leslie Marmon Silko.

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in ENG101H or ENG102H5 or ENG110H5 or ENG140Y5 or DRE/ENG121H5 and DRE/ENG122H5 may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.


Course Title: Feminist Approaches to Literature

Course Code: ENG275H5S | Lecture M 11-1, W 11-12

Instructor: Anna Thomas

This course will consider the implications, for literary studies and for literary writing, of modern traditions of feminist and gender theory. Students will encounter the work of major feminist thinkers - e.g., Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Alice Walker, Julie Kristeva, and Judith Butler - and texts by major women writers. The course will explore feminist approaches to literature, including those that borrow from post-structural, psychoanalytic, and contemporary gender, race, and queer theories.

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in ENG101H or ENG102H5 or ENG110H5 or ENG140Y5 or DRE/ENG121H5 and DRE/ENG122H5 may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

This course will begin with the question of what constitutes a "feminist approach" by texamining how positionality and perspective have been pursued in many feminist theories. The scale, methodology, and constituency of the "approach" can range from the individual to the institutional; the communal to the political; the local to the transnational; from solidarity to critique. Together the class will build a vocabulary for analyzing the emphases and omissions of the feminist literary tradition, ending with a particular emphasis on Black Feminism.

Selected Major Readings:
Weekly readings of a range of theoretical essays and excerpted materials, as well as: Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness, Gayl Jones Corregidora, Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Joan Scott "The Evidence of Experience"; "Chandra Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses"; "Saidiya Hartman, "Venus in Two Acts."

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation:Weekly posts, essays, final exam


Course Title: Fanfiction

Course Code: ENG276H5S | Lecture W 12-1, F 11-1

Instructor: Jessica Henderson

This course investigates fanfiction from a variety of theoretical standpoints, including gender and sexuality studies, critical race studies, and affect theory. It considers the literary history of fanfiction- amateur, unauthorized stories about characters invented by canonical writers (e.g., Jane Austen and Arthur Conan Doyle); a wide selection of fanfiction stories; and the commercialization of the products of the modern fanfiction industry.

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in ENG101H or ENG102H5 or ENG110H5 or ENG140Y5 or DRE/ENG121H5 and DRE/ENG122H5 may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.


Course Title: Bad Romance

Course Code: ENG277H5F | Lecture T 3-5, R 3-4

Instructor: Prathna Lor

This course covers romances of the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, ranging from the amatory (stories about love, longing, and desire) to the fantastic (the supernatural and fantasy). Students will consider issues of canonization, popularity, the text-author-reader relationship, definitions of high and low art, ideas about good and bad writing, and eroticism and desire. Texts may include Harlequin romances, paranormal romance, and works by Jane Austen, the Brontes, Daphne du Maurier, Stephenie Meyer, Nicholas Sparks, Sarah Waters, and E. L. James.

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in ENG101H or ENG102H5 or ENG110H5 or ENG140Y5 or DRE/ENG121H5 and DRE/ENG122H5 may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.


Course Title: Video Games

Course Code: ENG279H5F | Lecture M 3-5 | Lab W 3-4 or W 4-5

Instructor: Siobhan O'Flynn

What is the literary history of video games? This course considers 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 the rule-bound, interactive worlds of video games.

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in ENG101H or ENG102H5 or ENG110H5 or ENG140Y5 or DRE/ENG121H5 and DRE/ENG122H5 may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.


Course Title: Critical Approaches to Literature

Course Code: ENG280H5F | Lecture F 11-1 | Tutorials F 1-2, F 3-4

Instructor: Tom Laughlin

An introduction to literary theory and its central questions, such as the notion of literature itself, the relation between literature and reality, the nature of literary language, the making of literary canons, and the roles of the author and the reader.

Exclusion: ENG267H5
Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in any 100-level ENG or DRE course (except ENG100H5) may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.

Prerequisite: ENG 289H5/ENG 291H5


Course Title: Creative Writing

Course Code: ENG289H5S | Lecture T/R 1-2| Tutorials R 2-3, R 4-5

Instructor: Brent Wood

Students will engage in a variety of creative exercises, conducted across a range of different genres of literary writing.

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in ENG101H or ENG102H5 or ENG110H5 or ENG140Y5 or DRE/ENG121H5 and DRE/ENG122H5 may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

Students will develop and present a publishable piece of short fiction, a performable scene, and a performable poem. We will study basic techniques and principles of figurative language, character, narrative, description, and irony in lecture, then “workshop” drafts in tutorial sessions. Students will critique one another’s work and receive feedback from instructors. Discipline, regular attendance, and a commitment to work in a co-operative environment are required.

Selected Major Readings:
Topical readings as prepared by instructor

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: N/A

Method of Instruction: Lecture, workshop, critique

Method of Evaluation: Creative assignments, in-class exercises, peer criticism, final portfolio


Course Title: Reading for Creative Writing

Course Code: ENG291H5F | Lecture T/R 1-2 | Tutorials R 2-3, T 4-5

Instructor: Brent Wood

This course will help students to see connections between their reading and their work as creative writers. They will read texts in a variety of literary and non-literary genres and consider the way that writers learn their craft from other writers. Practical assignments will encourage students to find creative ways to critique, imitate, speak to, and borrow responsibly from the work they read.

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in ENG101H or ENG102H5 or ENG110H5 or ENG140Y5 or DRE/ENG121H5 and DRE/ENG122H5 may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.

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THIRD YEAR COURSES

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Course Title: Making Love in the Sixteenth Century

Course Code: ENG301H5F | Lecture T 2-3, R 1-3

Instructor: Jeff Espie

In this course, students will follow the changing constructions of love and love poetry in the sixteenth century, starting with Wyatt and Surrey, passing through Tottel, to the Elizabethan court, and ending with the erotic love poetry that served as a backlash against the Petrarchanism of the early sixteenth century.

Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

Sir Walter Raleigh—poet, lover, historian, politician, spy—honoured the publication of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene in 1590 with a dazzling commendatory sonnet. He imagines that Spenser’s titular monarch, mirror for England’s Elizabeth I, has superseded the Italian Laura, sovereign beauty of Petrarch’s Canzoniere. Petrarch, Laura’s onetime devotee, now weeps at his love’s oblivion; Homer, Spenser’s epic precursor, trembles in sight of a poetic rival. Fittingly, given his own eclectic expertise, Raleigh places Spenser’s masterpiece at the nexus of literary, political, and social worlds: the Faerie Queene surpasses the lyrics of Petrarchan sonneteers, even as it fashions the supreme head of the Tudor state; it reshapes the design of classical verse, even as it embodies the interplay of contemporary women and men. The result is a confluence of discourses paradigmatic of poetry in the English sixteenth century. Our course analyzes this capacious period, examining the themes encapsulated by Raleigh’s sonnet: the massive influence of the Petrarchan tradition; the widespread return to the Greek and Roman classics; the productive intersections among poetry and power, nationhood and gender; the complementary pursuit of personal desire and social ambition.

Accordingly, our course analyzes the formal innovations, gendered relationships, and idiosyncratic desires expressed in songs and sonnets by Surrey, Locke, P. and M. Sidney, Lanyer, and Donne; the self-conscious classicism of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Lodge’s Scylla, and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis; the refraction of political institutions in Wyatt’s lyrics, Askew’s Ballad, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene. We’ll position their works alongside key historical developments in the sixteenth century: the invention of the Renaissance as a historical period; the advent of the Reformation as a religious movement; the changing functions of print technology; the increased obsession with colonial conquest; the proliferation of humanist thought. Throughout, we’ll hone several critical skills, practicing the ability to interpret a rich assortment of literary forms, such as sonnets, odes, Spenserian stanzas, blank verses, and rhymed couplets; to understand works within the literary traditions from which they emerge; and to connect literature with the historical circumstances in which it participates.


Course Title: Swift, Pope, and Their Contemporaries

Course Code: ENG305H5S | Lecture M 1-3, W 1-2

Instructor: Terry Robinson

Selected works in prose and verse by Swift and Pope studied alongside works by their contemporaries. Topics may include the legitimacy of satire, the role of criticism, and the growing importance of writing by women.

Exclusion: ENG306Y5
Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits


Course Title: Women Writers before Austen

Course Code: ENG307H5F | Lecture T 10-11, R 9-11

Instructor: Michael Raby

A study of mystical writings, poems, plays, novels, letters, periodical essays, polemical works, and books for children by such writers as Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Mary Sidney, Emilia Lanyer, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Fanny Burney, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Topics may include patronage and publishing; nationality, class, and gender; and generic conventions.

Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits


Course Title: Special Topic in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Oscar Wilde)

Course Code: ENG315H5S | Lecture M 11-1, W 12-1

Instructor: Daniel Wright

A concentrated study of one aspect of nineteenth-century British literature or literary culture, such as a particular subgenre or author, specific theme, or the application of a particular critical approach.

Prerequisite: 2.0 credit in ENG, including ENG202Y5 or ENG203Y5, and 4.0 additional credits

Detailed Description by Instructor:

Oscar Wilde was a playwright, novelist, poet, and critic; a dandy and a provocateur; and a gay man before “gay” was really a thing. In this course, we’ll read a wide selection of his work in order to better understand what makes Wilde so unique and compelling, while also situating him in his own cultural and political context. We’ll see how he shaped literary and cultural history, and also how his own life and career were derailed by the cruel anti-gay laws of Victorian England. Our reading will range from plays to essays to poems to a novel and an impassioned prison memoir.

Selected Major Readings:
Our readings will likely include selected poems including “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”; selected essays including “The Decay of Lying,” “The Critic as Artist,” and “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”; the short story “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.”; Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray; several plays including Lady Windermere’s Fan, An Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Earnest, and Salomé; and Wilde’s prison memoir, De Profundis. We may also turn to some poems and essays by Wilde’s contemporaries such as Amy Levy, Vernon Lee, Edward Carpenter, A. E. Housman, Henry James, and Alfred Douglas.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Poems: "Symphony in Yellow," "Impression du Matin," "la mer"

Method of Instruction: lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation: essays, in-class writing, participation, final exam


Course Title: Special Topic in Modern and Contemporary Literature (Writing the Black Diaspora: Speaking Truth to Power)

Course Code: ENG316H5F | Lecture M 2-3, W 1-3

Instructor: Anna Thomas

A concentrated study of one aspect of modern or contemporary literature or literary culture, such as a particular subgenre or author, specific theme, or the application of a particular critical approach.

Prerequisite: 2.0 credit in ENG, including ENG202Y5 or ENG203Y5, and 4.0 additional credits

Detailed Description by Instructor:

What can slave narratives tell us about speech, power, and truth? Beginning with this question, this course will explore the relationships amongst self-expression, genre, and questions of truth under conditions of disempowerment in the Black Diaspora broadly. This course introduces contemporary thinking about race and colonial encounters alongside fiction and life-writing by African American, Canadian, and Caribbean authors from a range of historical periods.

Throughout the class, students will be asked to think about questions of circulation--how people and cultural formations, ideas and literary tropes, as well as material goods and commodities, travel and change cross space and time. Students will pursue a semester-long assignment with three staged component parts (a creative visual representation of a chosen cultural object's circulation, a presentation of that visual representation, and a final paper).

Selected Major Readings:
Authors may include: Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs, Audre Lorde, Jamaica Kincaid, Dionne Brand.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave; selections from Edward Glissant Poetics of Relation

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation: In addition to short weekly responses, students will work on a semester-long final project on a chosen topic pertaining to literature and circulation. that includes a mapping exercise, presentation, and final research paper.


Course Title: Austen and Her Contemporaries

Course Code: ENG323H5F | Lecture T 1-3, R 2-3

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

A study of selected novels by Austen and of works by such contemporaries as Radcliffe, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Edgeworth, Scott, and Shelley, in the context of the complex literary, social, and political relationships of that time.

Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits

Detailed Description by Instructor:

A study of selected novels (and fiction) by Austen and her contemporaries as Lewis, Radcliffe, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Edgeworth, Scott, and Shelley, in the context of the complex literary, social, and political relationships of that time.

Required Reading: (available at the UTM bookstore)
Austen, Northanger Abbey
Lewis, The Monk
Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Austen, Mansfield Park
Austen, Emma

**NOTE: These editions are from the publisher Broadview and are bundled together at a discounted price — available only at the UTM bookstore. They are essential to the course because of the contextual information they include—the introductions and appendixes.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:

Austen, Northanger Abbey; Lewis, The Monk

Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion

Method of Evaluation: Essay, Test, and Exam

WEBSITE: Quercus


Course Title: The Victorian Novel

Course Code: ENG325H5S | Lecture M 3-4, W 3-5

Instructor: Daniel Wright

This course surveys several major novels in order to understand the genre that came to dominate literary culture in the Victorian era. Topics may include realism, the marriage plot, the social-problem novel, feminism and sexual identity, novels of growing up, the city, and seriality. Authors may include Dickens, Thackeray, E. Bronte, C. Bronte, Gaskell, Trollope, Eliot, Collins, Hardy, Gissing, and Wilde, among others.

Exclusion: ENG324Y5
Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits

Detailed Description by Instructor:

Victorian novels are entertaining, ambitious, moving, edifying, and thought-provoking. They are also famously long. Originally written for serial publication, with a novel being released in short installments over the course of many months, they can seem much more daunting when published in book form, with all of those installments bound together into one very thick novel. In this course, we’ll read just three of the most ambitious novels of the Victorian era, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, immersing ourselves in their expansive, detailed, densely populated fictional worlds. Henry James, writing at the end of the period, famously dismissed these big Victorian books as “large, loose, baggy monsters.” Our reading this semester will allow us to test his criticism, as we think about the form and structure of the long, serialized narratives that were so immensely popular in the nineteenth century, and which continue to permeate our culture today. (It’s no accident that in our own contemporary moment, a different kind of long, serialized narrative, the TV series, dominates our culture.)

Topics will include the development of the “multi-plot” novel; the rhythms and forms of serial publication; suspense; realism and the “sensation novel”; major and minor characters in a crowded fictional world; narrative point of view; the marriage plot and its alternatives; plots of individual development; the novel as a genre of activism and social critique; the novel as a genre of the ordinary or the everyday; the novel as a genre of gothic terror; scope and scale; form and formlessness; reading widely versus reading deeply.

Selected Major Readings:
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

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

Method of Instruction: lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation: essays, in-class writing, participation, final exam


Course Title: Medieval Drama

Course Code: ENG330H5F | Lecture W 12-1, F 11-1

Instructor: Natasha Vashisht

Texts and performances preceding and underlying the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including creation-to-doomsday play cycles; plays performed in parishes, inns, great halls, outdoor arenas, and at court; religious and political propaganda plays; political pageants. Attention is given to social, political, and theatrical contexts.

Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits


Course Title: World Drama

Course Code: ENG343H5S | Lecture W 1-2, F 1-3

Instructor: Natasha Vashisht

Students will read/watch screenings of drama in English and in translation from around the world, including Africa, East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean, Latin America, and South America. Topics may include traditional forms (Kathakali dance, Noh and Kabuki, Beijing Opera, Nigerian masquerades) adapted for the modern stage; agit-prop and political drama; object performance; the place of drama within a global media ecology; and drama as a site of intercultural and transcultural appropriation, negotiation, and exchange.

Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.


Course Title: Poetry and Modernism

Course Code: ENG350H5S | Lecture M 12-2, W 12-1

Instructor: Geoff Bouvier

Special study of Hopkins, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Stevens; selections from other poets.

Exclusion: ENG348Y1, ENG348Y5
Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits


Course Title: Canadian Drama

Course Code: ENG352H5F | Lecture M 9-11, W 10-11

Instructor: Daniela Janes

Canadian plays, with emphasis on major playwrights and on developments since 1940, but with attention also to the history of the theatre in Canada.

Exclusion: ENG223H5
Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits


Course Title: Early American Literature

Course Code: ENG360H5F | Lecture M 11-1, W 11-12

Instructor: Melissa Gniadek

This course explores writing in a variety of genres produced in the American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as narratives, poetry, autobiography, journals, essays, sermons, and court transcripts.

Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits

Detailed Description by Instructor:

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 were decades of increasing European contact with the “New World.” 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 produced various types of writing that established the early American literary traditions that we will explore in this course, even as we will recognize indigenous traditions that existed in the Americas before European contact.

In Early American Literature we will approach the 16th, 17th, and 18th 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 of settler colonial violence. 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, autobiography, journals, sermons, and even one of the seduction novels that was popular in the years following 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 many of these narratives are still with us, in different ways, today.

Selected Major Readings:
Edward Taylor, poems
Mary Rowlandson, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
Unca Eliza Winkfield (pseudonym), The Female American
Phillis Wheatley, poems

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: Regular short writing assignments, one essay, final exam, active participation


Course Title: Special Topic in American Literature (Nineteenth-C American Novel)

Course Code: ENG366H5F | Lecture M 2-3, W 1-3

Instructor: Melissa Gniadek

A concentrated study of one aspect of American literature or literary culture, such as a particular subgenre, author, period, or theme, or the application of a particular critical approach.

Exclusion: None
Prerequisite: 2.0 credit in ENG, including ENG250Y5, and 4.0 additional credits

Detailed Description by Instructor:

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. Slavery and the violence of settler colonialism provided the conditions for this growth. 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 some of these concerns through the literature of the period. We will read a selection of canonical and lesser-known texts, considering these historical contexts as we probe important literary subgenres of nineteenth-century literature including sensation and sentiment. How did nineteenth-century authors wrestle with the contradictions at the heart of the young U.S. nation? How did these contradictions shape literary and cultural production? These are just a few of the questions we’ll ask as we read texts by authors including Charles Brockden Brown, William Apess, Fanny Fern, Harriet Jacobs, Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and Henry James.

Selected Major Readings:
Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly (1799)
William Apess, “An Indian's Looking-Glass for the White Man” (1833)
Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall (1854)
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
Henry James, Daisy Miller (1878)
Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (1901)
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905)

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly (1799)
William Apess, “An Indian's Looking-Glass for the White Man” (1833)
Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall (1854)

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation: Short writing assignments, essays, final exam, active participation.


Course Title: Special Topic in American Literature (Toni Morrison: Texts and Contexts)

Course Code: ENG366H5S | Lecture M 2-3, W 1-3

Instructor: Anna Thomas

A concentrated study of one aspect of American literature or literary culture, such as a particular subgenre, author, period, or theme, or the application of a particular critical approach.

Exclusion: None
Prerequisite: 2.0 credit in ENG, including ENG250Y5, and 4.0 additional credits

Detailed Description by Instructor:

This course is an advanced introduction to the work of Toni Morrison, in which we will pay particular attention to questions of literary tradition and inheritance; form and narrative voice; and ethics in contexts of oppression. In the chronological order in which they were published, we will read the majority of Morrison's published novels alongside major essays. Students will also be introduced to major themes in African American literary criticism and theory through their close engagements with Morrison's oeuvre and its critical legacy.

Selected Major Readings: The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, "Playing in the Dark," "The Site of Memory," Paradise, Home

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon

Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion

Method of Evaluation: Weekly posts, two essays, final research paper


Course Title: Global Literatures in English

Course Code: ENG370H5S | Lecture T 2-3, R 1-3

Instructor: Stanka Radovic

This course involves in-depth study, within the framework of postcolonial and transnational studies, of literatures in English from around the world. It includes fictional and non-fictional texts and contemporary films and media representations.

Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits

Detailed Description by Instructor:

We are often told that we now life in an era of globalization. The second half of 20th century is marked by a historical shift from the local and national to the global and multicultural understanding of the world. In this course, we will examine what it means to think of the world as “global” and how the histories of exploration, colonialism and tourism have contributed to the idea that the world is a network of connected cultural practices. We will look at some aspects of postcolonial, transnational and globalization discourses through relevant theoretical and literary texts. Our goal is to understand how the time and space we live in are shaped by the process of globalization and its related discourses of postcolonialism and transnationalism. All of these discourses challenge the idea of simple and firmly grounded identity in favour of our multiple, complex and often fragmented relation to the global world. Our readings will focus on the problems of migration, travel and tourism, multilingualism and fragmented identity in contemporary literature.

Selected Major Readings:
Manfred B. Steger, Globalization: A Very Short Introduction; Jamaica Jamaica Kincaid A Small Place; Ann Ang Bang My Car; Caryl Phillips Crossing the River; Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers; Salman Rushdie, Fury.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Jamaica Kincaid A Small Place; Ann Ang Bang My Car; Caryl Phillips Crossing the River

Method of Instruction: Lectures and class discussions

Method of Evaluation: Essays, class participation, book reports


Course Title: Special Topic in World Literature (Living a Feminist Life)

Course Code: ENG371H5S | Lecture T 11-1, R 11-12

Instructor: Raza Kolb

A concentrated study of one aspect of postcolonial literature or literary culture, such as a particular genre, author, period, regional or national context, or theme, or the application of a particular critical approach.

Prerequisite: 2.0 credit in ENG, including ENG270Y5, and 4.0 additional credits

Detailed Description by Instructor:

Ahmed’s recent theoretical book, Living a Feminist Life, putting her ideas in conversation with thinkers like Jamaica Kincaid, Audre Lorde, Gayatri Spivak, Valerie Solanas, Angela Davis, Jose Muñoz, and bell hooks. In the second half of the course, we’ll work together through discussion and student suggestions to construct a corpus of super-contemporary women’s and femmes’ life writing—TV, poetry, music, journalism, memes, theory, and memoir—to discover how image and the written word continue to shape feminist lives, and how femmes’ lived experience in turn shapes feminist, pro-femme, and queer discourse. Through weekly short writing exercises, students will consider how their own intimate relationships—with parents, partners, children, neighbors, or friends—can become sites of intersectional feminist activism, and sources of strength and knowledge to be carried into the broader world of public engagement and intervention. In the final weeks of the course, we will think seriously about the relationship between learning and living, and collectively interrogate the boundary between writing and living as modes of feminist praxis.

Selected Major Readings:
Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life; Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place; Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, Djamila Boupacha, Djamila Boupacha; bell hooks, Teaching to Trangress; Carla Lonzi, Let’s Spit on Hegel; Valerie Solanas, The SCUM Manifesto; Ana Lily Amirpour, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night; Jose Muñoz, Cruising Utopia; Angela Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography; Sahar Khalifeh, Wild Thorns.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life; Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place; Sahar Khalifeh, Wild Thorns.

Method of Instruction: Class discussion based on assigned readings; workshop of individual assignments and research projects; screenings and in-class writing assignments; lots of chatting.

Method of Evaluation: Weekly written assignments and a final research project.


Course Title: Creative Writing: Poetry

Course Code: ENG373H5S | Lecture T 11-1, R 11-12

Instructor: Richard Greene

This course will involve a wide variety of experiments with poetic expression and poetic forms.

Prerequisite: ENG289H5/ENG291H5


Course Title: Creative Writing: Prose

Course Code: ENG374H5F | Lecture T 12-1, R 11-1

Instructor: Brent Wood

Students will experiment with fiction and non-fiction prose writing, including autobiography, biography, and narrative for new visual, digital, and interactive media.

Prerequisite: ENG 289H5/ENG 291H5


Course Title: Creative Writing: Nonfiction

Course Code: ENG376H5F | Lecture W 3-5, F 3-4

Instructor: Geoff Bouvier

Students will experiment in a workshop environment with a variety of short, non-fictional forms, e.g. memoir, auto/biography, true crime.

Prerequisite: ENG289H5/ENG291H5

Detailed Description by Instructor:

This is a workshop and craft-based course devoted to the writing and reading of one of the bedrock forms of creative nonfiction: the feature article. A feature is a first-person, highly stylized, and strictly formal human-interest story. Students will read a variety of features, practice craft exercises, engage in discussions, and will work all semester – from formal pitch to formatted final product – to write their own lively features. To do this, students will engage deeply with a local subject of their choice and go out “into the field” to experience this subject first-hand. The goal is to produce a publishable long-form feature article.

Selected Major Readings:
Various websites and feature articles, all available online

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: No textbooks needed, but students must have regular and unimpeded access to a printer.

Method of Instruction: Lecture/Discussion/Workshop/Presentations/Group-work

Method of Evaluation: Major Assignments: Brief Discussion Board Posts Based on Readings (20%), Class Discussion and Workshop Participation (20%), Story Pitch (5%), Story Lede and Nut (5%), Quizzes (5%), Class Journals (5%), Presentation (5%), Final Feature Article (35%)


Course Title: Special Topic in Creative Writing (Experimental Writing)

Course Code: ENG377H5F | Lecture W 12-1, F 11-1

Instructor: Geoff Bouvier

A concentrated study of one aspect of creative writing practice, such as a particular genre or theme, or the application of a particular formal technique.

Prerequisite: ENG289H5/ENG291H5

Detailed Description by Instructor:

This creative writing class extends an invitation to challenge what we’ve been taught about the conventions of literature. Through the study of various radical texts, we’ll ask questions such as, “How radical is too radical? How can experimentation take the audience into account? What are the hallmarks of just plain good writing?” We’ll embrace rule-breaking, weirdness, and subversion, in discussions of poems, non-fiction, fiction, and cross-genre writings, always paying close attention to technique. Students will complete writing assignments inspired by the readings and eventually critique each other’s writing in a workshop setting.

Selected Major Readings:
Lyn Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure” and “Continuing Against Closure”; Ann Lauterbach, “Use This Word in a Sentence: ‘Experimental’”; Christian Bok, “Eunoia”; Anne Carson, “Float”; selected poems and critical writings of Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Arthur Baudelaire, Walt Whitman, Leslie Scalapino, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Gerard Bruns, Marjorie Perloff, and Chris Higgs.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Hejinian, Lauterbach, Higgs

Method of Instruction: Lecture/Discussion/Workshop/Presentations/Group-work

Method of Evaluation: Brief Discussion Board Posts Based on Readings (20%), Class Discussion and Workshop Participation (20%), Two Pieces of Original Experimental Writing, Revised (20% each), One Short Critical Essay (20%).


Course Title: Special Topic in Creative Writing (ARCHIVES OF REVOLT! Making Documentary Poems)

Course Code: ENG377H5S | Lecture T 2-3, R 1-3

Instructor: Raza Kolb

A concentrated study of one aspect of creative writing practice, such as a particular genre or theme, or the application of a particular formal technique.

Prerequisite: ENG289H5/ENG291H5

Detailed Description by Instructor:

Can poetry make things happen in the world? Can poets shape, undo, and render plastic the kinds of histories that seem to come to us fully formed? Are activist poems even readable? Are they good? This course will be both a theory seminar and a creative writing workshop in documentary poetics, an understudied area of activist writing. Through scholarship, novels, films, social media, published collections and chapbooks, digital poetry projects, and more, students will encounter theories of knowledge production, documentation, and archive-building that go against the sense of a fixed, settled history. We will study how power is shored up in these institutional sites—including what we call “the archive”—and consider how we might use these tools to tell our own stories about our communities and the threats they face (environmental, economic, etc) through research-based art. In the second half of the course, students will put these ideas in service of producing an activist work of documentary creative writing about a pressing political topic of their choice. The class will include training in archival practices, library sessions, and independent research in the U of T archives—final projects will be carefully and collaboratively built from the midterm on.

Selected Major Readings:
M. Nourbese Philip, Zong; Solmaz Sharif, LOOK; Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead; Craig Santos Perez, unincorporated territory; Don Mee Choi, Hardly War; Claudia Rankine, Citizen; Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever; Gianfranco Rosi, Fire at Sea; Ai Wei Wei, Human Flow, Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Claudia Rankine, Citizen; M. Nourbese Philip, Zong; Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead.

Method of Instruction: Mini-lecture and discussion based on assigned readings; workshop of individual assignments and research projects;

Method of Evaluation: Four short written assignments and a final research project of 10-15 pages.


Course Title: Digital Texts

Course Code: ENG381H5S | Lecture W 11-1 | Lab F 12-1

Instructor: Siobhan O'Flynn

This course considers the ways in which digital technologies are transforming texts, reading, readerships, and the idea of the literary. Students will study a wide variety of digital texts, e.g., fanfiction, webcomics, viral Tumblr posts and tweets, and video games. They will also learn about the use of digital tools to read, study, and preserve texts. The course may include a practical project, e.g., the design of a narrative game using Twine; the curation of a digital exhibit using Omeka; or an argument about some text/s using visualization software.

Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

In 2020, what exactly IS a digital text? A digitized, annotated manuscript? A rich-media academic article? A story exploration game? An infinite webcomic? An Esri story map? A Twitter thread? A meme?

The Digital Texts course will introduce students to the rich field of what Alan Liu has called Literature+ via groundbreaking digital texts in various forms, critical arguments, and key concepts from media studies, digital humanities, game studies, interaction design, and experience design. We will take up questions as to how digital technologies have changed our experience of the literary, reading, and readerships, by playing critically and making creatively, testing theory in practice. Students will have the opportunity to craft a ‘story’ in Twine, a story-game platform, Esri Story Maps (a rich media story-mapping platform), and other tools TBD.

Selected Major Readings:
Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message (excerpt); Mozilla Manifesto; Jerome McGann, "Visible and Invisible Books: Hermetic Images in n-Dimensional Space." Additional readings TBD

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message (excerpt); Mozilla Manifesto; Jerome McGann, "Visible and Invisible Books: Hermetic Images in n-Dimensional Space." Additional readings TBD

Method of Instruction: lecture, discussion, workshop, critical play

Method of Evaluation: short critiques, short creative projects, major project(s), short essay. More specifics TBD.


Course Title: British Romanticism and its Contexts

Course Code: ENG383H5F | Lecture W 1-2, F 1-3

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

This course gives students a new perspective on the cultural contexts for British Romanticism: students will learn about literature's relationship to philosophy, politics, religion, science, and colonialism in the Romantic period, as they examine works by some major authors such as William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, and Mary Shelley

Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

This year’s version of English 383 explores fame and celebrity in the life and works of Lord Byron and Lady Gaga. Both are performance artists, investing their artistic works with details of their lives; and both explore issues of celebrity, persona, high and low art and culture, and the “Sociology of Fame.”

Required Readings:
(available at Amazon and the UTM Bookstore, and Netflix):
1) Byron's Poetry and Prose, ed. Alice Levine. Publisher: Norton.
2) Access to:
2a) Lady Gaga’s albums: The Fame (2008); The Fame Monster (2009); Born this Way (2011); Artpop (2014);and Joanne (2016)
2b) Movies: Gaga: Five Foot Two (2017); A Star is Born (2018)
3) Lady Gaga Social media: twitter, LittleMonsters.com
4) Readings posted to the Quercus or in a course pack

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Byron poetry

Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion, Presentations

Method of Evaluation: Essays (with a creative writing option), tests, presentations and/or exam

WEBSITE: Quercus


Course Title: Literature and Psychoanalysis

Course Code: ENG384H5S | Lecture M 6-9

Instructor: TBA

An introduction to psychoanalysis for students of literature, this course considers major psycholanalytic ideas through close readings of selected texts by Freud and related psychoanalytic thinkers. The course also explores critiques and applications of Freud's work and examines a selection of literary texts that engage psychoanalytic theory.

Exclusion: ENG384Y5 Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits


Course Title: Popular Novels in the Eighteenth Century

Course Code: ENG387H5F | Lecture M 3-5, W 4-5

Instructor: Jeff Espie

This course offers students a chance to read some early novels in English - from the scandalous to the sentimental to the Gothic. They will consider what made novels best-sellers in eighteenth-century Britain and why the popularization of novel reading was such a source of controversy at the time. Authors may include: Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Frances Burney, and Ann Radcliffe.

Exclusion: ENG322Y5
Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

“In the republic of letters,” writes Frances Burney in the preface to her 1778 Evelina, “there is no member of such inferior rank, or who is so much disdained by his brethren of the quill, as the humble novelist. Nor is his fate less hard,” she continues, “in the world at large, since, among the whole class of writers, perhaps not one can be named, of whom the votaries are more numerous, but less respectable.” Our course studies the work of eight “humble novelist[s]” across the long eighteenth century, analyzing their role in gaining their “inferior,” popular mode of writing a “respectable” place in the literary canon. Stretching from travel narratives to the bildungsroman, from letter collections to gothic romances, we’ll examine the literary, historical, and cultural contexts for the English novel’s “rise,” directing special attention to several enduring questions: what characteristics define the novel as a distinct literary form? how do novels engage other kinds of contemporary writing in poetry and drama? who reads novels in the eighteenth century? is that experience different for women and men? what place does the novel hold in the century’s emerging category of literature? how do novelists respond to changing conventions, technologies, and audiences? why do so many novels represent issues of class, colonialism, and consent? The questions will frame our close reading of some of English literature’s most moving, provocative, and troubling scenes: Burney’s Evelina facing her estranged father; Sterne’s Yorick identifying himself in Shakespeare’s Hamlet; Defoe’s Crusoe mastering his man Friday; Richardson’s B. watching Pamela through the keyhole; Fielding’s Tom learning the secret of his birth.


Course Title: Individual Studies

Course Code: ENG390Y5

Instructor: TBA

A scholarly project chosen by the student and supervised by a faculty member. The form of the project and the manner of its execution will be determined in consultation with the supervisor. All project proposals must be submitted to the Undergraduate Advisor, who can also

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provide proposal forms.

Exclusion: ENG490Y5
Prerequisite: 1.0 credits in English and 3.0 additional credits.


Course Title: Individual Studies (Creative)

Course Code: ENG391Y5

Instructor: TBA

A project in creative writing chosen by the student and supervised by a faculty member. The form of the project and the manner of its execution will be determined in consultation with the supervisor. All project proposals must be submitted to the Undergraduate Advisor who can also provide

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proposal forms.

Prerequisite: 1.0 credits in English and 3.0 other credits.


Course Title: The Canadian Novel

Course Code: ENG392H5S | Lecture T 11-12, R 11-1

Instructor: Colin Hill

Students will read novels of importance for Canadian literary history: these may include, for example, L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes, and Lawrence Hill's Book of Negroes.

Exclusion: ENG353Y
Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

An exploration of some of Canada’s landmark novels, with a focus on the development of Canadian fiction from the late nineteenth century to the present. We will discuss texts by a diverse assortment of writers who engage the cultural conditions of Canada during their respective periods. Topics will include, but are not limited to, modernism, realism, Indigenous writing, 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 identities.

Required Readings (tenative): James DeMille, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder; Hugh MacLennan, Two Solitudes; Margaret Atwood, Surfacing; Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion; Thomas King, Green Grass Running Water; Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: DeMille, MacLennan, Atwood

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation: Mid-term Test 25%, Final Exam 25%, Term Paper 40%, Participation 10%

Go to: [ FIRST YEAR COURSES | SECOND YEAR | THIRD YEAR | FOURTH YEAR ]

FOURTH YEAR COURSES

[ ENG416H5S | ENG424H5F | ENG460H5S | ENG463H5S | ENG473H5F | ENG489Y5Y ]

Course Title: Seminr: Literary Theory / Methods

Course Code: ENG416H5S | Lecture M 1-3

Instructor: Thomas Laughlin

Detailed Description by Instructor:

This course reads tragedy and utopia first as separate literary genres and then as aesthetic and historical horizons immanent to modern art, literature, philosophy, and contemporary theory. We will begin by examining early-modern examples of the utopian and tragic genres alongside works by Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, which exemplify respectively the utopian and tragic keys in philosophy. The second half of the course examines modern works of literature for their commingling of tragic and utopian registers, and how they place the fate of their protagonists, society, or even the planet itself ambiguously between these two horizons. Why have these stark polar opposites been so dominant in our ways of thinking and writing about modern history and subjectivity? Can we think beyond these horizons or are they perennial to our modernity? To help draw out possible answers to this question, we will situate these works within the theoretical frameworks provided by psychoanalysis, feminist explorations of gender and sexuality, critical race theory, and new developments in the Environmental Humanities.

Selected Major Readings: May be subject to some modification:

Thomas More, Utopia; Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844; William Shakespeare, Hamlet; Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols; Kate Chopin, The Awakening; Shulasmith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex; Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm; Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None; M. P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud; Benjamin Morgan, “Fin du Globe: On Decadent Planets”; David Wallace-Wells, “The Uninhabitable Earth”; Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: More; Marx; Nietzsche

Method of Instruction: Combination of seminar discussion and short lecture segments.

Method of Evaluation: Seminar participation and written assignments/essays.


Course Title: Seminar: Canadian Literature (Canadian and Indigenous North American Literatures: Alice Munro)

Course Code: ENG424H5F | Lecture T 1-3

Instructor: Colin Hill

Detailed Description by Instructor:

The Atlantic Monthly declared that Nobel Prize winning writer Alice Munro is the “living author most likely to be read in a hundred years.” The Times of London once declared “when reading her work it is difficult to remember why the novel was ever invented.” This seminar explores Munro’s acclaimed short stories with attention to her literary development and eclectic contribution to Canadian and international literature. Our topics will include (but are not limited to) literary postmodernism, social critique and satire, Southern Ontario Gothic, and Munro’s representations of women’s lives, Canadian history, and contemporary society. 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 Readings:
Approximately 20 stories selected from the following collections:Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), Lives of Girls and Women (1971), Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), The Beggar Maid (1978), The Moons of Jupiter (1983), The Progress of Love (1986), Friend of My Youth (1990), Open Secrets (1994), The Love of a Good Woman (1998), Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001), No Love Lost (2003), Runaway (2004), The View from Castle Rock (2006), Too Much Happiness (2009), Dear Life (2012), and selected critical readings.

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%).


Course Title: Seminar: Literature Pre-1700 (TBD)

Course Code: ENG460H5S | Lecture T 1-3

Instructor: TBA


Course Title: Seminar: Literature 1700-1900 (Girls Gone Wild: Women and Reading in the Eighteenth-Century Novel)

Course Code: ENG463H5S | Lecture W 3-5

Instructor: Terry Robinson


Course Title: Seminar: Modern and Contemporary Literature (Postcolonial Magical Realism)

Course Code: ENG473H5F | Lecture R 11-1

Instructor: Stanka Radovic

Detailed Description by Instructor:

In this seminar, we will explore the origins and meaning of “magical realism” within postcolonial literary tradition. Magical realism is a visual and literary style that challenges our usual expectations about reality and its representation. 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. We will read literary and theoretical texts that foreground the uneasy marriage between reality and imagination in the context of political inequality.

Selected Major Readings:
Maggie Ann Bowers Magic(al) Realism; Robert J.C. Young Empire, Colony, Postcolony; Toni Morrison Beloved; Bessie Head Maru.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Jorge Luis Borges, "The Secret Miracle"; Maggie Ann Bowers Magic(al) Realism; Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny"

Method of Instruction: Lectures and seminar discussions, including oral presentations by students

Method of Evaluation: Essays (three in total), class participation and oral presentations


Course Title: Creative Writing Workshop

Course Code: ENG489Y5Y | Lecture R 1-3

Instructor: Richard Greene

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.

Selected Major Readings: William Strunk and E.B White, The Elements of Style. David Lodge, The Art of Fiction.

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%; journal, 20%; class participation, 10%; portfolio submitted at the end of the course, 50%.


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