*The Course Schedules below are subject to change once the new Academic Calendar is published as well as pending enrolment pattern changes. Detailed course descriptions by instructors are added when available and are also subject to change.
**Please consult the Registrar's Time Table for mode of delivery for courses.
First-Year Courses
- ENG100H5F Effective Writing (Online)
- ENG100H5S LEC0101 Effective Writing (Online)
- ENG100H5S LEC0102 Effective Writing (Online)
- ENG110H5F How to Read Critically
Course Title: Effective Writing
Course Code: ENG100H5F | Lecture MW 3-6 (ONLINE)
Instructor: Natasha Vashisht
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.
Group n/a
Course Title: Effective Writing
Course Code: ENG100H5S LEC0101| Lecture MW 9-12 (ONLINE)
Instructor: Natasha Vashisht
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.
Group n/a
Course Title: Effective Writing
Course Code: ENG100H5S LEC0102 | Lecture TR 6-9 (ONLINE)
Instructor: Natasha Vashisht
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.
Group n/a
Course Title: Narrative
Course Code: ENG110H5F | Lecture MW 9-11 | Tutorials MW 11-12, MW 1-2
Instructor: Daniela Janes
This course gives students skills for analyzing the stories 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, and biographies.
Group n/a
Second-Year Courses
- ENG202H5F British Literature in the World I: Medieval to Eighteenth-Century (Online)
- ENG203H5S British Literature in the World II: Romantic to Contemporary (Online)
- ENG213H5F The Short Story
- ENG263H5S Play and Games
- ENG280H5F Critical Approaches to Literature (Online)
- ENG289H5F Creative Writing (Online)
- ENG289H5S Creative Writing (Online)
Course Title: British Literature in the World I: Medieval to Eighteenth-Century
Course Code: ENG202H5F | Lecture TR 11-1 | Tutorials TR 1-2, TR 3-4 (ONLINE)
Instructor: Alexandra Atiya
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 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.
Group n/a
Course Title: British Literature in the World II: Romantic to Contemporary
Course Code: ENG203H5S | Lecture TR 11-1 | Tutorials TR1-2, TR 3-4 (ONLINE)
Instructor: Laina Southgate
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.
Group n/a
Course Title: The Short Story
Course Code: ENG213H5F | Lecture MW 12-3
Instructor: Daniela Janes
This course explores shorter works of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty first-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.
Group n/a
Course Title: Play and Games
Course Code: ENG263H5S | Lecture TR 1-3 | Tutorials TR 3-4, TR 5-6
Instructor: Chris Alton
Why do we play? Game designers, philosophers, sociologists, and performance theorists have long argued that play can tell us about our development as children and adults, our search for freedom, our relationship to animals, and the values and problems of our societies. This course introduces students to Play Studies and Game Studies in the humanities by considering the reasons we play in relationship to the objects we play with, including things that are more normally thought of as games—card and board games, sports, toys, video games—as well as other sites of playful thought and action, like paintings, films, and short stories. Students in this course will encounter major scholars of play and games and key terms and concepts in the analysis of play and games. We will play and design story-rich games and we will discuss effective narrative design primarily in digital games. Students will also consider problems in play and games like cheating, addiction, and gamification.
Group n/a
Course Title: Critical Approaches to Literature
Course Code: ENG280H5F | Lecture TR 9-11 | Tutorials TR 11-12, TR 1-2 (ONLINE)
Instructor: Julia Boyd
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
Prerequisites: 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.
Group n/a
Detailed Description by Instructor:
What is theory, and what is it good for? How can literary theory make us better readers: more attentive, nuanced, socially engaged interpreters of texts we engage—whether literary texts, or the world around us? How can the work we do as literary scholars equip us with an intellectual toolkit to build positive social change in our own lives and communities? This course grapples with these questions and more by introducing you to some of the major theoretical lenses that have shaped—and inflamed—literary scholars since the mid-nineteenth century, including Formalisms, Marxisms, Feminisms, Postcolonialisms, Ecocriticisms, Indigenous Studies, Postcriticisms, and interdisciplinary theories that defy categorization. We begin in the mid-nineteenth century with work by a German philosopher determined to build a theory that would expose the monstrous tenacles of a new economic system wreaking havoc on worker health and safety in Britain and its colonies. We’ll then leap into the twentieth century, where we’ll read a gay French intellectual excavating the inner workings of systemic domination, a Palestinian exile exposing the narrative underpinnings shaping colonial violence, poststructuralists deconstructing the binary logics too often lurking at the heart of oppressive hierarchies, postcolonialists and ecocritics committed to theory as a tool for global liberation and environmental sustainability, Black feminists imagining just futures in poetry and philosophy, Indigenous scholars from Turtle Island and Oceania championing literature as a tool for survivance and resurgence, and more. You’ll leave ENG280 equipped with a theory toolkit that will help make you a sharper, deeper, more analytic reader and interpreter of literary and cultural texts.
This is an active, discussion-based online course: in lectures and tutorials, we’ll apply the theoretical lenses we’re studying to literature and the world around us by testing out our readings on short literary texts, including short stories, poetry, film, and contemporary culture. Our assignments also give you sustained opportunities to develop your own voice and interests as a theoretically informed scholar: your major assignment is a term-long praxis project applying a course-inspired theoretical lens to a cultural text or object of your choice, presented in a format genuinely useful to someone outside our Zoom classroom (options include scholarly and public-facing essays, video essays, websites, podcasts, zines, lesson plans, infographics, graphic guides, and more). If you choose, you’ll also have the opportunity to hone your online communication and teaching skills by preparing and leading a “micro-teach” at our end-of-term Online Teach-In.
Selected Major Readings:
Theory:
- Bell hooks, “Theory as Liberatory Practice,” Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994)
- Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”
- Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture (1993)
- Karl Marx, from “The Commodity.” Chapter 1 of Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, trans. Paul Reitter, ed. Paul North (1867, trans. 2024).
- Louis Althusser, from “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)” (1968)
- Frantz Fanon, from “On Violence,” The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
- Michel Foucault, “Panopticism,” from Discipline and Punish (1975)
- Giorgio Agamben, from State of Exception (2004)
- Jacques Derrida, “Différance” (1968)
- Chela Sandoval, from “Love as a Hermeneutics of Social Change, a Decolonizing Movida,” Methodology of the Oppressed (2000)
- Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, from The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1980)
- Sara Ahmed, “Wilfulness and Feminist Subjectivity,” Living a Feminist Life (2017)
- Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts” (2008)
- Edward Said, Introduction, Orientalism (1978)
- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” revised version from “History,” Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999)
- Daniel Heath Justice, Introduction, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (2018)
- Joshua Whitehead, “Writing as a Rupture” (2022) and “On Ekphrasis and Emphasis” (2019)
- Edward Said, “Interiors,” from After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986)
- Rob Nixon, from Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011)
- Amitav Ghosh, from The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016)
- Heather Houser, “Abundance Against Scarcity” (2022)
- Rita Felski, “Crrritique,” The Limits of Critique (2015)
- Caroline Levine, “Toward an Affirmative Instrumentality,” The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (2023)
Literature: Page and video poems and short stories by authors including Andrea Thompson, Lucille Clifton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, M. NourbeSe Philip, Canisia Lubrin, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, and Ross Gay.
Films and Multimedia (free online streaming; links on Q): Anisia Uzeyman and Saul Williams, dirs., Neptune Frost (2021); Farah Nabulsi, dir., The Present (2020).
First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
Lorde, hooks, “Theory as Liberatory Practice”; Lorde, “Master’s Tools”; Morrison, Nobel Lecture; Wimsatt and Beardsley, “Intentional Fallacy”
Method of Instruction: Online synchronous lectures and tutorials
Method of Evaluation:
Welcome Survey: 2% May 6
Song of the Day: 3%
Think Pieces and/or Teaching Praxis: 25%
Annotation and Close Reading: 5%
Project Proposal and Annotated Bibliography: 20%
Major Praxis Project: 30%
Engaged Participation: 15%
Does this course feature an assessed creative writing component? No
Course Title: Creative Writing
Course Code: ENG289H5F | Lecture MW 1-3 | Tutorials MW 3-4, MW 5-6 (Online)
Instructor: Blair Hurley
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.
Group n/a
Course Title: Creative Writing
Course Code: ENG289H5S | Lecture TR 9-11 | Tutorials TR 11-12, TR 1-2 (ONLINE)
Instructor: Jacob Scheier
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.
Group n/a
Third-Year Courses
- ENG316H5S Special Topic in Modern and Contemporary Literature "Taylor Swift: Gender, Genre, and Celebrity"
- ENG323H5F Austen & her Contemporaries
- ENG343H5S World Drama
- ENG373H5F Creative Writing: Poetry [Writing & Wellness]
Course Title: Special Topic in Modern and Contemporary Literature "Taylor Swift: Gender, Genre, and Celebrity"
Course Code: ENG316H5S | Lecture TR 3-6
Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard
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. Topics may vary from year to year.
Detailed Description by Instructor: This course focuses on the music and career of American songwriter Taylor Swift, and, in turn, positions her career as a critical lens through which to examine the intersections of literary, gender, genre, political, and cultural issues.
In the last 16 years, Swift has released 10 albums (11 as of mid-April 2024), including the two pandemic albums, Folklore and Evermore—a span of time that has seen her develop from a Nashville-based guitar player and song-writer-for-hire to a globally successful musician who crosses and mixes genres. Our goal is to approach specific works (albums, and individual songs) and engage in discussions of creativity and aesthetics alongside a wide range of issues: sexuality, pop culture, politics, “authenticity,” and celebrity. We will ask questions about genre—what is folk? Poetry? What is country? What is pop?—as we explore: romance, love and desire (“Love Story”); the ownership and authorship of bodies of words (“Taylor’s Versions”); discourses of youth, girlhood, and teenagers; matters of persona, celebrity, fandom, and fan studies; and cultural and social constructions of identity, and intersections of gender and genre.
We will adopt a roughly diachronic, a chronological, course model that tracks the history of Swift’s development. But we will add to this a synchronic, or theme- and issue-based, thread of discussions when we will step outside of our chronology and focus on issues that emerge in key moments in her career (Swift’s withdrawal of her music from online streaming platforms during a dispute with Apple Music; the “feud” between Swift and Kanye West; and Swift’s re-recording and release of her first six albums after a dispute with the label Big Machine over ownership of the masters of these albums—to note only three). In doing so we are interested in exploring Swift’s construction of persona (and, through the lens of the sociology of fame, her handling of celebrity)—as she shifts and mixes genres, moving from country to pop. That is, we are interested in Swift’s relationship with “twang” —with a country style that embraces a national cultural identity. We will also follow musicologist Nate Sloan’s model of “work” in relation to Swift’s career, and consider “work as craft,” “work as sanctuary,” and “work as agency” (as ownership of work and identity). Doing so frames a critical window in which we can explore Swift and the “Sociology of Fame,” addressing models of celebrity and persona, as well as high and low art and culture, as Swift styles her identity in the documentaries Miss Americana and Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions.
Underlying these considerations we will pay attention to Swift as a lyricist, as an artist who marries music and text. We will investigate the poetic conventions of her lyrics, and the literary traditions, texts and authors that she engages—Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, Wordsworth, the Brontës, and Dickinson (to note only a few). Lastly, we will also position Swift’s music alongside her influences and antecedents (Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, The Beatles, Celine Dion, Shania Twain, James Taylor, and Dolly Parton) and contemporaries (Lorde, Lana Del Ray, The Chicks, Fall Out Boy, John Mayer, Ed Sheeran, and Adele)—to name a few.
Group n/a
Course Title: Austen & Her Contemporaries
Course Code: ENG323H5F | TR 12-3
Instructor: Terry F. Robinson
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.
Group 4
Course Title: World Drama
Course Code: ENG343H5S | MW 3-6
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.
Group 2
Course Title: Creative Writing: Poetry [Writing & Wellness]
Course Code: ENG373H5F | TR 1-3
Instructor: Andrea Thompson
This course will involve a wide variety of experiments with poetic expression and poetic forms.
Group n/a
Detailed Description by Instructor:
Mental health is an increasingly popular topic in contemporary poetry and is also an area of keen interest for students. Many of us, at some time in our lives, have been told that through writing down our thoughts and feelings, we will begin to feel better. But is there a difference between therapeutic writing and literature? Yes. And that difference comes down to craft. In this class you will be given the opportunity to work on your craft through experimentation with a wide variety of poetic forms, styles and approaches. You will also have the opportunity to take a deep dive into the work of selected contemporary poets whose work is a testament to the ways that our individual journey towards wellness can be used as fodder to create powerful poetry and exquisite literature
Learning Outcomes:
- The goal of this course is to not only advance your writing while exploring a variety of poetic forms, but to practice all elements required for the development of a successful poetry practice. These elements include:
- Learning to give insightful, constructive feedback that encourages others towards excellence.
- Learning how to use the feedback of others to edit and refine your work.
- Learning how to master the art of sharing your poetry before a live audience.
- Learning how to order and shape a poetry collection intended for professional publication.
Selected Major Readings:
- Bird By Bird, Anne Lamont (Anchor ‘Books, 2019)
- Crafting Poems: A Guide to Creative Writing, Ethel Rackin (Broadview Press, 2024)
- Impact Statement, Jody Chan (Brick Books, 2024)
- eholalia echolalia, Jane Shi (Brick Books, 2024)
- Xanax Cowboy, Hannah Green (House of Anansi Press, 2023)
Method of Instruction:
This course will take place in person, with the use of Quercus required to submit and share your work. Through a combination of readings, writing assignments, presentations and discussions, this class is structured to help you develop your unique poetic voice and to learn how to take your writing practice to the next level.
Method of Evaluation:
15% Participation
15% Peer Evaluations
20% Weekly Writing Assignments
20% In-class Presentation
30% Final Portfolio
Does this course feature an assessed creative writing component? Yes