2026 Summer English Courses and Descriptions

 

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*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


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 3


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 3


Course Title: Effective Writing

Course Code: ENG100H5S LEC0102 | Lecture TR 6-9 (ONLINE)

Instructor: TBD

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 3


Course Title: Narrative

Course Code: ENG110H5F | Lecture MW 9-11 | Tutorials MW 11-12, MW 1-2 

InstructorDaniela 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 1


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)
  • ENG218H5F Interactive Storytelling & Worldmaking
  • ENG235H5F Comics & The Graphic Novel (Online)
  • ENG263H5S Play and Games (Online)
  • 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: TBD

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 3


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: TBD

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 2


Course Title: Interactive Storytelling & Worldmaking

Course Code: ENG218H5F | Lecture TR 12-3 

 Instructor: Bruno R. Véras

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: Comics & The Graphic Novel

Course Code: ENG235H5F | Lecture TR 6-9

 Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

Group 1

Course Title: Play and Games

Course Code: ENG263H5S | Lecture TR 1-3 | Tutorials TR 3-4, TR 5-6

 Instructor: TBD

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 3


Course Title: Critical Approaches to Literature

Course Code: ENG280H5F | Lecture TR 9-11 | Tutorials TR 11-12, TR 1-2 (ONLINE)

InstructorJulia 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 1


Course Title: Creative Writing

Course Code: ENG289H5F | Lecture MW 1-3 | Tutorials MW 3-4, MW 5-6 (Online)

Instructor: TBD

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 3


Course Title: Creative Writing 

Course Code: ENG289H5S | Lecture TR 9-11 | Tutorials TR 11-12, TR 1-2 (ONLINE)

Instructor: TBD

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 3


Third-Year Courses


Course TitleWorld Drama

Course Code: ENG343H5S | Lecture MW 3-6

InstructorNatasha 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: Victorian Poetry

Course Code: ENG345H5S | TR 3-6

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

This course surveys the poetry of the Victorian era in Britain, with a focus on experiments in poetic genre and form, and on the social and political commitments of poetry in a period of colonialism, industrialization, and changing ideas about gender and sexuality. Topics may include lyric and the dramatic monologue, the poetry of political protest, love and sexuality, feminism and queerness, aestheticism and decadence, empire and the emergence of global poetry in English, and pastoral and the poetry of urban life. Poets may include Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Christina Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A. C. Swinburne, Toru Dutt, George Meredith, Augusta Webster, Amy Levy, Oscar Wilde, Michael Field, Thomas Hardy, Sarojini Naidu, and many others.

Group 4


Course TitleCanadian Literature, 1920 to the Present

Course Code: ENG362H5F | MW 12-3 

Instructor: Daniela Janes

This course explores Canadian literature from the 1920s to the contemporary period. Students will examine the work of major authors in their cultural, social, and historical contexts. Topics may include the development of literary modernism in Canada, regional literary geographies, postmodern innovations, multiculturalism and hybridity, and Indigenous literary and cultural production in the part of Turtle Island that is called Canada.

Group 5


Course TitleContemporary American Fiction

Course Code: ENG365H5F | TR 3-6 

Instructor: TBD

This course explores six or more works by at least four contemporary American writers of fiction.

Group 6


Course Title: Special Topic in Writing for Performance

Course Code: ENG378H5S | MW1-3

Instructor: TBD

A concentrated study of one aspect of writing for performance such as a particular medium (e.g. digital), genre, or theme. Topics may vary from year to year.

Group n/a