1020E - Understanding Literature Today
By studying a broad range of exciting and important literary works from the past and present, this course will increase your understanding and appreciation not just of the richness and power of the works themselves, but also of the role of literature in reflecting and shaping our perceptions of the world and of ourselves. 1.0 course

1022E - Enriched Introduction to English Literature
Why does literature matter? This course will pose this question by examining works of literature from the fourteenth century to now and through assignments that ask you to hone a range of interpretive, critical, and creative skills necessary to your future success as students and leaders. Above all the course will explore how the writing and reading of literature are inherently political acts that ask us to think through our most pressing issues—environment, sexuality, race, gender, class—with tolerance for others and hope for the future. 1.0 course

POPULAR! 1027F - The Storyteller’s Art I: Introduction to Narrative
The act of storytelling has been essential to human culture from the time of the ancient Greeks to the present day. Stories are integral to the way we define ourselves—and manipulate others. This course will examine the story teller's art not only through novels and short stories but also in its ancient and modern forms, ranging from the epic to more recent forms such as the graphic novel. As diverse as these stories may seem, they share a central concern with the way we represent ourselves and interpret others. 0.5 course

POPULAR! 1028G-001 - The Storyteller’s Art II: Strange Stories and Disturbing Narratives
This course examines texts that leave readers with questions about what happened or why it happened. Some are Gothic, or mysterious; others flirt with the strange or are simply weird in their content or method of narrating the story. All of them leave the reader with doubt. Literature always aims to engage the reader’s curiosity and imagination; these texts amplify the reader’s role in interpreting what seems inexplicable. 0.5 course

POPULAR! 1028G-002 - The Storyteller’s Art II: The Rise of the Machines
Where do I end and where does my phone or laptop or tablet begin? From Mary Shelley’s Creature to Janelle Monáe’s dirty computers, our technological prostheses have always been more than simply tools for carrying out the tasks that we have assigned them. They have been, too, the instruments by which we have sought to define what it means to be human in a world in which our microprocessor-driven devices seem to have acquired a mysterious agency, a liveliness all of their own. This course will study novels and a short film that have sought to explore the social, political, and psychological dimensions of our increasingly intimate relationship with the technological realm. What fears and desires do these new life forms elicit in us? How do they compel us to think differently about what it means to work, think, love? And where, in the future, will we draw the line between what we want from them and what they might want from us? 0.5 course

2016G - Papyrus to Pixels: A History of the Things We Read
This course explores the broad sweep of book history from early manuscript culture to the eBook. Much of this course will be "hands-on," working with the material artifacts or facsimiles of book culture. Field trips and guest lectures will enhance our understanding of the book’s long and complex history. 0.5 course

2017 - Reading Popular Culture
"If Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be writing for television." This course addresses the many forms of popular culture, including television, music, popular fiction and film, urban myths, and celebrities. The aim of this course is to encourage students to develop a critical understanding of all aspects of popular culture. FINAL EXAM WILL BE HELD IN-PERSON ON CAMPUS. 1.0 course

2032F - Harry Potter
The phenomenal success of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series may relate to its roots in a variety of genres including the gothic novel, detective fiction, fantasy, and adventure. This course studies all seven books alongside other novels and short stories that illustrate the generic conventions used and adapted by Rowling. 0.5 course

POPULAR! 2033E - Children’s Literature
This course examines the development of literature for and about children from its roots in fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and nonsense literature. Animal stories, adventure tales, picture books, and domestic novels will be considered alongside visits to fantasy realms like Wonderland, Neverland, or the Land of Oz. A central focus will be the assumptions about children and childhood that shape these texts, all produced by adults based on what they believe children enjoy, want, or need. 1.0 course

2041F - Special Topics in Drama: TBA
In this course, students participating in a major Western theatre production explore in theory and practice approaches to text in performance. The instructor will allocate specific roles from among the students enrolled in the course using various methods, including auditions. The instructor will choose the play to be produced. 0.5 course

2071F/G - Speculative Fiction: Science Fiction
From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, a consideration of the history and development of science fiction. Will include science fiction themes such as the Other, new technologies, chaos theory, cybernetics, paradoxes of space/time travel, first contact, and alien worlds. FINAL EXAM WILL BE HELD IN-PERSON ON CAMPUS. 0.5 course

2072F/G - Speculative Fiction: Fantasy
Wizards, vampires, fairies, and the Chosen One—these figures are no longer confined to a genre ghetto but have instead moved to the mainstream. This course examines the roots of the fantasy genre in novels such as Dracula  and The Lord of the Rings  and considers how the tropes of the genre have been reproduced and transformed by authors like J.K. Rowling and Lev Grossman. We will examine the continuing appeal of stories about magic, whether they involve supernatural intrusions, visits to the realm of faerie, or extraordinary powers hidden in apparently ordinary places. FINAL EXAM WILL BE HELD IN-PERSON ON CAMPUS. 0.5 course

2073G - Speculative Fiction: Utopias and Dystopias
An examination of major utopian and dystopian texts. Will concern ways in which humanity has tried to imagine a perfect world, fix the current world, or construct an exaggerated version of the world in order to demonstrate its flaws and weaknesses. 0.5 course

These courses require prerequisites. Students are responsible for ensuring that they have successfully completed all course prerequisites and that they have not taken an antirequisite course, as stated in the Academic Calendar.

2112G - Adapting Across Page, Stage, and Screen (cross-listed with Film 2212G and Theatre Studies 2212G)
How does the shape an artwork takes contribute to its aesthetic and political power? When artworks flex across form and media how do their messages change? What did Marshall McLuhan mean when he said "the medium is the message"? How do genre and form shape social and political discourse? In this course, students explore these questions and more as they investigate texts that assume multiple cultural forms and represent a diversity of perspectives. 0.5 course

2190F - Special Topics in English: Foundations in Feminist Thought (cross-listed with GSWS 2240F)
Description tba. 0.5 course

2191F - Special Topics in English: Shakespeare in the Age of "Me Too" and Taylor Swift
Description tba. 0.5 course

2200F - History of Theory and Criticism
An introduction to important issues in the history of literary criticism and theory from Plato to the twentieth century. 0.5 course

2201G - Contemporary Theory and Criticism
This course builds on the historical foundations of English 2200F/G to concentrate on important issues in contemporary literary theory and criticism. English 2200F/G is recommended as preparation for English 2201F/G. 0.5 course

2202F - Studies in Poetics
An introduction to important issues and concepts in the theory and analysis of poetry from different periods. 0.5 course

2301E - British Literature Survey
This survey course charts the history of British and Irish literature through study of its major authors, from the anonymous poet who wrote Beowulf to the very recent Irish novelist Claire Keegan. Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales), John Donne's love poetry and devotional verse, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility, Emily Brontë, (Wuthering Heights) and T. S. Eliot are read along the way. 1.0 course

2401E - American Literature Survey
A survey of American literature from the period of imperial exploration and contact in North America to the postmodern era. In this class, we will read some of the most fascinating literary works of the United States in a variety of modes and genres. We will consider the aesthetic and formal properties of each text and consider how writers were shaped by the social conditions, ideological conflicts, economic forces, and political developments of their times, such as the forced removal of Native Americans and the practice of chattel slavery. As we study the evolution of major artistic movements and periods, we will also trace the development of important assumptions, myths, and fundamental beliefs about the United States that still influence American discourse today.

In this survey, we will also pay close attention to the voices that are heard—and not heard—in different moments of US history. The pressure of attempting to read 400 years of literary history will force us to pose questions about the limits of the American literary canon. Why do we read what we read, and who benefits from that? How have ideas of what constitutes "literature" (or "America," for that matter) changed over time? What could lesser-known writers contribute to our understanding of the US nation and its literature? And is it possible to read so-called canonical writers in a way that produces new kinds of knowledge?

Readings will include novels such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar; short fiction by Herman Melville, Henry James, and Leslie Marmon Silko; personal narratives such as Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Zitkala-Sa's Impressions of an Indian Childhood and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; and poetry by Anne Bradstreet, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, and Allan Ginsberg. Assignments will include 4 essays, participation quizzes, a library assignment and a final exam. 1.0 course

NEW! 2402F - Dramatic Literature 1: The Greeks to Shakespeare (cross-listed with TS 2204F)
This course will introduce students to the range of plays and theatre practices that shaped the first two millennia of theatre. Landmark texts will be studied in the context of the diverse theatre spaces, festivals, and political cultures in which the drama first came into being. 0.5 course

2601E - Global Literatures in English Survey
This course offers students a great opportunity to survey of the links between and among different literary traditions and innovations across such diverse geographic regions as Asia, Africa, Australia, South America, and the Caribbean. Through close reading of literary texts written in English, students will explore how cultures produce different—often competing--ways of making meaning. 1.0 course

These courses require prerequisites. Students are responsible for ensuring that they have successfully completed all course prerequisites and that they have not taken an antirequisite course, as stated in the Academic Calendar.

3204G - Critical Race Theory (cross-listed with GSWS 3324G)
This course explores key concepts in critical race theory, focusing on: cultural constructions of race and their connection to settler colonialism and imperialism; the links between race, class, gender, and sexuality; processes of racialization; whiteness as an "invisible" category; the hypervisibility of racialized subjects; and anti-racist cultural production. 0.5 course

3209F - Topics in Theory: Queer Theory (cross-listed with GSWS 3173F and SASAH 3393F)
This course offers advanced study in a narrowly defined area of theory and criticism. Specific content will vary from year to year depending on the instructor. 0.5 course

3310 - Old English Language and Literature
Studying the language and literature of England a millennium ago, we will move from introducing the language to simple prose texts to the poetry of the Exeter and Vercelli Books, and for most of the second term to the study of Beowulf. 1.0 course

3315E - Disenchanted Chaucer: Authority and Literature in Medieval England
The authority of crown, family, and church, and even the texts that supported those institutions, was questioned in the late medieval period. While introducing the Middle English language, this course will explore how Geoffrey Chaucer and his contemporaries used literature to critique social and political institutions. 1.0 course

3323F - Drama After Shakespeare
The decades following Shakespeare's retirement witnessed the production of some extraordinary drama. This half-course will range from dark tragedies, by authors such as Middleton and Ford, to improbable romances by the likes of Heywood and Fletcher. Island princesses, miraculous reunions, lycanthropy, bloody murders, sexual obsession, and redemption lie in wait. 0.5 course

3341F - Sex, Death, and Philosophy: Libertinism and Eighteenth-Century British Literature
The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 ushered in a new and sometimes frightening era of philosophical, social, and sexual freedom. This course explores Libertinism, a subversive doctrine that challenged cultural and sexual norms, through the poems, plays, and prose of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. 0.5 course

3351F - Romantic Revolutions
Revolt, radicalism, counter-revolution, reaction, reformation; hope, crisis, peace, war, invention, imagination, catastrophe, wonder, terror. What shadows did revolution cast upon the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? This course examines a range of texts that reflect Romantic and post-Romantic transformations, upheavals, and reversals in aesthetic, socio-political, scientific, and/or psychological thought and writing. 0.5 course

3371F - Contemporary Experimental Literature
Several contemporary poets and fiction writers express a profound dissatisfaction with traditional literary genres, preferring to focus on radical innovations in technique. This course examines a range of texts that offer a more clinical approach to writing, inspired by such structures as dreams, arbitrary constraints, and game theory. 0.5 course

3374G - Decadence and its Discontents
It is popularly assumed that decadence, as an artistic movement, died in the 1890s. The reports of its death in English literature, however, are greatly exaggerated. This course will examine the afterlives of decadence and its avatars, aestheticism and camp, in modernism, postmodernism, and beyond. 0.5 course

3378F - Topics in Twentieth-Century British and Irish Literature: Decline and Fall?  Re-evaluating the Past in Twentieth-Century British Literature
This course will examine the ways in which selected novels, short stories, poems, and a play help to create and question a nation's sense of itself. How does literature create and challenge the imagined community that is a nation? 0.5 course

3471G - Ballots and Bullets: US Literature and Civil Rights
This course considers literature that produced, reflected, and reacted to the emergence of the various American civil rights movements. Approaches will vary but likely topics include: the revolution and founding; "Indian Removal" and indigenous rights; slavery, abolition, and Jim Crow; women’s rights and feminism; the sexual revolution and queer identity. 0.5 course

NEW! 3557G - 20th-Century Theatre
This course explores theatre of the long 20th century, beginning in the late 19th century and ending at the turn of the millennium. Students will read and watch plays from Canada, the US, Great Britain, Ireland, and mainland Europe. Artists from diverse gender, race, and cultural backgrounds will be featured. 0.5 course

3580G - Canadian Literature: Creativity and the Local (cross-listed with SASAH 3390G)
This course explores the literary cultures of Southwestern Ontario, examining the ways local writing accesses the public, builds communities, relates people to their environment, and connects local, national, and transnational networks. Students develop critical, creative, and experiential perspectives and employ community engaged learning to develop course concepts beyond the classroom. 0.5 course

3581F - Toronto: Culture and Performance (cross-listed with TS 3581F and SASAH 3390F)
We will explore a range of recent work produced on Toronto's stages, the contexts in which that work is made, and its reception by reviewers, bloggers, and others. Students will read six to eight plays along with contextual material, and see at least two live performances in Toronto. 0.5 course

3679G - Topics in Postcolonial Literature: Making Decolonial Shakespeares
Making Decolonial Shakespeares aims to introduce students to the "decolonial turn" in Shakespeare and early modern cultural studies, with a specific focus on the contributions of women-identifying artists (including AFAB, trans, Indigenous, POC, Black, and disabled artists). We will begin by unpacking what we talk about when we talk about "Shakespeare", examining the ways in which that figure became first, in the 18th and 19th centuries, central to the labour of the British Empire, and through the long 20th century central to the Anglo-American cultural economy. We will then turn to recent explorations of Shakespeare and race, Indigeneity, ability, gender identity, and more—both in the scholarly literature and, more importantly, in contemporary performance work. 0.5 course

3891F - Topics in Cultural Studies (cross-listed with BLST 3420F)
This course offers an advanced study in a more narrowly defined area of cultural studies. Specific content will vary from year to year depending on the instructor. 0.5 course

4320F – Seminar in Renaissance Literature: Milton and C.S. Lewis
Description TBA. 0.5 course

4321G – Seminar in Renaissance Literature: The Royal Court (Tudor and Stuart) and English Literature
Description TBA. 0.5 course

4350F – Seminar in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Romantic Ways of Knowing
Description TBA. 0.5 course

4370G – Seminar in Twentieth-Century British and Irish Literature: "What huge imago made a psychopathic god": Democracy in Crisis, 1929-1945
Description TBA. 0.5 course

4470F - Seminar in American Literature: Climate Humanities
How might art and literature help us navigate the urgent reality of human-caused global warming and ecological devastation? What perspectives do the humanities offer when the terms of human life seem increasingly precarious, governed as they are by the logics of extraction and accumulation, nationalism and colonialism? Our approach to these questions will be guided by decolonial thinkers, artists, and organizers who are developing critical, creative, and collaborative practices for spurring climate action and renewing our relationship with nature. We will draw on these models to devise our own hands-on experiments in imagining and enacting more collective, constructive ways of being in the world. 0.5 course

4472G - Seminar in American Literature: Topic TBA
Topics vary from year to year. Description TBA. 0.5 course

4670F - Seminar in Global Literature in English: Topic TBA
Topics vary from year to year. Description TBA. 0.5 course

4871G - Seminar in Literary Studies: Monsters of the Present Moment: Writing At/Past the Limits of Realism (cross-listed with Writing 4880G)
Taking its cue from the speculative turn in contemporary literature, this course will support students to develop a sustained work of fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction through shared reading, writing and workshopping. We will explore how other creative writers are integrating elements of myth, folk and faerie tale, sci-fi, and horror into literary writing to stretch and sometimes explode the limits of realism, and focus on introducing similar elements into our own work. Through regular writing exercises and workshopping, we will experiment with new approaches to writing, support each other’s creative development, and deepen and strengthen our creative work. 0.5 course

4999E - Thesis
Individual instruction in the selection of a topic, the preparation of materials, and the writing of a thesis. Students who wish to take this course must apply to the Chair of Undergraduate Studies, Department of English and Writing Studies. This course is restricted to students in fourth year of an English Program with a minimum A average. Additional registration in 4000-level English courses require permission of the Department. See English Studies 4999E - Undergraduate Thesis for details. 1.0 course

POPULAR! 1020E - Understanding Literature Today
By studying a broad range of exciting and important literary works from the past and present, this course will increase your understanding and appreciation not just of the richness and power of the works themselves, but also of the role of literature in reflecting and shaping our perceptions of the world and of ourselves. 1.0 course

Spring/Summer

1020E / 650

J. Devereux

Syllabus

POPULAR! 2033E - Children's Literature
This course examines the development of literature for and about children from its roots in fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and nonsense literature. Animal stories, adventure tales, picture books, and domestic novels will be considered alongside visits to fantasy realms like Wonderland, Neverland, or the Land of Oz. A central focus will be the assumptions about children and childhood that shape these texts, all produced by adults based on what they believe children enjoy, want, or need. 1.0 course

Spring/Summer

2033E / 650

G. Ceraldi

Syllabus

POPULAR! 2071F - Speculative Fiction: Science Fiction
From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, a consideration of the history and development of science fiction. Will include science fiction themes such as the Other, new technologies, chaos theory, cybernetics, paradoxes of space/time travel, first contact, and alien worlds. 0.5 course

Spring/Summer

2071F / 650

J. Schuster

Syllabus

3330E - Shakespeare
Shakespeare remains one of the most influential of English writers. This course studies twelve plays across a range of genres. Instructors may integrate theatre-oriented exercises and/or other dramatic or non-dramatic material, depending on individual emphasis. When possible, the teaching program will include an autumn theatre trip. 1.0 course

Spring/Summer

3330E / 650

J. Purkis

Syllabus