100-level Courses
Term 1
MWF, 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM
The Unruly Self in Literature and Culture
Poems about identity and race by Philip Larkin and Natasha Trethewey, fiction by Ralph Ellison about a segregated U.S. filled with racial tensions, the absurd talk-show circuit of Don DeLillo’s drama Valparaiso, homophobic small-town America in Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home . . . These are some of the settings and social orders the heroes and heroines of this course have to navigate. We will follow these characters as they sometimes rebel against and sometimes acquiesce to the orders and institutions in which they find themselves. Why isn’t the self easily tamed by society’s demands and norms? We conclude the course with Werner Herzog’s astonishing documentary film about a man among the bears, Grizzly Man. This course offers students an introduction to the skills and practices of literary criticism. Through a focus on writing assignments (both in-class and at home) across the term, students will learn how to ask rich and provocative questions about literary texts, how to build interpretations around highly focused work with a text’s individual words and images, and how to use literature and film as a lens for understanding historical contexts and social problems. Through invigorating reading and viewing experiences, students will build an arsenal of strong interpretive and writing techniques for their university futures.
Term 1
MWF, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
A writing-intensive introduction to the disciplines of literary studies through the exploration of texts in their critical and theoretical contexts. Fulfils the first-year component of the Faculty of Arts Writing and Research Requirement. Open only to students in the Faculty of Arts. Recommended for students intending to become English majors. Essays are required. This course is not eligible for Credit/D/Fail grading.
This course is an introduction to the art of reading and writing about literature. Our meetings will be devoted to reading literature, listening the music, and watching film. These sessions will focus on key texts that take up Black sound. Black sound is a conceptual framing that considers how sound, noise, speech, and music have shaped Black life. Blackness has its own sound and Black diasporic writers, artists, and performers have mobilized the aesthetic devices of noise and sound to do the work of living and resisting. In this course, we turn our attentions towards various genres of Black sound and its manifestations in literature, performance, film, and more. Some texts may include Beyonce’s Lemonade, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, M.A.A.D City, and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, among others.
We will deepen our understanding of these texts and their contexts by: engaging with scholarly articles that explore historical context and audience; reading in current criticism and theory; and developing strategies for textual analysis in literary and cultural studies. Over the term, students will be able to develop their own conclusions about literature, film, and music and scholarly criticism, while developing their skills as scholarly writers.
Our meetings will also be spent tackling writing. To put it another way, ENGL 100 is a writing course that uses literature as its topic; because it meets the Faculty of Arts Writing Requirement, the focus must clearly be on scholarly writing throughout the course. You can expect to write weekly responses, short essays, and a term paper requiring secondary research.
Term 1
MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
English 100 provides a writing-intensive introduction to language and literary studies through the exploration of texts in their critical and theoretical contexts. It fulfills the first-year component of the Faculty of Arts Writing and Research Requirement and is recommended for students intending to take a Major or Honours in English.
Are they "mad"? Or just neurodivergent?:
Fragmented Identities from Frankenstein to Freshwater
This section of English 100 will explore representations of madness and multifaceted identities in a range of diverse texts: two novels (Frankenstein and Freshwater), two short stories ("The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Yellow Wallpaper") and several of Sylvia Plath's poems. In class lectures and discussions, we will consider the historical and cultural contexts in which these works were produced as well as a range of theoretical and critical approaches.
Course assignments will focus on developing university-level skills of critical analysis and response, academic writing and research. There will be no final examination in this course.
Term 1
MWF, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 1
MWF, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 1
MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Cinematic Interiors
This section of English 100 explores the evolving role of space in shaping storytelling across film and television. Focusing on the films of directors such as Hitchcock, Coppola, and Bong, as well as TV series like Severance and Succession, we’ll look at domestic interiors, workplaces, curated environments, communal settings, and transitional spaces to consider how cinematic spaces function as sites of mood, meaning, and narrative tension. We’ll explore how cultural and technological shifts are changing our relationships to space, presence, and perception. Themes include the collapse of shared narratives, the erosion of trust in once-stable spaces, and the fragmented self in surveillance culture. Drawing on film theory, design, and narrative analysis, students will gain tools to analyze visual and spatial storytelling.
Short, scaffolded writing assignments, informed by key readings from Steven Jacobs and others, will support the development of interpretive and analytical skills.
No prior film experience required - just curiosity and a willingness to look closely.
Term 1
MWF, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 1
MWF, 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Genres of Indigeneity
ENGL 100 is a writing-intensive introduction to the disciplines of literary studies through the exploration of texts in their critical and theoretical contexts. The course explores the ways that Indigenous peoples have sought to overcome the legacy of colonialism and achieve self-determination through literary and other forms of cultural production and critique. This course will examine contemporary articulations of Indigenous identity, politics and cultural traditions in the field of literature, through the genres of the novel, poetry, drama, film, and other modes of resurgent cultural expression. In doing so, ENGL 100 will consider the literary, geographic, political, historical, racial, economic and social processes that have facilitated the contexts and content of authorship and text in Indigenous literary studies broadly speaking. What do these literary forms tell us about “Indigeneity,” and what is set into motion by the interaction of this modifier with “literature”? What does Indigenous literature tell “us” about the form of the settler nation states and Indigenous nations and their citizens in the present day? What does a study of literature have to do with answering questions about nationhood, identity, community, and citizenship? Why does it matter? In attempting to answer these (and other) questions, we will remain committed to the complexities of audience and reception, genre, authorship, and the present and future of Indigenous literary studies.
Term 1
TR, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 1
TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 1
TR, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 1
TR, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 1
TR, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
Literature and (Re)Creation
Literature is a powerful mechanism for (re)creation. Reading literature can be a recreational activity that provides respite from the stresses of living in this world, even as authors use literature to help recreate this world, help us see this world differently, and help us imagine other worlds. This course will examine how images, non-fiction, poems, films, stories, and plays engage in and with (re)creation: how they depict recreation, people (re)creating themselves, and people (re)creating the world. After some introductory matters, we will work through a unit called “Just Nature” (a collaborative ecojustice learning project with 5 academic institutions), and then examine Ryan Coogler's Black Panter, Octavia E Butler’s Blood Child and Other Stories, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and “Body Snatchers”, Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful, and William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
This is a writing-intensive course, which means you will do a lot of writing, both formal and informal.
Term 1
TR, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 2
MWF, 9:00 PM - 10:00 AM
English 100 provides a writing-intensive introduction to language and literary studies through the exploration of texts in their critical and theoretical contexts. It fulfills the first-year component of the Faculty of Arts Writing and Research Requirement and is recommended for students intending to take a Major or Honours in English.
Are they "mad"? Or just neurodivergent?:
Fragmented Identities from Frankenstein to Freshwater
This section of English 100 will explore representations of madness and multifaceted identities in a range of diverse texts: two novels (Frankenstein and Freshwater), two short stories ("The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Yellow Wallpaper") and several of Sylvia Plath's poems. In class lectures and discussions, we will consider the historical and cultural contexts in which these works were produced as well as a range of theoretical and critical approaches.
Course assignments will focus on developing university-level skills of critical analysis and response, academic writing and research. There will be no final examination in this course.
Term 2
MWF, 10:00 PM - 11:00 AM
Books and Friendship
Aristotle says, “Without friends no one would choose to live, though they had all other goods.” Friendship is supposed to exist upon a principle of perfect equality. It promises a private intimacy free from masquerade and convention; only a friend knows and loves your “true portrait,” proposes Montaigne. But what would a cultural history of friendship show? Is modern friendship a different kind of thing than friendships in the past? Could you have a friend at first sight, or only briefly, or must a friendship be built with labour over time? Can friendship be erotic or romantic? What changes when friendship occurs among a group? This course thinks about “two [or more] going together,” exemplary and distinctive friendships in fiction, in drama, in poetry, in life. We consider topics including friends as companions, friends and self-growth, friendships with animals, philosophy of friendship, heroic friendships, queer and romantic friendships, friendship and the nation, doomed and difficult friendships.
We will discover multiple answers to our questions. Along the way, we will also learn general principles about narrative and fiction as they are theorized in English, and how writing works at an analytical level, by discussing matters such as plot, figuration, character, focalization, and setting. Writers may include Ursula Le Guin, Nella Larsen, Samuel Beckett, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Kazuo Ishiguro, or others.
Term 2
MWF,11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Poetry, Plays, Prose
This course is designed for students interested in the discipline of English literary studies and aims to cultivate in students the practice of reading and writing about literary texts. We will cover the basic concepts and vocabularies of literary criticism, and familiarize ourselves with the central forms and genres of literature—poetry, plays, and prose—and the specific methods involved in analyzing them. We will ask not just what the meaning of a literary work is, but how meaning is conveyed, and why it is conveyed in such a way. That is to say, we will look at the formal elements of a text and the way they interact with, reinforce, or subvert a text’s thematic content. Additionally, we will learn about the conventions of essay writing and how to write good prose. Texts to be studied include a variety of poems, William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Titus Andronicus; Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechuan, and Nella Larsen’s Passing.
Term 2
MWF, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Writing in an Age of AI
What does it mean to “write with AI?” What does artificial intelligence offer our writing practices? What does it obstruct or challenge? And why does it matter? In this course, designed to introduce students to a range of academic and professional genres of writing, we will engage directly with AI technologies, examining not only what they do on the page but also how they contribute to broader intellectual and ethical questions around thinking, creating, and communicating. Built for students who love using AI, students who hate it, and students are scared or confused by it, this course will both prepare you for college-level writing and help you to define what it means to be a writer.
Term 2
MWF, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
"Awakenings"
This course offers a writing-intensive introduction to literary studies and fulfils the first-year component of the Faculty of Arts Writing and Research Requirement. The course is open only to students in the Faculty of Arts and is recommended for students intending to enter the Majors or Honours program in English Language and Literatures.
Authors to be studied may include Ernest Hemingway, Kate Chopin, Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sylvia Plath, Willa Cather, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Roland Barthes, Emily Dickinson, Joan Didion, William Faulkner, Sophocles, and others.
Students will write short essays in class; engage in discussion and intellectual exchange in the classroom; do informal close readings (aloud); and write one longer take-home essay. There will also be a final exam. 100% attendance is expected, attendance will be taken, and the final mark will be adjusted accordingly.
Please also note: this course is resolutely unfriendly to AI tools and CHATGPT etc.
“And what is the reason?”
“Do you not see the reason for yourself?” (Melville, "Bartleby").
Term 2
MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Writing the Self
This course is a writing-intensive introduction to literary study recommended for students considering English as a major. The focus of this particular section of the course will be 19th and 20th-century North American literature. Our theme is the self, a concept that we will explore by reading texts in a variety of genres (memoirs, essays, biography, lyric poetry) that address self-making, self-deception, self-reliance, self-expression, self-representation, etc. We begin with a hip hop opera based on the biography of the US’s first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, one of the first self-made men in America; the libretto provides two versions of Hamilton: the biography narrated by his nemesis Aaron Burr and the autobiography promoted by Hamilton himself. We will then read life writing by a formerly enslaved person (Harriet Jacobs) and the first Asian American author (Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton); essays about self-reliance by an early environmentalist (Henry David Thoreau) and a nineteenth-century US philosopher (Emerson); and lyric (self-expressive) poetry by Whitman and Dickinson. Students will read and report on works of contemporary life writing and have a chance to write a micro-memoir as one of their final assignments.
Texts may include:
- Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton: The Revolution
- Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” (1841)
- Selections from Walt Whitman’sSong of Myself
- Emily Dickinson’s selected poems
- Excerpts from Henry David Thoreau’s memoir, Walden (1854)
- Harriet Jacobs’ autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl(1861)
- Sui Sin Far’s memoir, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” (1909)
- Elizabeth Jordan’s ed. Composite novel The Sturdy Oak(1917)
- Ava Chin, Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming (2023)
Term 2
MWF, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 2
MWF, 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 2
TR, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 2
TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Breaking apart, bringing together: techniques of criticism
This course offers an introduction to techniques of literary criticism. Our emphasis will be on skills and craft, paying particular attention both to analysis (breaking up, loosening, moving from complex wholes to simpler parts) and to synthesis (putting together, assembling, combining or composing). The primary objects of our critical attention will be classic works of literature as well as modern and contemporary ones: Aristotle's Poetics, an enormously influential book of literary criticism which offers some fundamental terms for our course (mimesis, plot, catharsis, techne, and others); Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, an ancient Greek tragedy that describes the fate of the god Prometheus punished by Zeus for teaching humans how to use fire and other basic arts; some remarkable poetry by Emily Dickinson; possibly, Bertolt Brecht's Life of Galilieo which examines the revolutionary possibilities of knowledge; and a novel (TBD). We will think about these works in their critical, historical, and theoretical contexts, and read selected secondary sources. Where relevant, we may include film and/or television treatments that offer distinctive media interpretations of the primary works.
The learning objectives of this course include:
- to familiarize students with a vocabulary of criticism
- to give students practical experience with analytical tools such as the reading response, the summary, the bibliography, and the critical question
- to build student confidence to writea research paper that synthesizes ideas from other sources and crafts an original argument of their own
The course will be taught as a mix of lecture, discussion, in-class exercises, and group work.
There will be a writing textbook as well as other required readings and viewings for this course. Please note, students will be required to complete the reading (or viewing) for a given class meeting before class so that they are prepared to engage in lively discussion.
Term 2
TR, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM
Dog Tales
Under the writing intensive rubric of this course, we will study tales of dogs. Our readings will include a canine biography by Virginia Woolf, a harrowing hurricane novel by Jesmyn Ward, and a “supernatural” thriller by Arthur Conan Doyle. We’ll supplement these literary texts with critical writings by Ackerly, Boisseron, Haraway, and Weaver, and with the film Best in Show (2000) in honour of the late Catherine O’Hara. In these artefacts, dogs are dogs, but they’re always something else, too – creatures (Canis familiaris) for talking about family, poverty, race, gender, violence, and sexuality in human communities.
Students need not be “dog people” to succeed in this course. They need to complete a midterm, final exam, and multiple shorter writing assignments that lead to a longer term paper.
Term 2
TR, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 2
TR, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 1
MW, 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM
Identity and Identification in Literary Texts
How do we define ourselves – as Canadians, as artists, as lovers, as survivors? These are some of the broad issues of identity and identification we will explore through a selection of fiction, drama and poetry in this section of English 110. We will consider ways in which individuals craft and perform the "selves" they wish to be, and the multiplicity of ways in which writers convey these identities through literary texts. To what extent do we control the person we become and to what extent are we shaped by our community? How meaningful are the concepts of ethnicity, gender and nationality in the creation of identity? How can a writer convey the complex and shifting nature of individual and group identity through the permanence of written discourse? Texts studied will include a novel (Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi), a play (The Rez Sisters by Tomson Highway), and a selection of short stories and poetry. In lectures and seminars, students will engage with concepts of genre and form in literature and will pursue hands-on practice of methods of literary analysis. Students will be encouraged to develop independent critical responses to the works studied. Assessment will include two in-class essays, a term paper and a final examination.
Term 1
MW, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Short Fiction
We’ll read a selection of short stories (some very short, some longer; some funny, some sad) from the last 200 years or so. We’ll consider the different kinds of narration, plot structure, point of view, and beginnings and endings. Students will gain an appreciation for what it means to tell stories.
Term 1
MW, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
It’s Alive! Frankenstein and Adaptation
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is by far the most influential work of literature in the English language. It has inspired plays, films, video games, comics, cartoons, stand-up comedy, dolls, cereals, and all manner of science-fiction, horror, and fantasy. Many of these adaptations have brought the key social and political issues of their own time to bear on Shelley’s tale of scientific overreach and moral conflict. And recent adaptations engage powerfully with our own obsessions: colonialism and racism, , justice and crime, gender and sexuality, corporate greed and government power, media technology and artificial intelligence. Reading adaptations enable us to put such thorny issues in their historical and cultural contexts, to see how they have evolved over time, and to consider how they—and we—might develop in the future. Adaptation shows us that literature, like Frankenstein’s creature is alive! After closely reading Shelley’s original novel and investigating several of its themes and contexts, we will explore a selection of adaptations of Frankenstein in a variety of media and genres. Assignments will include both in-class and take-home writing and a final exam.
Term 1
MW, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
The Self in (and Out of) Place
This section of ENGL 110 will focus on the relationship between self and place. How does place (geographical, social, psychological, textual) shape our understanding and definition of self, how we imagine ourselves as human beings in the world? And how does literature both define and mediate the relationship between self and place? In our readings, we will address questions of class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and race, as they intersect with our main categories. We’ll explore these questions in poetry (by Thomas Wyatt, Christina Rossetti, William Blake, Linton Kwesi Johnson, David Dabydeen, Jackie Kay, Tom Leonard, Dionne Brand, and others), drama (Ayub Khan-Din’s East Is East and Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters), short stories (by Angela Carter, Angélique Lalonde, William Faulkner, and Haruki Murakami), and a film, Lee Chang-dong’s Burning.
Term 1
MW, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Identity and Identification in Literary Texts
How do we define ourselves – as Canadians, as artists, as lovers, as survivors? These are some of the broad issues of identity and identification we will explore through a selection of fiction, drama and poetry in this section of English 110. We will consider ways in which individuals craft and perform the "selves" they wish to be, and the multiplicity of ways in which writers convey these identities through literary texts. To what extent do we control the person we become and to what extent are we shaped by our community? How meaningful are the concepts of ethnicity, gender and nationality in the creation of identity? How can a writer convey the complex and shifting nature of individual and group identity through the permanence of written discourse? Texts studied will include a novel (Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi), a play (The Rez Sisters by Tomson Highway), and a selection of short stories and poetry. In lectures and seminars, students will engage with concepts of genre and form in literature and will pursue hands-on practice of methods of literary analysis. Students will be encouraged to develop independent critical responses to the works studied. Assessment will include two in-class essays, a term paper and a final examination.
Term 2
MW, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
The Body at the Border
This course introduces students to methods for studying cultural expressions and critical theory by focusing on the body’s relationship to borders. In particular, we will examine how borders in their various forms are represented, interrogated, or reimagined in contemporary North American and diasporic cultural productions. We will focus on the relationships between race, gender, sexuality and narratives of migration that illuminate ongoing histories of imperialism and settler colonialism. The course uses the frameworks of literary analysis, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and migration and diaspora studies in order to attend to formal and thematic components of cultural productions, and to put them in conversation with questions about power, embodiment, and difference. In doing so, students will develop skills essential to university-level reading, writing, and critical analysis.
Term 2
MW, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 2
MW, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Artificial Intelligence in Literature
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 2
MW, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Counternarratives in comics, fiction & poetry
Scientists use data—gathered through experimentation, for example, or measurement—to discover and interpret the world around them. What do literary scholars use? What kind of “data” is a graphic narrative, a novel, or a poem? And what can the study of literature tell us about how we interpret the world we live in? In particular, what might we learn from literature that we can’t learn by other means?
The texts on this course include local and global stories written in the 21st century. They will show us contemporary lives lived in different corners of the world—for example, a Vietnamese refugee in California, an Ojibwe hockey player in Ontario. These are personal stories about public events, and they are the stories that have generally been less discovered, measured, or recorded. They reveal the sometimes invisible, even erased, narratives and lives that lurk behind the headlines or history books. They invite us to ask, who gets to speak and who may be silenced? What kind of knowledge does literature give us access to—and what should we do with that knowledge?
Possible texts include The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui, Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese, Medium by Johanna Skibsrud.
Term 2
MW, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 1
MW, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Rhetoric, Controversy, & Propaganda
How does everyday language work to influence our thoughts and actions? This course delves into the realm of rhetoric – the motivation of belief and action, which encompasses not only overt techniques of persuasion and propaganda, but also the quotidian aspects of language and symbol usage that facilitate (or hinder) our daily lives and organize society. In order to work on their own communication skills, students will study and implement argumentative, critical, and stylistic techniques by analyzing the rhetoric of contemporary and historical political controversies, such as the Trump regime, the public function of science, and whatever current controversies fill the headlines this semester.
Term 1
TR, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 2
MW, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Metaphor and Friends: How Language Reflects (and Supports) our Creativity
Most of us believe that our everyday communication is essentially conducted via literal language. The goal of this course is to show you that there are at least two ways in which such a belief is not accurate. First, much of what we communicate, whether in conversations with peers or in an academic context, relies heavily on figurative expressions. We will consider various areas of communication (conversation, journalism, politics, science, literature, etc.) to see how our everyday language relies on metaphor and its “friends” (whom we will meet in class!).
Secondly, contemporary communication also relies heavily on images (many scholars refer to such uses as ‘multimodal)’. We will study examples of various multimodal genres (ads, campaigns, memes, etc.) to understand how and why language works together with images. Through these two strands, we will see why language can be (metaphorically!) described as a toolkit supporting problem solving and creativity.
We will spend much time in class discussing examples (some of which you yourselves will bring for our consideration and enjoyment). And we will also respond to the materials studied in written assignments, engaging more closely with texts and examples.