English Course List

Global English Literatures (ENGL 108B): An exploration of texts from a range of geographical locations, such as South Africa, Australia, the Caribbean, India, New Zealand, and Pakistan.

Digital Lives (ENGL 108D): An examination of how digital communication technologies create and promote online identities and social spaces, as well as interpersonal and communal interactions.

Gender and Representation (ENGL 108E): A study of the ways gender in all its diversity is constructed and gendered experience is expressed in literature, rhetoric, and a variety of media.

The Rebel (ENGL 108F): A study of various works of literature in which the protagonist is a rebel against existing norms. The course will examine a number of rebel types and concepts, moral implications, and final outcomes either in successful realization or in tragic defeat.

Horror (ENGL 108G): A study of the contemporary horror genre in literature and film. Topics may include the history of horror, the construction of fear, and the development of horror archetypes. Authors and creators may include H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, George Romero, and Stephen King.

Popular Potter (ENGL 108P): This course examines all seven of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels. Also offered online.

Tolkien: From Book to Film (ENGL 108T): A study of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-55), and their film adaptations by Peter Jackson (2001-03, 2012-14).

Literature and Medicine (ENGL 108X): How can literature help us understand the body, illness, and healing? The course considers the perspectives of patients and medical practitioners across a range of works, including poetry, fiction, medical texts, and other nonfiction.

Introduction to Academic Writing (ENGL 109): An exploration of a variety of issues in academic writing such as style, argument, and the presentation of information. Frequent written exercises will be required. Also offered online.

Communications in Mathematics Computer Science (ENGL 119): This course aims to build students' oral and written communication skills to prepare them for academic and workplace demands. Working independently and in collaboration with others, students will analyze and produce various written and spoken forms of communication. Projects and assignments will draw on materials for Mathematics and Computer Science students.

Genres of Creative Writing (ENGL 210C): This course introduces students to both contemporary and historical forms of creative writing. Students will explore genres of poetry, prose, and/or drama through their own writing. Students will also investigate the culture of publishing, learn key revision strategies, and workshop the writing of their peers to develop their critical abilities.

Genres of Technical Communication (ENGL 210E): This course explores writing, presentation, and design across various genres of technical communication, with a primary focus on printed and/or online computer documentation. Other assignments might include white papers, product specifications, help-desk communication, etc.

Genres of Business Communication (ENGL 210F): This courses explores the genres of communication in business and other organizations, such as reports (of several kinds), letters, email messages, marketing materials, public relations materials, and any other types of organizational communication. Offered online only.

Genres of Fundraising Communication (ENGL 210G): This course covers researching, organizing, drafting, and editing documents used to raise funds in contexts such as public and charitable organizations, academic research, and the arts. Students will design and write materials such as grant proposals, applications, and fundraising campaigns, using traditional and digital media. Students will have the opportunity to cater projects to their specific needs and objectives as fundraisers.

Arts Writing (ENGL 210H): A study of the various forms, processes, and modes of publication of professional writing in the arts. The course will consider both free-lance writing and writing within institutional contexts. Practice in research, writing, and editing will be emphasized.

Legal Writing (ENGL 210I): A study of the principles, processes, and various forms of writing used in the practice of law and drafting of legislation. The history and structure of legal writing, including current debates about plain language, will be examined.

Technical Editing (ENGL 210J): This course will introduce students to practices and tools of technical editing, such as language and format editing, verification and fact-checking, style guide consistency, discourse appropriateness, and the use of profession-specific software.

First Nations, Metis, and Inuit Literatures (ENGL 211): This course examines literary works in a variety of genres by First Nations, Metis, and Inuit authors in Canada. Students will study the literature in relation to key concepts that recur in Indigenous literary criticism such as land, teaching, and respect.

Literature and the Law (ENGL 213): A study of literary works that involve legal matters and/or have led to litigation on such grounds as obscenity, treason, heresy, libel, and plagiarism.

Canadian Children's Literature (ENGL 217): A study of 19th- and 20th-century Canadian literature for children.

Monstrous Hunger (ENGL 221): In this course students will explore the role eating plays in emotional and physical well-being. Through close reading of literary texts and other textual objects, students will build an understanding of eating as a biological necessity that requires the confrontation of one's relationships with others, the environment, and one's own body and health. Furthermore, in gaining an ability to use the concepts of eating/food studies, students will not only consider how eating is an encounter with one's bodily vulnerabilities and dependencies but also ask how acts of and attitudes towards eating can become monstrous.

Health, Illness, and Narrative (ENGL 222): What stories do we tell ourselves about our bodies, relationships, and lives as we try - individually and as a culture - to be "healthy"? And how do stories help us cope with the uncertain, often scary, and sometimes tragic scenarios when illness replaces health? In this course students will pursue these questions by exploring the role narrative plays in our broader perceptions of health and illness. Through discussion and writing, students will analyze a range of media and genres to gain insight into the larger cultural discourses and social institutions that shape our understanding of these topics.

Introduction to Anti-Racist Communication (ENGL 225): This course surveys the rhetorical strategies of both more recent and historical civil rights and anti-racist activists. Students will use Black rhetorical theory and will examine work by international historical figures such as Franz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Edouard Glissant, Albert Memmi, and Mohandas Gandhi, Frederick Douglas, WEB Dubois, Martin Luther King, Fannie Lou Hamer, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, Fred Hampton, Robert Hill, and Walter Rodney and such recent figures as Kimberle Crenshaw, Robyn Maynard, Brittney Cooper, Desmond Cole, Feminista Jones, Rinaldo Walcott, and Idil Abdillahi. The objective for students is to understand the evolution of liberatory, anti-racist rhetoric and the rhetorical successes and failures of key anti-racist activists.

The Pleasure of Poetry (ENGL 230): This course is an introduction to the enjoyment of poetry: what we like about it, what makes it fun, and how we can enjoy it more. Students will have an opportunity to expand their understanding of poetry. A range of poems will be sampled, and students will have opportunities to share poems that they like.

Graphic Narrative (ENGL 232): A study of graphic narrative (such as comics, graphic novels, and alternative modes) from the eighteenth century to the present. This course addresses issues such as the history and formal conventions of the medium as well as the unique rhetoric of comics-based storytelling. Topics of interest may include graphic memoir, multimodality, cross-cultural influence, and the comics-as-literature movement.

Postcolonial Literature of the Americas (ENGL 322): This course examines postcolonial literature in English from Canada, the U.S., and the Caribbean. Through study of both written and oral genres, we will discuss how language practices adapt to and are created in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Topics may include diaspora and migration, nationalism, gender, neo-colonialism, and multiculturalism.

Modern and Contemporary American Drama (ENGL 324): This course explores traditions and experiments in American drama through an analysis of American plays, especially those from the 1940s to the present, in their historical, textual, and theatrical contexts.

Austen (ENGL 325): A study of selected novels by Jane Austen, including Pride and Prejudice and Emma. Her letters and juvenilia may also be considered, as well as some of the films based on or inspired by her novels.

Language, Life, and Literature in the Caribbean (ENGL 326): This course introduces students to the ways in which language shapes and sustains various forms of cultural expressions in the Caribbean region. Students will use the creative output of storytellers, poets, DJs, and playwrights as a lens to investigate and trace the evolution of a distinctly Caribbean identity from the post-colonial period (1960s) up to the present. Students are also introduced to the social dynamics of Creole language use in the Caribbean and an exploration of the ways in which these languages are implicated in diverse cultural art forms.

Black Diasporic Lives: 1740-1900(ENGL 327): An introduction to cultural productions of the Black diaspora pre-1900, with an emphasis on political writing, memoir, fiction, and journalism. Students will engage works from a variety of regions, situated in their historical and cultural contexts, even as connections will be drawn to later social movements.

Introduction to Black Canadian Writing (ENGL 328): An analysis of Black writing and cultural achievement in Canada. Theoretical and literary texts will be studied to explore how contributions from this field have helped to shape Canada from the 18th century to the present.

Sixteenth-Century Literature 1 (ENGL 330A): A study of short poems by such writers as Wyatt, Gascoigne, Whitney, Ralegh, Spenser, the Sidneys, Shakespeare, and Donne.

Sixteenth-Century Literature 2 (ENGL 330B): A study of selected genres, topics, and works from Tudor literature.

Creative Writing 1 (ENGL 335): Designed to assist students with an interest in developing their creative writing skills in various genres, this course consists of supervised practice, discussions of craft, and peer critiques.

Creative Writing 2 (ENGL 336): This course is designed to assist advanced creative writers in developing a body of work in one or more genres by means of supervised practice, discussions of craft, and peer critiques.

American Literature to 1860 (ENGL 342): A study of developments in early American Literature, possibly including Anglo-European movements such as gothicism and romanticism; captivity narratives and other colonial writings; Afro-American, Native American, and other minority traditions; sentimental and domestic fiction; and indigenous American forms such as the frontier romance, and other minority literatures.

American Literature 1860-1910 (ENGL 343): A survey of literary developments in America from the Civil War through the turn of the 20th century, including significant movements of the period such as realism, regionalism, and naturalism; the New Woman's writing and other developments in women's literatures; popular forms such as the Western; and minority literatures.

Modern American Literature (ENGL 344): A study of American Literature from the early twentieth century through the second world war, emphasizing aesthetic innovation in the modernist movement, and its aftermath in the social writings of the 1930s.

American Literature in a Global Context (ENGL 345): A study of the ways in which movements of peoples and cultures have shaped American literature. Topics may include colonialism, immigration and migration, literary influence across borders and languages, nativism and internationalism, racial and ethnic styles and exchanges.

American Fiction (ENGL 346): A study of four to five writers. Topics may include the evolution of narrative style, realism and anti-realism, literature and story, fiction and history, the novel and film, gender and ethnicity.

Global Asian Diasporas (ENGL 346R): This course explores the literature and culture from one or more global Asian diasporas, with particular emphasis on cultures of East Asian origin. Topics may include identity, transnationalism, imperialism, war, labour, migration, and popular culture.

American Literature Since 1945 (ENGL 347): A study of the movements of American Literature following the second world war. The course will consider the formal and cultural diversity of writing in this period, with attention to topics such as avant-garde experiment, the persistence of realism, counter-cultural politics, feminism and literature, postmodernism, and the emergence of minority writers in the mainstream.

American Poetry Since 1850 (ENGL 348): A study of poems, poets, ideas, and movements, contributing to the growth of a distinctive American poetry from Whitman and Dickinson to the 21st century. Texts will be drawn from popular and avant-garde contexts, as well as the literary mainstream.

Seventeenth-Century Literature 1 (ENGL 350A): A study of literature by such writers as Jonson, Donne, Wroth, Herbert, Bacon, Milton, Behn, and Dryden.

Seventeenth-Century Literature 2 (ENGL 350B): An intensive study of Milton's epic, Paradise Lost, in its historical and literary contexts.

Eighteenth-Century Literature and Media (ENGL 412): A study of oral, printed, and popular media and literature (such as ballads, fiction, and newspapers) in the Restoration and 18th century. Topics may include the role of women in the rise of print culture, the social role of popular print forms, and the literary reception of new media technologies.

Transnational Feminisms and Contemporary Narratives (ENGL 425): This course examines the dialogue between transnational feminist theories and literary practices. Drawing on a range of literary and media genres from the late 20th and early 21st centuries, this course considers the historical developments, as well as contemporary contexts (e.g., migration, globalization), that gave rise to the framework of transnational feminism and its negotiations with Anglo-American and European feminist literary theories.

Literature of the Romantic Period 1 (ENGL 430A): An examination of the first generation of Romantic writers, including such authors as Barbauld, Blake, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, and Coleridge.

Literature of the Romantic Period 2 (ENGL 430B): An examination of the second generation of Romantic writers, including such authors as Byron, P. B. Shelley, Mary Shelley, Keats, and Hemans.

Topics in Creative Writing (ENGL 432): This course will focus on a selected genre, approach, creative method, or other aspect of creative writing. Please see course instructor for details.

Literature of the Victorian Age 1 (ENGL 451A): A critical study of early to mid-Victorian literature, including authors such as Carlyle, Arnold, Tennyson, the Brontës, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Gaskell, Ruskin, and Dickens. Topics may include liberty, work, gender, class, imperialism, and poetry.

Literature of the Victorian Age 2 (ENGL 451B): A critical study of mid to late Victorian literature, including authors such as Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, George Eliot, Newman, Hopkins, Michael Field, Wilde, and Hardy. Topics may include the "Woman Question," the crisis in religious faith, and aestheticism.

Early Literature of the Modernist Period in the United Kingdom and Ireland (ENGL 460A): A study of the literatures of the United Kingdom before and after World War I, including such writers as Conrad, Forster, Hopkins, Mansfield, Shaw, Synge, Wilde, and Yeats.

Literature of the Modernist Period in the United Kingdom and Ireland (ENGL 460B): A study of the literatures of the United Kingdom and Ireland from World War I to World War II, including such writers as Auden, Eliot, Isherwood, Joyce, Lawrence, Orwell, West, and Woolf.

Literature of the Postwar Period in the United Kingdom and Ireland (ENGL 460C): A study of the literatures of the United Kingdom and Ireland after World War II, including such writers as Beckett, Greene, Larkin, Murdoch, Osborne, Pinter, and Spark.

Contemporary Literature of the United Kingdom and Ireland (ENGL 460D): A study of the contemporary literatures of the United Kingdom and Ireland, including such writers as Byatt, Boland, Drabble, Heaney, Hughes, Rushdie, and Stoppard.

Irish Literature (ENGL 461): A study of modern and contemporary Irish literature in English. This course will introduce students to a range of Irish writing in its often turbulent historical and cultural context. The international dimensions of Irish writers and their work will be explored.