*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 9-12
Instructor: Siobhan O'Flynn
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
Detailed Description by Instructor: This course is designed to provide students with necessary foundational skills for academic writing and to foster effective communication, by honing precision and clarity. The course will focus on the fundamentals of clear articulate prose, analytical thinking, expository and persuasive writing, pre-writing, editing, and revision, and provide an overview of the value and pitfalls of digital research in detailing a topic and/or developing an argument. Students will engage with writing as a process through multiple short exercises (individual and group; online & solo), directed brainstorming, and peer review. This course is not a basic writing course as to spelling and sentence structure.
Critical Writing Guide: G. Graff & C. Birkenstein, They Say, I Say, 4th Edition
Method of Instruction: Lecture, class discussion, and in-class activities
Method of Evaluation: 2 short draft essays, short essays, peer reviews, final essay.
Course Title: Effective Writing
Course Code: ENG100H5S | Lecture TR 1-4
Instructor: Thomas Laughlin
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: How to Read Critically
Course Code: ENG101H5S | Lecture TR 9-11 | Tutorials TR 11-12, TR 1-2
Instructor: Thomas Laughlin
This foundational course serves as an introduction to a wide range and variety of methods for literary and textual analysis, giving students a set of interpretive tools they can use to analyze texts in English classes and beyond. Emphasis will be on developing close, attentive reading skills as ways of thinking not just about, but through texts, and on deploying these skills effectively in essays and discussions. The class will draw on literary works from a variety of countries, centuries, genres, and media. We recommend that students considering a Specialist, Major, or Minor in English take this course.
Group 1 Literary Theory/Methods
Second-Year Courses
- ENG202H5F British Literature in the World I: Medieval to Eighteenth-Century
- ENG203H5S British Literature in the World II: Romantic to Contemporary
- ENG213H5F The Short Story
- ENG234H5F Children's Literature
- ENG238H5F Fantasy Literature
- ENG289H5S Creative Writing
Course Title: British Literature in the World I: Medieval to Eighteenth-Century
Course Code: ENG202H5F | Lecture MW 9-11 | Tutorials MW 11-12, MW 1-2
Instructor: Liza Blake
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
Detailed Description by Instructor:
What is a world, and what does it mean for something like “British” literature to be “in” it? This course, a foundational course for the English major, offers an introduction to the major authors of almost nine centuries of British and English literature. We will see how something like “British” or “English” literature emerges out of the slow historical colonizations and recolonizations of the British Isles. But we will also see how the literature coming out of these isles imagines and describes other worlds within and without itself. We will focus especially on texts that imagine travel to other words (lands of faerie; distant lands occupied by monsters; utopias that imagine better societies; the New World of the Americas; other planets ruled by women scientists), and will think about how different genres (medieval theater, metaphysical poetry, sci-fi novels) project both author and reader beyond the worlds they typically inhabit.
Throughout the course, we will also question what it means to read literary texts as part of a broad historical survey, considering especially how modern understandings of the nature of history might warp our perceptions of the past. As a result, we will not only consider the “origins” of British literature but also question what it means to have an origin at all. We will embed the literary works we read in their historical contexts, but also consider the way each presents its own understanding of history, examining in particular the ways that literary texts situate themselves in times and places.
Selected Major Readings:
Medieval, early modern, and eighteenth-century literature, including Old English riddles, Bede History, Sir Orfeo, Marie de France’s Lays, Margery Kempe, Mandeville’s Travels, More’s Utopia, Cavendish’s Blazing World, Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, and poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer, Queen Elizabeth, William Shakespeare, Mary Wroth, John Donne, Hester Pulter, John Wilmot, Aphra Behn, and Phillis Wheatley
First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
Bede (English Historiography), Geoffrey of Monmouth (British Historiography), Gerald of Wales (Irish Historiography)
Method of Instruction:
Taught via fully online lectures and tutorials; both lectures and tutorials will be interactive and will run synchronously, with asynchronous options.
Method of Evaluation:
Papers, quizzes, smaller creative and analytical assignments, engaged participation
Course Title: British Literature in the World II: Romantic to Contemporary
Course Code: ENG203H5S | Lecture TR 1-2 | Tutorials TR 1-2, TR 3-4
Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard
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
Detailed Description by Instructor:
A survey of influential texts that have shaped the British literary heritage, covering poetry, drama, and prose from the Romantic period (1789-1832) to the 21st century. The course is intended to
1) familiarize students with selected major works of the history of British literature;
2) expand interpretative skills through a range of comparative and cultural studies approaches; and
3) focus on honing close reading, and critical writing and thinking skills.
All three serve to help with other courses, to broaden your historical sense of literature, and to polish critical and interpretative skills.
Selected major readings: (I have not ordered texts through the UTM Bookstore; both are available directly from Broadview—in print—and through Google Play):
1. Broadview Anthology of British Literature: One-Volume Compact Edition: The Medieval Period through the Twenty First Century. (Print: $75.95; E-edition: $44.95) https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Joseph_Black_The_Broadview_Anthology_of_British_Li?id=Y7vxBwAAQBAJ
2. Other material posted to Quercus, under modules.
Recommended Texts:
1) A good glossary, such as The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. (Ed. Murfin and Ray) Bedford.
2) A good dictionary: Oxford English Dictionary: http://www.oed.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/
First three texts/authors to be studied: Blake, “London”
Method of instruction: Synchronous Lectures (also recorded), discussion, tutorials
Method of evaluation: Written Assignments
Website: Quercus
Course Title: The Short Story
Course Code: ENG213H5F | Lecture TR 9-12
Instructor: Daniela Janes
This course explores shorter works of 19th- and 20th-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.
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
Detailed Description by Instructor:
This course examines the development of the short story from the nineteenth century to the present. We will explore stories drawn from a range of national literatures, including several works that will be studied in translation. The goal of the course is to develop your knowledge of the literary short story by examining major writers, and to build a sense of historical and theoretical context. We will consider the short story in terms of the formal features of the genre, and will seek to define some of the essential characteristics of the short story as more than, simply, a story that is short.
Selected major readings: The recommended course text is The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, Shorter 8th Edition. Some of the authors to be covered include Baldwin, Carver, Chekhov, Chopin, Faulkner, Hawthorne, Hemingway, Joyce, Kafka, Kincaid, Lahiri, Le Guin, Mansfield, de Maupassant, Melville, Munro, Oates, Poe, and Woolf.
First three texts/authors to be studied: Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown; Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher; Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener.
Method of instruction: This class will be conducted fully online and will include a combination of synchronous and asynchronous elements. Students should anticipate investing time in preparing readings, engaging with course material independently and collaboratively, contributing to online discussion, and completing several substantial writing projects.
Method of evaluation: written projects, online discussion, and engaged participation.
Course Title: Children's Literature
Course Code: ENG234H5F | Lecture MW 1-4
Instructor: Siobhan O'Flynn
A critical and historical study of poetry and fiction written for or appropriated by children, this course may also include drama or non-fiction. The authors studied may include Bunyan, Stevenson, Carroll, Twain, Alcott, Nesbit, Montgomery, Milne, Norton, Fitzhugh and Rowling.
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
Detailed Description by Instructor: Richard Van Camp, Dogrib Tłı̨chǫ writer of the Dene nation from Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, has said, “stories are good medicine.” The stories we hear as children give us road maps and role models for life’s challenges and these can be empowering or constraining. We will consider key aspects such as the classic themes of maturation and escape, the construction and performance of gender, the significance of animal protagonists, children’s & YA serial fiction, and the often didactic function of children’s literature. We will also attend to the importance of historical and cultural contexts, and how literature for younger people engages with systemic oppression, race, and gender. We will trace through the works studied the way that different writers articulate the moral core of children’s literature, that sets the clarity insight and commitment to values of the child/youth protagonist against the moral prevarications of adults.
Selected major readings (a number of texts from the following):
B. Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit; C. Perrault, selection of Fairy Tales (online);
Brothers Grimm, selection of Fairy Tales (various tales, online);
The Thousand and One Nights (various tales, online);
L. Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, Norton, ISBN 978-0393932348
A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh, McClelland & Stewart, ISBN 9780142404676
M. L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time, ISBN 978-0-312-36754-1
Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass ISBN 978-0-440-41832-0
Angie Thomas, The Hate You Give ISBN 978-0062498533
Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves ISBN 9780439023528
Critical Writing Guide: G. Graff & C. Birkenstein, They Say, I Say, 2nd Edition (free download/ PDF Quercus)
First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Perrault, Grimms, The Thousand and One Nights
Method of Instruction: Lecture, class discussion, and in-class activities
Method of Evaluation: short assignments, short essay, long essay, in-class activities
Course Title: Fantasy Literature
Course Code: ENG238H5F | Lecture TR 1-4
Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard
This course focuses on fantasy literature, film and television, and draws on a wide range of critical, cultural and theoretical approaches. As it explores the magical and supernatural, it may consider such genres as alternative histories, animal fantasy, epic, fairy tales, magic realism and swords and sorcery. Authors and texts covered will survey the history of fantasy across American, British and Canadian literature, and may include Beowulf, Butler, Carroll, Gaiman, Le Guin, Lewis, Martin, Ovid, Rowling, Shakespeare, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Swift and Tolkien.
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
Detailed Description by Instructor: This course explores fantasy literature from a variety of theoretical and critical approaches. As we read (text and graphic) novels that treat the magical, the supernatural, epic, fairy tales, and magic realism, we will be interested in intersections between fantasy and a wide range of themes: gender and sexuality, culture, politics, philosophy, and race—to name a few.
Required Reading Note:
I have NOT ordered books through the UTM Bookstore. Please purchase copies of the texts from the following
- Kindle and Paper copies: Amazon
- Electronic copies: Google Play and Comixology
1. Tolkien, J.R.R., Hobbit ISBN: 978-0261102217
Amazon:
https://www.amazon.ca/Hobbit-J-R-Tolkien/dp/0261102214/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=978-0261102217&qid=1596579810&sr=8-1
Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/books/details/J_R_R_Tolkien_The_Hobbit?id=U799AY3yfqcC
2. Kelly, Joe, I Kill Giants. ISBN: 978-1-607069850
Amazon: https://www.amazon.ca/I-Kill-Giants-Joe-Kelly/dp/1607060922/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=i+kill+giants&qid=1618327931&sr=8-3
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Joe_Kelly_I_Kill_Giants?id=4bZ_AwAAQBAJ
Comixology (You can save a PDF backup to your computer):
https://www.comixology.com/I-Kill-Giants/digital-comic/98469?ref=c2VhcmNoL2luZGV4L2Rlc2t0b3Avc2xpZGVyTGlzdC90b3BSZXN1bHRzU2xpZGVy
3. Adeyemi, Tomi, Children of Blood and Bone ISBN: 978-1250170972 Amazon: https://www.amazon.ca/Children-Blood-Bone-Tomi-Adeyemi/dp/1250170974/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=978-1250170972&qid=1596580020&sr=8-1
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Tomi_Adeyemi_Children_of_Blood_and_Bone?id=vuguDwAAQBAJ
4. Readings posted to the Quercus
First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: The Hobbit, I Kill Giants, Children of Blood and Bone
Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion
Method of Evaluation: Essays (with a creative writing option)
Website: Portal
Course Title: Creative Writing
Course Code: ENG289H5S | Lecture MW 11-1 | Tutorials MW 1-2, MW 3-4
Instructor: Kateri Lanthier
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
Detailed Description by Instructor: This course will give students the opportunity to experiment with writing in several genres: poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. We will read inspiring examples (both contemporary and older), analyze the essential components, and discuss what works. Creativity-sparking exercises and prompts will help to guide students' writing. Constructive editorial feedback will be provided in tutorials and via email. Students will complete both short and long writing assignments, with the goal of creating a chapbook-length work.
Selected Major Readings: Recommended reference books: How Fiction Works, James Woods (Picador, 2008); The Poet's Companion, Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux (W.W. Norton, 1997); The Elements of Style, Strunk and White (Pearson Canada, 1999).
Method of instruction: Lecture, class discussion, tutorial
Method of evaluation: Short quizzes, short writing assignments, long writing assignment.
Third-Year Courses
- ENG316H5S Special Topic in Modern and Contemporary Literature (Virginia Woolf and Illness)
- ENG371H5F Special Topic in World Literature (Theatres of Resistance)
- ENG375H5F Editing Literary Texts
- ENG385H5S Editing Literary Texts
Course Title: Special Topic in Modern and Contemporary Literature (Virginia Woolf and Illness)
Course Code: ENG316H5S | Lecture MW 1-4
Instructor: Daniela Janes
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.
Prerequisite: 2.0 credit in ENG, including ENG202Y5 or ENG203Y5, and 4.0 additional credits
Group n/a
Detailed Description by Instructor: This class will undertake a reading of two novels and an assortment of shorter works to investigate questions related to the literary representation of illness, mortality, and the body. As we read Woolf’s work in the context of our own historical moment living through a global pandemic, we will consider the way Woolf writes about illness in the aftermath of the 1918-19 influenza pandemic. Elizabeth Outka’s monograph, Viral Modernism (2019), invites us to consider what she calls “the pandemic’s spectral presence” and to take note of “the changes it produced on the streets, in domestic spaces, within families, and in the body.” Through our reading and analysis of Woolf’s work, this course will offer students new ways to think about the representation of illness, the body, the mind, the experience of time, and the “spectral presence” of the influenza pandemic in modernist literature.
Selected Major Readings: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and On Being Ill, and selections from Elizabeth Outka’s Viral Modernism.
First three texts/authors to be studied: Outka, Viral Modernism (Chapter One); Woolf, On Being Ill, Mrs. Dalloway.
Method of instruction: This class will be conducted fully online as a synchronous lecture/discussion class. Students should anticipate investing time in preparing readings, engaging with course material independently and collaboratively, contributing to online discussion, and completing several substantial writing projects.
Method of evaluation: written projects, discussion, and engaged participation.
Course Title: Special Topic in World Literature (Theatres of Resistance)
Course Code: ENG371H5S | Lecture WF 1-4
Instructor: Natasha Vashisht
A concentrated study of one aspect of postcolonial literature or literary culture, such as a particular genre, author, period, regional or national context, or theme, or the application of a particular critical approach.
Prerequisite: 1.0 credits in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.
Group 2 Race, Ethnicity, Diaspora, Indigeneity
Detailed Description by Instructor: This course explores the fundamental connections between theatre as a medium of cultural intervention and the revolutionary dramatic aesthetics of representative political playwrights of the post-war decades. These dramatists will be studied in their politico-cultural milieu focusing particularly on how they adapt that context to articulate protest, and cultivate resistance through a form of theatre that voices the struggle of the marginalized – tribals, workers, peasants, robbers and even madmen. An analysis of their fearless staging of disorderly capitalist, colonial, and casteist counterdiscourses should help you respond to few vital questions: More than direct action against normative categories, is revolutionary theatre a more effective form of non-violent citizen action? Can it transform a spectator into a voter, the emotions generated by spectacle into a viable means of affecting political ideology? Alternately, can theatres of protest endure as active channels of counter-information? Ngugi and Osofisan’s scourging of disorderly post-colonial states ravaged by classist and capitalist conflict, Brecht, Wesker and Fo’s staunch vindication of proletariat issues, Mahashweta Devi and Rendra’s fearless trysts with the subaltern, and many more such concerns will be tabled and critically analyzed as radical attempts to subvert status quo. In doing so, I hope that we can appreciate the significance of staging resistance, and perhaps develop a Brechtian critical conscience where, ‘One thinks feelings and one feels thoughtfully.’
Selected Major Readings:
1. Bertolt Brecht, Caucasian Chalk Circle
2. Arnold Wesker, Roots
3. Dario Fo, Accidental Death of an Anarchist
4. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi
5. Femi Osofisan, Once Upon Four Robbers
6. Mahasweta Devi, Aajir
7. WS Rendra, The Struggle of the Naga Tribe
First three texts/authors to be studied:
1. Bertolt Brecht, Caucasian Chalk Circle
2. Arnold Wesker, Roots
3. Dario Fo, Accidental Death of an Anarchist
Method of instruction: Online synchronous
Method of evaluation:
I. Early-term written response 20%
II. Mid-term written response 25 %
III. Final Creative Project 25 %
IV. Class participation and attendance 30 %
Course Title: Editing Literary Texts
Course Code: ENG375H5F | Lecture TR 1-4
Instructor: Elisa Tersigni
Students will learn the basics of literary editing for different readerships: the course will cover such topics as the selection of a base text; treatment of variants; creation of paratext; design and layout; proofs and proofchecking; and the differences between print and digital media. [36L]
Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits; or ENG289H5/ENG291H5
Group n/a
Course Title: British Romanticism 1770-1800
Course Code: ENG385H5S | Lecture WF 2-5
Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard
This course covers the early Romantic period in British Literature. Students may read novels such as Frances Burney's Evelina; plays such as Richard Brinsley Sheridan's School for Scandal; writing on the French and American Revolutions; William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience; and ballads by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hannah More and Mary Robinson.
Exclusion: ENG308Y5
Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.
Group 4 Literature 1700-1900
Detailed Description by Instructor: In surveying “early” Romanticism, which is typically comprised of the first generation of British Romantic writers such as Blake, Burney, Coleridge, Hemans, More, Robinson, and Wordsworth, we will explore intersections of literature and culture. Thus we will explore these and other writers’ roles in shaping (and being shaped by) a number of central themes, and political and cultural movements and events, that include revolution and reform (political and literary); legal and natural rights (age, gender, racial, natural/legal): Empire and Imperialism; The Slave Trade and Abolition—among others. In doing so, we are interested in investigating humanity and identity—along age, gender, race, national, and cultural lines—as we reflect on the very theory and practice of studying of English literature, periodization, and canonization.
Selected Major Readings: I have NOT ordered books through the UTM bookstore. You can purchase paper copies through Amazon and Broadview and e-copies through Google Play. Hard copies from Broadview will include a shipping fee; overall, the least expensive option will be Google Play.
Black et al., editors. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature Volume 4: The Age of Romanticism. 3rd Edition https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Joseph_Black_The_Broadview_Anthology_of_British_Li?id=n9QvDwAAQBAJ
First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: TBA
Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion
Method of Evaluation: Essays and Written Assignments