2022-2023 English Courses and Descriptions

*The Course Schedules below are subject to change pending enrolment 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
Second-Year Courses
Third-Year Courses
Fourth-Year Courses

First-Year Courses

Fall Term

ENG100H5F LEC0102 Effective Writing
ENG100H5F LEC0103 Effective Writing
ENG101H5F How to Read Critically
ENG105H5F Introduction to World Literatures
ENG121H5F Traditions of Theatre and Drama

Winter Term

ENG100H5S LEC0101 Effective Writing
ENG100H5S LEC0102 Effective Writing
ENG100H5S LEC0103 Effective Writing
ENG102H5S How to Research Literature
ENG110H5S Narrative
ENG122H5S Modern and Contemporary Theatre and Drama

Course Title: Effective Writing LEC0102

Course Code: ENG100H5F | Lecture MWF 10-11

Instructor: Chester Scoville

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 provides practical tools for writing in university and beyond, with a special focus on writing about literature. 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, but does provide foundational tools for the writing of essays in any program in the humanities.

Selected Major Readings: Graff & Birkenstein, They Say/I Say, 5th ed.; Acheson, Writing Essays about Literature, 2nd ed. Other readings will be available on Quercus.

Method of Instruction: Interactive lecture/Workshop

Method of Evaluation: Scaffolded short writing assignments building to a final portfolio. Final exam

Course Title: Effective Writing LEC0103

Course Code: ENG100H5F | Lecture T 3-4, R 3-5

Instructor: Mitchell Johnston

Group n/a

Course Title: Effective Writing LEC0101

Course Code: ENG100H5S | Lecture MWF 9-10

Instructor: Sarah Star

Group n/a

Course Title: Effective Writing LEC0102

Course Code: ENG100H5S | Lecture T 11-12, R 11-1

Instructor: Marshelle Woodward

Group n/a

Course Title: Effective Writing LEC0103

Course Code: ENG100H5S | Lecture T 3-4, R 3-5

Instructor: TBD

Group n/a

Course Title: How to Read Critically

Course Code:ENG101H5F | Lecture R 9-11 | Tutorials MT 9-10, R11-12, R12-1, R1-2, R2-3

Instructor: Marshelle Woodward

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

Detailed Description by Instructor:
The theme of our course is “dreams,” both literal and metaphorical. As Renaissance essayist Sir Thomas Browne observed, nearly one–third of our lives are spent dreaming. Yet the meaning of our dreams—their purpose and relation to our waking lives—remains elusive. Are they prophecies that foretell our future? Enigmatic revelations of our darkest desires? Mere neural responses to environmental stimuli? To what extent do our nightly dreams relate to the aspirational fancies of our daydreams or hopes for the future? Such questions have fascinated and frustrated thinkers from Plato to Sigmund Freud and twenty-first century scientists, whose contributions to the art of dream interpretation (“oneirocriticism”) have illuminated, but never definitively explained, our sleeping visions. This semester, we, too, will delve into the surreal landscapes of dreams and dream analysis as we undertake the critical reading of literature—a medium that is itself frequently compared to dreaming. Over the course of three units, we’ll sharpen our critical reading skills as we analyze dream–related literature from a variety of countries, centuries, genres, and media. In lecture, discussion, and informal and formal writing assignments, we’ll practice strategies like annotation, keyword analysis, and “new formalist” reading that will help you think about and through texts in English classes and beyond.

Selected Major Readings: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”; Lucille Clifton and Langston Hughes’s dream poems; Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun; William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: John Keats, “The Eve of Saint Agnes,” Lucille Clifton (select dream poems), Mark Turcotte, The Back When Poems

Method of Instruction: Lecture with tutorials

Method of Evaluation: Essays and exam

Course Title: How to Research Literature

Course Code: ENG102H5S | Lecture MW 11-12 | Tutorials W 12-1, W 4-5

Instructor: S arah Star

This foundational course serves as an introduction to conducting research for English courses at the university level. Skills taught will be: reading and engaging with arguments about literature; incorporating the arguments of others into your own; locating and evaluating secondary sources; and conducting primary research. The class will draw on literary works from a variety of countries, centuries, genres and media. The class will normally culminate in a longer research paper, developed over the course of the semester. We recommend that students considering a Specialist, Major or a Minor in English take this course.

Group n/a

Course Title: Introduction to World Literatures

Course Code: ENG105H5F | Lecture TR 11-12 | Tutorials T 12-1, T 4-5

Instructor: Anna Thomas

Students will learn about contemporary creative writing in English from around the world. The course will cover the work of some famous writers, such as Toni Morrison or J.M. Coetzee, and also new and emerging authors, from Canada to New Zealand to Nigeria.

Exclusion: ENG140Y5

Group n/a

Detailed Description by Instructor:

This class approaches the category of “world literature” through an introduction to and thinking with anticolonial and postcolonial writing. We will read writers from South Asian, African, and Caribbean contexts, through whom we will examine questions of representation, genre, identification, and power in response to empire and its legacies, scaling from the person to the planet.

Selected Major Readings:
M.K. Gandhi, Aimé Césaire, Chinua Achebe, V.S. Naipaul, Wole Soyinka, Jamaica Kincaid, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amitav Ghosh

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
M.K. Gandhi, Manto, Lahiri.

Method of Instruction:
Lectures and tutorials

Method of Evaluation:
Essays and a final exam.

Course Title: Narrative

Course Code: ENG110H5S | Lecture MW 10-11 | Tutorials M 11-12, W 11-12, W 12-1

Instructor: Chester Scoville

This course gives students skills for analyzing the stories that shape our world: traditional literary narratives such as ballads, romances and novels, and also the kinds of stories we encounter in non-literary contexts such as journalism, movies, myths, jokes, legal judgments, travel writing, histories, songs, diaries and biographies.

Exclusion: ENG110Y5

Group n/a

Detailed Description by Instructor:

Thomas King says, “The truth about stories is that’s all we are.” This course will examine the phenomenon of the story both as an art form and as a tool that people use to make sense of their lives in the world. We will focus on literary narrative as a particularly rich variety, but our analyses will apply broadly, to narratives found in history, law, politics, and more. As an introductory English course, ENG110 will also focus on student writing and analytical techniques, so that students may begin to master the art of the scholarly essay. By the end of the course, students should be able to construct and present analytical arguments in forms appropriate to literary studies and other humanistic disciplines.

Selected Major Readings: Hemingway, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”; James, The Turn of the Screw; Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”; Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Hemingway, James, Le Guin

Method of Instruction: Lecture with Tutorials

Method of Evaluation: Scaffolded short writing assignments capped by a final paper and final exam. Participation in tutorials will also be counted.

Course Title: Traditions of Theatre and Drama

Course Code: ENG121H5F | Lecture MW 11-12 | Tutorials M 12-1, M 2-3

Instructor: Holger Syme

An introductory survey of the forms and history of world drama in its performance context from the classical period to the 19th century. May include later works influenced by historical forms and one or more plays in the Theatre Erindale schedule of production. May include a research performance component. This course is also listed as DRE121H5.

Exclusion: ENG125Y1

Group n/a

Course Title: Modern and Contemporary Theatre and Drama

Course Code: ENG122H5S | Lecture MW 10-11 | Tutorials W 12-1, W 1-2

Instructor: Lawrence Switzky

An introductory survey of the forms and history of world drama from the late 19th century to the present in its performance context. May include film adaptations and one or more plays in the Theatre Erindale schedule of productions. May include a research performance component. This course is also listed as DRE122H5.

Exclusion: ENG125Y1

Group n/a

Detailed Description by Instructor: Picking up where DRE121 left off, this course is an introduction to selected plays, aesthetic theories, and performance techniques from the nineteenth century to (roughly) the present. We’ll watch theatre artists contend with the dominant philosophical ideas, aesthetic values, and political realities of their time, as they attempt to create artworks capable of responding to—or even creating—a modern world. While doing so, they transformed the molecular structure of theatre, pulling apart traditional ways of understanding narrative, illusion, and character—destroying the old, to make way for the new.

Selected Major Readings: A range of modern and contemporary plays, manifestos, and contextual materials.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Ibsen, A Doll’s House; others TBA

Method of Instruction: Lecture, class discussion, discussion-based tutorials.

Method of Evaluation: Final exam, short papers, creative project, class and tutorial participation.

Second-Year Courses

Fall Term

ENG202H5F British Literature in the World I: Medieval to Eighteenth-Century
ENG204H5F How to Read Poetry
ENG214H5F The Short Story Cycle
ENG218H5F Interactive Storytelling & Worldmaking
ENG237H5F Science Fiction
ENG238H5F Fantasy Literature
ENG251H5F Introduction to American Literature
ENG255H5F Introduction to Canadian Literature
ENG273H5F Literatures of Immigration and Exile
ENG274H5F Indigenous Literatures
ENG280H5F Critical Approaches to Literature
ENG289H5F Creative Writing

Winter Term

ENG203H5S British Literature in the World II: Romantic to Contemporary
ENG206H5S Rhetorical Criticism
ENG211H5S Introduction to the Novel
ENG215H5S The Canadian Short Story
ENG223H5S Introduction to Shakespeare
ENG235H5S Comics and the Graphic Novel
ENG236H5S Detective Fiction
ENG239H5S Horror Literature
ENG261H5S Music and Literature
ENG263H5S Play and Games
ENG275H5S Feminist Approaches to Literature
ENG291H5S Reading for Creative Writing

Course Title: British Literature in the World I: Medieval to Eighteenth-Century

Course Code: ENG202H5F | Lecture MW 10-11 | Tutorials W 4-5, W 6-7

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 our 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:
Exeter Book Riddles; Marie de France’s lais; The Travels of Sir John Mandeville; Sir Orfeo; Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales; The Second Shepherd’s Play; The Book of Margery Kempe; Thomas More, Utopia; Thomas Hariott, Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia; Margaret Cavendish, Blazing World; Aphra Behn, Oroonoko; Olaudah Equiano, Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; romantic, erotic, political, and metaphysical poetry by Thomas Wyatt, Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Sidney Herbert, Philip Sidney, Mary Wroth, William Shakespeare, John Donne, George Herbert, Margaret Cavendish, Hester Pulter, Thomas Traherne, Phillis Wheatley, and more.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”; (from) Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People; (from) Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain

Method of Instruction: Twice-weekly interactive lectures and once-weekly tutorials tutorials

Method of Evaluation: Creative and analytical writing assignments; take-home quizzes; participation in discussion-oriented tutorials

Course Title: British Literature in the World II: Romantic to Contemporary

Course Code: ENG203H5S | Lecture TR 10-11 | Tutorials T 11-12, T 1-2

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.

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.

Course Texts:
The following have been ordered through the UTM Bookstore, and are available 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. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. Ed. Jo-Ann Wallace. Broadview: ISBN: 9781551117232 (Print: $12.95; E-edition: $11.95) https://play.google.com/store/search?q=9781770483248&c=books

3. 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 Text/ Authors to be Studied: TBA and Blake, “London”
Method of Instruction: In Person lectures and tutorials; class discussion
Method of Evaluation: Written Assignments
Website: Quercus

Course Title: How to Read Poetry

Course Code: ENG204H5F | Lecture M 3-5, W 3-4

Instructor: Brent Wood

This course gives students the tools they need to appreciate and understand poetry's traditional and experimental forms, specialized techniques and diverse ways of using language. The course asks a fundamental question for literary studies: why is poetry such an important mode of expression in so many different time periods, locations and cultures?

Exclusion: ENG201Y5
Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Group 1 Literary Theory/Methods

Course Title: Rhetorical Criticism

Course Code: ENG206H5S | Lecture MWF 3-4

Instructor: Chester Scoville

This course will use the tools and perspectives of rhetoric, from the Sophists to the postmodern, to analyze and critique the texts and other cultural artifacts that surround us. Much of what we encounter in the cultural realm is an argument; the task in this course will be to understand and engage with those arguments. Students will analyze the rhetoric of poetry, fiction, and drama, as well as of news stories, speeches, video, images, and more.

Prerequisites: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits. Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in any 100-level ENG or DRE course (except ENG100H5) may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.

Group 1 Literary Theory/Methods

Course Title: Introduction to the Novel

Course Code: ENG211H5S | Lecture MWF 12-1

Instructor: Thomas Laughlin

This course gives students a foundational understanding of the novel in English. It introduces them to the history of the novel, from medieval sagas and adventure stories to modern experiments with fragmentary narratives. The course covers novels from a range of geographical places; students will be asked to consider why the novel has been so successful in the past, and what its futures might be. Students will read at least one complete novel during the course and extracts from others. [36L]

Exclusion: ENG210Y
Prerequisites: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits. Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in any 100-level ENG or DRE course (except ENG100H5) may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.

Group n/a

Course Title: The Short Story Cycle

Course Code: ENG214H5F | Lecture MW 9-11, 9-10

Instructor: Daniela Janes

This course explores collections of short stories. It examines individual stories, the relationships among and between stories, the dynamics of the collection as a whole, and the literary history of this genre, along with its narrative techniques and thematic concerns.

Group n/a

Course Title: The Canadian Short Story

Course Code: ENG215H5S | Lecture MWF 9-10

Instructor: Daniela Janes

An introduction to the Canadian short story, this course emphasizes its rich variety of settings, subjects and styles.

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Group 5 Canadian Literature

Course Title: Interactive Storytelling & Worldmaking

Course Code: ENG218H5F | Lecture W 11-12, F 11-1

Instructor: Siobhan O'Flynn

This course examines the deep history and extraordinary diversity of interactive storytelling, with a focus on narrative art in digital games, transmedia/cross-platform projects, alternate reality and pervasive games, theme parks, and immersive performances, as well as literary texts and films. We will consider forms (e.g., riddles, parables, metafiction, branching narratives) that require participatory agency, choice-based and emergent storytelling, as well as genres (e.g., creation myths, planetary romances, travelogues, adventure fiction, Expressionist cinema) that discover or assemble a narrative by traversing a world. We will also explore the contexts and theoretical grounds of reader- and player-centric approaches.

Prerequisites: Open to students who have successfully completed a minimum of 4.0 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.

Group n/a

Course Title: Introduction to Shakespeare

Course Code: ENG223H5S | Lecture MW 11-12 | TUT M 12-1, M 4-5

Instructor: Holger Syme

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.

Group 3 Literature pre-1700

Course Title: Comics and the Graphic Novel

Course Code: ENG235H5S | Lecture MWF 12-1

Instructor: Chester Scoville

An introduction to the writing and sequential art of comics and graphic novels, this course includes fictional and nonfictional comics by artists such as Will Eisner, Art Spiegelman, Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Julie Doucet, Marjane Satrapi, Chester Brown and Seth.

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Group n/a

Detailed Description by Instructor:
The graphic novel, comic books, sequential art — whatever its name, this popular but long-marginalized art form has been rapidly gaining cultural respectability. Over the past twenty years, artists and writers in this medium have departed from its traditional subject matter to create graphic autobiographies, journalism, political analyses, philosophical arguments and histories, as well as revisiting, critiquing and reinventing such familiar subjects as magic, science fiction and the superhero. This course will examine the range of the current graphic novel, focusing on the medium’s rhetoric, narration and socio-political range.

Selected Major Readings: We will be reading such literary graphic texts as Seth’s It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken; Meags Fitzgerald's Photobooth, and Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters, as well as some mainstream comics such as Grant Morrison’s Animal Man. We will also use such resources as Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics as theoretical and historical background.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: McCloud, Seth, Fitzgerald

Method of Instruction: Online, asynchronous lecture/synchronous discussion, unless we will have returned to classrooms by then.

Method of Evaluation: There will be several short writing assignments, leading up to a substantial final essay.

Course Title: Detective Fiction

Course Code: ENG236H5S | Lecture MWF 10-11

Instructor: Daniela Janes

At least 12 works by such authors as Poe, Dickens, Collins, Doyle, Chesterton, Christie, Sayers, Van Dine, Hammett, Chandler, Faulkner, P.D. James, Rendell.

Group n/a

Course Title: Science Fiction

Course Code: ENG237H5S | Lecture T 9-11, R 9-10

Instructor: Stanka Radovic

This course explores speculative fiction that invents or extrapolates an inner or outer cosmology from the physical, life, social, and human sciences. Typical subjects include AI, alternative histories, cyberpunk, evolution, future and dying worlds, genetics, space/time travel, strange species, theories of everything, utopias, and dystopias. [36L]

Prerequisites: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits. Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in any 100-level ENG or DRE course (except ENG100H5) may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.

Group n/a

Detailed Description by Instructor:
Contemporary science/speculative/dystopian fiction re-imagines our social landscapes. Our course will explore how this genre offers alternative perspectives on the existing social order, envisions the consequences of environmental degradation, revises the norms of individual and communal identity, and re-conceptualizes categories of race and gender. Challenging readers’ expectations about the meaning of history, community, and identity, the assigned texts propose radically different, yet strangely familiar, visions of our world. What alternative social environments will we find in these readings and how will they affect our relationship to the world we actually live in?

Selected Major Readings:
Fredric Brown “Knock”; Douglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide Through the Galaxy; Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep; Larissa Lai “Rachel”; J. G. Ballard “The Subliminal Man”; Ursula Le Guin “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”; Octavia Butler Kindred; Omar El Akkad “Factory Air”; Helen Phillips “The Disaster Store”

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
Fredric Brown “Knock”; Douglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide Through the Galaxy; Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep;

Method of Instruction:
Lectures, class discussions, Quercus discussion board

Method of Evaluation:
Class participation (15%), Assignment 1 (25%), Assignment 2 (25%), Assignment 3 (35%)

Course Title: Fantasy Literature

Course Code: ENG238H5F | Lecture MWF 12-1

Instructor: Chester Scoville

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.

Group n/a

Detailed Description by Instructor: Fantasy literature is, as Brian Attebery puts it, the literature of making the oldest stories say new things. Or, to look at it from Seo-Young Chu’s perspective, it is the art of making literary techniques themselves into the story. These two critical perspectives will begin our reading of fantasy fiction, which will range from early modern fairy and folk tales through some classics of 19th and 20th-century literary fantasy, to contemporary tales of the fantastic in modern settings. Along the way, we will focus on how fantasy transforms the concrete realities of place, space, and everyday life into something unfamiliar, and how readers experience and interact with its complex rhetorical modes. We will also consider fantasy as a popular and cultural phenomenon, asking why it has become so important to so many people in our modern, technological, apparently disenchanted age.

Selected Major Readings: We will read a number of fantasies old and new, including fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, Tolkien’s The Hobbit, LeGuin’s The Tombs of Atuan, and Clarke’s Piranesi, as well as locally-situated texts such as Bobet’s Above and Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Andersen, Tolkien, LeGuin

Method of Instruction: Lecture/discussion. Although group work will not be a marked component of the course, it will be an integral part of classroom discussion.

Method of Evaluation: There will be several short writing assignments, leading up to a substantial final essay.

Course Title: Horror Literature

Course Code: ENG239H5S | Lecture T 1-3, R 2-3

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

A critical and historical critical introduction to gothic literature, film, and television covering such authors as Carter, King, Lovecraft, Matheson, Poe, Rice, Shelley, Stevenson, and Stoker. The course draws on diverse critical and theoretical approaches as it examines a wide range of national and cultural contexts. It focuses on the gothic in broad terms and such concepts and issues as fear, horror, terror, the monstrous, the mythological, and the supernatural. [36L]

Prerequisites: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits. Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in any 100-level ENG or DRE course (except ENG100H5) may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.

Group n/a

Detailed Description by Instructor: This course explores horror literature. In this year’s version of the course, we are interested monsters (vampires, in particular), but will explore numerous facets of horror: As we consider the aesthetics of terror, horror, the gothic, the uncanny, and fear, we will explore issues of gender, race, genre, science, and religion.

Course Texts:
Note: I have ordered books through the UTM bookstore; texts are available through Amazon—or through Google Play (which will be the least expensive and most convenient option).

Note: the flowing-text-only format of GP editions will see the page numbers vary from my teaching editions (which can be overcome in part by using the search feature of GP.)

1. Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies ISBN Paper Copy 978-1-4391-9232-0 (Simon and Schuster) https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Isaac_Marion_Warm_Bodies?id=jzXvEhfnpDIC

2. Anne Rice, Interview with a Vampire ISBN Paper Copy: 978-0-345-33766-5 https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Anne_Rice_Interview_with_the_Vampire?id=MbW3_eSDGl4C

3. Stephen King, Misery ISBN Paper Copy 978-1501143106 https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Stephen_King_Misery?id=QbUACwAAQBAJ

4. Pichetshote and Campbell, Infidel ISBN Paper Copy: 978-1534308367 https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Pornsak_Pichetshote_Infidel?id=K-ptDwAAQBAJ

5. Other material posted to “Modules” on Quercus—compiled in a course pack

Texts on Quercus

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: short stories: Keevil, Lovecraft, Gillman (in course pack)

Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion

Method of Evaluation: essays (with a creative writing option) and written assignments

Website: Quercus

Course Title: Introduction to American Literature

Course Code: ENG251H5F | Lecture M 1-3, W 1-2

Instructor: Melissa Gniadek

This course introduces students to major works in American literature in a variety of genres, from poetry and fiction to essays and slave narratives.

Exclusion: ENG250Y5

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Group 6 American Literature

Detailed Description by Instructor:

In recent years we have again been reminded that the ideals espoused in the founding documents of the United States are not, in fact, realities. Inequalities and systemic racism surface again and again as America constantly reassesses its present in relation to its past. While protests have taken on new urgency recently, protest itself is not new. Since the beginnings of the U.S. as a nation, writers have used various genres to point to the limitations of practices of freedom and equality in the U.S. In this course we will examine examples of these writings, from Phillis Wheatley’s late 18th-century poems to Claudia Rankine’s 21st-century prose poem. Along the way we’ll think about how the experiment of the United States is constantly being revised and critiqued. As we investigate forms of protest, some overt and radical and others rather quiet, we’ll carefully close read texts to think about how authors position their readers to raise political and ethical questions. At the same time, we’ll develop a sense of major literary periods and movements that will provide a groundwork for future study of American literature.

Selected Major Readings:

Phillis Wheatley poems
Hannah Foster, The Coquette
David Walker’s Appeal
Herman Melville, Benito Cereno
Charles Chesnutt short stories
Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:

Lemuel Haynes, “Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Thoughts on the Illegality of Slave-keeping”
Phillis Wheatley poems
Hannah Foster, The Coquette

Method of Instruction:

lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation:

online discussion forum, short writing assignments, essays (4-6 pages), active participation.

Course Title: Introduction to Canadian Literature

Course Code: ENG255H5F | Lecture T 9-11, R 10-11

Instructor: Sarah Star

This course introduces students to Canadian literatures, from the oral narratives of Canada's early Indigenous communities to new writing in a digital age.

Exclusion: ENG252Y5

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 5 Canadian Literature

Detailed Description by Instructor: Canadian writers grapple with ideas about the relationship between space (geographical, cultural, imagined) and identity in a variety of ways and from a wide range of perspectives. In our course, we will analyze ideas about home, loss, belonging, citizenship, immigration, colonization, landscape, space, and identity that characterize Canadian literature. We will ask, for example, to what extent is “national identity” stable? What makes a text “transnational”? How do Canadian writers use landscape and space to think through issues of identity? We will analyze the complexities and pluralities of cultural identities in Canada, and in doing so we will uncover more nuanced and accurate truths about Canadian Literature.

Selected Major Readings: Thomas King, Green Grass, Running Water; David Chariandy, Brother; Dionne Brand, thirsty

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Lee Maracle, “Goodbye Snauq”; Alice Munro, “Dear Life”; Souvankham Thammavongsa, “How to Pronounce Knife”

Method of Instruction: Lecture and Class Discussion

Method of Evaluation:

Presentations (20%)
Book Review or Short Story Response (20%)
Poetry Paper (20%)
Final Paper or Podcast (25%)
Participation (15%)

Course Title: Music and Literature

Course Code: ENG261H5S | Lecture M 2-3, W 1-3

Instructor: Brent Wood

This course introduces students to the intersection of music and literature. We will study how melody, rhythm and texture interact with language, story and performance using examples from folk ballads and blues, art-songs, popular songs, musical theatre, jazz and hiphop, as well as poems inspired by musical styles and performers. Works to be covered may include folksongs collected by Francis Child and Alan Lomax, Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies, popular songs by Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, theatrical works by Bertolt Brecht, Stephen Sondheim and Lin-Manuel Miranda, performances by The Last Poets, hiphop lyrics by Public Enemy, and poems by William Blake, William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Don McKay.

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Group n/a

Course Title: Play and Games

Course Code: ENG263H5S | Lecture MW 3-4 | TUT F10-11, F12-1

Instructor: Lawrence Switzky

Why do we play? Game designers, authors, philosophers, and sociologists have long claimed that play can tell us about our development as children and adults, our search for freedom, why we enjoy art, our relationship to animals, and our pursuit of social justice. This course introduces students to Play Studies and Game Studies from. Humanistic perspective by considering the reasons we play in relationship to the objects we play with, including things that are more normally thought of as games—card and board games, sports, toys, video games—as well as other sites of playful thought and action, like paintings, films, fashion, and short stories. Students in this course will play and design story-rich games and will discuss effective narrative design across a wide variety of tabletop and digital games. Students will also consider problems in play and games like cheating, addiction, and gamification.

Group n/a

Selected Major Readings: A range of short essays on play and games, short stories, and plenty of tabletop and digital games.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:

Reading: Will Wright, “Dream Machines”; Roger Ebert, “Video games can never be art”; Friedrich Schiller, selection from Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man

Playing: Mazapan, “You Have to Burn the Rope”; Pippin Barr, “Art Game”; Takuma Okada, Alone Among the Stars; Momatoes, Tiny Stories

Method of Instruction: Lectures; discussions; game design workshops; game and play jams

Method of Evaluation: Attendance and participation, two critical play blogs, two story-into-game assignments, final story-game project

Course Title: Literatures of Immigration and Exile

Course Code: ENG273H5F | Lecture M 6-9

Instructor: Raji Soni

In this course we will study literary and non-literary texts in English from the 19th century to the present day that come from colonial and postcolonial contexts and that speak to the experience of those affected by colonization, immigration, exile, war and globalization. Students will be introduced to postcolonial theory and questions about race, ethnicity, religious difference and diasporas in Anglophone literary studies. They may study texts by Conrad, James, Beckett, Joyce, Rhys, Pound, Ionesco, Nabokov, Koestler, Brodsky, Naipaul, Achebe, Kundera, Skvorecky, Rushdie, Gallant, Sebald, Ondaatje, Danticat, Ali and Nafisi.

Exclusion: ENG253Y5, ENG270Y1, ENG270Y5, ENG272H5
Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Group 2 Race, Ethnicity, Diaspora, Indigeneity

Course Title: Indigenous Literatures

Course Code: ENG274H5F | Lecture M 11-12, W 11-1

Instructor: Daniela Janes

An introduction to Indigenous literature with emphasis on writers from Canada's First Nations. Readings will be considered in the context of global aboriginal cultures and oral traditions. Texts may include fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction by writers such as Sherman Alexie, Jeannette Armstrong, Michael Dorris, Tomson Highway, Basil Johnston, Thomas King, Lee Maracle, Daniel David Moses, Eden Robinson andLeslie Marmon Silko.

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 2 Race, Ethnicity, Diaspora, Indigeneity

Course Title: Feminist Approaches to Literature

Course Code: ENG275H5S | Lecture T 11-12, R 11-1

Instructor: Anna Thomas

This course will consider the implications, for literary studies and for literary writing, of modern traditions of feminist and gender theory. Students will encounter the work of major feminist thinkers — e.g., Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Alice Walker, Julie Kristeva, and Judith Butler — and texts by major women writers. The course will explore feminist approaches to literature, including those that borrow from post-structural, psychoanalytic, and contemporary gender, race and queer theories.

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Group 1 Literary Theory/Methods

Detailed Description by Instructor:
This course will begin with the question of what constitutes a "feminist approach" by examining how positionality and perspective have been pursued in many feminist theories. The scale, methodology, and constituency of the "approach" can range from the individual to the institutional; the communal to the political; the local to the transnational; from solidarity to critique. Together the class will build a vocabulary for analyzing the emphases and omissions of the feminist literary tradition, ending with a particular emphasis on Black Feminism.

Selected Major Readings: Selections from A Room of One’s Own, Gertrude Stein, Simone de Beauvoir, bell hooks, June Jordan.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Saidiya Hartman, Mary Wollstonecraft, Phillis Wheatley

Method of Instruction: Lectures and discussion

Method of Evaluation: short written assignments, essays, exam

Course Title: Critical Approaches to Literature

Course Code: ENG280H5F | Lecture M 11-1 | Tutorials M 1-2, M 3-4, M 5-6

Instructor: Daniel Wright

An introduction to literary theory and its central questions, such as the notion of literature itself, the relation between literature and reality, the nature of literary language, the making of literary canons and the roles of the author and the reader.

Exclusion: ENG267H5
Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Group n/a

Detailed Description by Instructor:

What does it mean to adopt a “critical approach” to literature, and why it is any better than just reading and interpreting? This question has long animated debates over the role of “theory” (a variety of ways of thinking philosophically about the nature of literature, literary language, form, meaning, and interpretation) in the study and interpretation of literature in universities. In a recent essay, Kinohi Nishikawa describes how the rise of theory in literature departments in the 1980’s led to an urgent debate, for example, among scholars of African-American literature, some of whom thought that theory helped them to emphasize the “formal complexity and aesthetic autonomy” of Black literature, and others of whom thought theory “could not help but evoke a Eurocentric bias, and thus had limited analytical value for studying the black experience, including its literature and culture.”

In this course, we’ll survey a variety of theoretical schools and movements, from formalism to deconstruction to historicism to queer theory, with our survey introduced and framed by this debate among scholars of African-American literature over the nature and usefulness of theory as well as its emphasis on a white European philosophical history. Framing the survey in this way will help us to think throughout the course about theory’s consequences for how we read and for what we read. As Toni Morrison argued in her Nobel Prize lecture of 1993, a writer “thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as an agency—as an act with consequences.” If we adopt any given critical approach, what are the consequences of that act? What effect does that approach have? What does it do to the language we use and read and interpret as writers, readers, and scholars?

Selected Major Readings:
Subject to change, but likely to include many of the following: Henry Louis Gates, Barbara Christian, bell hooks, Cleanth Brooks, Angela Leighton, Caroline Levine, Jacques Derrida, Barbara Johnson, Michel Foucault, Catherine Gallagher, Stephen Greenblatt, Karl Marx, Sianne Ngai, Sigmund Freud, Leo Bersani, Cathy Caruth, Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, Hélène Cixous, Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, José Esteban Muñoz, C. Riley Snorton, Audre Lorde, Hortense Spillers, Zadie Smith, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, Rita Felski

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:

Henry Louis Gates, introduction to Figures in Black
Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory”
bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness”

Method of Instruction: Lecture

Method of Evaluation: Writing assignments, final take-home exam, participation

Course Title: Creative Writing

Course Code: ENG289H5S | Lecture MW 12-1 | Tutorials W 1-2, W 3-4, W 4-5, W 6-7

Instructor: Brent Wood

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.

Group n/a

Course Title: Reading for Creative Writing

Course Code: ENG291H5S | Lecture TR 10-11 | Tutorials R 11-12, R 2-3

Instructor: Lamees Al Ethari

This course will help students to see connections between their reading and their work as creative writers. They will read texts in a variety of literary and non-literary genres and consider the way that writers learn their craft from other writers. Practical assignments will encourage students to find creative ways to critique, imitate, speak to and borrow responsibly from the work they read.

Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Group n/a

Third-Year Courses

Fall Term

ENG311H5F Medieval Literature
ENG316H5F Special Topic in Modern and Contemporary Literature (Dungeons & Dragons & Roleplaying)
ENG323H5F Austen and Her Contemporaries
ENG325H5F The Victorian Novel
ENG339H5F Early Modern Women Writers
ENG343H5F World Drama
ENG349H5F Contemporary Poetry
ENG373H5 F Creative Writing: Poetry
ENG380H5F History of Literary Theory
ENG385H5F British Romanticism, 1770-1800
ENG388H5F Spaces of Fiction
ENG392H5F Canadian Fiction

Winter Term

ENG303H5S Milton
ENG309H5S Anishinaabe Storytelling & Oral Tradition
ENG310H5S Modern South Asian Literatures in English
ENG313H5S Margaret Cavendish’s Drama: Performing the Unperformable
ENG330H5S Medieval Drama
ENG347H5S The Nineteenth-Century American Novel
ENG352H5S Canadian Drama
ENG360H5S Early American Literature
ENG367H5S African American Literature
ENG371H5S Special Topic in World Literatures (Living a Feminist Life)
ENG374H5 S Creative Writing: Prose
ENG377H5S Special Topic in Creative Writing (Documentary Poetics: Activist Writing in the Archives)
ENG386H5S British Romanticism, 1800-1830
ENG396H5S Literary Theory Now

Course Title: Milton

Course Code: ENG303H5S | Lecture T1-3, R 2-3

Instructor: Marshelle Woodward

Selections from Paradise Lost and other works.

Prerequisites: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.

Group 3 Literature pre-1700

Course Title: Anishinaabe Storytelling & Oral Tradition

Course Code: ENG309H5S | Lecture F 1-4

Instructor: Maria Hupfield

An introduction to the legends, beliefs, and values of the Anishinaabek Nation. Students will explore literary and non-literary texts, media, and/or performances, spanning traditional and innovative forms, genres, and mediums. Content may include contributions by Basil Johnston, Jane School Craft, George Copway, Richard Wagamese, Winona LaDuke, Margaret Noodin, Drew Hayden Taylor, Louise Erdrich, Waubgeshig Rice, Alan Corbiere, Isaac Murdoch, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Debajehmujig Theatre Group, and Aanmitaagzi.

Prerequisites: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.

Group 2 Race, Ethnicity, Diaspora, Indigeneity

Course Title: Modern South Asian Literatures in English

Course Code: ENG310H5S | Lecture M 11-1, W 12-1

Instructor: Raji Soni

The English language belongs not just to the British conquerors, but also (and perhaps more so) to the artists and writers, the poets and politicians of the colonized world. From Rabindranath Tagore’s mystical poetry to Slumdog Millionaire, the styles and aesthetics of South Asian English are as vast as the peninsula itself, and the literature that has emerged from this diverse region has utterly reshaped contemporary global culture. Additionally, we will take up select contemporary criticism on subaltern studies, postcolonialism, and narratology. Authors will include Anand, Naipaul, Narayan, Suleri, Rushdie, Roy, Lahiri, as well as select works of poetry, film, and visual art.

Prerequisites: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3 additional credits

Group 2 Race, Ethnicity, Diaspora, Indigeneity

Course Title: Medieval Literature

Course Code: ENG311H5F | MWF 2-3

Instructor: Chester Scoville

This course explores a selection of writings in from medieval Britain, excluding the works of Chaucer.

Prerequisites: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.

Group 3 Literature pre-1700

Detailed Description by Instructor:

The literature of the late Middle Ages is a rich field, whose best works speak across the centuries. Stories of honour, loss, isolation, friendship, hope, tragedy – all familiar human experiences come to us in medieval literature, yet framed in a series of assumptions that are not those of our modern world. Understanding how people with a very different view of the world asked and answered vital questions can help us understand our own experiences and reframe our understanding of them; the literature of the Middle Ages, though powerful in its own right, speaks to us vitally today. This course will constitute an in-depth critical selection of Middle English literature, focusing first on aspects of the language and some short textual examples, and then moving to analysis of three major texts of the 14th and 15th centuries. Previous knowledge of Middle English (such as a Chaucer course) is recommended but not required.

Selected Major Readings: We will consider a number of short poems and selections of longer ones, in Fulk’s textbook and anthology An Introduction to Middle English. This book will also serve as a reference guide to the language itself. We will then work in-depth with three major late-medieval texts: Pearl: Text and Translation, ed. Beal; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Winny; and Malory, Le Morte DArthur: Selections, ed. Okrun.

First Three Texts/Authors to Be Studied: Fulk, Pearl, Sir Gawain.

Method of Instruction: Lecture/discussion. Although group work will not be a marked component of the course, it will be an integral part of classroom discussion.

Method of Evaluation: There will be several short writing assignments, leading up to a substantial final essay; participation on discussion boards will also be marked.

Course Title: Margaret Cavendish’s Drama: Performing the Unperformable

Course Code: ENG313H5S | Lecture M 3-5, W 4-5

Instructor: Liza Blake

A concentrated study of one aspect of early modern British literature or literary culture, such as a particular subgenre or author, specific theme, or the application of a particular critical approach. Topics may vary from year to year.

Prerequisites: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.

Group 3 Literature pre-1700

Detailed Description by Instructor:
This class will offer an intensive study of the plays of Margaret Cavendish, with a goal to reimagining them for modern theatrical productions. We will read canonical plays like her Convent of Pleasure and Bell in Campo, as well as her more experimental drama, such as her play The Presence, for which she wrote optional bonus “Scenes” to be inserted, or The Comical Hash, which is a collection of scenes that seemingly refuse to cohere into any plot. Readings will also include her dramatic criticism (e.g., of Shakespeare) from her volume Sociable Letters, descriptions of the theater from her novel Blazing World, and selections from her philosophical works to help understand some of the theories of Nature, gender, and movement underlying her drama. Though none of her plays were ever publicly performed during her lifetime, we will constantly imagine what it would mean to realize them on a modern stage.

Selected Major Readings: Selected plays from Margaret Cavendish’s two volumes of plays, likely including at least Convent of Pleasure, Bell in Campo, The Presence, and The Comical Hash.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: We will begin by reading the several letters “To the Reader” Cavendish writes about her own drama at the front of her first collection of plays.

Method of Instruction: Interactive (discussion-based) lectures

Method of Evaluation: Creative and analytical writing assignments; take-home “quizzes”; scene performance(s); editorial experiment

Course Title: Special Topic in Modern and Contemporary Literature (Dungeons & Dragons & Roleplaying)

Course Code: ENG316H5F | Lecture W 1-2, F 1-3

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

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. Topics may vary from year to year.

Prerequisites: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.

Group n/a

Detailed Description by Instructor:

Role-Playing Games (RPGs) are more popular than ever because they band together people in a powerful and shared social, emotional, and intellectual experience during a time when we have been isolated, distanced, and quarantined. A form of immersive entertainment that requires players to co-create the game, in this course we will study RPGs by playing games. In this course, we will critically investigate (and immerse ourselves) in the dynamics of how players actively make, improvise, and author the narrative of RPGs broadly and Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) in particular.

This is, in part, a hands-on and experiential course: we will play D&D in small breakout groups as we discuss the history, theory, and design of RPGs. In doing so, we will balance theory and practice, exploring games studies and theories of play, gaming, and role-playing as we examine the literary, gaming, and cultural influences that shaped D&D. RPGs and D&D thus become vehicles for framing discussions about race, gender, politics, ideology, culture, game theory and design, and about the vital social impact that games play in shaping humanity.

Eng 316 is one of three Game Studies courses that we are offering in the Department of English and Drama, with an eye to launching a Game Studies minor in September 2023.

Course Texts:

1] D&D [Dungeons and Dragons] Essentials Kit ISBN 978-0-7869-6683-7 ~ UT Bookstore: https://www.uoftbookstore.com/adoption-search-results?ccid=24567&itemid=75904 ~ Amazon: https://www.amazon.ca/Dungeons-Dragons-Essentials-Kit-Boxed/dp/0786966831]

2] All other course material will be posted top Quercus, under Modules

Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion; Game Play

Method of Evaluation: Written Assignments; Informed Course Contribution

Website: Quercus

Course Title: Austen and Her Contemporaries

Course Code: ENG323H5F | Lecture T 11-1, R 11-12

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

A study of selected novels by Austen and of works by such contemporaries as Radcliffe, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Edgeworth, Scott and Shelley, in the context of the complex literary, social and political relationships of that time.

Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits

Group 4 Literature 1700-1900

Detailed Description by Instructor: A study of selected novels (and fiction) by Austen and her contemporaries as Lewis, Radcliffe, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Edgeworth, Scott, and Shelley, in the context of the complex literary, social, and political relationships of that time.

Required Reading: All editions are published by Broadview, and we will use the introductions and appendixes of these books. I have ordered texts through the UTM bookstore. Electronic versions of the Broadview editions are available at Google Play; paper copies are available through Broadview and Amazon).

Book info at UT bookstore:

1] Austen, Northanger Abbey (2nd edition) ISBN: 9781551114798 / 1551114798 Broadview (paper copy): https://broadviewpress.com/product/northanger-abbey-second-edition/#tab-description Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Jane_Austen_Northanger_Abbey_Second_Edition?id=YKScaPvtxrcC

2] Shelley, Frankenstein (3rd edition) ISBN: 9781554811038 / 1554811031 Broadview: https://broadviewpress.com/product/frankenstein-third-edition/#tab-description GP: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Mary_Shelley_Frankenstein_Third_Edition?id=UQc52fOn3hUC

3] Austen, Pride and Prejudice (2nd edition) ISBN: 9781554814893 / 1554814898 Broadview: https://broadviewpress.com/product/pride-and-prejudice-second-edition/#tab-description GP: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Jane_Austen_Pride_and_Prejudice_Second_Edition?id=TyLGDwAAQBAJ

4] Jane Austen, Mansfield Park. ISBN: 9781551110981 / 1551110989 Broadview (paper copy): https://broadviewpress.com/product/mansfield-park/#tab-description GP: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=oNJjDwAAQBAJ&rdid=book-oNJjDwAAQBAJ&rdot=1&source=gbs_api

5] Other material on Quercus, under Modules

First three texts/authors to be studied:

Austen, Northanger Abbey; Frankenstein; Pride and Prejudice; Mansfield Park

Methof of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion

Method of Evaluation: Essays; Final Exam

WEBSITE: Quercus

Course Title: The Victorian Novel

Course Code: ENG325H5F | Lecture F 9-12

Instructor: Thomas Laughlin

This course surveys several major novels in order to understand the genre that came to dominate literary culture in the Victorian era. Topics may include realism, the marriage plot, the social-problem novel, feminism and sexual identity, novels of growing up, the city and seriality. Authors may include Dickens, Thackeray, E. Bronte, C. Bronte, Gaskell, Trollope, Eliot, Collins, Hardy, Gissing and Wilde, among others.

Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits

Group 4 Literature 1700-1900

Course Title: Medieval Drama

Course Code: ENG330H5S | Lecture M 1-2, W1-3

Instructor: Liza Blake

Texts and performances preceding and underlying the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including creation-to-doomsday play cycles; plays performed in parishes, inns, great halls, outdoor arenas and at court; religious and political propaganda plays; political pageants. Attention is given to social, political and theatrical contexts.

Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits

Group 3 Literature pre-1700

Detailed Description by Instructor:
In the beginning of the York play The Fall of the Angels, God steps forward and declares his power and his timelessness: “I am maker unmade, all mighte es in Me[!]” The appearance of a self-confident and enthusiastic supernatural character was not unusual in medieval drama, which afforded a number of opportunities for the everyday world of medieval England to open into other worlds. Metrically adventurous, theatrically complicated, gleefully metatheatrical, and socially critical, medieval drama in all its forms explores the aesthetic, philosophical, religious, social, and satirical possibilities of theater. This course will serve as an introduction to medieval drama in all its variety, including Biblical plays, conversion plays, moral plays, and interludes. The course will focus especially on medieval dramatic texts in performance, including both their original performance conditions and modern performance possibilities.

Selected Major Readings: Biblical Drama (Fall of Angels, Fall of Man, Noah Plays, Crucifixion, etc.); Conversion Plays (Conversion of St. Paul, Croxton Play of the Sacrament); and Interludes (Everyman; Fulgens and Lucres; Nature; Magnyfycence). No deep familiarity with the Christian Bible presumed or needed.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Biblical drama from York, Chester, and N-Town

Method of Instruction: Interactive (discussion-based) lectures

Method of Evaluation: creative and critical writing assignments; take-home “quizzes”; collaborative scene performance assignment

Course Title: Early Modern Women Writers

Course Code: ENG339H5F | Lecture T 1-3, R 2-3

Instructor: Marshelle Woodward

A study of poems, plays, prose fiction, and polemical works by medieval and early modern writers such as Anne Askew, Mary Wroth, Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Sidney, Amelia Lanyer, Lucy Hutchinson, Hester Pulter, and Margaret Cavendish. Topics may include race, women and science, love poetry from a female perspective, gender and trans studies, renarrations of the story of Eve, sexuality, and editorial history and practice.

Prerequisites: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.
Exclusions: ENG307H5

Group 3 Literature pre-1700

Detailed Description by Instructor: This course explores women’s writing and the problem of “authority” in Renaissance England and colonial North America. Derived from the Latin auctor, a masculine noun connoting mastery, gravity, leadership, and written expertise, authority as a concept closely associated with masculine rule has presented a stumbling block to women’s speech from antiquity to the present day. Whether Chaucer’s Wife of Bath claiming “Experience, though noon auctoritee” to legitimize her discourse on marriage or 21st-century female politicians walking a tightrope between “strength” and “stridency” in public perception, women who wish to command an audience are often forced to expend considerable energy defending their right to speak and be heard. This term, we will examine the manifold rhetorical strategies early modern English and colonial North American women used to assert authority at a time when women’s political, economic, and cultural status was in flux: from ironic use of the commonplace humility topos (similar to today’s “humblebrag”), to the co-optation of male relatives’ patriarchal authority, claims to “crip authority,” and racist appeals to whiteness as a legitimizing force. We will ask how women’s rhetorical strategies shifted as they moved between discursive spheres, writing authoritatively not only within the feminine purview of “huswifery,” but also the conventionally masculine realm of politics and the contested domains of religion, philosophy, and science. Finally, we will question why early modern women who attained considerable authority in their own lifetimes were often robbed of it by later generations in a process of selective forgetting recurrent throughout women’s history.

Underlying all our inquiries will be the urgent consideration of what sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women have to teach us today about the fight for gender justice in a patriarchal world—one in which forces of progress and reaction are locked in a consequential battle for dominance. To this end, our readings will place early women writers like Queen Elizabeth I, Anne Bradstreet, Margaret Cavendish, and Phillis Wheatley in dialogue with modern feminist thinkers such as Audre Lorde, Judith Butler, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Kate Manne, and Ruby Hamad.

Selected Major Readings: Anne Askew, The Examinations of Anne Askew; Anne Hutchinson, “The Examination of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson”; Queen Elizabeth I, “Response to Parliament’s Request she Marry, 1559” and other speeches; Professor Tracy Bear, Indigenous Women in Indigenous Societies and European travel narratives feat. Arnaq, Pocahontas, and Malintzin; Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World; Aphra Behn, The Widow Ranter; Poems by Isabella Whitney, Aemelia Lanyer, Hester Pulter, Lucy Hutchinson, and Phillis Wheatley

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny; Tressie McMillan Cottom, “Dying to be Competent”; Anne Askew, The Examinations of Anne Askew

Method of Instruction: Lectures and discussion

Method of Evaluation: Formal and informal writing assignments, group presentation, and exam

Course Title: World Drama

Course Code: ENG343H5F | Lecture T 9-11, R 10-11

Instructor: Natasha Vashisht

Students will read/watch screenings of drama in English and in translation from around the world, including Africa, East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean, Latin America, and South America. Topics may include traditional forms (Kathakali dance, Noh and Kabuki, Beijing Opera, Nigerian masquerades) adapted for the modern stage; agit-prop and political drama; object performance; the place of drama within a global media ecology; and drama as a site of intercultural and transcultural appropriation, negotiation, and exchange.

Prerequisites: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.

Group 2 Race, Ethnicity, Diaspora, Indigeneity

Course Title: The Nineteenth-Century American Novel

Course Code: ENG347H5S | Lecture M 9-11, W 10-11

Instructor: Melissa Gniadek

This course will introduce students to historical and cultural concerns of nineteenth-century America through major subgenres of the novel, including the gothic, the sentimental, realism, and naturalism. Emphasis will be on shifts in the novel across the century as well as the relationship of the nineteenth-century novel to print culture, including serial publication in literary magazines and newspapers. We may also think about how non-fiction texts from this period draw on the conventions of fiction. Authors studied may include Charles Brockden Brown, Fanny Fern, George Lippard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Chesnutt, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and Pauline Hopkins.

Prerequisites: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits

Group 6 American Literature

Detailed Description by Instructor:

What forms did the novel take in nineteenth-century America? How did non-fictional texts intersect with evolving novelistic sub-genres and narrative expectations? In this course we’ll think about how traditions of the Gothic, the domestic, the sentimental and the sensational were deployed in novels of this period. And we’ll think about how issues of race, histories of enslavement, and the violence of settler colonialism shaped this literary and cultural production. Over the course of the semester we’ll focus on five novels, but we’ll also read some shorter texts that will help to provide context for these novels. The authors that we’ll read will include Charles Brockden Brown, William Apess, Fanny Fern, Harriet Jacobs, Charles Chesnutt and Edith Wharton.

This course will provide a foundation in 19th-century American literature and history as it encourages students to think about the form of the novel across periods and nations.

Selected Major Readings:

Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly (1799)
William Apess, “An Indian's Looking-Glass for the White Man” (1833)
Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall (1854)
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
Henry James, Daisy Miller (1878)
Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (1901)
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905)

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:

Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly (1799) William Apess, “An Indian's Looking-Glass for the White Man” (1833) Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall (1854)

Method of Instruction:

Lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation:

online discussion forum, short writing assignments, essays, active participation

CourseTitle: Contemporary Poetry

Course Course: ENG349H5F | Lecture T 1-3, R 1-2

Instructor: Avery Slater

This course examines works by a variety of contemporary poets, focusing on how their writing participates in contemporary dialogues about art, society, and the larger world.

Prerequisites: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.

Group na

Detailed Description by Instructor:

This course will explore ecologically concerned poetry from the twentieth- and twenty-first century in a global context. We will focus on poetry’s attempts to create and use language in ways that enable surprising and innovative ecological modes of relation: between human and nonhuman beings, living and nonliving worlds, science and art, history and imagination. No prior knowledge of poetry is required, and students from all disciplinary backgrounds are very welcome. While all readings for the course will be in English, many materials will be presented in English translation alongside the work’s original language. In doing so, we will consider the ecological valences of translation—in the domain of world literature as well as in the “translations” of life-worlds, bodies, and habitats.

Selected Major Readings:

selections distributed by pdf from:
Islands, Kamau Brathwaite
Education by Stone, João Cabral de Melo Neto
Throwing Fire at the Sun, Water at the Moon, Anita Endrezze
The Wild Iris, Louise Glück
Commons, Myung-Mi Kim
The Rain in the Trees, W. S. Merwin
Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person, Erin Mouré
Canto General, Pablo Neruda
Songs for the Harvester of Dreams, Duane Niatum
Pages from the Book of the Sun, Niyi Oṣundare
Dart, Alice Oswald
An Ark for the Next Milennium, José Pacheco
River River, Arthur Sze
Ocean Power, Ofelia Zepeda

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
The Rain in the Trees, W. S. Merwin
“Anthropocene,” Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer
“Nature,” Rayond Williams

Method of Instruction:
seminar discussion with short lectures

Method of Evaluation:
25% Short papers (2 short papers; 15% and 10%)
5% In-class Student Presentation
10% Session Engagement
20% Quercus Discussion Board
10% Creative Small-Group Project
30% Final paper

Course Title: Canadian Drama

Course Code: ENG352H5S | Lecture MWF 12-1

Instructor: Daniela Janes

Canadian plays, with emphasis on major playwrights and on developments since 1940, but with attention also to the history of the theatre in Canada.

Exclusion: ENG223H5
Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.

Group 5 Canadian Literature

Course Title: Early American Literature

Course Code: ENG360H5S | Lecture M 1-2, W 1-3

Instructor: Melissa Gniadek

This course explores writing in a variety of genres produced in the American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as narratives, poetry, autobiography, journals, essays, sermons, and court transcripts.

Prerequisites: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.

Group 6 American Literature

Detailed Description by Instructor:

When you think of early seventeenth-century literature you might first turn to England, imagining Shakespeare, who died in 1616, or perhaps John Donne, who died in 1631. You might not think about the Americas, but these same decades saw increasing European contact with lands across the Atlantic and various forms of textual, visual, and cultural engagements with these spaces. For example, the Jamestown settlement was established in the English colony of Virginia in 1607. Governor John Winthrop famously brought a group of Puritans to Massachusetts Bay in 1630. Such events produced various types of writing that established the early American literary traditions that we will explore in this course, even as we will emphasize indigenous traditions that existed in the Americas before European “contact” and that continue through the present.

In Early American Literature we will approach the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries with a focus on the geographies that would become the United States, though we will also acknowledge the contingency of borders and boundaries in this pre-national period of settler colonial violence. We will consider literature emerging from a range of contexts, from journeys of exploration and conquest to the extra-legal world of piracy to the religious world of New England Puritans. We will read a variety of genres, including captivity narratives, poetry, autobiography, journals, sermons, and even one of the seduction novels that was popular in the years following the American Revolution. We will work to develop a sense of some of the earliest literatures emerging from what is now the U.S. And we will think about how many of these narratives are still with us, in different ways, today.

Selected Major Readings:

Anne Bradstreet, poems
Mary Rowlandson, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson Unca Eliza Winkfield (pseudonym), The Female American
Phillis Wheatley, poems

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:

Indigenous oral traditions; Selections from Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación; John Smith, from The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles

Method of Instruction:

Lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation:

online discussion forum, short writing assignments, essays, active participation

Course Title: Special Topic in American Literature (African American Literature)

Course Code: ENG367H5S | Lecture T 1-3, R 2-3

Instructor: Anna Thomas

A concentrated study of one aspect of American literature or literary culture, such as a particular subgenre, author, period or theme, or the application of a particular critical approach.

Prerequisite: 2.0 credit in ENG, including ENG250Y5, and 4.0 additional credits

Group 2 Race, Ethnicity, Diaspora, Indigeneity

Group 6 American Literature

Detailed Description by Instructor:
This class is an advanced introduction to the field of African American literary studies, tracing its origins and emergence through the slave trade to the present day, with particular focus on 19th- and 20th-century writing, and the criticism and theory to which it gives rise. Authors studied may include: Harriet Jacobs, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison.

Selected Major Readings:
Harriet Jacobs, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells

Method of Instruction:
This class will combine both lectures and discussion-based, seminar style teaching.

Method of Evaluation: Essays

Course Title: Special Topic in World Literature (Living a Feminist Life)

Course Code: ENG371H5S | Lecture T 11-1, R 11-12

Instructor: Avery Slater

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:
Around the turn of the twentieth century, medical and sociological theories of psychological trauma first came into widespread circulation. These theories were investigating new forms of “invisible wounds” caused by human exposure to technological shock: railway accidents, urban industrialization, and the mechanized horrors of trench warfare. From these early explorations of the problem of technological “shock,” new aspects of the human mind were opened for research—the unconscious, the status of human memory, psychological alternatives to instinct, and, most challenging of all, a new concept that Sigmund Freud first named “the death drive.”

Leaving imprints not only on psychology but on literature, philosophy, political theory, sociology, and historiography, the legacies of trauma theory will form this course’s intellectual focus. Keeping in mind the profound breadth of influence that trauma theory has had on so many fields and sciences, we will focus on trauma's interplay with literary works from the global twentieth- and twenty-first century. Because theories of trauma seriously challenge existing ideas of human knowledge and expression, its appearance within the artistic realm raises complex questions. How can trauma theory serve to help us understand wider histories of harm and violence on global, collective scales?

This course will give students an introduction to key theoretical texts and shifts in trauma theory from its origins to the present day. Students will also investigate how these theories interact with literary texts’ historically specific confrontation with modernity.

Selected Major Readings:

Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud Broadview, 9781551119946
The Return of the Soldier, Rebecca West Penguin, 9780141180656
The Reawakening, Primo Levi Touchstone, 9780684826356
Dien Cai Dau, Yusef Komunyakaa Wesleyan, 9780819511645
Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko Penguin, 9780143104919
The Dew Breaker, Edwidge Danticat Vintage, 9781400034291

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
· Sigmund Freud Beyond the Pleasure Principle
· Henri Barbusse Under Fire
· Rebecca West Return of the Soldier

Method of Instruction:
seminar discussion with short lectures

Method of Evaluation:
25% Short papers (2 short papers; 15% and 10%)
5% In-class Student Presentation
15% Session Engagement
20% Quercus Discussion Board
35% Final paper

Course Title: Creative Writing: Poetry

Course Code: ENG373H5F LEC0101 | Lecture T 3-5

Instructor: Ryan Fitzpartrick

This course will involve a wide variety of experiments with poetic expression and poetic forms.

Prerequisite: ENG289H5/ENG291H5

Group n/a

Course Title: Creative Writing: Prose

Course Code: ENG374H5S LEC0102 | Lecture M 3-5

Instructor: Brent Wood

Students will experiment with fiction and non-fiction prose writing, including autobiography, biography and narrative for new visual, digital and interactive media.

Prerequisite: ENG289H5/ENG291H5

Group n/a

Course Title: Creative Writing: Prose

Course Code: ENG374H5S LEC0201 | Lecture M 3-5

Instructor: Lisa Foad

Students will experiment with fiction and non-fiction prose writing, including autobiography, biography and narrative for new visual, digital and interactive media.

Prerequisite: ENG289H5/ENG291H5

Group n/a

Course Title: Special Topic in Creative Writing (Documentary Poetics: Activist Writing in the Archives)

Course Code: ENG377H5S | Lecture T 3-5

Instructor: Andrea Thompson

A concentrated study of one aspect of creative writing practice, such as a particular genre or theme, or the application of a particular formal technique. Topics may vary from year to year.

Prerequisites: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 other credits

Group n/a

Course Title: History of Literary Theory

Course Code: ENG380H5F | Lecture MWF 3-4

Instructor: Thomas Laughlin

Literary theory from classical times to the nineteenth century. Topics include theories of the imagination, genre analysis, aesthetics, the relations between literature and reality and literature and society, and the evaluation and interpretation of literature.

Prerequisites: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.
Exclusions: ENG367Y5

Group 1 Literary Theory/Methods

Course Title: British Romanticism, 1770-1800

Course Code: ENG385H5F | Lecture W 6-9

Instructor: Dan White

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:
This course provides a general survey of the poetry and prose of the early part of the Romantic period. You will thus become familiar with the astonishing literary output of William Cowper, Anna Barbauld, Ottobah Cugoano, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Jane Austen, among others. Subjects to be explored will include new ideas about the imagination and creativity, the revolutions that gave birth to our modern political order, slavery and the transatlantic movement to abolish the slave trade, the expansion of the British Empire, the advent of feminist thought and the emergence of women writers as a major cultural force, and the radical experiments with literary form through which writers responded to and shaped the cultural, social, and political developments of their age.

Selected Major Readings: Poetry and prose by J. Austen, A.L. Barbauld, W. Blake, E. Burke, S.T. Coleridge, W. Cowper, O. Cugoano, F. Jeffrey, H. More, T. Paine, C. Smith, H.M. Williams, M. Wollstonecraft, and W. Wordsworth

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Selections by John Locke, Edmund Burke, William Gilpin, to be followed by poems of sensibility (by Hannah More, Helen Maria Williams, William Cowper)

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation: Scansion assignment (5%); two close-reading exercises (15% each); three reading quizzes (10 each%); term paper (35%)

Course Title: British Romanticism, 1800-1830

Course Code: ENG386H5S | Lecture F 1-4

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

This course covers the later Romantic period in British Literature. Authors studied may include Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, and John Keats. [36L]

Exclusion: ENG308Y5
Prerequisites: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.

Group 4 Literature 1700-1900

Detailed Description by Instructor:
In surveying “late” Romanticism, which is typically comprised of the second generation of British Romantic writers such as Ketas, the Shelleys, and Lord Byron, we will explore intersections of literature, politics and culture. 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. 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.

Course Texts: I have ordered through the UTM bookstore, and the following is also available online (as an e-text or in hard copy)

1. Black et al., editors. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature Volume 4: The Age of Romanticism. 3rd Edition (Print: $62.95; E-edition: $43.95) https://broadviewpress.com/product/the-broadview-anthology-of-british-literature-volume-4-the-age-of-romanticism-third-edition/

2] Shelley, Frankenstein (3rd edition) ISBN: 9781554811038 / 1554811031 Broadview: https://broadviewpress.com/product/frankenstein-third-edition/#tab-description
GP: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Mary_Shelley_Frankenstein_Third_Edition?id=UQc52fOn3hUC

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 Text/ Authors to be Studied: To be Announced
Method of Instruction: Lecture, Discussion
Method of Evaluation: Essays, tests, and final exam
Website: Quercus

Course Title: Spaces of Fiction

Course Code: ENG388H5F | Lecture T 12-1, R 11-1

Instructor: Stanka Radovic

Real or imagined geographical locations, landscapes, rooms and houses play an important role in literature. In addition to providing a narrative setting, fictional space might guide our interpretation of plot, serve as a metaphor for broader historical, sociological or psychological issues, or become a character in its own right. Ranging across a variety of literary periods and genres, this course will explore how works of fiction describe space and how these descriptions shape our responses. Authors and texts may range from the early English period to the present day, including Beowulf, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, Jane Austen, Edgar Alan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson, Gloria Naylor, Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, V.S. Naipaul, and so on.

Prerequisites: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.

Group n/a

Detailed Description by Instructor:
Real or imagined geographical locations, landscapes, rooms, and houses play an important role in literature. More than just the background setting for a story, fictional space can guide our interpretation of the plot, serve as a metaphor for broader historical, sociological, and psychological issues, or become a full character in its own right. In this course, we will focus on one particular version of literary space—the haunted house—where unsettled histories and buried memories come back to life. What can we learn about the past as we look at the uncanny shapes it takes in the present? What will the inanimate objects coming to life tell us about the conceptual scope of the story and its context, and about ourselves as readers?

Selected Major Readings:
Edgar Allan Poe “The Tell-Tale Heart”; Shirley Jackson The Haunting of Hill House; Daphne du Maurier Rebecca; Toni Morrison Beloved; Neil Gaiman Coraline

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
Edgar Allan Poe “The Tell-Tale Heart”; Shirley Jackson The Haunting of Hill House; Daphne du Maurier Rebecca

Method of Instruction:
Lectures, class discussion, Quercus discussion board

Method of Evaluation:
Class participation (15%), Assignment 1 (25%), Assignment 2 (25%), Assignment 3 (35%)

Course Title: Canadian Fiction

Course Code: ENG392H5F | Lecture T 11-12, R 11-1

Instructor: Colin Hill

Students will read novels and/or short stories of importance for Canadian literary history: these may include, for example, L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes, Lawrence Hill’s Book of Negroes, and Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.

Exclusion: ENG353Y

Group 5 Canadian Literature

Detailed Description by Instructor: This course offers students an exploration of the development of Canadian fiction. We will discuss texts by diverse writers who engage the cultural conditions of Canada from the early 20th century to the present. Topics will include, but are not limited to, modernism, realism, urban/rural tensions, the Indigenous novel in Canada, the artist figure, gender and sexuality, Canadian postmodernism and postcolonialism, multiculturalism, racism and antiracism, psychological and spiritual self-discovery, various “schools” of Canadian literary theory, and personal, social, cultural, and national identities. Students will be expected to attend regularly and to complete readings thoughtfully and on time. Students are also strongly encouraged to participate in class discussions in a respectful and intellectually rigorous atmosphere. This course aims to build knowledge and appreciation of Canadian writing and to introduce students to a wide range of theoretical, critical, and literary-historical approaches relevant to the study of Canadian and other literatures. Engaged students should expect to come away from the course with a good understanding of the subjects and forms of Canadian fiction and many of its important literary, historical, cultural, and theoretical contexts.

Selected Major Readings:

1. Sinclair Ross, As for Me and My House
2. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing
3. Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion
4. Thomas King, Green Grass, Running Water
5. André Alexis, Fifteen Dogs
6. Souvankham Thammavongsa, How to Pronounce Knife

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
Ross, Atwood, Ondaatje

Method of Instruction:
Lecture / discussion

Method of Evaluation:

1. Participation 10%
2. Term Paper 35%
3. Mid-term Test 25%
4. Final exam 30%

Course Title: Literary Theory Now

Course Code: ENG396H5S | Lecture T 2-3, R 1-3

Instructor: Thomas Laughlin

This course will explore some of the most recent, provocative, and significant developments in literary theory, including work in such areas as eco-criticism, literary activism, critical race studies, Indigenous studies, queer and trans studies, and cognitive literary studies.

Prerequisites: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.

Group 1 Literary Theory/Methods

Fourth-Year Courses

Fall Term

ENG414H5F Seminar: Literary Theory / Methods (Critical Animal Studies)
ENG426H5F Seminar: Race, Ethnicity, Diasporas, Indigeneity (TBA)
ENG473H5F Seminar: Modern and Contemp. Lit. (Monsters & Monstrosity)

Winter Term

ENG470H5S Seminar: Literature 1700-1900 (Staging Comedy, 1660-1800)
ENG472H5S Seminar: Modern and Contemporary Literature (Magical Realism in Postcolonial Literature)

Course Title: Seminar: Literary Theory / Methods (Critical Animal Studies)

Course Code: ENG414H5F | Seminar F 9-11

Instructor: Daniela Janes

Prerequisites: 5.0 credits in ENG and 4.0 additional credits

Group 1 Literary Theory/Methods

Course Title: Seminar: Race, Ethnicity, Diasporas, Indigeneity (TBA)

Course Code: ENG426H5F | Seminar W 3-5

Instructor: Julia Boyd

Prerequisite: 5.0 credits in ENG and 4.0 additional credits

Group 2 Race, Ethnicity, Diaspora, Indigeneity

Detailed Description by Instructor:
What roles do literature, film, and culture play building practical, sustainable solutions to urgent environmental challenges? This course investigates this question through a dynamic breadth of Indigenous and diasporic environmental writing from around the world, weaving together continents, cultures, literary genres, and communication forms. We begin with an introduction to the intersections of race, indigeneity, and environmental (in)justice through Frantz Fanon’s decolonial classic The Wretched of the Earth (1961, trans. 1963), the landmark First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit’s “Principles of Environmental Justice” (1991), and the Indigenous-led Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth (UDRME, 2010). With this combination of theory and policy frameworks as our foundation, we launch into a wide selection of Indigenous and diasporic environmental literature and culture, including works from Turtle Island/North America, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Nigeria, Kenya, India, Oceania, and the Japanese diaspora. Our readings and viewings range from decolonial and Indigenous literary landmarks, through legal writing, memoirs, novels, and essays—alongside a wide range of multimedia such as documentaries, film, a music video, and digital “video poems.” The works we will study include Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj; Unbowed, the memoir of Wangari Maathai, the first African woman and first environmentalist to win the Nobel Peace Prize; ground-breaking environmental justice novels like Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters; essays by Arundhati Roy; and legal documents such as the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act; alongside films like Angry Inuk and multimodal projects like Tanya Tagaq’s novel Split Tooth and its companion album Tongues.

As we investigate these varied forms together, we will analyze the techniques Indigenous and diasporic environmental writers use to build concrete legal, policy, and cultural change—including how they negotiate the complexities of trans-Indigenous and cross-cultural solidarity, environmental racism, “slow violence” (Nixon), and the uneven impacts of climate change. We study innovative communications with an eye to developing your own research and writing skills. The major assignment in this course is an independent research project about an environmental or sustainability issue of your choice, culminating in an original research paper, article, or multimedia communications materials (options include a scripted podcast or video, digital communications package, teaching/educational materials, set of short articles for a public outlet, and more). You’ll also have an opportunity to share that knowledge with a wider community through our class-organized event/project (format to be determined by the class).

Readings: Readings marked with “Q” are posted on Quercus. Print copies of our other books are available at the UTM bookstore. Alternatively, you can also access full copies of every book except Jetñil-Kijiner and Tagaq for free on archive.org (links posted under “Readings” on Quercus). Please use whichever format best supports you.

Required Readings: Mohandas K. Gandhi, selections, Hind Swaraj (1909/10; Q); Frantz Fanon, “On Violence,” The Wretched of the Earth (1961; Q); Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (2nd ed., 2016; Q); Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth (2010; Q); Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (1977); Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Sacred and the Superfund,” Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (2013; Q); Linda Hogan, “Backbone” (2016; Q); Ken Saro-Wiwa, excerpts, A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary (1995; Q); Wangari Maathai, Unbowed: A Memoir (2006); Arundhati Roy, “The End of Imagination” and “The Greater Common Good” (1998/1999; Q); Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters (1980); “Principles of Environmental Justice” (1991; Q); Ruth L. Ozeki, My Year of Meats (1998); Witi Ihimaera, The Whale Rider (1987/2003); Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act (2017; Q); Tanya Tagaq, Split Tooth (2018); Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter (2017).

Films and Multimedia: Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, Angry Inuk (2016); Nneka, “Soul Is Heavy” (2011); Niki Caro, Whale Rider (2002); Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna, “Rise: From One Island to Another” (2018); Tanya Tagaq, Tongues (2022).

Optional bonus films (screened at optional virtual plenary screenings): Franny Armstrong, Drowned Out (2003); Danis Goulet, Night Raiders (2021).

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Gandhi, selections, Hind Swaraj; Fanon, “On Violence”; Shiva, selections, Earth Democracy.

Method of Instruction: Lecture and seminar discussions (in-person).

Method of Evaluation: Short Environmental Writing Analysis (1–2 pp.; 5%); Short weekly Discussion Board Posts (20%); Major Research Project and Process Assignments (Research Proposal and Annotated Bibliography, 20%; Contribution to Class Event/Project, 10%; Editing Reflection, 5%; final project, 25%); In-Class Participation (15%)

Course Title: Seminar: Literature 1700-1900 (Staging Comedy, 1660-1800)

Course Code: ENG470H5S | Seminar W 3-5

Instructor: Terry Robinson

Prerequisites: 5.0 credits in ENG and 4.0 additional credits

Group 4 Literature 1700-1900

Detailed Description by Instructor: Comedy dominated the theatrical stage in the eighteenth-century. This course offers a focused exploration of comedic dramas ca. 1660-1800 and their continuing impact on our modern age. We'll read and analyse a range of comedic genres (farce, satire, sentimental comedy, and comedy of manners) as they were deployed by major playwrights such as Aphra Behn, Susannah Centlivre, John Gay, Richard Steele, David Garrick, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. In addition to considering eighteenth-century comedic theory and form, we'll explore how playwrights addressed matters political, social, and sexual; learn about the professionalization of the woman writer in the eighteenth century; and analyze scholarly criticism in relation to the comedies studied. Subject to be addressed include the navigation of patriarchal society through systems of courtship and marriage; the construction of gender norms and gender expression; the articulation of sexual desire; matters of rank and class; colonialist themes and contexts; genre and generic experimentation, and more.

Selected major readings:
Aphra Behn, The Rover
Susannah Centlivre, The Busy Body
John Gay, The Beggar's Opera
Richard Steele, The Conscious Lovers
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal

First three texts / authors to be studied: Aphra Behn, Susannah Centlivre, John Gay

Method of instruction: Lecture and Discussion (In-Person)

Method of evaluation: Participation; Presentation; Essays; Other

Course Title: Seminar: Modern and Contemp. Literature. (Climate Fiction)

Course Code: ENG472H5S | Seminar R 10-12

Instructor: Stanka Radovic

Prerequisites: 5.0 credits in ENG and 4.0 additional credits

Detailed Description by Instructor: This course will explore environmental criticism through climate fiction, popularly known as "cli-fi." In recent years, the deeply polarizing political debate about the extent of human-driven climate change has resulted in an increased awareness of the importance and fragility of our environment. Scientific, technological, economic, and political concerns that fuel this discussion have also been reflected in climate fiction. More often than not, climate fiction takes a dystopian and speculative perspective on the relationship between humans and their physical environment. In this course, we will examine the ways in which climate fiction (re)imagines environmental crisis and what it contributes to the larger debate about the environment. Scholarly texts and works of fiction will help us engage climate change and environmental degradation as central to the ways we envision our future and reconsider our past on this planet.

Required Reading: Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable; Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Environment (“Introduction: The Challenge”); Tony Eggleton, A Short Introduction to Climate Change (excerpts); Short stories from Guernica Magazine: Special Issue on Climate Fiction; J.G. Ballard, The Drought (aka The Burning World); Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower; China Mieville, Un Lun Dun.

First Three Authors/Texts: Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable; J.G. Ballard, The Drought (aka The Burning World); Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Environment (“Introduction: The Challenge”).

Method of Instruction: Lectures and seminar discussions.

Method of Evaluation: Class participation (10%), Class Presentation (15%), Essay 1 (15%), Essay 2 (25%), Essay 3 (35%).

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Course Title: Seminar: Modern and Contemp. Lit. (Monsters & Monstrosity)

Course Code: ENG473H5F | Seminar R 1-3

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

Prerequisites: 5.0 credits in ENG and 4.0 additional credits

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Detailed Description by Instructor:
The course explores monsters and monstrosity as the 19th century shifts to the 20th century, from the Victorian to the Modern. In reading three novels from the fin de siècle (the 1880s-90s)—The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Dracula (1896)—we will explore canonisation and periodization and question how the content and form of the novels are Victorian (1832-1900), proto/pre-Modernist, Modernist (1900-1950), proto-postmodernist, and/or postmodernist. The course is thus about slippage, messiness, muddiness, complexity, and the dialectical as we engage the very composition of literary studies, as well as aesthetics, hermeneutics, feminism, Marxism, and cultural studies (and a suite of themes: race, gender, genre, sexuality, politics, culture, crime, and technology, to list a few). The monster stands in the middle of this muddiness. The monster, monstrosity, and monstrousness figure at the course’s centre, and will stretch the historical and methodological elasticity of its circumference.

Required Reading: All editions are published by Broadview, and we will use the introductions and appendixes of these books. I have ordered texts through the UTM bookstore. Electronic versions of the Broadview editions are available at Google Play; paper copies are available through Broadview and Amazon). Book info at UT bookstore: https://www.uoftbookstore.com/adoption-search-results?ccid=24622&itemid=75907

1] Robert Louis Stevenson. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. 3rd ed. Ed. Martin A. Danahay. ISBN 9781554810246 / 1554810248 Bdvw: https://broadviewpress.com/product/strange-case-of-dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde-third-edition/#tab-description GP: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=1aR6BwAAQBAJ&rdid=book-1aR6BwAAQBAJ&rdot=1&source=gbs_api

2] Oscar Wilde. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ed. Norman Page. ISBN: 9781551111261 / 1551111268 Bdvw: https://broadviewpress.com/product/the-picture-of-dorian-gray/#tab-description GP: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=i5tBDwAAQBAJ&rdid=book-i5tBDwAAQBAJ&rdot=1&source=gbs_api

3] Bram Stoker, Dracula. Ed. Glennis Byron. ISBN: 9781551111360 / 1551111365 Bbvw: https://broadviewpress.com/product/dracula/#tab-description GP: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=3DWfKBMGbB8C&rdid=book-3DWfKBMGbB8C&rdot=1&source=gbs_api

4] Other material on Quercus, under Modules

First three texts/authors to be studied: Jekyll and Hyde; Dorian Gray; Dracula

Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion; Written Assignments; Student Presentation

Method of Evaluation: Written Assignments; Student Presentation; Final Exam

Website: Quercus

First-Year Courses

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Group 1 Literary Theory/Methods

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Second-Year Courses

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Group 1 Literary Theory/Methods

Group 1 Literary Theory/Methods

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Group 5 Canadian Literature

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Group 3 Literature pre-1700

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Group 6 American Literature

Group 5 Canadian Literature

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Group 2 Race, Ethnicity, Diaspora, Indigeneity

Group 2 Race, Ethnicity, Diaspora, Indigeneity

Group 1 Literary Theory/Methods

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Third-Year Courses

Group 3 Literature pre-1700

Group 2 Race, Ethnicity, Diaspora, Indigeneity

Group 3 Literature pre-1700

Group 3 Literature pre-1700

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Group 4 Literature 1700-1900

Group 4 Literature 1700-1900

Group 3 Literature pre-1700

Group 3 Literature pre-1700

Group 2 Race, Ethnicity, Diaspora, Indigeneity

Group 6 American Literature

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Group 5 Canadian Literature

Group 6 American Literature

Group 2 Race, Ethnicity, Diaspora, Indigeneity

Group 6 American Literature

Group 2 Race, Ethnicity, Diaspora, Indigeneity

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Group 4 Literature 1700-1900

Group 4 Literature 1700-1900

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Group 5 Canadian Literature

Group 1 Literary Theory/Methods

Fourth-Year Courses

Group 2 Race, Ethnicity, Diaspora, Indigeneity

Group 4 Literature 1700-1900

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Detailed Description by Instructor: