2023-2024 English Courses and Descriptions

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*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

Fall Term

Winter Term

Course Title: Effective Writing LEC0101

Course Code: ENG100H5F | Lecture MWF 9-10   

Instructor: TBD

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here.

Group n/a

Course Title: Effective Writing LEC0103

Course Code: ENG100H5F | Lecture W 1-3, F 1-2

Instructor: TBD

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here.

Group n/a

Course Title: Effective Writing LEC0101

Course Code: ENG100H5S | Lecture MWF 9-10

Instructor: TBD

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here.

Group n/a

Course Title: Effective Writing LEC0102

Course Code: ENG100H5S | Lecture T 10-11, R 9-11

Instructor: Julia Boyd

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here.

Group n/a

Course Title: How to Read Critically

Course Code: ENG101H5F | Lecture T 9-11 | Tutorials T 11-12, T 1-2, R 11-12, R 1-2

Instructor: Thomas Laughlin

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 1 Literary Theory/Methods

Course Title: How to Research Literature

Course Code: ENG102H5S | Lecture MW 12-1 | Tutorials W 1-2, W 3-4

Instructor:  Sarah Star

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Course Title: Literature and Medicine

Course Code: ENG103H5F | Lecture TR 10-11 | Tutorials T11-12, T1-2, R11-12, R1-2

Instructor: Sarah Star

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Course Title: Introduction to World Literatures

Course Code: ENG105H5S | Lecture TR 10-11 | Tutorials R 11-12, R 1-2

Instructor: Anna Thomas

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

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, exam

Creative writing component: No

Course Title: Narrative

Course Code: ENG110H5F | Lecture MW 10-11 | Tutorials M 11-12, W 11-12, W 1-2

Instructor: Chester Scoville

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

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: James, The Turn of the Screw; Clarke, Piranesi; 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.

Creative writing component: No

Course Title: Traditions of Theatre and Drama

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

Instructor: Holger Syme

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Course Title: Modern and Contemporary Theatre and Drama

Course Code: ENG122H5S | Lecture MW 11-12 | Tutorials W 12-1, W 2-3

Instructor: TBD

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Second-Year Courses

Fall Term

Winter Term

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

Course Code: ENG202H5F | Lecture MW 11-12 | Tutorials W 12-1, W 2-3

Instructor: Liza Blake

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

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:
(from) Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People; (from) Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain; (from) Gerald of Wales History and Topography of Ireland

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 9-10 | Tutorials T 10-11, R 10-11

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a
 

Course Title: How to Read Poetry

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

Instructor: Brent Wood

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 1 Literary Theory/Methods

Course Title: Introduction to the Novel

Course Code: ENG211H5F | Lecture M 9-10, W 9-11

Instructor: Thomas Laughlin

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Course Title: The Short Story

Course Code: ENG213H5F | Lecture MWF 12-1

Instructor: Daniela Janes

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Course Title: The Canadian Short Story

Course Code: ENG215H5S | Lecture MWF 1-2

Instructor: Daniela Janes

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 5 Canadian Literature

Course Title: Interactive Storytelling & Worldmaking

Course Code: ENG218H5F | Lecture T 11-1, R 11-12 

Instructor: TBD

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Course Title: Introduction to Shakespeare

Course Code: ENG223H5S | Lecture MW 11-12 | TUT W 12-1, W 2-3

Instructor: Holger Syme

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 3 Literature pre-1700

Course Title: Children's Literature

Course Code: ENG234H5S | Lecture T 11-1, R 12-1

Instructor: TBD

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Course Title: Comics and the Graphic Novel

Course Code: ENG235H5F | Lecture MWF 2-3

Instructor: Chester Scoville

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

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.

Creative writing component: Yes

Course Title: Science Fiction

Course Code: ENG237H5S | Lecture T 12-1, R 11-1

Instructor: Stanka Radovic

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

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%)

Creative writing component: No 

Course Title: Horror Literature

Course Code: ENG239H5F | Lecture T 9-11, R 9-10

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Course Title: Introduction to American Literature

Course Code: ENG251H5S | Lecture T 10-11, R 9-11

Instructor: TBD

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 6 American Literature

Course Title: Introduction to Canadian Literature

Course Code: ENG255H5F | Lecture T 1-3, R 1-2

Instructor: Colin Hill

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 5 Canadian Literature

Detailed Description by Instructor: This course is an introduction to some of Canada’s best writing from pre-confederation to the present. Our writers are from diverse backgrounds and engage the cultural conditions of their evolving country from various perspectives. Class topics will include (but are not limited to) exploration and immigration narratives, Canadian literary history and development, realism, modernism, urban / rural tensions, the artist figure, gender and sexuality, Canadian postmodernism and postcolonialism, multiculturalism, racism and anti-racism, psychological and spiritual self-discovery, and personal, social, cultural, and national identities

Selected Major Readings: This course consists of short readings from An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English, ed. Bennett and Brown, 4th edition.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: TBA

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion

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

Creative writing component: No

Course Title: Music and Literature

Course Code: ENG261H5S | Lecture M 3-5, W 3-4

Instructor: Brent Wood

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Course Title: Play and Games

Course Code: ENG263H5S | Lecture MW 2-3 | TUT M 3-4, W 3-4

Instructor: Lawrence Switzky

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Detailed Description by Instructor: This course explores foundational concepts in Play Studies and Game Studies through both theory and practice: solo and group play, game design, storytelling through games, and the affordances and limitations of game engines. We’ll discuss major ideas and terms, from the “magic circle” to environmental storytelling, player agency, metagaming, flow, and dark play and we’ll test, extend, and even break those ideas. We’ll also model how making a game can be a form of research and the kinds of research questions you can ask (and answer) by creating, playing, and studying games.

Texts/Games to be Studied:
Some games (there will be more!):
Z-Man Games, Carcassonne
Days of Wonder, Ticket to Ride
Libellud, Dixit
Kanaga and Key, Proteus
Takuma Okada/Adam Roy, “Along Among the Stars”
Arvi Telkari, Baba Is You
Draw Me a Pixel, There Is No Game
Jimmy Andrews, “Realistic Kissing Simulator”
Molleindustria, “Every Day the Same Dream”
Fullbright, Gone Home
Re-Logic, Terraria

Some readings:
Roger Caillois, selection from Man, Play, and Games
Aaron Trammell, selection from Repairing Play
Richard Garfield, “Metagames”
Bernard De Koven, selection from The Well-Played Game
C. Thi Nguyen, selection from Games: Agency as Art

Method of Instruction: Lecture, discussion, playing together (and solo), group game design and playtesting

Method of Evaluation: Brief presentation, written game design exercises and demonstrations, making and iterating a game to play together, short papers, tutorial discussions

Creative writing component: Yes

Course Title: Queer Writing

Course Code: ENG269H5S | Lecture M 11-1, W 11-12

Instructor: Daniel Wright

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Detailed Description by Instructor: The history of writing by and about queer and trans people is long, and so in this course, we’ll narrow our focus by tracing the history of queer fiction in English from the 1950’s to the present. Among our central questions, we’ll ask: how are sexualities and gender identities shaped by writing and literary representation, and by the novel form specifically? How useful are “queer” and "trans" as umbrella-terms that attempts to group together a variety of different experiences and identities? What happens when we consider queer and trans identity from a global perspective, as it intersects with questions of race, ethnicity, and class? Because of our focus on the contemporary, the course will be organized not by a long historical chronology (although we will read in chronological order) but rather by multiplicity, variety, and diversity.

Selected Major Readings: Authors likely to include some of the following: Virginia Woolf, Patricia Highsmith, James Baldwin, Richard Bruce Nugent, Andrew Holleran, Jeannette Winterson, Sarah Waters, Shyam Selvadurai, jia qing wilson-yang, Jordy Rosenberg, Garth Greenwell, Monica Arac de Nyeko, Arinze Ifeakandu

First three texts / authors to be studied: TBD

Method of instruction: Lecture and discussion

Method of evaluation: Writing assignments, participation

Creative writing component: No

Course Title: Literatures of Immigration and Exile

Course Code: ENG273H5F | Lecture W 6-9

Instructor: Raji Soni

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 2 Race, Ethnicity, Diaspora, Indigeneity

Course Title: Indigenous Literatures

Course Code: ENG274H5S | Lecture MWF 9-10

Instructor: Daniela Janes

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 2 Race, Ethnicity, Diaspora, Indigeneity

Course Title: Feminist Approaches to Literature

Course Code: ENG275H5F | Lecture T 11-12, R 11-1

Instructor: Anna Thomas

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

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

Creative writing component: No

Course Title: Critical Approaches to Literature

Course Code: ENG280H5S | Lecture MW 10-11 | Tutorials M 11-12, M 1-2

Instructor: Thomas Laughlin

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Course Title: Creative Writing

Course Code: ENG289H5F | Lecture MW 11-12 | Tutorials M 12-1, W 12-1 

Instructor: Brent Wood

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Course Title: Reading for Creative Writing

Course Code: ENG291H5S | Lecture MW 12-1 | Tutorials M 1-2, W 1-2

Instructor: Brent Wood

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Third-Year Courses

Fall Term

Winter Term

Course Title: Seventeenth-Century Poetry

Course Code: ENG304H5S | Lecture W 6-9

Instructor: TBD

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 

Course Title: Special Topic in Modern and Contemporary Literature (J.R.R. Tolkien)

Course Code: ENG316H5F | Lecture MWF 12-1

Instructor: Chester Scoville

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Detailed Description by Instructor: In readers’ polls at the turn of the twenty-first century, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was many times voted the best novel of the twentieth. This popularity dismayed some critics, who believed that something had gone terribly wrong with the reading public’s taste. This course will, on the contrary, explore what it is about Tolkien that continues to resonate with so many readers. We will examine Tolkien’s status as a modern author responding to contemporary issues, and link his creative work with his scholarly production on medieval languages and literature. Our considerations will range through Tolkien’s work: we will examine his major completed fiction – The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion – as well as some of his minor works such as “Leaf by Niggle” and “Mythopoeia.” In addition, we will explore some of his scholarly writings, such as the essays “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” and “On Fairy-Stories.” And we will assess some of the criticisms, both apologetic and condemnatory, of Tolkien’s work and legacy. The course will turn on the following large-scale questions: what does it mean to be a contemporary author, and what can the relationship be between scholarly examination and imaginative fantasy?

Selected Major Readings: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: “Mythopoeia,” The Hobbit, “On Fairy-Stories.”

Method of Instruction: Discussion of readings, with some short lectures

Method of Evaluation: Short assignments leading to a substantial final paper; participation

Creative writing component: Yes

Course Title: Sexuality, Race, & Gender in VG & Gaming Culture

Course Code: ENG319H5S | Lecture MWF 1-2

Instructor: TBD

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Course Title: Austen and Her Contemporaries

Course Code: ENG323H5F | Lecture T 3-5, R 3-4

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 4 Literature 1700-1900

Course Title: The Victorian Novel

Course Code: ENG325H5S | Lecture M 2-3, W 1-3

Instructor: Daniel Wright

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 4 Literature 1700-1900

Detailed Description by Instructor: Victorian novels are filled with ordinary people confronting ordinary problems: growing up, loving (and maybe marrying), working, dying, thinking, and living ethically. Over the past two centuries, readers and critics alike have often wondered why we find such novels so appealing. When we escape into a book, why would we want to find a world very much like our own? How do we define what is “ordinary” in the first place in a complex modern world? We might say that we owe the fullest development of this kind of reading practice, in which we become absorbed with the ordinary lives of fictional people—sometimes for the comfortable pleasure of familiarity and identification, sometimes for the difficult but strengthening experience of identifying with unfamiliar people and past historical moments—to the legacy of the Victorian era, in which the realist novel (the novel that portrays the world “as it really is”) came to dominate popular literary culture. In this course, we’ll survey four or five of the major novels of nineteenth-century Britain, with a focus on how they deploy (and often bend, defy, or experiment with) the aesthetic conventions of realism.

Selected Major Readings: Authors may include some of the following: Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Amy Levy, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, Bram Stoker

First three texts / authors to be studied: TBD
Method of instruction: Lecture and discussion
Method of evaluation: Writing assignments, participation

Creative writing component: No 

Course Title: Premodern World Literatures

Course Code: ENG326H5S | Lecture MWF 2-3

Instructor: Sarah Star

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 3 Literature pre-1700

Course Title: Medieval Drama

Course Code: ENG330H5S | Lecture W 3-5,  F 3-5

Instructor: Michael Raby

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 3 Literature pre-1700

Course Title: The Modernist Novel

Course Code: ENG333H5S | Lecture MWF 10-11

Instructor: Daniela Janes

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Course Title: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama

Course Code: ENG337H5S | Lecture F 10-1

Instructor: Terry Robinson

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Detailed Description by Instructor: This course explores British dramatic literature from the Restoration through the late Georgian Era, ca. 1660-1800. We will examine major plays in a range of genres (comedy, tragedy, farce, ballad opera) by authors such as William Wycherley, Aphra Behn, Susanna Centlivre, Richard Steele, John Gay, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Hannah Cowley, and Elizabeth Inchbald. In the process, we will consider how the dramas address questions of sex and gender, economics, politics, national identity and empire. We will also become familiar with theatre history, including the advent of women performers, the age’s most famous (and infamous) actors, the Licensing Act, the popularization of Shakespeare, the aural and spectacular effects of changing theatre construction, and critical controversies. While the principal mode of investigation will involve analysis of the plays, we will also pay close attention to the material conditions of performance, as theatres grew from makeshift spaces for the social elite to vast, purpose-built venues able to accommodate thousands of spectators. We’ll also consider the the shaping influence of these dramas on modern performance.

Selected Major Readings: TBD

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: William Wycherley, Aphra Behn, Susanna Centlivre

Method of Instruction: In-Person

Method of Evaluation: Participation; Close Reading Essay; Group Presentation; Final Project

Creative writing component: No 

Course Title: Early Modern Women Writers

Course Code: ENG339H5F | Lecture M 1-2, W 1-3

Instructor: Liza Blake

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 3 Literature pre-1700

Detailed Description by Instructor: 
Though women wrote a great number and variety of poetic, fictional, and dramatic texts in the early modern period, few actually appear in grand surveys of British literature, and only in the past couple decades have they been taken seriously at all as writers or thinkers. This class corrects that omission. We will read a wide range of writing by women from the English Renaissance. Many women wrote explicitly on female rights, addressing from the inside the querelle des femmes or the “question of women”: their rights, their relationships to men, their abilities to reign as queen (as did Mary I and then Elizabeth I in the second half of the sixteenth century), what the story of Eve’s fall in the Garden of Eden is really about. We will read many works on women by women, and ask about how we might challenge long-held traditions of editing and anthologization—even by editing women writers ourselves.

However, we will also grant women the right to be as interested in a range of topics as their male counterparts. We will therefore also read, for example, Anne Askew’s fierce political and religious beliefs that got her burned as a heretic; Aemelia Lanyer and Mary Sidney Herbert, on class and patronage; Katherine Philips on the metaphysics of friendship; Lucy Hutchinson on atoms and the chaotic universe; Margaret Cavendish’s imaginary journeys to other, scientific worlds; Hester Pulter’s poetic fantasies of being completely annihilated by God; and the critiques of (and complicities with) racism in Elizabeth Cary and Aphra Behn’s works.

Selected Major Readings: Poetic, narrative, and dramatic works of Anne Askew, Mary I, Elizabeth I, Mary Sidney Herbert, Mary Wroth, Aemelia Lanyer, Elizabeth Cary, Katherine Philips, Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, Hester Pulter, and Aphra Behn.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Anne Southwell poem; Margaret Cavendish, prefatory letter from Poems and Fancies; Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own”

Method of Instruction: lecture, discussion

Method of Evaluation: Editing Women Writers Project (three smaller assignments); three quizzes; participation in recipe book “Transcribathon”; final paper; active and engaged participation

Course Title: World Drama

Course Code: ENG343H5F | Lecture MWF 3-4

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 2 Race, Ethnicity, Diaspora, Indigeneity

Course Title: Spy Fiction

Course Course: ENG344H5S | Lecture T 6-9

Instructor: Richard Greene

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Course Title: Contemporary Poetry

Course Course: ENG349H5F | Lecture T 11-1, R 11-12

Instructor: Avery Slater

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Detailed Description by Instructor: This interdisciplinary course will investigate the global evolution of ecologically concerned poetry in the twentieth- and twenty-first century. Contemporary global poetry has rapidly expanded its commitments to include the nonhuman world it inhabits, a world lately thrown into crisis by human action. All readings for the course will be in English, including materials in translation from other languages. This course thus also considers the ecological significance of translation—through literature as well as virtual “translations” of life-worlds, bodies, and habitats.

Selected Major Readings: 
Songs for the Harvester of Dreams by Duane Niatum
Dart by Alice Oswald
Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person by Erin Mouré

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

Method of Instruction: Seminar

Method of Evaluation:
Short Papers (25%); Student Presentation (10%); Discussion board posting (20%); Session Engagement (10%); Collaborative project (10%); Final Paper (25%)

Creative writing component: No 

Course Title: Toni Morrison: Texts and Contexts

Course Code: ENG351H5F | Lecture T 1-3, R 2-3

Instructor: Anna Thomas

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 6 American Literature

Detailed Description by Instructor: In this advanced introduction to the work of Toni Morrison, we will encounter masterpieces such as Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved and pay particular attention to questions of literary tradition and inheritance, form and narrative voice, and ethics in contexts of oppression. We will read most of Morrison's novels, alongside major essays, in the chronological order in which they were published. Students will be introduced to major themes in African American literary criticsm and theory through close engagement with Morrison's oeuvre and its critical legacy.

Selected Major Readings: Sula, Beloved, Song of Solomon, Jazz

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Sula, Beloved, selections of nonfiction writing and literary criticism

Method of Instruction: Lectures and discussion

Method of Evaluation: Essays

Creative writing component: No 

Course Title: Canadian Drama

Course Code: ENG352H5S | Lecture MWF 10-11

Instructor: Daniela Janes

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 5 Canadian Literature

Course Title: New Writing in Canada

Course Code: ENG357H5S | Lecture T 11-1, R 11-12

Instructor: Colin Hill

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 5 Canadian Literature

Detailed Description by Instructor: This course explores writing published in Canada in the twenty-first century with an emphasis upon the diversity of voices and perspectives in contemporary Canadian literatures. We will read six works of fiction by contemporary Canadian authors who write in Canadian and international contexts. As we work to discern the “new directions” of Canada’s literatures in the twenty-first century, our topics will include (but are not limited to) the role of the writer in the contemporary world, language, gender and sexuality, Canadian postmodernism and post-colonialism, multiculturalism, racism and anti-racism, Indigenous reconciliation, psychological and spiritual self-discovery, historiography, the Canadian Literature/Literatures in Canada debate, and individual, social, cultural, regional, and national identities.

Selected Major Readings:
1. Eden Robinson, Son of a Trickster
2. Kaie Kellough, Dominoes at the Crossroads
3. Souvankham Thammavongsa, How to Pronounce Knife
4. Shyam Selvadurai, The Hungry Ghosts
5. André Alexis, Days by Moonlight
6. Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Robinson, Kellough, Thammavongsa

Method of Instruction: Discussion and lecture

Method of Evaluation:
Participation 10%
Term paper 35%
Midterm test 25%
Final exam 30%

Creative writing component: No 

Course Title: Global Literatures in English

Course Code: ENG370H5F | Lecture M 3-5, W 3-4

Instructor: Julia Boyd

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 2 Race, Ethnicity, Diaspora, Indigeneity

Course Title: Special Topic Literature Theory: AI in Literature & Culture

Course Code: ENG372H5S

Instructor: Avery Slater

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 1 Literary Theory/Methods

Course Title: Creative Writing: Poetry

Course Code: ENG373H5F LEC0101 | Lecture M 1-3

Instructor: TBD

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Course Title: Creative Writing: Poetry

Course Code: ENG373H5F LEC0101 | Lecture R 1-3

Instructor: TBD

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Course Title: Creative Writing: Prose

Course Code: ENG374H5S LEC0102 | Lecture T 9-11

Instructor: TBD

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Course Title: Creative Writing: Prose

Course Code: ENG374H5S LEC0201 | Lecture R 3-5

Instructor: TBD

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Course Title: Special Topic in Writing for Performance (TBA)

Course Code: ENG378H5F LEC0101 | F 11-1

Instructor: TBD

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Course Title: British Romanticism, 1770-1800

Course Code: ENG385H5F | Lecture R 6-9

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 4 Literature 1700-1900

Course Title: British Romanticism, 1800-1830

Course Code: ENG386H5S | Lecture T 11-1, R 12-1

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 4 Literature 1700-1900

Course Title: Spaces of Fiction

Course Code: ENG388H5S | Lecture T 1-3, R 2-3

Instructor: Stanka Radovic

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

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%)

Creative writing component: No 

Course Title: Literary Theory Now

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

Instructor:  Avery Slater

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 1 Literary Theory/Methods

Fourth-Year Courses

Fall Term

  • ENG400H5F Capstone Seminar: Writing a Research Project
  • ENG415H5F Seminar: Lit. Theory/Meth. (Writers on Reading & Writing)
  • ENG471H5F Seminar: Literature 1700-1900 (The Unreal City)

Winter Term

  • ENG416H5S Seminar: Lit. Theory / Methods (Language & the Human)
  • ENG424H5S Seminar: Canadian Lit. (Suburban Literatures in Canada)
  • ENG435H5S Seminar: American Lit (Sea Stories)
  • ENG489Y5Y Creative Writing Workshop - 2nd 1/2

Course Title: Capstone Seminar: Writing a Research Project

Course Code: ENG400H5F | Lecture M 3-5

Instructor: Liza Blake

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 1 Literary Theory/Methods

Detailed Description by Instructor: 
This capstone seminar is designed to allow students nearing the end of their English degree to undertake longer research projects, producing literary critical essays that result from both primary research and engagement with a subfield in literary criticism. The class will begin with a survey of various critical methods and approaches, including both theoretical readings and dissections of published essays to see how they are put together. Students will then be guided through the steps of proposing, researching, and writing a longer research project, working both in consultation with the professor and in collaborative peer editing environments. The course offers an opportunity to explore deeply into a topic (chosen in consultation with the professor), and students can expect to leave the course with a polished piece of writing that can serve as a writing sample for graduate school, or possible publication in the English department’s journal.

Selected Major Readings: TBD

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: TBD

Method of Instruction: seminar-style discussions, peer-editing sessions and workshops

Method of Evaluation: capstone essay of ~15 pages, active participation in workshops, short research presentations, reflective research journal, participation

Course Title: Sem: Lit. Theory/Meth. (Writers on Reading & Writing)

Course Code: ENG415H5F | Lecture R 9-11

Instructor:  Stanka Radovic

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 1 Literary Theory/Methods

Detailed Description by Instructor: This seminar will explore reading and writing through the select statements that eminent 20th century writers have made about these practices. As students of literature, we often take for granted the fact that words shape our worldview in both private and professional settings. In this course, we will seek to problematize the acts of reading and writing not only as parts of a literary practice but also as ways of making sense of our environment, traditions, and history. Because of their chosen profession, writers in particular often reflect on the complex relationship between words and the world. By exploring these select authors’ texts about reading and writing, we will try to define and refine our own understanding of these practices and their social impact.

Required reading:
Virginia Woolf “How to Read a Book,” Stephen King On Writing (selections), V.S. Naipaul “Reading and Writing,” T.S. Eliot “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Sartre The Words, Orwell “Politics and the English Language” and “Why I Write,” Henry Miller “Reflections on Writing” from The Wisdom of the Heart, Robert Frost “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Kurt Vonnegut “How to Write with Style” from How to Use the Power of the Written Word, Rilke Letters to the Young Poet, Kafka “Written Kisses” (a letter to Milena Jesenska).

Method of evaluation: Participation (15%); Reading responses (10% each, total of 4); Short Essay (20%); Final Essay (25%)

Creative writing component: No 

Course Title: Sem: Lit. Theory / Methods (Language & the Human)

Course Code: ENG416H5S | Lecture R 10-12

Instructor: Avery Slater

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here.  

Group 1 Literary Theory/Methods

Course Title: Sem: Canadian Lit. (Suburban Literatures in Canada)

Course Code: ENG424H5S | Lecture R 1-3

Instructor: Colin Hill

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 5 Canadian Literature

Detailed Description by Instructor: This course invites students to read and interpret the remarkably diverse, global, contemporary, and often ignored literatures produced in and about Canadian suburbs (including, in our own region, Mississauga, Brampton, Scarborough, etc.). The course will consider both canonical literary representations of the suburban in Canada and an emergent body of writing about suburban space and experience produced largely by new Canadian writers of diverse origins and backgrounds whose histories, life stories, and geographies fit uncomfortably, or not at all, within established and exclusionary narratives of Canadian literature. Participants in the course will read a representative selection of short fiction, two or three novels, and selected short critical materials that offer an interdisciplinary approach to the subject of writing in and about Canadian suburbs; these critical materials are selected to combine innovatively some traditional literary approaches to the suburbs, contemporary cultural studies of suburban life, and recent Canadian and international geographical and sociological theories of suburban spaces. Seminar topics will include (but are certainly not limited to) literary representations of suburban experience, the creative problems and possibilities associated with writing about suburban spaces, the lives and stories of immigrants in the contemporary Canadian “ethnoburb,” various socio-political discussions of suburban life, suburban geographies in relation to the Indigenous land they occupy, urban/suburban tensions and inequalities, the material and real-life conditions that affect the production of suburban literature, and the problematic critical reception of suburban writing by a Canadian literary establishment centred in downtown Toronto. As students engage these topics and readings, they will be encouraged to reflect upon and share their own experiences of living, studying, working, and creating in suburban areas of the GTA.

Selected Readings: Primary sources (short stories and novels) will be drawn from the following list of authors:

Mona Awad, Michelle Berry, David Bezmozgis, David Chariandy, Douglas Coupland, Kelli Deeth, Barbara Gowdy, Andrea Gunraj, Catherine Hernandez, Uzma Jallaluddin, Carrianne Leung, Derek Mascaranas, Rohinton Mistry, Tea Mutonji, Kenneth Radu, Sarah Selecky, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Halli Villegas, and possibly others.

Secondary sources include short readings by some or all of the following:

Nishanthan Balasubramaniam, Christopher Cheung, Cheryl Cowdy, Judith De Jong, Richard Harris, Rupa Huq, James Howard Kunstler, Wei Li, James Onusko, Lara Vaughan, and possibly others.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: TBA

Method of Instruction: Discussion and lecture

Method of Evaluation:
Participation 15%
Short Presentation 20%
Term paper 40%
Midterm Writing Assignment 25%

Creative writing component: No 

Course Title: American Literature: Sea Stories

Course Code: ENG435H5S | Lecture T 3-5

Instructor: Melissa Gniadek

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 6 American Literature

Detailed Description by Instructor: From Moby-Dick to Pirates of the Caribbean, oceans occupy a central space in U.S. literature and culture, past and present. In this class we will explore the history of engagement with the oceans in American literature, broadly construed. Our readings may range from sailors’ narratives and tales of piracy and captivity to fiction set at sea and fiction about global travel. As we read these texts we will confront issues of race, labor, gender, and environmental concerns, among others. And we will ask: what happens to our ideas about American literature if we shift our focus from land to the oceans?

This is a question that has been motivating many scholars over the past decades. While “American literature” once designated a focus on the literature of the United States as a nation, American literary studies have gone transnational, exploring historical and literary movements across and beyond national borders and questioning the very primacy of those borders. In this class we will think about how taking an oceanic perspective might reorient conversations about the transnational. What difference does it make when we focus on the oceans instead of on land? How does this change the questions that we ask of familiar texts, and what less familiar texts does it allow us to talk about? How is thinking about oceanic literature central to ecocritical concerns? And what happens when we start to think about oceans, islands, and continents together in relation to imperial formations, as the field known as “archipelagic American studies” does? These are questions that we’ll ask in this course as we develop research and writing skills and practice entering into scholarly conversations.

Selected major readings:

Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (1789)
Anonymous, The Woman of Colour: A Tale (1808)
From The Female Marine, or The Adventures of Lucy Brewer (1815)
Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)
Herman Melville, The Encantadas (1854)
Craig Santos Perez, from unincorporated territory [lukao] (2017)

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:

Hester Blum, “The Prospect of Oceanic Studies” (2010)
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851), excerpts
Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “Introduction: Of Oceans and Islands,” New Literatures Review (2011) special issue on postcolonial island literatures
Derek Walcott, “The Sea is History” (1979)

Method of Instruction: Seminar discussion

Method of Evaluation: Short writing assignments, initiating discussion, essay proposal, annotated bibliography, research essay, active participation.

Creative writing component: No 

Course Title: Sem: Literature 1700-1900 (The Unreal City)

Course Code: ENG471H5F | Lecture M 1-3

Instructor:  Thomas Laughlin

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group 4 Literature 1700-1900

Course Title: Creative Writing Workshop 

Course Code: ENG489Y5Y | Lecture T 3-5

Instructor:  Richard Greene

For the UTM calendar description of this course, click here. 

Group n/a

Detailed Description by Instructor: A workshop in writing fiction and poetry. Students will be expected to write poetry (in strict forms and free verse) and narrative prose. They will submit their work on a regular basis for group discussion. Admission to the course is limited. Students should submit a 15-page portfolio of their best creative writing (not academic essays) in advance of registration, and the professor will choose those most likely to benefit from the work-shop.

Selected major readings: 
William Strunk and E.B White, The Elements of Style.
David Lodge, The Art of Fiction.

First three texts / authors to be studied: William Strunk and E.B White, The Elements of Style. David Lodge, The Art of Fiction.

Method of Instruction: Seminar and discussion

Method of Evaluation: Tests and small assignments, 20%; journal, 20%; class participation, 10%; portfolio submitted at the end of the course, 50%.

Creative writing component: Yes