*The Course Schedules below are subject to change once the new Academic Calendar is published as well as pending enrolment pattern changes. Detailed course descriptions by instructors are added when available and are also subject to change.
**Please consult the Registrar's Time Table for mode of delivery for courses.
First-Year Courses
Course Title: Effective Writing
Course Code: ENG100H5F | Lecture MW 6-9 (ONLINE)
Instructor: TBD
This course provides practical tools for writing in university and beyond. Students will gain experience in generating ideas, clarifying insights, structuring arguments, composing paragraphs and sentences, critiquing and revising their writing, and communicating effectively to diverse audiences. This course does not count toward any English program.
Group n/a
Course Title: Effective Writing
Course Code: ENG100H5S | Lecture MW 3-6
Instructor: Julia Boyd
This course provides practical tools for writing in university and beyond. Students will gain experience in generating ideas, clarifying insights, structuring arguments, composing paragraphs and sentences, critiquing and revising their writing, and communicating effectively to diverse audiences. This course does not count toward any English program.
Group n/a
Course Title: Narrative
Course Code: ENG110H5F | Lecture MW 1-3 | Tutorials W 3-4, W 5-6
Instructor: Daniela Janes
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.
Group n/a
Second-Year Courses
- ENG202H5F British Literature in the World I: Medieval to Eighteenth-Century (Online)
- ENG203H5S British Literature in the World II: Romantic to Contemporary (Online)
- ENG205H5S Rhetoric
- ENG218H5F Interactive Storytelling and Worldmaking
- ENG238H5F Fantasy Literature
- ENG280H5S Critical Approaches to Literature (Online)
- ENG289H5F Creative Writing
- ENG289H5S Creative Writing (Online)
Course Title: British Literature in the World I: Medieval to Eighteenth-Century
Course Code: ENG202H5F | Lecture TR 9-11 | Tutorials R 11-12, R 1-2
Instructor: TBD
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
Course Title: British Literature in the World II: Romantic to Contemporary
Course Code: ENG203H5S | Lecture TR 9-11 | Tutorials R11-12, R 1-2 (Online)
Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard
An introduction to influential texts that have shaped British literary history from the Romantic period to the present, covering developments in poetry, drama and prose, from William Wordsworth to Zadie Smith and beyond. The course will address topics such as revolution and war; the increasing diversity of poetic forms; the cultural dominance of the novel; romanticism, Victorianism, modernism and postmodernism; feminism; colonialism and decolonization; the ethnic and cultural diversity of Anglophone literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; literature and sexual identity; the AIDS epidemic; and technology and the digital age. The course will encourage students to think about the study of English literatures in relationship to history, including the history of world literatures.
Exclusion: ENG203Y5
Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits. Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in any 100-level ENG or DRE course (except ENG100H5) may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.
Group n/a
Course Title: Rhetoric
Course Code: ENG205H5S | Lecture TR 6-9
Instructor: TBD
An introduction to the rhetorical tradition from classical times to the present with a focus on prose as strategic persuasion. Besides rhetorical terminology, topics may include the discovery and arrangement of arguments, validity in argumentation, elements of style, and rhetorical criticism and theory.
Group 1
Course Title: Interactive Storytelling and Worldmaking
Course Code: ENG218H5F | Lecture TR 3-6
Instructor: TBD
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.
Group n/a
Course Title: Fantasy Literature
Course Code: ENG238H5F | Lecture MW 3-6
Instructor: TBD
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.
Group n/a
Course Title: Critical Approaches to Literature
Course Code: ENG280H5S | Lecture MW 1-3 | Tutorials W 3-4, W 5-6 (Online)
Instructor: Thomas Laughlin
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
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: Creative Writing
Course Code: ENG289H5F | Lecture TR 11-1 | Tutorials TR 1-2, TR 2-3
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. Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in ENG101H or ENG102H5 or ENG110H5 or ENG140Y5 or DRE/ENG121H5 and DRE/ENG122H5 may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.
Group n/a
Course Title: Creative Writing
Course Code: ENG289H5S | Lecture TR 1-3 | Tutorials TR 3-4, TR 5-6 (Online)
Instructor: TBD
Students will engage in a variety of creative exercises, conducted across a range of different genres of literary writing.
Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits. Students who do not meet the prerequisite but are enrolled in ENG101H or ENG102H5 or ENG110H5 or ENG140Y5 or DRE/ENG121H5 and DRE/ENG122H5 may petition the department in writing for approval to take the course. See the guidelines for written petitions on the department website.
Group n/a
Third-Year Courses
- ENG316H5S Special Topic in Modern and Contemporary Literature "Taylor Swift: Gender, Genre, and Celebrity"
- ENG352H5F Canadian Drama
- ENG356H5S Caribbean Literature
- ENG365H5F Contemporary American Fiction (Online)
Course Title: Special Topic in Modern and Contemporary Literature "Taylor Swift: Gender, Genre, and Celebrity"
Course Code: ENG316H5S | Lecture MW 3-6
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.
Detailed Description by Instructor: This course focuses on the music and career of American songwriter Taylor Swift, and, in turn, positions her career as a critical lens through which to examine the intersections of literary, gender, genre, political, and cultural issues.
In the last 16 years, Swift has released 10 albums (11 as of mid-April 2024), including the two pandemic albums, Folklore and Evermore—a span of time that has seen her develop from a Nashville-based guitar player and song-writer-for-hire to a globally successful musician who crosses and mixes genres. Our goal is to approach specific works (albums, and individual songs) and engage in discussions of creativity and aesthetics alongside a wide range of issues: sexuality, pop culture, politics, “authenticity,” and celebrity. We will ask questions about genre—what is folk? Poetry? What is country? What is pop?—as we explore: romance, love and desire (“Love Story”); the ownership and authorship of bodies of words (“Taylor’s Versions”); discourses of youth, girlhood, and teenagers; matters of persona, celebrity, fandom, and fan studies; and cultural and social constructions of identity, and intersections of gender and genre.
We will adopt a roughly diachronic, a chronological, course model that tracks the history of Swift’s development. But we will add to this a synchronic, or theme- and issue-based, thread of discussions when we will step outside of our chronology and focus on issues that emerge in key moments in her career (Swift’s withdrawal of her music from online streaming platforms during a dispute with Apple Music; the “feud” between Swift and Kanye West; and Swift’s re-recording and release of her first six albums after a dispute with the label Big Machine over ownership of the masters of these albums—to note only three). In doing so we are interested in exploring Swift’s construction of persona (and, through the lens of the sociology of fame, her handling of celebrity)—as she shifts and mixes genres, moving from country to pop. That is, we are interested in Swift’s relationship with “twang” —with a country style that embraces a national cultural identity. We will also follow musicologist Nate Sloan’s model of “work” in relation to Swift’s career, and consider “work as craft,” “work as sanctuary,” and “work as agency” (as ownership of work and identity). Doing so frames a critical window in which we can explore Swift and the “Sociology of Fame,” addressing models of celebrity and persona, as well as high and low art and culture, as Swift styles her identity in the documentaries Miss Americana and Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions.
Underlying these considerations we will pay attention to Swift as a lyricist, as an artist who marries music and text. We will investigate the poetic conventions of her lyrics, and the literary traditions, texts and authors that she engages—Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, Wordsworth, the Brontës, and Dickinson (to note only a few). Lastly, we will also position Swift’s music alongside her influences and antecedents (Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, The Beatles, Celine Dion, Shania Twain, James Taylor, and Dolly Parton) and contemporaries (Lorde, Lana Del Ray, The Chicks, Fall Out Boy, John Mayer, Ed Sheeran, and Adele)—to name a few.
Group n/a
Course Title: Canadian Drama
Course Code: ENG352H5F | Lecture MW 9-12
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.
Group 5
Course Title: Caribbean Literature
Course Code: ENG356H5S | TR 3-6
Instructor: TBD
A multi-lingual and multi-racial archipelago, the Caribbean has a rich literary and theoretical tradition: this course will introduce students to major figures in Caribbean Anglophone literature (including Jean Rhys, Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming, Erna Brodber, V.S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid, in addition to some texts read in English translation (including Aimé Cesaire, Alejo Carpentier, Maryse Condé, Marie Vieux Chauvet)
Group 2
Course Title: Contemporary American Fiction
Course Code: ENG365H5F | TR 6-9 (Online)
Instructor: TBD
This course explores six or more works by at least four contemporary American writers of fiction.