2018-2019 English Courses | Department of English & Drama

Course Title: How to Read Critically

Course Code: ENG101H5F | Lecture M/W 12-1 | Tutorials TUT0101 M 1-2, TUT0102 M 1-2, TUT0103 M 1-2, TUT0104 M 3-4, TUT0105 M 3-4, TUT016 M 3-4, TUT0107 R 12-1, TUT0108 R 1-2, TUT0109 R 2-3

Instructor: Michael Raby

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.

Course Title: How to Research Literature

Course Code: ENG102H5S | Lecture T/R 12-1 | Tutorials TUT0101R 1-2, TUT0102 T 1-2, TUT0103 1-2, TUT0104 3-4, TUT0105 T 3-4, TUT0106 T 3-4

Instructor: Daniela Janes

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.

Course Title: Narrative

Course Code: ENG110H5S | Lecture R 10-12 | Tutorials TUT0101 R 12-1, TUT0102 R 12-1, TUT0103 R 12-1, TUT0104 R 2-3, TUT0105 R 2-3, R TUT0106 R 2-3, TUT0107 12-1, TUT0108 R 2-3

Instructor: Chester.Scoville

This course explores the stories that are all around us and 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, biographies.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

The lectures will introduce concepts of narrative and apply them to a variety of texts; the tutorials will provide critical discussion of these concepts and texts. By the end of the course, students should be able to demonstrate a critical understanding of the concepts of narratology and their applicability to a broad range of phenomena. 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; LeGuin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”; Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway.

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

Method of Instruction: Lecture with Tutorials

Method of Evaluation: Scaffolded short writing assignments capped by a final paper and final exam, the latter worth 35% of the final mark. Participation in tutorials will also be counted.

Course Title: Traditions of Theatre and Drama

Course Code: ENG121H5F | Lecture M/W 11-12 | Tutorials TUT0101 M 12-1 and TUT0102 M 2-3

Instructor: Jacob Gallagher-Ross

An introductory survey of the forms and history of world drama from the classical period to the nineteenth century in its performance context. 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

Detailed Description by Instructor:

This course is an introduction to key moments from theatrical history, surveying the period from antiquity to (roughly) the eighteenth century. While it operates as a stand-alone course, it also serves as the precursor to DRE 122, which covers the period from (roughly) the eighteenth century to the present. We'll read a selection of important plays ranging from ancient Greek tragedies to nineteenth century melodramas. We'll study the performers who brought those plays to life, the theatres they performed in, and the audiences who went to see them. And we'll talk about the afterlives of these old plays, many of which are regularly performed today. The theatre has always been a place to think—about politics, about religion, about social life, about cultural inheritances or projected futures, about the theatre itself. We’ll weigh the arguments of theatre’s most passionate advocates and its fiercest enemies; discuss its complex exchanges with other art forms; and consider its avid incorporation of new technologies, from the invention of writing to the arrival of electric light.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Aeschylus, Agamemnon; Euripides, Bacchae; Arisophanes, Lysistrata.

Method of Instruction: Lecture, class discussion, tutorials

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

Course Title: Modern and Contemporary Theatre and Drama

Course Code: ENG122H5S | M/W 11-2 | Tutorials TUT0101 W 12-1 and TUT0102 W 2-3

Instructor: Jacob Gallagher-Ross

An introductory survey of the forms and history of world drama from the late nineteenth 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

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, TBA

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

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

Course Title: Contemporary World Literatures

Course Code: ENG140Y5Y | T 9-11 | Tutorials TUT0101 11-12, TUT0102 T 11-12

Instructor: Raji Soni

An exploration of how late twentieth and twenty-first century literature in English responds to our world. Includes poetry, prose, and drama by major writers, such as Morrison, Munro, Coetzee, and Rushdie, and emerging writers.

Course Title: Reading Poetry

Course Code: ENG201Y5Y | Lecture T 3-5, R 3-4

Instructor: Brent Wood

An introduction to poetry, through a close reading of texts, focusing on its traditional forms, themes, techniques, and uses of language; its historical and geographical range; and its twentieth-century diversity.

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.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

We will read and discuss a selection of finely-crafted, popular poems from the age of Shakespeare to the new millennium. We will study the basic elements of poetry – rhythm, repetition, diction, metaphor, imagery – then travel through the history of imaginative verse in English on the subjects of desire, spirit, death, intoxication, violence, mythology, and gender. Memorizing, discussing, and reading poems out loud are integral components of the course.

Selected Major Readings: Course Reader: Making Language Dance, 2nd ed.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Basic poetic elements in theory, illustrated by poems ranging from William Blake to Sylvia Plath

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation: Essay, regular short assignments, in-class participation, midterm test, final exam.

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

Course Code: ENG202H5F | Lecture W/R 11-12 | Tutorials TUT0101 W 12-1, TUT0102 W 12-1, TUT0104 W 2-3, TUT0105 W 2-3

Instructor: Chester Scoville

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.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

This course will survey the imaginative literature of Britain from its beginnings as an isolated, poor country on the edge of the known world through its growth into a global power. We will consider the unlikely trajectory of a nation through the critical eyes of its poetry, prose, and drama, focusing on how a society’s literature both embodies and critiques its values, politics, and beliefs. We will also study the changes in language and literary form over nearly a thousand years of history, familiarizing ourselves with such varied kinds of writing as the saga, the sonnet, the tragedy, the epic, and the novel.

Selected Major Readings: Readings will include Beowulf, Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, and more.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Bede, Beowulf, Chaucer.

Method of Instruction: Lecture with Tutorials

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

Course Title: British Literature in the World II: romantic to Centemporary

Course Code: ENG203H5S | Lecture M/W 2-3 | Tutorials TUT0101 M 3-4, TUT0102 M 3-4, TUT0103 W 3-4, TUT0104 3-4

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

An introduction to influential texts that have shaped British literary history from the Romantic period to the present, covering developments in poetry, drama, and prose, from William Wordsworth to Zadie Smith and beyond. The course will address topics such as revolution and war; the increasing diversity of poetic forms; the cultural dominance of the novel; romanticism, Victorianism, modernism, and postmodernism; feminism; colonialism and decolonization; the ethnic and cultural diversity of Anglophone literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; literature and sexual identity; the AIDS epidemic; and technology and the digital age. The course will encourage students to think about the study of English literatures in relationship to history, including the history of world literatures.

Exclusion: ENG203Y5
Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

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

familiarize students with selected major works of the history of British literature;
expand interpretative skills through a range of comparative and cultural studies approaches; and
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.

Required Texts: (available at UTM bookstore in January):
1) A bundle of Broadview texts, only available at the UTM bookstore:

1a) Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 4: Age of Romanticism, 3rd ed.
1b) Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 5: Victorian Era, 2nd ed.
1c) Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Vol 6: 20th Century, 2nd ed.

2) David Mitchell, Could Atlas 978-0-345-80747-2

3) George Eliot, Silas Marner 978-0-14-143975-4

Recommended Texts:
1) A good glossary; such as The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. (Ed. Murfin and Ray) Bedford.
2) A good dictionary: Oxford English Dictionary: http://www.oed.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Browning “My Last Duchess”; Eminem “Stan”

Method of Instruction: Lecture, Discussion, Group Work, weekly tutorials

Method of Evaluation: Essays, tests, and final exam

Course Title: Rhetoric

Course Code: ENG205H5F | Lecture T 1-3, R 1-2

Instructor: Chester Scoville

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.

Exclusion: WRI305H5
Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

An introduction to the major concepts and theories of rhetoric from the ancient world to the present day. We will explore the roots of rhetoric in Athenian political culture, trace its development through Roman law and medieval religion and literature, and consider some of its modern and postmodern varieties. Along the way, we will see the centrality in Western thought of the study and practice of persuasive speech and writing, and its relationship to politics, science, history, literature, and more.

Selected Major Readings: Readings will include selections from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Homer’s Iliad, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen, Bitzter’s “The Rhetorical Situation,” and more.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Aristotle, Bitzer, Gorgias

Method of Instruction: The course will be set in an Active Learning Classroom, and will rely to a heavy extent on group discussion and guided exercises. The ALC is designed as a highly interactive learning environment based on group work, problem-solving, and task accomplishment; the course’s mixture of (some) lectures and (much) in-class participation will reflect and take advantage of this design.

Method of Evaluation: Short analytical writing assignments capped by a substantial final paper. Participation will also be counted.

Course Title: Rhetorical Criticism

Course Code: ENG206H5S | Lecture T 1-3, R 1-4

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.

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

Detailed Description by Instructor:

The world that surrounds us is not neutral; it is replete with designed objects, textual and otherwise, that seek to persuade, move, and teach us. This course will build on the base of ENG205 Rhetoric to focus on detailed analysis of texts, their persuasive methods, and their grounding in the power structures and struggles of their day. Students will use the tools of analysis to conduct rhetorical readings of a variety of texts, in order to reveal their agendas and techniques. This experience will both lay the groundwork for other forms of analysis in English courses, and foster skills of reading and critical thought that are applicable in a wide variety of fields and situations.

Selected Major Readings: Much of our work will rely on Foss, Rhetorical Criticism, 5th edition, which will be available at the UTM bookstore. Students will also choose texts from a variety of sources to analyze using the tools we study.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Foss; Aristotle’s Rhetoric; Lanham, Handlist of Rhetorical Terms

Method of Evaluation: Short analytical writing assignments capped by a substantial final paper. Participation will also be counted.

Course Title: The Canadian Short Story

Course Code: ENG215H5F | Lecture T 12-1, R 11-1

Instructor: Brent Wood

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.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

We will read and discuss a selection of short fiction by men and women from across the Canadian cultural landscape over the past century, including First nations and immigrant perspectives, tragedy and satire, history and invention. We will develop an understanding of the stories’ use of narrative viewpoints, characterization, irony and suspense, while learning from their commentary on the psychology of sexual desire, identity, family dynamics, and colonialism.

Selected Major Readings: Course Reader

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Thomas King, Rudy Wiebe, Stephen Leacock

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation: Essay, exams, in-class participation

Course Title: Children's Literature

Course Code: ENG234H5F | Lecture W 9-10, F 9-11

Instructor: Siobhan O'Flynn

A critical and historical study of poetry and fiction written for or appropriated by children, this course may also include drama or non-fiction and will cover works by at least twelve authors such as Bunyan, Stevenson, Carroll, Twain, Alcott, Nesbit, Montgomery, Milne, Norton, and Fitzhugh.

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

Course Title:Comics and the Graphic Novel

Course Code: ENG235H5S | Lecture W 11-12, F 11-1

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.

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 alternative graphic texts as Seth’s It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken and Tamaki and Tamaki’s This One Summer, as well as some mainstream comics such as Wilson’s Ms. Marvel and Moore and Gibbons’s Watchmen. We will also use such resources McCloud’s Understanding Comics and Chute’s Why Comics? as theoretical and historical background.

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

Method of Instruction: Lecture with discussion

Method of Evaluation: Scaffolded writing assignments leading up to a final essay, and a final exam worth 25% of the final mark.

Course Title: Detective Fiction

Course Code: ENG236H5F | Lecture T 11-1, R 12-1

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.

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

Course Title: Science Fiction

Course Code: ENG237H5S | Lecture W 4-5, F 3-5

Instructor: Andrea Day

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.

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

Detailed Description by Instructor:

This course charts the ways in which authors use science fiction to reflect upon the most salient social problems of their own eras, and, more specifically, how they grapple with the ethical implications of technoscientific advancements and their potential effects on human and nonhuman life. Beginning with Frankenstein, we will conduct a historical survey of English-language science fiction from the nineteenth century through its Pulp Era, Golden Age, and New Wave iterations, finishing with contemporary dystopian and utopian visions of the ways in which technoscience might affect our own futures. We will use fictional representations of the body and science’s incursions upon it as a starting point for our discussions of the ways in which our focal texts conceptualize — and unsettle — issues including moral agency, bioethics, speciation, class, sexuality, race, gender, and power.

Selected Major Readings:
The Marrow Thieves (Dimaline)
Salt Fish Girl (Lai)
The Island of Dr. Moreau (Wells)
Frankenstein (Wollstonecraft Shelley)
“Eye of the Beholder,” The Twilight Zone (Serling)
“San Junipero,” Black Mirror (Brooker)

Short fiction will be posted to Quercus.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: “Eye of the Beholder,” Frankenstein, The Island of Doctor Moreau

Method of Instruction: Lecture and participatory discussion

Method of Evaluation: Test, essays, exam, and informed participation

Course Title: Fantasy Literature

Course Code: ENG238H5F | Lecture M/W/F 3-4

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

This course focuses on fantasy literature, film, and television, and draws on a wide range of critical, cultural, and theoretical approaches. As it explores the magical and supernatural, it may consider such genres as alternative histories, animal fantasy, epic, fairy tales, magic realism, and swords and sorcery. Authors and texts covered will survey the history of fantasy across American, British, and Canadian literature, and may include Beowulf, 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.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

This course explores fantasy literature from a variety of theoretical and critical approaches. As we read novels that treat the magical, the supernatural, epic, fairy tales, and magic realism, we will be interested in intersections between fantasy and a wide range of themes: gender and sexuality, culture, politics, philosophy, and race—to name a few.

Required Readings:
(available at Amazon and the UTM Bookstore):

TOLKIEN, J.R.R., HOBBIT ISBN: 978-0-261-10221-7
COLLINS, SUZANNE, HUNGER GAMES ISBN: 978-0-439-02352-8
ROWLING, HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN ISBN: 978-1-4088-5567-6
JOYCE, SOME KIND OF FAIRY TALE ISBN: 978-0-575-11529-3
LIU, MARJORIE, MONSTRESS V1: AWAKENING ISBN: 978-1-63215-709-6
ADEYEMI, TOMI, CHILDREN OF BLOOD AND BONE ISBN: 978-1-250-17097-2
Readings posted to the PORTAL or in a course pack

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Beowulf, The Hobbit, The Hunger Games

Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion

Method of Evaluation: Essays (with a creative writing option), tests, and exam

Course Title: Horror Literature

Course Code: ENG239H5S | Lecture M/W/F 12-1

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.

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

Detailed Description by Instructor:

This course explores horror literature. We are particularly interested in the monstrous—monsters and monstrosity, especially vampires, zombies, and ghosts. As we consider the aesthetics of terror, horror, the gothic, the uncanny, the abject, and fear, we will explore issues of gender, race, genre, science, and religion.

Required Readings:
(available at the UTM Bookstore in January, or at links provided):

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein 978-1-55481-103-8
Richard Matheson, I am Legend 978-0-312-86504-7
Bram Stoker, Dracula 978-1-55111-136-0
Pornsak Pichetshote and Aaron Campbell, Infidel 978-1-5343-0836-7
LaValle, Destroyer 978-1684150557
Octavia Butler, Fledgling 978-0446696166
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House 978-0143039983

Texts on Quercus

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Gillman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”; Keevil, “The Herd”; Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”—all available on Quercus in January

Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion; Film Screenings (on Jan 16 and Feb 6—6pm, CC1080)

Method of Evaluation: 3 essays (with a creative writing option) and exam

Course Title: American Literature

Course Code: ENG250Y5Y | Lecture T 1-3, R 2-3

Instructor: Avery Slater

An introductory survey of major works in American literature, this course explores works in a variety of genres, including poetry, fiction, essays, and slave narratives.

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

Detailed Description by Instructor:

This course is a survey in American Literature from the 19th through the 21th centuries. In addition to fiction from these periods, we will also turn our attention to poetry, nonfiction, photography, literary essays, and creative journalism. One broad theme connecting our year’s readings will be the ever-changing techniques invented by literary artists so as to mirror and to question the many "fictions" of everyday life. We will trace how American writers from a diversity of backgrounds develop these new modes of literature in order to intervene in a broader, communal story or history. How has literature created new ways of expressing identity and belonging? Literary periods covered will range from transcendentalism, naturalism, and regionalism to modernism, postmodernism, and the contemporary.

Selected Major Readings: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Frederick Douglass), Life in the Iron Mills (Rebecca Harding Davis), The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald), "The Book of the Dead" (Muriel Rukeyser), Notes of a Native Son (James Baldwin), Dispatches (Michael Herr), The House on Mango Street (Sandra Cisneros), The Dew Breaker (Edwidge Danticat)

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Ralph Waldo Emerson "Nature," Nathaniel Hawthorne "The Old Manse," Edgar Allan Poe "The Fall of the House of Usher"

Method of Instruction: lecture with participatory discussion

Method of Evaluation: quizzes, short papers, midyear exam, final exam, participation in lectures (attendance, discussion)

Course Title:Canadian Literature

Course Code: ENG252Y5Y | Lecture T 9-10, R 9-11

Instructor: Daniela Janes

An introductory survey of major Canadian works in poetry, prose, and drama from early to recent times.

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

Course Title: Literature and Environmental Criticism

Course Code: ENG259H5S | Lecture W 3-4, F 3-5

Instructor: Thomas Laughlin

This course is an introduction to the field of ecocriticism: the study of literary writing about nature and of literature's role in thinking about environment. Students will read work by prominent theorists of the field and by major literary writers such as Shakespeare, Marvell, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, Dickens, Hardy, Pratt, Lawrence, Frost, and Atwood.

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

Detailed Description by Instructor:

Since the dawn of human culture (at least 10,000 years ago by one count), our species has been actively shaping the physical and imaginative landscapes we occupy. “Nature” is thus an ambiguous concept. As both a real thing and a symbolic value, it is constantly undergoing transformations wrought by human culture. Throughout the course, we will be interested in (1) how real historical changes to lived environments are registered and represented in art and literature, and (2) how, along with these changes, “nature” takes on varying symbolic values. Along the way, students will be introduced to Romantic depictions of sublime nature, Victorian and modern representations of human-made landscapes wrought by the industrial revolution and colonial expansion, and Utopian imaginings of pathways towards different eco-futures. Overall, the course strives strike a balance between historical research into the literature of the past and present-day concerns about climate change and the hypothetical new geological epoch dubbed “the Anthropocene.” In the process, students will improve their ability to recognize and understand the ways that literature reflects and mediates environmental concerns, and how artistic experimentation can help expand our knowledge of the scale of humanity’s social-metabolic relationship with nature.

Selected Major Readings:
Charles Dickens, Hard Times (Penguin)
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Penguin)
Edward Burtynsky et al., Anthropocene (Goose Lane)
Richard Jefferies, After London (Dover)
Bessie Head, When Rain Clouds Gather (Waveland)
Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia (Bantam)
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton)

Additional short and excerpted readings will be made available as PDFs.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Greg Garrard; William Wordsworth; Jason W. Moore

Method of Instruction: lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation: participation; two essays; exam

Course Title: Queer Writing

Course Code: ENG269H5S | Lecture W 3-5, F 3-4

Instructor: Margeaux Feldman

Introducing a lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer tradition in literature and theory, this course may explore texts from a variety of historical periods, from the classical to the contemporary. It will focus on a variety of genres, potentially including poetry, drama, fiction, criticism, and popular culture.

Exclusion: ENG273Y1
Prerequisite: Open to students who have successfully completed at least 4.0 full credits.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

In his seminal text Cruising Utopia (2009), the late José Esteban Muñoz argues that “Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.” For Muñoz, “we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.” In this course, we’ll take up Muñoz’s call to imagine a queer utopia by looking at the ways that queer writing prompts us, as readers and writers, to imagine the worlds that we want to live in. What shapes might a queer utopia take? How does the vision of a queer utopia change across genre and form? In order to explore these questions, we’ll turn to contemporary literature, film, art, and culture produced by those in the 2SLGBTQ+ umbrella. We will take into consider how fantasy, pleasure, trauma, disability, politics, and nationality, inform queer writing.

This course has three main objectives. The first is to introduce students to what may be termed lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, two-spirit, and queer texts across different genres. The second is to provide students with an understanding of some of the key questions in contemporary queer theory. Don't worry: no experience with critical theory is needed to succeed in this course. And the final aim is to arm students with the writing skills needed to produce clearly written and thought-provoking papers, so that they may enter the final years of their degree with greater confidence in critical writing.

Required Texts:
Sean Baker (dir.) Tangerine
Billy Ray Belcourt, This Wound is a World
Kai Cheng Thom, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars
Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Bodymap and Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
Vivek Sharaya, I’m Afraid of Men
Lindsay Nixon, nîtisânak

Method of Evaluation:
Collaborative Project: 25%
Blog Posts: 25%
Final Essay or Creative Work: 35%
Informed Participation: 15%

Course Title: Toronto's Multicultural Literatures

Course Code: ENG271H5F | Lecture W 11-1, F 12-1

Instructor: Siobhan O'Flynn

Toronto is one of the world's most diverse and multicultural cities. This course is a study of literature by writers with strong connections to Toronto who explore issues such as diasporas, identity, nationality, place, origin, and the multicultural experience. Writers may include: Judy Fong Bates, Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, Rohinton Mistry, Michael Ondaatje, M. Nourbese Philip, Shyam Selvadurai, M. G. Vassanji.

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

Course Title: Literatures of Immigration and Exile

Course Code: ENG273H5F | Lecture M 11-12, W 11-1

Instructor: Raji Soni

In this course we will study literary and non-literary texts in English from the nineteenth 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.

Course Title: Indigenous Literatures

Course Code: ENG274H5S | Lecture M 9-11, W 10-11

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, Leslie Marmon Silko.

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

Course Title: Fanfiction

Course Code: ENG276H5S | Lecture W 9-10, F 9-11

Instructor: Siobhan O'Flynn

This course investigates fanfiction from a variety of theoretical standpoints, including gender and sexuality studies, critical race studies, and affect theory. It considers the literary history of fanfiction- amateur, unauthorized stories about characters invented by canonical writers (e.g., Jane Austen and Arthur Conan Doyle); a wide selection of fanfiction stories; and the commercialization of the products of the modern fanfiction industry.

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

Course Title: Bad Romance

Course Code: ENG277H5F | Lecture M/W/F 1-2

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

This course covers romances of the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, ranging from the amatory (stories about love, longing, and desire) to the fantastic (the supernatural and fantasy). Students will consider issues of canonization, popularity, the text-author-reader relationship, definitions of high and low art, ideas about good and bad writing, and eroticism and desire. Texts may include Harlequin romances, paranormal romance, and works by Jane Austen, the Brontes, Daphne du Maurier, Stephenie Meyer, Nicholas Sparks, Sarah Waters, and E. L. James.

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

Required Textbooks: (available at UTM bookstore and through Amazon)—read in this order: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice Editor:
Irvine. Broadview, ISBN: 978-1551110288 / 1551110288
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights Editor: Newman. broadview, ISBN: 978-1551115320 / 1551115328
Jenny Holiday, One and Only Forever, ISBN: 978-1455542406 /1455542407
Stephen King, Misery Scribner, ISBN 978-1501143106 /1501143107
Claire Cameron, The Last Neanderthal Doubleday, ISBN 978-0385686785 / 0385686781
Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire Riverhead, ISBN 978-0735217690 / 0735217696

Recommended Texts:
1) A good glossary; such as The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. (Ed. Murfin and Ray) Bedford.
2) A good dictionary: Oxford English Dictionary: http://www.oed.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Books will be read in order noted above.

Method of Instruction: Lecture, Discussion, Group Work, Author visits (Jenny Holiday and Claire Cameron)

Method of Evaluation: Essay (with a creative writing option), test, and final exam

Course Title: Video Games

Course Code: ENG279H5F | Lecture W 3-4, F 3-5

Instructor: Siobhan O'Flynn

What is the literary history of video games? This course considers how some novels and plays work like games; how games have evolved complex and often non-verbal means of conveying narratives; and whether narrative in fiction, theatre, and film can or should be a model for storytelling in the rule-bound, interactive worlds of video games.

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

Course Title: Critical Approaches to Literature

Course Code: ENG280H5S | Lecture M 11-1 | Tutorials TUT0101 M 1-2, TUT0102 M 1-2, TUT0103 M 3-4, TUT0103 M 3-4

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

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

Detailed Description by Instructor:

This course examines classic texts of literary, aesthetic, and critical theory that every student of literature should be familiar with. Starting from foundational texts by Marx and Nietzsche, the course works through the most significant moments in twentieth-century theory. However, it is not designed to provide a historical overview but rather to foreground themes, questions, and concerns that remain pertinent to contemporary literary study. We will consider the complex relationship between reader and text; the value, purpose, relevance, and pleasure of literature; the criteria of aesthetic judgment; the poetics and challenges of interpretation; as well as the often quite heated politics of criticism, including feminist, queer, ethnic, and postcolonial challenges to the Western canon.

This course poses the following questions: What is the purpose of studying literature? What does literature give us? How does it relate to our social and political world? Does it refine our minds? Allow us to feel more deeply or authentically? Help us live more meaningful lives? In what ways do we as readers participate in the production of meaning? What, if any, is our responsibility as readers? What constitutes the distinctiveness of literature (in comparison to other sites of cultural production)? Does it make sense to draw a division between theory and literature? What is the significance of what the text hides, represses, or leaves out? What constitutes readerly or interpretative generosity? Does the author’s race, gender, or nationality impact literary production? Who gets to decide what counts as literature? And why does this matter?

Selected Major Readings:
Calvin Thomas, Ten Lessons in Theory Adventures in Theory: A Compact Anthology

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Calvin Thomas

Method of Instruction: Lecture & tutorials

Method of Evaluation:
Two in-class tests (25% each)
5-7-page paper (30%)
Tutorial participation (20%)

Course Title: Creative Writing

Course Code: ENG289H5S | Lecture T/R 12-1 | Tutorials TUT0101 R 1-2, TUT0102 R 1-2, TUT0103 R 3-4, TUT0104 R 3-4

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.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

Students will develop and present a publishable piece of short fiction, a performable scene, and a performable poem. We will study basic techniques and principles of dialogue, description, story, character, rhetoric, and poetics in lecture, then “workshop” drafts in tutorial sessions. Students will critique one another’s work and receive feedback from instructors. Discipline, regular attendance, and ability to work in a co-operative environment are required.

Selected Major Readings:
Excerpts from texts on creative writing, and examples of various forms and techniques, online and in class.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Exerpts from Woods, How Fiction Works; Gardiner, The Art of Fiction; Graham/Volansky, The Collaborative Playwright.

Method of Instruction: Lecture, discussion, criticism

Method of Evaluation: Creative works in progress, peer critiques, active participation, midterm test, final portfolio.

Course Title: Reading for Creative Writing

Course Code: ENG291H5F | Lecture M/F 1-2 | Tutorials TUT0102 F 2-3, TUT0103 F 2-3

Instructor: Michael Raby

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.

Course Title: Making Love in the Sixteenth Century

Course Code: ENG301H5S | Lecture W 1-2, F 1-3

Instructor: Jessica Lochart

In this course, students will follow the changing constructions of love and love poetry in the sixteenth century, starting with Wyatt and Surrey, passing through Tottel, to the Elizabethan court, and ending with the erotic love poetry that served as a backlash against the Petrarchanism of the early sixteenth century.

Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.

Course Title: Women Writers before Austen

Course Code: ENG307H5F | Lecture W 9-10, F 9-11

Instructor: Michael Raby

A study of mystical writings, poems, plays, novels, letters, periodical essays, polemical works, and books for children by such writers as Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Mary Sidney, Emilia Lanyer, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Fanny Burney, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Topics may include patronage and publishing; nationality, class, and gender; and generic conventions.

Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits

Course Title: Romantic Poetry and Prose

Course Code: ENG308Y5Y | Lecture R 6-9

Instructor: Daneil White (F) | Yoam Yoreh (S)

Poetry and critical prose of Blake, W. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, P.B. Shelley, Keats; may include brief selections from other writers such as Crabbe, Dorothy Wordsworth, Scott, Landor, Mary Shelley, Clare, De Quincey.

Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits

Detailed Description by Instructor:

This course provides a general survey of the poetry and prose of the British Romantic period (roughly from 1780 to 1830). You will thus become familiar with the astonishing literary output of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, the canonical Romantic poets to whom we owe many of our assumptions about the nature of poetry, the imagination, and artistic creativity. The literature of this period, however, also draws our attention to the revolutions that gave birth to our modern political order, the movement to abolish the slave trade, the advent of feminist thought and the emergence of women writers as a major cultural force, and the radical experiments with form through which numerous writers responded to the colonial enterprise. We will explore these aspects of Romantic culture through an intense encounter with both canonical and non-canonical works, written in a wide range of genres and styles.

Selected Major Readings: Poetry and prose by A.L. Barbauld, W. Blake, E. Burke, Byron, S.T. Coleridge, W. Cowper, W. Godwin, J. Keats, H. More, M. Robinson, P.B. and M. Shelley, C. Smith, 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 with discussion

Method of Evaluation: First term only: scansion assignment (5%); one or two portfolios each including a combination of two close-reading exercises and two study question responses (12.5% or 25%); term test, only for students who submitted one portfolio (12.5% each); term paper (20%).Second term: Posted under different instructor TBD.

Course Title: The Rise of the Novel in the Eighteenth Century

Course Code: ENG322Y5Y | Lecture M 3-5, W 4-5

Instructor: Noa Reich

This course studies the emergence of prose fiction as a genre recognized in both a literary and a commercial sense. Authors may include Behn, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Scott, and Austen.

Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits

Course Title: Austen and Her Contemporaries

Course Code: ENG323H5S | Lecture M 11-1, W 11-12

Instructor: Adrienne Todd

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

Course Title: The Victorian Novel

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

Instructor: Daniel Wright

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.

Exclusion: ENG324Y5
Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits

Detailed Description by Instructor:

Victorian novels are entertaining, ambitious, moving, edifying, and thought-provoking. They are also famously long. Often written for serial publication, with a novel being released in short installments over the course of many months, they can seem much more daunting when published in book form, with all of those installments bound together into one very thick novel. Our reading process is necessarily accelerated as we “binge-read” novels that on their first publication were consumed in monthly or weekly parts. In this course, we’ll read just three of the most ambitious novels of the Victorian era, immersing ourselves in their expansive, detailed, densely populated fictional worlds.

Henry James, writing at the end of the period, famously dismissed these big Victorian books as “large, loose, baggy monsters.” Our reading this semester will allow us to test his criticism, as we think about the form and structure of the long, serialized narratives that were so immensely popular in the nineteenth century. It’s no accident that in our own contemporary moment, a different kind of long, serialized narrative (the TV series) dominates our culture.

Topics will include: the development of the “multi-plot” novel; major and minor characters in a crowded fictional world; narrative point of view; the marriage plot and its alternatives; plots of "growing up"; the novel as a genre of social critique; scope and scale; the local and the global; form and formlessness; reading widely versus reading deeply.

Selected Major Readings: THREE novels to be chosen from among the following contenders:

W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847)
Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853)
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1849-50)
------, Bleak House (1852-53)
------, Little Dorrit (1855-57)
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859-60)
Ellen Wood, East Lynne (1860-61)
Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? (1864-65)
------, The Way We Live Now (1875)
Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters (1864-66)
George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-72)
------, Daniel Deronda (1876)
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1880-81)
John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga (1906-21)

Method of Instruction: lecture and class discussion

Method of Evaluation: essays, discussion leadership, final exam

Course Title: Global Literatures in the Premodern World

Course Code: ENG326H5S | Lecture T 3-4, R 3-5

Instructor: Jessica Lockhart

This course approaches the premodern period by examining early English/British literatures alongside travel narratives, epics, story collections, and lyric poems of the period c.500-1650 from the continents of Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Texts may include love poems from Heian Japan, the Persian epic Shahnameh, the Italian Decameron, 1001 Nights, Old Norse sagas from England, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Harriot's Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. Texts will be provided in translation where necessary.

Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.

Course Title: Medieval Drama

Course Code: ENG330H5F | Lecture W 1-3, F 2-3

Instructor: Chester Scoville

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

Detailed Description by Instructor:

The religious drama of the late Middle Ages in England is among the most sophisticated forms of pre-modern cultural expression. Drawing from the popular religion of the medieval period as well as from localized conditions of production, medieval drama gives us a rare glimpse of the full range of lived experiences of its time and place. Its study is endlessly shifting and surprising, as modern scholars, actors, and audiences interpret and reinterpret the few remaining fragments of what was once a much more populated field. This course will give students an introduction to the some of its major texts and to the scholarly and dramaturgical issues that surround them.

Selected Major Readings: Our primary readings will all rely on The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama, edited by Fitzgerald and Sebastian.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Hrosvitha, Abraham; York plays; The Conversion of Saint Paul.

Method of Instruction: Mixed lecture/discussion with frequent group discussion and exercises.

Method of Evaluation: Scaffolded writing assignments leading to a substantial final project; participation.

Course Title: The Modernist Novel

Course Code: ENG333H5S | Lecture T 11-1, R 11-12

Instructor: Kyle Murdock

This course explores novels by such writers as James, Conrad, Cather, Forster, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, and Faulkner.

Exclusion: ENG328Y1, ENG328Y5
Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits

Course Title: Jacobean Drama

Course Code: ENG335H5F | Lecture M 2-3, W 1-3

Instructor: Arlynda Boyer

This course explores English drama from the death of Queen Elizabeth I to the closing of the theatres, with attention to such playwrights as Jonson, Middleton, Shakespeare, and Webster. As part of this course, students may have the option of participating in an international learning experience that will have an additional cost and application process.

Exclusion: ENG332Y5
Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits

Course Title: Special Topic in Shakespeare

Course Code: ENG336H5S | Lecture M 3-5, W 3-4

Instructor: Isabel Stowell-Kaplan

A concentrated study of one aspect of Shakespeare's work, such as his use of a particular genre, a particular period of his work, a recurring theme, or the application of a particular critical approach.

Prerequisite: 2.0 credit in ENG, including ENG220Y5/DRE221Y5 and 4.0 additional credits

Course Title: The Rise of Modern Drama

Course Code: ENG340H5F | Lecture M 11-12, W 11-1

Instructor: Lawrence Switzky

A study of plays in English by such dramatists as Wilde, Yeats, Shaw, Synge, Glaspell, Hughes, and O'Neill, as well as plays in translation by such dramatists as Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, and Pirandello.

Exclusion: ENG338Y5
Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits

Detailed Description by Instructor:

Playwrights at the end of the nineteenth century inherited a series of conventions about how to represent action, character, and conduct on stage. This course is about the strategies they invent to upend those conventions to give a fuller rendition of human life and consciousness; to respond to radical shifts in society, politics, and technology between the 1860s through the 1940s; and to incorporate developments in literature, painting, music, photography, and film into the repertoire of theatrical creation. Among other topics, we will consider the influence of psychology and the unconscious basis of selfhood on dramatic plot and character; naturalism and other attempts to place “real life” on stage; experiments in representing gender, sexuality, and race in the theatre; and the creation of new genres to embody and counter secular, sped-up, fragmentary modernity, from the Total Work of Art to machine-age comedies to happy tragedies to epic theatre. Film clips and live performances will help us to envision how these plays were staged in their own time and how they have been reimagined throughout the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.

Selected Major Readings: Richard Wagner, Tristan and Isolde; Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt; August Strindberg, Creditors; Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan; W. B. Yeats, “The Land of Heart’s Desire” and “At the Hawk’s Well”; J. M. Synge, “Riders to the Sea”; Lady Gregory, “Spreading the News”; Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya; Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion; Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author; Eugene O’Neill, “The Emperor Jones” and “The Hairy Ape”; Angelina Grimke, Rachel; Sophie Treadwell, Machinal; Vladimir Mayakovsky, The Bedbug; Bertolt Brecht, Man Equals Man

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Wagner, Ibsen, Strindberg

Method of Instruction: Lectures, discussions, screenings, performances

Method of Evaluation: Participation (10%); two take-home exams (20% each); a performance project (20%); final paper or project (30%)

Course Title: World Drama

Course Code: ENG343H5S | Lecture M 11-12, W 11-1

Instructor: Lawrence Switzky

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.

Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

This course offers students a broad survey of twentieth and twenty-first century drama from East Asia, South Asia, the Caribbean, West Africa, Southern Africa, South America, and the Middle East. Theatre is often celebrated for its “local” qualities: unlike mass media, plays designate circumstances that unfold through the immediate responses of performers and spectators. The plays we’ll study, however, were either designed to travel, representing particular lifeworlds for audiences far beyond the contexts in which they were produced, or have subsequently been understood (and misunderstood) as emblems of specific cultural forms and regional experiences. This is a course, in short, about the problem and the exuberance of encountering plays across cultures—for us and for a diverse community of readers, performers, and filmmakers who have also grappled with, translated, and transformed them.

In place of examinations, students in this course will keep process journals that track their responses to familiar and unfamiliar elements in the plays and that find points of contact between geographically and temporally disparate texts. Final projects will ask students to write a critical introduction or create a wiki that situates one play we have studied within other recent writing for the theatre in a single region.

Selected Major Readings: Chikamatsu, The Love Suicides at Amijima; Rabindranath Tagore, The Post Office; Cao Yu, Sunrise; Kobo Abe, The Man Who Turned into a Stick; Derek Walcott, Ti-Jean and His Brothers; Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman; Ariel Dorfman, Death and the Maiden; Manjula Padmanabhan, Harvest; Lara Foot, Tshepang; Toshiki Okada, Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech; Hassan Abdulrazzak, Baghdad Wedding; Nassim Soleimanpoor, White Rabbit Red Rabbit; Dalia Taha, Keffiyeh: Made in China; Guillermo Calderon, Kiss

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Chikamatsu, Tagore, Cao Yu

Method of Instruction: Lectures, discussions, screenings, conversations with visiting speakers

Method of Evaluation: Participation (15%); entries in process journal (30%, evaluated twice during the term); questions for visiting speakers (15%); final project (30%); participation in in-class group discussions of final projects (10%)

Course Title: Poetic Ruptures: Approaches to Contemporary Verse

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

Instructor: Richard Greene

Works by at least six contemporary poets, such as Dickey, Ginsberg, Heaney, Howard, Hughes, Larkin, Lowell, Plath, Warren.

Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits

This course will examine some of the most accomplished and influential poetry of recent times. Included in the course are poets from England, Ireland, Wales, the United States, and Trinidad. It is hoped that by grappling with the themes and techniques in these works, students will come to understand and to enjoy contemporary poetry.

Selected Major Readings: Jahan Ramazani et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, 3rd ed. Volume 2: Contemporary Poetry.

Gwyneth Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey. Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2010.

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, and Allen Ginsberg

Method of Instruction: Lectures and discussion.

Method of Evaluation: Three in-class essays (20% each) and term-paper (40%)

Course Title: Poetry and Modernism

Course Code: ENG350H5F | Lecture T 10-11, R 9-11

Instructor: Prathna Lor

Special study of Hopkins, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Stevens; selections from other poets.

Exclusion: ENG348Y1, ENG348Y5
Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits

Course Title: Canadian Drama

Course Code: ENG352H5F | Lecture M 11-1, W 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

Course Title: The Immigrant Experience in Contemporary Canadian Fiction

Course Code: ENG358H5S | Lecture M 9-11, W 10-11

Instructor: Dana Patrascu-Kingsley

A concentrated study of one aspect of Canadian 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 ENG252Y5, and 4.0 additional credits

This course will examine how Canadian prose fiction from the last two decades explores immigrant and refugee experiences. We will study a variety of voices from different cultural contexts, and we will look at how race, gender, and culture factor in understandings of the ‘immigrant experience.’ We will also examine how the concepts of arrival, refuge and home are depicted and interrogated in these recent texts.

Selected Major Readings:
David Bezmozgis—Natasha and Other Stories (ISBN: 0006393225)
Dionne Brand—What We All Long For (ISBN: 067697693X)
Rawi Hage—Cockroach (ISBN: 0887848346)
Shannon Bala—The Boat People (ISBN: 0771024290)
Kim Thuy—Man (ISBN: 9780345813800)
Djamila Ibrahim—Things are Good Now (ISBN: 978-1487001889)
David Chariandy—Brother (ISBN: 978-0771023330)

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Bezmozgis, Brand, Hage.

Method of Instruction: Lecture, discussion, group work.

Method of Evaluation: short essay (15%), presentation (15%), final essay (25%), participation (10%), final exam (35%).

Course Title: Early American Literature

Course Code: ENG360H5F | Lecture M 2-3, 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.

Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits

Detailed Description by Instructor:

When you think of early seventeenth-century literature you might first imagine Shakespeare, who died in 1616, or perhaps John Donne, who died in 1631. You probably don’t think of the Americas, but these were decades of increasing European contact with the “New World.” 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 recognize indigenous traditions that existed in the Americas before European contact.

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:
Edward Taylor, 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 Christopher Columbus’ Journals; John Smith, from The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation: Regular short writing assignments, two essays, active participation.

Course Title: African-American Literature before the Harlem Renaissance

Course Code: ENG366H5S | Lecture M 1-3, W 2-3

Instructor: Melissa Gniadek

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.

Exclusion: None
Prerequisite: 2.0 credit in ENG, including ENG250Y5, and 4.0 additional credits

Detailed Description by Instructor:

In this course we will explore African-American literature written (mostly) before the twentieth-century. We’ll begin the semester with a few poems by writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance, a well-known period of African-American artistic innovation in the 1920s and 1930s. But then we’ll go back in time to the late eighteenth-century to explore a much longer history of African-American written expression. We’ll read poems by Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon; a radical abolitionist pamphlet by David Walker; slave narratives by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs; and fiction by Charles Chesnutt and Pauline Hopkins. We’ll explore how these authors harnessed various forms of print culture to confront slavery, racism, and the injustice embedded in the very foundations of the U.S.

In the final weeks of the course we’ll move forward in time, reading Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad which was published just a few years ago in 2016 (and which won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction among other awards). We’ll think about how Whitehead draws on earlier texts and literary traditions in a novel that engages the past and present of the U.S.

Selected Major Readings:
David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal (1829)
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845)
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood (1902)
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (2016)

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied:
Langston Hughes, poems
Phillis Wheatley, poems
Jupiter Hammon, poems

Method of Instruction: Lecture and discussion

Method of Evaluation: Short writing assignments, essays, active participation.

Course Title: Post-Apocalyptic and Dystopian Literature

Course Code: ENG371H5F | Lecture M 9-10, W 9-11

Instructor: Chris Koenig-Woodyard

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: 2.0 credit in ENG, including ENG270Y5, and 4.0 additional credits

Detailed Description by Instructor:

A study of a selection of recent (late 20th to 21st century) post-apocalyptic and dystopian novels that engages a wide range of critical, historical, and contextual frameworks: race, gender and feminism, Marxism and class, among others.

Required Readings:
(Available through Amazon and the UTM bookstore)

Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) 978-0-7710-0879-5
Moore, V for Vendetta (1988-89) 978-1-4012-0841-7
Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004) 978-0-345-80747-2
McCarthy, The Road (2006) 978-0-307-38789-9
Collins, The Hunger Games (2008) 978-0-439-02352-8
Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves (2017) 978-1770864863

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Atwood, Moore, Mitchell

Method of Instruction: Lecture, Discussion, and Group work

Method of Evaluation: Essays, tests, final exam, and presentations

Course Title: Literatures of South Asia

Course Code: ENG371H5S | Lecture T 2-3, R 1-3

Instructor: Raji Soni

Prerequisite: 2.0 credit in ENG, including ENG270Y5, and 4.0 additional credits

Course Title: Critical Theory and Artificial Intelligence

Course Code: ENG372H5F | Lecture T 11-12, R 11-1

Instructor: Avery Slater

A concentrated study of one aspect of literary or critical theory, such as a particular school of theory, an important author, or a contemporary theoretical debate.

Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.

Detailed Description by Instructor:

Critical theory takes as its intellectual task the analysis of how human subjects and societies come to be organized by their systems of signs, symbols, and meanings. One fundamental goal of artificial intelligence is to engineer machines that can make use of these human languages and sign-systems at levels of sophistication indistinguishable from our own. Is there a critical theory uniquely suited for the rise of A.I.? This course will examine the importance of the question of artificial intelligence to critical theory (Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, Lacan, Baudrillard, Luhmann, Kittler). Thinking in an interdisciplinary way, we will equally consider how computer scientists and A.I. historians have described the philosophical stakes of these new machines (Turing, Von Neumann, Wiener, Minsky, Boden, Bostrom). This course will encourage students to examine what intertwined questions, risks, and imaginaries connect the quest for artificial intelligence with the work of critical theorists and philosophers of the last century.

Selected Major Readings:
"Can Thought Go On Without a Body?" Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Language to Infinity," Michel Foucault; "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Alan Turing; "Freud and the Scene of Writing," Jacques Derrida; "Performative Code and Figurative Language," N. Katherine Hayles; selections from The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener; "There is no Software," Friedrich Kittler; "Tuche and Automaton," Jacques Lacan; selections from Superintelligence, Nick Bostrom; A.I., Margaret Boden; The Computer and the Brain, John Von Neumann; "How Can the Mind Participate in Communication?" Niklas Luhmann

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: "Can Thought Go On Without a Body?" Jean-Francois Lyotard; readings from The Freudian Robot, Lydia Liu; "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Alan Turing

Method of Instruction: seminar, discussion

Method of Evaluation: short papers, in-class writing, student presentations, final paper

Course Title: Digital Texts

Course Code: ENG381H5S | Lecture W 1-3, F 2-3

Instructor: Siobhan O'Flynn

This course considers the ways in which digital technologies are transforming texts, reading, readerships, and the idea of the literary. Students will study a wide variety of digital texts, e.g., fanfiction, webcomics, viral Tumblr posts and tweets, and video games. They will also learn about the use of digital tools to read, study, and preserve texts. The course may include a practical project, e.g., the design of a narrative game using Twine; the curation of a digital exhibit using Omeka; or an argument about some text/s using visualization software.

Prerequisite: 1.0 credit in ENG and 3.0 additional credits.

Course Title: Seminar: Socialism, Aesthetics, Ecology

Course Code: ENG414H5S | Lecture M 3-5

Instructor: Thomas Laughlin

By the end of twentieth century the word socialism for most people conjured up dreary images of uniform grey buildings, perhaps a row of dutifully puffing factory smokestacks, or, worse, breadlines. How different were the visions of socialism that circulated from the middle to the end of the nineteenth century, when socialism was imagined as the pathway to a complete revolution of the senses: an aesthetic revolution that would radically transform the way men and women interacted with nature and with one another, both as comrades and as lovers. Despite confidence about the liberal march of history at the end of the twentieth century, we find ourselves confronted once again with many of the same issues these “dreamers” sought to address in their writing and paintings. This course draws on the Marxist theory of alienation, new developments in environmental sociology, feminist historiography, and the Freudian metapsychology of desire to unpack the complex layering of social, aesthetic, and ecological issues that informed these men and women’s greatest fears and hopes about the future. We conclude by asking if their more optimistic visions of “communal luxury” might now have a horizon of desirability in the twenty-first century as well.

Selected Major Readings:
Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
William Morris, News from Nowhere
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
Tim Barringer, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites
Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune

Additional short and excerpted readings by authors such as Oscar Wilde, Eric Hobsbawm, Herbert Marcuse, Sheila Rowbotham, and John Bellamy Foster.

First Three Texts/Authors To Be Studied:
Marx; Nietzsche; Barringer

Method of Instruction: seminar discussion; short lecture segments; student presentations

Method of Evaluation: participation; seminar presentation; short précis; essay writing

Course Title: Multiculturalism and Canadian Literature

Course Code: ENG424H5F | Lecture T 1-3

Instructor: Colin Hill

This course will explore the representation of multicultural experience and identities in Canadian literature, and issues affecting the production and reception of “ethnic” Canadian writing, through a reading of texts by writers such as Pauline Johnson, A. M. Klein, Roy Kiyooka, Joy Kogawa, Wayson Choy, Evelyn Lau, David Bezmozgos, Austin Clarke, Makeda Silvera, Shyam Selvadurai, Judy Fong Bates, Rohinton Mistry, Neil Bissoondath, Thomas King, and others. Our seminars will consider creative and critical texts by a diverse selection of Canadian writers in various relevant critical, cultural, social, theoretical, and political contexts. Topics for discussion will include but are not limited to multiculturalism as a government policy, canonization, the “material production” of Canadian literature, gender, racism, postcolonialism, and how recent multicultural writing in Canada presents a challenge to established notions of our national literature. Students will be expected to attend regularly and to complete readings thoughtfully and on time. Students are also required to participate in the seminar discussions.

Selected Major Readings: Selections from Making a Difference: An Anthology of Ethnic Canadian Writing, (ed. Smaro Kamboureli) and 2 or 3 novels.

Method of Instruction: Seminar discussion; short lecture segments; student seminar presentations.

Method of Evaluation: Short seminar presentation (20%); mid-term writing assignment (25%); research paper (40%); participation (15%).

Course Title: American Literature, "Sea Stories"

Course Code: ENG435H5F | Lecture M 11-1

Instructor: Melissa Gniadek

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 will 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 ultimately 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 decade. 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?

Selected Major Readings:
Alexander O. Exquemelin, The Buccaneers of America
Anonymous, The Woman of Colour: A Tale
Herman Melville, Typee
Herman Melville, The Encantadas and Other Stories

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat”; Hester Blum, “The Prospect of Oceanic Studies”; Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter 35, “The Mast-Head”

Method of Instruction: Seminar discussion

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

Course Title: Seminar: Literature Pre-1700

Course Code: ENG460H5S | Lecture M 1-3

Instructor: Daniel Price

Course Title: Romantic Literature and the Religions of the World

Course Code: ENG463H5F | Lecture R 3-5

Instructor: Daniel White

Along with the expansion of empire during the Romantic era (1780-1830) came increasingly intimate understandings of and encounters with the religions of the world. In ways that will seem fascinatingly familiar and foreign to you, exciting works of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction prose engaged with Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and the religions of China (Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism), as well as with skepticism and "free thought." From William Blake's claim that "all deities reside in the human breast" and Maria Edgeworth's novel about a recovering anti-Semite to Robert Southey's epic poem about a Muslim hero, Rammohun Roy's translation of the Isha Upanishad, and Samuel Turner's account of his meeting with the eighteen-month-old seventh incarnation of the Panchen Lama in Tibet, we will explore the sympathies and fears, the alliances and confrontations, and the understandings and misrepresentations that informed relationships among Romantic literature, religion, and empire.

Selected Major Readings: Anna Barbauld, An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts; William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species; Maria Edgeworth, Harrington; Hannah More, Village Politics; Sydney Owenson, The Missionary; Rammohun Roy, Translation of the Íshopanishad; Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason; Robert Southey, Thalaba the Destroyer; Samuel Turner, An Account of an Embassy to the Court of the Teshoo Lama, in Tibet

First Three Texts/Authors to be Studied: William Blake, Anna Barbauld, Thomas Paine

Method of Instruction: Discussion-based seminar

Method of Evaluation: Three short response essays (2 pp., 10% each), test (15%), term paper (35%), participation (20%)

Course Title: Creative Writing Workshop

Course Code: ENG489Y5Y | Lecture R 1-3

Instructor: Richard Greene

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 10-page portfolio of their best creative writing (not academic essays) to the professor in advance of registration, and he 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: The Elements of Style

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%.

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