Laughter and tears are not always straightforward. A tale of pride going before a fall can be reassuring to us as well as sad, and a Hollywood romantic comedy can encode a scathing social critique. Offering insight into our ongoing fascination with the extremes of human emotion, this course traces how the twin poles of the comic and tragic have developed through literary history, and how they vary across diverse cultural traditions. This course is not available to BAENGLISH students for credit.
As a relatively new genre that burst on the literary scene with the emergence of magazine culture, the short story is a truly modern form. Its excitement has to do with the concision of its form and the startling turns its narratives can offer. This course explores the history and conventions of the genre, examining stories from a variety of cultural contexts representing a range of styles, themes, and social issues.
Life without stories? Inconceivable. The moment we ask, "Who am I?" or "Where did I come from?" narrative steps in, giving shape to our identity and experience. This foundational course introduces students to fictional forms across a variety of historical periods and media in order to examine the underlying mechanisms of storytelling: narrative's goals, inner structures, strategies, and rhetorical effects. Texts may include stories, novels, poetry, and drama as well as cinematic and digital texts.
Horror stories, pop songs, love poetry, comics-this course introduces students to various types of writing that were popular at different times and in different cultures. Students will learn central concepts and terminology in the study of popular writing and culture, and they will analyze the impact that cultural and political issues have had not only on what works became popular but also on the very notion of "the popular" itself. This course is not available to BAENGLISH students for credit.
We live our lives through networks of texts, both printed and digital. This course takes a rhetorical perspective to explore how written texts provide more than just information: they perform important cultural actions in contemporary civic life. Students examine the relationship of writing to knowledge, belief, and social organization in contexts such as popular and social media, politics and activism, literature and art, and professional, technical, and academic cultures.
From classical poetry to video games, stories follow recognizable patterns that tell us much about our values, fears, and desires. Offering a fertile source for plots and themes, myth systems present a set of limits to be investigated, challenged, and rewritten. This course examines how plays, poems, novels, and/or other texts engage with myth. Topics may include such diverse ideas as masculinity, initiation, fellowship, betrayal, rebirth, exile and homecoming. This course is not available to BAENGLISH students for credit.
How has colonialism impacted indigenous cultures, and how have indigenous people used texts to pose challenges to colonialism and to preserve and retell traditional stories? Reading contemporary literature by Aboriginal Australian, Maori, First Nations and other indigenous writers, students address these and other important socio-political questions, examine wider literary and theoretical issues, and consider questions regarding cultural identity raised in the writings of Native peoples.
Edward Said declared the twentieth century "the age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration." This course looks at literature and films from around the world that focus on experiences of immigration and exile, and the challenges of living in a new culture and a new language. These narratives often describe the immigrant experience in terms of both loss and opportunity. This course explores the limitations and the possibilities of living between two cultures.
Storytelling forms the narrative backbone of texts even in non-fictional modes of discourse like scientific essays, historical testimony, political speeches, documentaries, travel writing, and legal discourse. Focusing on non-fictional texts in a variety of genres, media and time periods, this course examines the role culture plays in the production and reception of meaning in even the most putatively factual and objective texts.
Using novels, short stories, films and other media, this course focuses on significant challenges faced by, and changes initiated in, a wide range of cultures. From the perspectives of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability, mobility, and ongoing negotiations of identity within multicultural and im/migrant communities, course materials illuminate the complex nature of modern experience and draw attention to the important questions and concerns cultures have faced and continue to face. This course is not available to BAENGLISH students for credit.
Starting with the powerful images of folk tale, fairy tale, and legend, and following them through fantasies and animal tales, this course explores their evolution from oral stories for adults to literary versions for children. It will also examine the intellectual and historical influences of the periods. The material to be studied includes modern versions of the tales in print and visual media. Authors include the Grimm Brothers, Andersen, Wilde, Carroll, Milne, and Beatrix Potter.
This course examines children's literature as a cultural category that shapes and is shaped by changing notions of "the child" and childhood. Students explore the ways in which texts directed at children's instruction and entertainment relate to their time, place, and generic form. Topics may include fiction; picture books; comics; film; and poetry.
From grants, scripts and interviews to story pitches, reviews, profiles and publicity copy, professional writers in the Arts shape the sounds and sights of contemporary culture. In this project based course, students learn about the wide variety of writing in the professional world of the Arts. Offering examples of writing from different sectors within the Arts, the course also allows students to gain firsthand experience of these kinds of writing. Available to BAENGLISH students only.
Writing permeates professional life; the ability to help others write effectively is in high demand. Students in this project-based course examine the purposes and forms of writing, gain editing skills, and learn how to apply their knowledge to assist others. Informed by topics such as rhetoric and composition theory and the cultural issues surrounding writing practices, hands-on activities may include peer-mentoring, organizing and leading writing workshops, online outreach, and service learning. Available to BAENGLISH students only.
This project-based course examines the theory and practice of writing and editing in digital environments. Particular attention will be given to the scholarly approach to digital archiving and publishing. Topics vary but may include producing a scholarly archive; creating and editing content in interactive sites such as online blogs and reviews; and designing and creating formats for the scholarly presentation of electronic magazines, anthologies, and editions. Available to BAENGLISH students only.
This project-based course offers students the opportunity both to study models of good writing and to develop their own creative abilities. Class discussions and workshop groups are designed to enhance the student's understanding of the creative process, to stimulate the imagination, and to develop individual abilities. Areas of discussion include style, prosody, conflict, character, dialogue, and revision. Available to BAENGLISH students only.
Topics for this project-based course vary from year to year, in order to allow instructors and students to take advantage of new opportunities for applying literary knowledge. For information about the experiential and/or service learning topic each year, students should check the Department of English website or contact the Program Administrator. Available to BAENGLISH students only.
Critical theory has become indispensable to the discipline of English studies today. This course is designed to familiarize the student of English literature with a wide range of theoretical debates in the discipline, challenging established notions of literature, text, and culture. The course provides students with a theoretical vocabulary with which to understand and analyse social and cultural phenomena, with particular attention to the politics of the production of knowledge and culture. Available to BAENGLISH students only.
This course introduces students to one of the key areas of critical interest and debate in English studies, postcolonialism, and invites them to reflect upon and discuss the ways in which Empire - in its historical and present day manifestations - shapes "third world" or the "developing" world's relationship with the West. It also familiarizes students with some of the most exciting and politicized theoretical debates in the discipline.
In this class, students study some of the most prominent efforts of 20th Century American writers, public figures, and filmmakers to give voice and shape to the promises and perils of modern American experience. Topics may include mobility, migration, democracy, individualism, U.S. national identity, and the U.S. in a global context. Genres to be covered may include the novel, the short story, poetry, drama, public oratory, memoir, and film.
This course examines literary and cultural texts from the 16th century that capture the vibrancy of Europe as it transforms from a feudal to a modern society. Students explore works by figures such as Marlowe, Machiavelli, and Michelangelo. Topics may include the "Renaissance man," discourses of Orientalism and imperialism, evolving notions of the individual, the monarch and the state, and changing conceptions of gender and sexuality as they affect the period's literature, theatre, and art.
This course examines British literature and culture of the 17th century, when England becomes the centre of the European Renaissance. Students investigate a range of genres - including poetry, prose, and drama - produced by writers such as Shakespeare, Milton, Ford, and Behn. Topics may include English culture and imperialism, the significance of English Renaissance literature in the Commonwealth, the socio-political impact of canonized texts, and the study of stage and other art forms of the period.
The mythology of our civilization is the story of things to come. The prophetic visions of writers such as Asimov, Brunner, Clarke, Gibson, Heinlein, Herbert, Hogan, LeGuin, Lem and Niven offer endless playgrounds for the imagination. Their second gift is a widening vista or real alternatives: our future may be what they let us choose to make it. If you want to play an informed part in that choice, this course will provide the menu. This course is not available to BA ENGLISH students for credit.
The era between 1900 and 1945 experienced such a radical sense of its own difference from the past that it is still referred to as the Modern Age. It was an age of new thought, new fashion, and a new sense of the self. In literature, it was an age of experimentation. This course explores the literature and the cultural influences of the period. Such writers as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce will be studied. This course is not available to BA ENGLISH students for credit.
This upper-level course offers students the opportunity both to study models of good writing and to develop their own creative abilities. Class discussions and workshop groups are designed to enhance the student's understanding of the creative process, to stimulate the imagination, and to develop individual abilities. Areas of discussion include style, prosody, conflict, character, dialogue, and revision. This course is not available to BA ENGLISH students for credit.
This course deals with the impact of innovation in scientific theory on the themes and forms of literature. It considers in what ways contemporaneous literary texts reflected the implications for human identity and significance of these great shifts in understanding. This course is not available to BA ENGLISH students for credit.
Invented over 200 years ago, the gothic has become one of the most popular genres in literature and film. This course will explore the gothic presence in popular culture during this time. Students will analyze ways in which the genre challenges not only other cultural conventions, but also claims in the realms of art, science, and medicine. Topics to be addressed include the relation of the gothic to gender, sexuality, class, orientalism, imperialism, and criminality. This course is not available to BA ENGLISH students for credit.
This course examines a variety of life-writing genres including the diary, letter, autobiography, memoir, and biography. By sampling a range of texts (both print and electronic) throughout history, students will explore diverse ways in which writers express their private and public stories about life and self. Students will gain an understanding of life-writing theory which can be used to rethink the relationships between gender and genre; fact and fiction; and art and artlessness. This course is not available to BA English Students for credit.
What makes a political speech good? Why are some advertisements more effective than others? This course focuses on the crucial role of rhetoric in cultural communication: the means through which language is mobilized to persuasive ends. Students learn a critical vocabulary drawn from a variety of perspectives and explore persuasion in contemporary discourse, including print and online media, television, film, public events, and art, in order to understand how language achieves its most powerful effects.
This course examines forms of literary non-fiction such as essays, travel writing, journalism, and biography. Students explore how such works - in their artfulness, seriousness of ideas, and promise of authenticity - represent, persuasively and often polemically, the complexities of modern human experience.
The first half of the eighteenth century in Britain can be understood as an age looking both backwards and forwards. The old patrician-plebeian order of the feudal period was still vibrant, yet the Enlightenment introduced modern ideas of social organization and individual subjectivity. This course considers tensions between tradition and modernity in the period by looking at visual and print texts. Topics may include Neo-Classicism; middle-class culture and the novel; Enlightenment discourse; plebeian culture.
Referred to often as the "Age of Reason," the second half of the eighteenth century was infused with the spirit of the Enlightenment and an enthusiasm for system. This course examines Enlightenment as a dominant discourse shaping British literature, art, and culture and investigates how ideas and modes of cultural expression from this period have shaped modern Western society. Topics may include childhood; feminism; slavery; antiquarianism; the gothic and sensibility; publishing practices; and revolution.
What does it mean for a novel to tell its story in the form of a picaresque, an epistolary exchange, or as speculative or experimental fiction? This course offers an in-depth exploration of the novel in its many genres, drawing examples from different historical periods, cultural traditions, and literary movements. In addition to studying theoretical approaches to the novel, students examine how writers have developed and responded to its generic conventions.
The word "drama" derives from the Greek term for "to do" or "achieve": this course considers texts designed to come alive on stage. The diversity of dramatic forms is explored through in-depth study of texts from different historical periods and cultures. Students examine questions related to the script, its performance, and its reception, as well as the ways in which the material and social conditions have influenced the development of the genre.
Ancient bards, sonneteers, rappers, nursery rhymes, love lyrics, inauguration odes: poetry has always been part of lived experience. This course considers the poetics, politics, and social practices that produce new forms of creative responses in poetry. Examining a range of poetic strategies and genres selected from different historical periods, cultural locations, and literary movements, students investigate how artistic tensions, traditions, and formal challenges are posed by writers who continually attempt to enhance the art's potential.
This course examines autobiographical writings (including the diary, memoir, and letter) and biography (including literary and popular forms), and the connections between them. The study of life-writing sources may also include print and electronic sources, as well as film, photography, visual art, and performance art. Critical and theoretical readings are introduced to analyze issues including genre, aesthetics, identity, veracity, and commerce.
Ever since it rose from 18th-century popular consciousness like a mummy from the crypt, the gothic has spread its frightening spawn across populations and cultures around the world. This course will explore and theorize various manifestations of the gothic and its sociopolitical functions over a broad span of time. Texts may include graveyard poetry, horror film, southern gothic, and goth culture. Issues to be addressed may include xenophobia, sexual diversity, ethnic migrations and animality.
From illuminated manuscripts to graphic novels, words have always been accomplished by images that combine aesthetic design with intellectual expressiveness. This course examines the ways in which visual/verbal relations have changed in different times and places, and interrogates the complex inter-relationships of technology, style, form, and culture. Topics vary but may include illumination, emblems, chapbooks, illustrated magazines and periodicals, illustrated books,picture books, graphic novels, comics, and hypertext.
What does it mean to "write as a woman"? Is there such a thing as "women's writing" and if so, what are its characteristics? This course explores the ways in which women have contributed to literary traditions both by working within and by challenging mainstream movements. In examining women's use of literary forms as aesthetic, personal and political sites, we will consider how issues of identity and historical context inflect and inform their writing strategies. This course is not available to BA English students for credit.
Imaginative writing of the post-war period reflects the complexity of contemporary life. In themes as old as folk tales and as current as new visions of space, writers express the dreams and terrors of post-nuclear life. It is an era in which values and beliefs have been challenged and conventional distinctions - illusion and reality, fact and fiction, the sacred and the profane - have been called into question by writers as diverse as Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje. This course is not available to BA English students for credit.
Love, sex, and gender are fluid and complex. Looking at stories, novels, films, and other types of texts, students will analyse the impact of literature, popular culture, and aesthetics on the formation of new notions of gender, sexuality, and desire. Emphasis will be placed on a consideration of the cultural and sociopolitical influences that contributed to these changes and on the possibility of affections, sexualities, and genders that may not yet have names. This course is not available to BA English students for credit.
The lives of peoples from the English-speaking Caribbean are extensively explored in dramatic works, films, music, art, novels and stories produced in the region and by Caribbean expatriates in Canada, the US and the UK. By situating examples of such works within their cultural contexts, the course raises a number of questions about Caribbean identities and experience and uses these questions to illuminate the history, struggles, and triumphs of these peoples and to imagine future possibilities.
This course introduces students to literary and cultural works by women writers across the globe. Students will read and discuss narratives by writers from a range of backgrounds, paying particular attention to the ways in which "women" and "gender" as political and cultural categories are constructed through the vectors of race, culture, politics, and sexuality.
The first half of the twentieth century can be characterized as a period that defined itself in reaction to the past. Across the Western world, aesthetic, political, and cultural movements led to innovations and experimentations in literature, art, film, fashion, architecture, and music. By focusing on a variety of verbal and visual texts, this course explores how these dramatic changes came about, and how they made the period self-consciously modern.
The second half of the twentieth century is characterized as Postmodernist in that the self-reflexive literature and culture of the period are both an extension of, and a simultaneous critique of, modernist and earlier works. By focusing on a variety of verbal and visual texts in the context of the period's socio-political upheavals, this course explores such aesthetic and political discourses, movements, and developments as feminism, Postcolonialism, queer theory, cultural studies, and Internet technology.
This course introduces students to a variety of Asian literatures and cultures. Literature written by people of Asian descent in Asia, Canada, and elsewhere has seen a notable increase in popularity and influence over the past few decades and has made us, as Canadians, more aware of the diversity of Asian languages and cultures. The design of this course offers students the opportunity to explore a range of Asian literatures through different approaches and themes.
Often described as the "Age of Revolutions," the first half of the nineteenth century is characterized by revolutionary new ways of understanding the individual and society. Focusing on the British context, this course examines how the period's visual and verbal texts expressed the dominant discourse of "romanticism" and helped shape modern Western culture. Topics may include childhood; nature and culture; science and the supernatural; medievalism; publishing practices; technology; war and revolt; and class, gender and race.
Modernism, the neogothic, the Decadent Movement, cinema, the telephone, the typewriter, sexology, psychology - the second half of the nineteenth century invented much that continues to influence us. Focussing on the British context, this course addresses ways in which this era used literature and other cultural works to shape and respond to changing social conditions, ideologies, and media. Possible topics include the women's movement, consumer culture, class conflicts, socialism, imperialism, and developments in visual culture and publishing.
How does a national literature reflect on its people? Works studied in this course may include various genres from colonial to contemporary times. Students examine critically Canada's national identity, as well as issues of language, gender, class, and ethnicity in the articulation of a national culture. This course considers how writers capture and captivate Canada (or not) in the imagination, and may examine literature in relation to film, music, and criticism.
Students will learn to recognize and identify different conventions defining genres of popular literature such as romance and sensation; gothic and horror; and melodrama. The course will explore the relationship between texts and audiences, and how readers assign meaning to and make use of what they read. Students will study the origins of today's popular genres in books and other media and the sociocultural values embodied in such works.
By exploring the ways images in photography, painting and film, as well as in literary and non-literary writing, are scripted and can be read as text, this course seeks to show how visuality organizes and shapes Western culture. Topics can include how such things as the invention of perspective and the visual technologies of photography and film have influenced philosophy and literature, and how the culture industries have used the visual as a tool to influence and entertain.
Shakespearean drama was an important medium for entertainment and for reflecting contemporary socio-political realities on stage. A mark of Shakespeare's continued relevance and popularity is the constant remaking of his plays in a variety of media. This course analyses the textual, thematic, historical, and theoretical readings of Shakespearean drama. Students explore a variety of adaptations, including folk performance, early-modern theatre, television, and film.
Aristotle defined rhetoric over 2000 years ago as the art of discovering, in any given case, the available means of persuasion. Since then, definitions of rhetoric have shifted in tenor and scope but all emphasize rhetoric's role in shaping public life. Offering a survey from ancient Greek and Roman texts through to contemporary rhetorical criticism and related fields, this course examines how we use rhetoric to negotiate knowledge, belief, and action in various contexts.
From the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century to the electronic publications of the digital age, books have been central to the shaping of culture and society. Drawing on bibliographic theory and practice, this course investigates the history of the book from interdisciplinary, transnational, and transmedia perspectives. Subjects include the reception, production, composition, material existence, and social life of books in diverse times, places, and forms.
English scholars use a variety of research methods, including archival, ethnographic, bibliographic, and digital. This course explores a range of research methods and contemporary methodological debates, providing a foundation for advanced work in the discipline. Students will be given practical opportunities for developing their own research skills in visits to the local archives and in a series of applied research assignments. Available to BAENGLISH students only.
Love it or hate it, television stands alone as a medium in its ability to influence the way we live and view the world. What is it about the immediacy of television that invites us to engage with it? Students will draw from literary studies, sociology, and anthropology to explore how the "flow" of television structures our time and our relations to one another, and how the "televisual" evolves as new communications technologies develop.
The senior seminar provides students the opportunity to develop advanced English research, presentation and writing skills in a discussion-based setting. Students are required to write a major research paper. Course content varies according to the instructor's expertise. Students must have a minimum 70 percent average in their best four ENG courses or permission of the department prior to enrolling in this course.
This course provides individualized instruction in the selection of a topic, the planning and implementation of a research plan, and the writing of a thesis. This course is available to fourth-year students in the BAENGLISH with a minimum 4.00 CGPA. Departmental consent required.
This course brings students together for a project that combines literary theory with practice. Students showcase their own research in a public forum by planning, organizing, and hosting a public event that can take the form of an exhibition, a conference, a lecture series, or a combination of these. Students hone their literary, cultural, and research skills, and may liaise with local and national archives, institutions, businesses, and media. Available to BAENGLISH students only. Departmental consent required.
Introducing students to collaborative and seminar-based methods of theoretical study, this course builds on the program's backbone in literary and cultural theory and complements the capstone seminars in research and praxis. To allow for a diversity of advanced theoretical analysis and study, course content varies according to the instructor's expertise. Available to BAENGLISH students only. Departmental consent required.
This required capstone seminar offers in-depth study of a specialized topic in a discussion-based setting. Students are guided in the development of advanced research, presentation, and writing skills and are required to write a major research paper. Course content varies according to the instructor's expertise. Available to BAENGLISH students only.
This course explores how contemporary writers and artists have attempted to come to terms with the so-called post-print era - a historical moment characterized by the strategies of fragmentation and recombination that digital hyperspaces make possible. By analysing digital texts and the work of cultural theorists on the nature and impact of this new medium, students will address the implications of the rise of computing and the internet for the future of literary and other cultural practices.
Why do we assign critical and aesthetic value to some works of art and not to others? Why are some considered "classics," others "trash"? This course focuses on age-old distinctions between "high" and "low" art. By examining a variety of texts such as fiction, poetry, drama, music, television, and visual arts, students will explore how the divide between the "elite" and "popular" culture was erected and why it needs to be questioned.
Diversity is embodied in the texts that surround us, from novels, movies, and other works that we consciously consume, to more subliminal pieces such as billboards and radio jingles. Indeed, literature and other arts with the greatest impact always have been those that challenge social and artistic norms. In this course, students will learn the ways in which literature and culture in general influence our views regarding various forms of diversity.
In literature, advertising, and online - we are surrounded by representations that both enable and prescribe how we interpret gender and sex. This course explores how popular culture, inter-personal communication, literature, and film construct gender, sexuality, and desire. From conventional notions of masculinity and femininity, to the emergence of categories such as transgendered, students will consider the cultural, social, and political influences that contribute to how we imagine ourselves as gendered beings.
The course considers the interconnections and ongoing dialogue between postcolonial and colonial discourses and literatures, and the socio-historical contexts from which the texts and theories have emerged. In giving comprehensive coverage to literatures and theories produced within former British colonies (including settler colonies) and the neo-colonial world, we shall examine key issues relating to the role that language, race, nation, ethnicity, gender, and subaltern identities play in shaping experience and producing knowledge.
This course for English as a Second Language students covers material focusing on how our use of language reflects our social identities. The course will also help students improve their English and express themselves in a university setting. Students will analyze, discuss, and write essays on the material. The online ESL/EAL Placement test is required. (Formerly LNG 100)
As the third course in the series of Lower Level Liberal courses for students whose mother tongue is not English, this course introduces students to contemporary Western thinking about oral and written language and the social use of language. Students will explore several issues including the nature of language, first and second language learning, and style of speech. The course is designed to improve students ability to communicate their ideas in speaking and writing. The online ESL/EAL Placement Test is required. (Formerly LNG 300).
This course for English as a Second Language students covers material focusing on how language is framed by institutional and cultural perspectives. The course will also help students improve their English and express themselves in a university setting. Besides discussion and analysis of the material, students will write essays. (Formerly LNG 200). The online ESL/EAL Placement Test is required.
This writing intensive course explores how language reflects and shapes society. The course also aims to further develop students' academic reading and writing skills by exploring methods of active reading, and strategies for structuring and supporting written arguments. (Formerly LNG 101)
