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Undergraduate Courses (2025-2026)

Below is a tentative list of undergraduate courses to be offered in the 2024-2025 academic year.ÌęComplementary course listingsÌęcan be found here.Ìę

Each course offered in the Department of English begins with the designation ENGL followed a three digit number. The first digit of this course number offers a rough guide to the level of the course:

2 - U1

3 - U2

4 - U3

5 - U3/Graduate

Note: All 500-level courses and a certain number of 200-, 300-, and 400-level courses have limited enrolment and require the instructors' permission to register. Students hoping to enroll in these courses should consult relevant course descriptions for the procedures for application procedures.

100-Level
First Year Seminars

200-Level
Introductory Courses

Professor Maggie Kilgour
Fall 2025
Time TBA

Prerequisite: Open only to English Majors and Minors, or by special written permission of instructor.

Description: Why does anyone write literature? Even more importantly for us, why and how does anyone read it? Many people, some of whom you will know, will argue that studying literature, above all English literature, is irrelevant and useless today. Yet during the Covid pandemic, many others found literary works of all kinds essential, not just as a form of escape into another world from a reduced reality but also as creative and imaginative stimuli that kept us active and engaged humans.

This course considers these questions by looking at the development of major non-dramatic works in English from the Anglo-Saxon period to the mid-18th century. It introduces students to the early history of English literature, while reflecting upon the meaning of tradition, literary history, the idea of a “canon”, and especially the concept of “English.” We will trace the development through time of specific literary forms and genres, including lyric, elegy, epic, satire, sonnet, romance, and pastoral. At the same time, we will explore the relation of literature to religion, politics, and culture broadly, to see why in different periods people read and write literature, and to follow the changing ideas of the writer and his/her role in society.

Foundational to further study of literature in the department of English, ENGL 202 prepares students for more advanced and specialized study in the department. Discussions in conferences and written assignments will help students develop skills of interpretation and communication.

Texts: (texts are available at șÚÁÏÍű Bookstore):

  • Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol 1. 9th Edition.
  • Edmund Spenser’s Poetry. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Anne Lake Prescott and Andrew D. Hadfield. (Included with the Anthology if purchased at the Bookstore)

Evaluation: 20% in class mid-term; 40% 5-6 page term paper; 30% formal final exam;10% conference participation

Format: lecture and conferences

Professor Miranda Hickman
Winter 2026
Time TBA

This course is intended for Faculty of Arts or Faculty of Science Students in a Major or Minor Program in literature in the Department of English. Not open to students in other Faculties.

Prerequisite: English 202. Not open to students who have taken English 201, the non-Departmental Survey of English Literature 2.

Description: Focused primarily on literature of the British Isles, this course surveys literature in English from the years following the French Revolution to the early twentieth century, with particular emphasis on poetry. We engage critically with the received constructs of “Romanticism,” “Victorianism,” and “Modernism” traditionally governing the periodization and study of literature covered by this course, and we interrogate the concept of literary “canon.”

​We open with what has come to be known as the “Romantic” era in British literature, falling between the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth. David Perkins once suggested that we are still living in the “comet’s tail” of the Romantics’ fiery trajectory, such that we still feel the influence of their ideas about the artist’s role, creative process, the power of the imagination, “Nature,” and the relationship between the individual and community. Especially salient in the Romantic inheritance is a conception of the poet—as hero, rebel, solitary genius, and visionary—that still compels readers today.

The Victorian period that followed often critiqued the Romantic emphasis on introspection, feeling, and individual visionary experience, and often shaped their work according to commitments to social justice. We address the Victorian “fin de siùcle” is read as a late-nineteenth century revolt against Victorianism from within, together with the movement that the fin de siùcle is often read as ushering in: twentieth-century literary “modernism,” associated with pathfinding aesthetic, social, and philosophical innovation. We close with examples from contemporary literature engaging critically with history and literature of these eras and addressing postcolonial experience.

Texts: Readings will likely include work by the following:

  • Romantic: William Blake, S.T. Coleridge, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, John Keats, Mary Robinson, P.B. Shelley, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth,
  • Victorian: Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walter Pater, Christina Rossetti, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, John Ruskin, Oscar Wilde
  • Modern and Contemporary: W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H.D., Amy Lowell, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Kiran Desai, Zadie Smith
    Possible novels: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Dickens, Hard Times; Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Selvon, Lonely Londoners; Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

Method of Evaluation (subject to revision): 2 critical essays (5-6 pp.), final examination

Professor Antje Chan
Winter 2026
Time TBA

Description: What do Beowulf, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Mary Sidney’s poetry, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Herbert’s sonnets, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, Austen’s novels, Yeats’ Plays, Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets have in common? Their engagement with the Bible is one of the most common threads. Biblical quotations, plots and references have shaped ordinary speech and writing in English to the point where many people were simply unaware of the origins of the saying and metaphors they were using. By delving into the Bible as a major element in the western imaginative tradition, as Northrop Frye puts it, this course is an aid in understanding its vast influence and central place in the wider canon of poetry and prose.

We will explore the literature of the Bible, with its literary forms and genres, whether narrative, history, poetry, etc., as well as themes such as “creation”, “exodus”, “law”, “wisdom”, “prophecy”, “gospel” and “apocalypse”, prior to turning to its reception history, considering elements of the history of the book, and ways in which authors engaged with the Bible in their literary production (using typology, allegory, affect, etc.). By doing so, we will delineate the extent to which the Bible and literature is an infinitely complex topic, modulated by each author’s engagement with the text, according to the style and theme of each literary work, and by the form of belief and disbelief that undergird it.

ENGL204 prepares students to discern and pick upon themes and allusions that may pass otherwise unnoticed without close attention to the embeddedness of the Bible in English literature.

Texts (provisional):

  • The English Bible: King James Version
  • The Bible and Literature: a Reader (eds. David Jasper and Stephen Prickett)

Texts will be made available at șÚÁÏÍű Bookstore and on myCourses

Evaluation (provisional): term paper 40%; final exam 30%; mid-term assignment 20%; conference participation 10%

Format: lecture and conferences

Professor Fiona Ritchie
Fall 2025
Time TBA

Description: TBA

Texts:TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: TBA

African American Literature before the Harlem Renaissance

Professor Camille Owens
Winter 2026
Time TBA

Description: This introductory course surveys African American literature from its 18th-century beginnings to the horizon of its “Renaissance” in the 20th century. During this period, African Americans developed a heterogenous literary culture across poetry, memoir, novels, folktales, songs, and stage performances. The innovations, creativity, and political power of their literature was deeply influential on U.S. literary culture as a whole, however, their work was undertaken against the backdrop of slavery—where not only literature, but black literacy was largely forbidden; and later, against the backdrop of Jim Crow, where black culture was often exploited and uncredited by white Americans. In this course, we will examine the dynamism of African American literature in context of this history. From the artful poetry that Phillis Wheatley penned while an enslaved teenager in the 1760s, to James Weldon Johnson’s invention of a psychologically modern narrator in the 1910s, we will study how African American writers and cultural producers interpreted the conditions of black life in the U.S. and ask how their imaginative work contributed to reshaping those conditions. Offering a wide-ranging study of major authors including Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Frances E.W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Charles Chesnutt, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Jean Toomer, this course also reaches toward performance and music as key sites in the making of African American literature and culture. By placing canonical literature in broader cultural context, students will develop foundational skills of literary study, while also building a wider toolkit of cultural analysis. Demonstrating the richness of African American literature before the Harlem Renaissance, this course is designed to anchor further coursework in a deep appreciation of the creative traditions from which later African American authors drew, and still draw.

Texts (tentative):

  • Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
  • William Wells Brown, Clotel, or, The President’s Daughter (1853)
  • Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1863)
  • Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (1901)
  • James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)

Evaluation (tentative): discussion posts, 2 short close-reading essays, midterm exam, final exam, participation

Format: lectures and discussion conferences

Professor Robert Lecker
Fall 2025
Time TBA

(Note: For English Majors, this course qualifies for the required three credits from a course in Canadian literature)

Description: A survey of English Canadian poetry and prose from the Second World War to the present. We will read a range of poetry and short fiction by many of Canada’s most accomplished writers in order to explore ideas about the nature of Canada and the literary representation of race, identity, politics, and indigenous experience in Canada. In addition to looking at the work of major authors from 1945 to the present, the lectures will also cover such topics as Canadian literary nationalism, realism, postmodernism, and different forms of experimentation. We will also look at the idea of the north as a central metaphor in Canadian writing and will discuss the economic and cultural forces accounting for the construction of a national literature. Students will be introduced to several concepts related to literary analysis.

Please note that in addition to weekly lectures there will be one mandatory conference meeting (50 minutes) each week. Conference times will be announced at the beginning of the term.

Required texts: TBD

Evaluation (tentative): participation (10%); discussion boards (20%); in-class essays (30%); final take-home exam (40%)

Format: lecture and conference

Professor Katherine Zien
Fall 2025
Time TBA

Description: Theater is a tree with deep roots and many branches: not only does the history of world theatre stretch millennia long, but theatre studies encompasses both textual analysis and investigation of all the aspects of a staged production: lighting, sound, movement, vocalizations and uses of language, set design, and stage-audience interactions. Given the complexity and breadth of the field, this course provides a critical introduction to theatre studies, focusing on play texts, drama theory, and theatre history. We will cover both western and non-western theatrical events, examining a range of works from Ancient Greek tragedy through contemporary and postcolonial performance, and including the Department of English mainstage show. Through the plays, we will examine what “theatre” is and does in different periods and places. We will learn how theatre is constituted by the material and social conditions of performance, codified in dramatic genres, and conceptualised in dramatic theory.

Required Texts:

  • The Norton Anthology of Drama, Shorter 3rd Edition
  • Additional play texts and production videos, where available, will be provided through MyCourses.

Evaluation: participation: 10%; in-class assignments: 10%; short essays: 20%; midterm exam: 30%; final exam: 30%

Format: lecture, discussion, and small group work.

Professor Amber Rose Johnson
Winter 2026
Time TBA

Course Description: This course is designed to support students in exploring the use of the body and voice as tools for communication and expression in the presence of an audience. While the course will introduce students to tools and techniques used in acting and improvisation, including vocal and physical warm-ups, theater and improvisational games and simple scene study, we will also explore other, experimental modes of performance that exceed the frame of “acting”. Together we will attend to embodied modes of imagination, creativity and spontaneity. Throughout the course, you will be asked to commit fully to the group and the creative process, and you may be expected to work on your own, outside of class, rehearsing or preparing performance materials.

Texts: Select essays and videos will be made available through myCourses.

Evaluation: participation (15%), in-class performances (15%), bi-weekly journal entries (20%), mid-term performance (25%), final performance and reflection (25%)

Format: group discussions, practical exercises, class presentations

Professor Derek Nystrom
Fall 2025
Time TBA

Description: This course, a required course for Cultural Studies majors and minors, will introduce various critical efforts to theorize the aesthetics, semiotics, and politics of popular culture over the past century. Beginning with a few crucial theoretical touchstones (Marx, Freud, structuralism), we will survey such movements as the Frankfurt School, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, critical race studies, queer theory, affect theory, and various feminisms, as they each formulate critical frameworks to explain how popular culture works. Along the way, we will consider the following questions: What does the “popular” in “popular culture” mean? Does the distinction between “high” and “low” culture have a political dimension? Furthermore, when we do cultural studies, whose culture should be investigated? What is the role of the critic? Finally, how can we grasp the meanings of popular culture: by examining the texts themselves, or by studying the audiences’ interpretations and uses of these texts?

Required Texts: Roland Barthes, Mythologies (either Hill and Wang editions)

Essays by Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Richard Dyer, Dick Hebdige, Stuart Hall, John Fiske, Janice Radway, Constance Penley, Lisa Nakamura, Sara Ahmed, Eric Lott, and others.

Evaluation: quizzes, two short papers, final exam

Format: lecture; weekly, TA-led discussion sections

Professor Ned Schantz
Fall 2025
Time TBA
Screening TBA

Description: This course is designed to prepare students for future film courses at șÚÁÏÍű. It is therefore dedicated to three main goals: establishing a frame of reference for the history of film and film theory, introducing key analytical concepts and skills, and inspiring an ongoing interest in film.

The course will initially be restricted to Cultural Studies majors/minors and Film Studies minors. If space permits, some other students may be admitted.

Texts: coursepack

Evaluation: 2 quizzes 10% each, short paper 20%, participation 10% or 25%, posted class notes 5%, comprehensive final 30-65% (depending on quiz and participation marks)

Format: lecture and conferences

Introduction to Film History

Professor Alanna Thain and Professor Daniel Schwartz
Winter 2026
Time TBA

Expected Preparation: None. This is a required course for students in the World Cinemas minor.

Description: Designed as one of the two core courses for World Cinemas Minors, this course introduces key historical moments, cinematic movements, formal styles, as well as historiographical and theoretical debates in the history of world cinema. The course maps out diverging trajectories and merging paths of exemplary filmmakers and filmmaking collectives in various nations and geo-political regions against the backdrop of the changing technological media environments. While we distinguish chronology from history, the course follows the transformation of cinema from its emergent era to the present. Students will read both historical and contemporary texts to gain a broad sense of the seminal debates in film studies, reception and criticism. This course aims to foster a critical understanding of cinema as an international, distributed and polycentric phenomenon. Note that this course is cross listed with LLCU 279 and counts towards the History requirement for Cultural Studies students.

Texts: Films may include: A Page of Madness, Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926; Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein, 1926; La Mujer del Puerto (The Woman of the Port), Arcady Boytler, 1934; M, A City Searches for A Murderer, Fritz Lang, 1931; Rome, Open City, Roberto Rossellini, 1945; The Housemaid, Kim Ki-young, 1960; Daisies, Věra Chytilová, 1966; The Hour of the Furnaces, Part I, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, 1968; Xala, Ousmane Sembene, 1974; Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Pedro Almodovar, 1988; : Fallen Angels, Wong Kar Wai, 1994; Moment of Innocence, Mohsan Makmahlbaf, 1996; Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, Agnùs Varda, 2000; Universal Language, Matthew Rankin, 2024.

Evaluation: TBA

Format: screenings, lectures, discussion

Cinematic Adaptation

Professor Trevor Ponech
Winter 2026
Time TBA

Description: Adaptation--roughly speaking, the practice of basing a movie on a literary or other source-work--is a remarkably common, perhaps the historically dominant, strategy movie makers employ in the course of inventing and shaping their works. ENGL 280 Cinema as Mass Medium surveys some theories of adaptation. Our first order of business will be to look at ways in which the artistic genre of adaptation has been conceptualized. We'll pay special attention to puzzles and problems surrounding the notion that movies are texts and that adaptations are "intertexts" or "palimpsestic texts." Textualist definitions of adaptation will be compared with alternative approaches grounded in the idea that cinema is an essentially nontextual medium. To explore this alternative, we will need to clarify what it is that we are talking about when we use terms like “text," "medium," and “cinema.” This discussion opens onto an examination of whether adaptation essentially involves a medium shift, that is, a change from one mode or vehicle of expression (the literary text, for instance) to another (the cinematic display). At the same time, we'll survey some varieties of adaptation. Cinematic adaptations can be described as versions of their source works. For one thing to be a version of another necessarily means that features of one be markedly informed or shaped by features of the other. But not all versions are, for instance, faithful to the original. Hence we'll link adaptation to the concepts of "fidelity," "artistic nesting," and "transgression." This discussion will, in turn, lead us to consider how best to go about critically appreciating an adaptation as an adaptation, that is, as a certain kind of artistic achievement. 

Movies: TBD

°Ő±đłæłÙČő:  a selection of readings drawn from contemporary film theory and aesthetic philosophy; a selection of novels and short fictional works.

Evaluation (tentative): conference participation 20%; midterm exam (short essay) 30%; final exam 50%

Format: lectures, discussions, in-class screenings, conference sections

Professor Richard So
Fall 2025
Time TBA

Description: TBA

°Ő±đłæłÙČő:  TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: TBA

Inuit Literature

Professor Marianne Stenbaek
Fall 2025
Time TBA

Description. “To read a book by an indigenous author is a step towards reconciliation”.

Literature is one of the best ways to know a people, their desires, their lives, their ideologies, and their hopes. There are three groups of Indigenous peoples in Canada: the First Nations, the Metis, and the Inuit. They are very distinct, though they share some similarities. The course will focus on the Inuit.

Inuit literature is often thought to be mainly legends or myths, recorded by outsiders, but the Inuit also have an impressive and exciting modern literature, mainly written after 1950. This course will focus on works actually written by Canadian Inuit in a variety of formats: poetry and essays, satirical and political cartoons, drawings, articles, animated films, autobiographies or short stories. It will examine some of the earliest works, but the course focuses mainly on contemporary times.

Much of the literature is autobiographical and deals with topics of great importance to Inuit, such as climate change, reconciliation, and the importance of traditional knowledge. The course will supplement the written texts with excerpts from Inuit TV and Film as well as contemporary songs.

Texts: Available at Paragraphe bookstore
 across from the Roddick gates.

  • Arctic Dreams and Nightmares (excerpts). Alootook Ipellie. Theytus Books Ltd. 1993. Please note that all necessary excerpts will be posted online.
  • Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women. Nancy Wachowich. șÚÁÏÍű-Queen's University Press. 2001.
  • The Diary of Abraham Ulrikab. University of Ottawa. 2005.
  • The Right to Be Cold: One Woman's Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic, and the Whole Planet. Sheila Watt-Cloutier. Penguin Random House, Canada. 2015.
  • Excerpts from Voices and Images of Nunavimmiut volume 1. Edited by Stenbaek and Grey. 2010.

Evaluation: TBA

Format: lecture and class discussions

300-Level
Intermediate Courses

Professor Kenneth Borris
Fall 2025
Time TBA

Description:ÌęA tour through the English literary Renaissance from around 1500 to 1600, apart from drama, emphasizing literary authors and texts of particularly high quality and influence, and relating them to significant or interesting cultural contexts and nonliterary discourses, including the visual arts. Further readings sample those contexts and discourses. Featured texts and authors will include Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, Edmund Spenser, including his Shepheardes Calender and the iconography of its twelve illustrations, Mary Stuart (Queen of Scots), Isabella Whitney, and William Shakespeare’s nondramatic poetry. Other parts of the course will address various particular topics through study of relevant English and translated continental texts, including the gender debate enhancing the status of women; the beginnings of female authorship in English; contemporary erotica; the advent of printing and controls upon print; the relation of visual iconography and emblematics to literature; Neoplatonic love theory and its literary and social impacts; and mythography.

°Ő±đłæłÙČő:Ìę

  • Sir Thomas More, Utopia, trans. David Wootton (Hackett Publishing)
  • Shakespeare, Sonnets and Narrative Poems (Signet Classic Shakespeare)
  • Baldesar Castiglione, The Courtier, trans. George Bull (Penguin Classics)
  • Edmund Spenser, Book VI of The Faerie Queene (Hackett Publishing)

Course Reader for English 305, provided as files for each text, on the ENGL 305 Mycourses website.

Evaluation: term paper 55%; final exam 45%; class attendance

Format: lectures and class discussion

Professor Maggie Kilgour
Winter 2026
Time TBA

Prerequisite: None.

Expected Student Preparation: This is a challenging course. Previous university courses in English literature, especially ENGL 202 or familiarity with other Renaissance works are desirable. All students who wish to take this course must come to the first class.

Description: A survey of 17th-century poetry and prose (excluding Milton). In England, the 17th century was a time of revolution: of social upheaval and Civil War, as well as radical changes in philosophy and science. The literature of this turbulent time also is marked by its vitality and its variety. In this course, we will read representative works by writers including Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Herrick, Marvell, Cowley, Lanyer, Cavendish, Philips, Bacon, Burton, Browne, discussing aesthetic developments in the context of the events of the period.

Texts: The Broadview Anthology of 17th Century Verse & Prose (available at șÚÁÏÍű Bookstore)

Other supplementary materials will be posted on Mycourses.

Evaluation: midterm (20%), 8-page term paper (40%), final exam (30%); participation (10%).

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Average Enrolment: 40

Fall 2025
Professors Wes Folkerth and Carmen Mathes
Time TBAÌę

Prerequisite or Corequisite: ENGL 202 or ENGL 200. This course is open only to English majors in the literature stream. This course is to be taken in the Fall semester of U1 or in the first Fall semester after the student’s selection of the Literature Major program.

Description:ÌęThis course introduces students to the formal and stylistic elements of poetry and prose fiction, provides them with a shared vocabulary for recognizing and analyzing different literary forms, and develops their reading, writing, and critical discussion skills. Although many critical methods can be applied to the works in this course, Poetics focuses on teaching students how to talk and write precisely about a wide range of formal and stylistic techniques in relation to literary meaning in poetry and prose fiction. All the critical methodologies you will learn in your other English courses will benefit from your knowledge of the material of ENGL 311. You will read some works in Poetics that are also required in other courses, such as ENGL 202 and 203, the Departmental Surveys of English Literature. In Poetics, we study such works not primarily in historical context, or as engagements with literary, cultural or social history, but for the techniques of literary art that they exhibit. The course instructors assume that students enrolled as English majors will already have some facility explaining what given works of literature mean; we instead focus on understanding how literature creates meaning. Discussions and assignments will therefore involve the memorization, identification, and application of concepts and terms essential to the study of literary techniques. Thus, the English Literature program requires that ENGL 311 be taken in U1 so that all Literature students will be well prepared for their other studies with a shared terminology and training in critical writing.

Required Texts:

  • Abrams, M.H. and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 11th ed., Boston: Wadsworth, 2015.
  • Bausch, Richard, and R. V. Cassill, eds. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Shorter 8th ed., New York: Norton, 2015.
  • Ferguson, Margaret, Tim Kendall and Mary Jo Salter, eds. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 6th ed., New York: Norton, 2018.

Recommended:

  • Messenger, William E., et. al. The Canadian Writer’s Handbook. 6th ed. Oxford UP, 2015.

Evaluation: essay 1 (15%); in-class midterm (15%); essay 2 (20%); final exam (30%); participation and informed discussion (10%); developmental assignments TBD (10%)

Professor Sean Carney
Winter 2026
Time TBA

Description: This course will examine European and North American drama of the twentieth century. We will begin by studying the great realists of the late nineteenth century and the philosophy underlying their dramaturgy. This will lead us into a consideration of various positive and negative responses to the realist tradition. We will examine these plays in their original theatrical contexts, while at the same time positioning these dramas in relation to their individual social and political moments. A special emphasis throughout the course will be the representation of the family unit in modern drama, generational conflict, and the dialectical relationship between family members. A second emphasis will be the restaging of canonical plays within new and innovative contexts. The overall goal of the course is to impart to students a foundational understanding of a dominant trend in modern drama in the west.

Please Note: In the event of extraordinary circumstances beyond the University’s control, the content and/or evaluation scheme in this course is subject to change.Ìę

    Required Texts (tentative):

    • Ibsen, Henrik. Hedda Gabler in Four Major Plays vol 1 (Signet)
    • Strindberg, August. The Ghost Sonata in Eight Modern Plays (Norton)
    • Chekhov, Anton. Three Sisters in Eight Modern Plays (Norton)
    • Pirandello, Luigi. Six Characters in Search of an Author in Eight Modern Plays (Norton) Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire (New Directions)
    • O’Neill, Eugene. Long Day’s Journey into Night, in Eight Modern Plays (Norton)
    • Beckett, Samuel. Happy Days, in Eight Modern Plays (Norton)
    • Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun (Vintage)
    • Pinter, Harold. The Caretaker (Faber)
    • Ryga, George. The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (Talonbooks)
    • Tremblay, Michel. Forever Yours, Marie-Lou (Talonbooks)
    • Pollock, Sharon. Blood Relations (Newest)

    Evaluation (tentative):

    • First essay (5 pages): 25%
    • Class Attendance / Participation: 10%
    • Major Essay (6 pages): 30%
    • Final Exam: 35%

    Instructional Method: lectures and conferences

      Shakespeare the Maker

      Professor Paul Yachnin
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      The Greeks called him “a poet” . . . It comes of this word poiein, which is, “to make”; wherein, I know not whether by luck or wisdom we Englishmen have met with the Greeks in calling him “a maker”: which name, how high and incomparable a title it is, I had rather were known by marking the scope of other sciences than by any partial allegation.

      --Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesy

      Description:Ìę Sidney called poets “makers” in order to affirm “how high and incomparable” they were, but the word “maker” also suggests an artisan who labours with his hands and with other artisans in the making of objects for sale. In this course, we study “Shakespeare the Maker” in both senses of the word—the poet whose critical and creative imagination was able to see the world anew and to teach thousands of playgoers new ways of seeing, speaking, and being in the world and also the playwright who worked shoulder to shoulder with the actors, musicians, carpenters, costume makers, and others and who crafted wonderfully entertaining plays for sale in the early modern playhouse.

      In the course, we read plays from the beginning, middle, and end of Shakespeare’s career as a professional playwright. We study his work in the four key dramatic genres—comedy, tragedy, history, and romance. We consider how the playhouse and the practices of performance made Shakespeare the great theatrical artist that he became, how in his turn Shakespeare made the professional theatre a big-time popular and money-making success (and the founding institution of the modern entertainment industry), and how together Shakespeare and the theatre helped transform the world.

      There is no prohibition against the use of ChatGPT and/or similar AI systems in the course.

      Format: lecture and conference sections

      Evaluation: midterm exam (30%); final essay (30%); final exam (30%); conference participation (10%)

      Texts:

      • Shakespeare texts are available at Paragraph books.
      • Titus Andronicus (and Timon of Athens), ed. Sylvan Barnet et al (Signet)
      • Love’s Labor’s Lost, ed. Peter Holland, Pelican Shakespeare (Penguin Books)
      • Richard II, ed. Anthony Dawson and Paul Yachnin (Oxford)
      • As You Like It, ed. David Bevington (Broadview)
      • Measure for Measure, ed. N. W. Bawcutt (Oxford)
      • Othello, ed Michael Neill (Oxford)
      • Cymbeline, ed. Roger Warren (Oxford)
      • Henry VIII, ed. Jay Halio (Oxford)

      Evaluation:

      • Journal 40%
      • Group presentation 15%
      • Essay (10 pages double-spaced, 3,000 words approx.) 30%
      • Participation 15%

      Assessment:

      The best work—written, presented, or performed—exemplifies creativity, critical intelligence, commitment, and connection:

      • your creativity—your active and free approach to a text or an idea or a question. Your work is not bound within the expected terms of the course. How the professor sees things is no doubt of value, but it is the view of only one person. Your work dares to be free, original, even beautiful
      • your critical engagement never takes anything as simply true or simply given, but puts in question all ideas that are seen to be living in the object of study and/or that have been articulated by others. Your critical engagement even includes your ability to be critical about your own ideas and arguments
      • your commitment to the work that you are undertaking. It is your work after all, so you have to be ready to stand up for its cogency and its value (though always keeping an open mind about the questions and counter-arguments coming from others)
      • your ability to connect with your reader or your auditors. How are you able to meet others face to face (whether in written work or presentations)? Writing and speaking about what you care about needs to be “loud and clear”—able to lift your reader or your auditors out of passiveness and stillness and transform them into your active and engaged conversation partners

      I am here to lend a hand at any time. When you are preparing your group or individual presentations, writing your journal, or prepping for the oral exam, my door (the real one or the zoom door) is open for you. Of course, I’ll provide written responses to all your work, and I’ll be happy to meet with you to discuss the work that you will have done and to think with you about how to do even better.

      Your tasks:

      • keep a journal where you can think by writing about the texts we are studying and the questions that we are developing. It is also something you do for marks, so you have to write at least a page (about 350 words) about each week’s readings, presentations, and discussions. Your journal certainly doesn’t have to be formal like an essay. After all, it is mostly for you and about your thinking, questioning, arguing. But it’s also going to be read by me, so make it reader-friendly. And don’t hesitate to include your own creative work. Artwork is just fine. You will prepare 12 journal entries in all. You’ll submit your journal to me halfway through the course so that I will be able to read and respond to what you have written.
        • Think about two or three questions or ideas that matter to you, and keep those questions or ideas in play from entry to entry (though never in lock step)
        • Feel most welcome to be creative with your journaling (it is your journey). Art work is welcome. So is poetry and other non-argumentative forms of writing
        • Try staging a conversation with AI about a question that you have
        • Think about how the plays we are studying speak to who we are now, the problems we are facing now, the abiding questions that keep coming back to challenge us
      • work with a group of your colleagues on a group presentation. Each presentation will feature a performance of a major scene or scenes from a play that we are studying and a discussion—organized and facilitated by your group—of key ideas and questions that arise from the performance and the play
      • write an essay (10 pages double-spaced) that is grows out from your group presentation. The essay should bring together your experience as a performer of the play with your engagement with central ideas, questions, features of the play. Your essay is due the week after you do your group presentation
      • participate. Be here! Come to each class with your ideas, questions, complaints, sudden insights, or expressions of puzzlement. We are working toward creating wide-ranging conversations around the questions that arise from our work together

      Ìę

      Professor Maggie Kilgour
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Prerequisite: None.

      Expected Student Preparation: This is a challenging course. Previous university courses in English literature, especially ENGL 202, or some knowledge of Renaissance literature or culture is desirable. All students who wish to take this course must come to the first class.

      Description: A study of the poetry and selected prose of one of England’s most important, influential, and still controversial writers. While to many people today Milton seems the epitome of literary and political orthodoxy, in his own time he was known as a radical thinker, an advocate of regicide and divorce. His writing is complex and challenging, demanding careful and active engagement from his readers. In the first few weeks of the term, we will look at Milton’s early poetry and some of his political writings, tracing his development as a poet in relation to his social, political, and literary context. The centre of the course will focus on a close reading of Paradise Lost. In conclusion, we will look briefly at his last works, Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes, and discuss Milton’s later reputation and his place in the Western literary tradition.

      Texts (required texts are available at șÚÁÏÍű Bookstore):

      • Stella Revard ed, John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)
      • Barbara Lewalski, ed. John Milton: Paradise Lost (Blackwell, 2007).
      • Selections from the prose: on MyCourses
      • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (recommended)
      • King James Bible (recommended)

      Evaluation: 20% in class mid-term; 40% 8 pp. term paper on Paradise Lost; 25% take-home exam; 15% class participation.

      Format: lecture and discussion

      Average Enrolment: 40 students

      The Private and the Public

      Professor Paul Yachnin
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Description: In this course, we study key literary works that have helped create our ideas about the private and the public and that think critically about the private and the public. These include three plays by Shakespeare, readings from the two influential “confessions” of St. Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and two novels—Passing by Nella Larson and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Our literary reading will be supplemented by the work of a number of important thinkers, including Hannah Arendt, JĂŒrgen Habermas, Michael Warner.

      The course is about the history of the ideas, practices, spaces, and technologies that have created the shifting zones of private and public life. We’ll move toward a deeper understanding of how our world has been shaped by the history of privacy and publicity (i.e., the condition of being public).

      There is no prohibition against the use of ChatGPT and/or similar AI systems in the course.

      Texts: Texts will be available from Paragraph Books. All the other readings for the course, including the sections of Rousseau’s Confessions, will be available on our myCourses site.

      • Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Oxford University Press).
      • Twelfth Night, ed. Roger Warren and Stanley Wells (Oxford University Press).
      • A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Peter Holland (Oxford University Press).
      • Saint Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford University Press).
      • The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories. Edited and with an Introduction by Charles R. Larsen (Anchor Books, 2001). Please try to get this edition (paperback or as an ebook) so that we will have the same page numbers. You should know that Passing, a novel by a leading Black novelist and member of the Harlem Renaissance, contains the N-word.
      • Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (Vintage Canada) 2009.

      Format: lecture and discussion

      Evaluation:

      • Journal 30
      • Individual presentation 15
      • Participation 10
      • Group presentation 15
      • Oral exam 30

      Your tasks:

      • keep a journal where you can think by writing about the texts we are studying and the questions that we are developing and also relating those texts and questions to your own lived experience. It is also something you do for marks, so you have to write at least a page (about 350 words) about each week’s readings and discussions. Your journal certainly doesn’t have to be formal like an essay. After all, it is mostly for you and about your thinking, questioning, arguing. But it’s also going to be read by me, so make it reader-friendly. And don’t hesitate to include your own creative work (artwork is just fine). You’ll share your journal with me midway through the course so that I will be able to read and respond to what you have written
        • Think about two or three questions or ideas that matter to you, and keep those questions or ideas in play from entry to entry (though never in lock step)
        • Feel most welcome to be creative with your journaling (it is your journey). Art work is welcome. So is poetry and other non-argumentative forms of writing
        • Try staging a conversation with AI about a question that you have
        • Think about how the works we are studying speak to who we are now, the problems we are facing now, the abiding questions that keep coming back to challenge us;
      • do a three-minute presentation on a topic chosen from a list of topics that will be provided. This assignment is based on the three-minute thesis program, where graduate students compete for prizes in recognition of the clarity, succinctness, value, and appeal of their research /skillsets/offerings/3mt . We’ll take the competition out of what we do, but leave in the emphasis on clear, succinct, and engaging accounts of valuable research. You’ll prepare one slide for your presentation, and your presentation will be notes-free (in other words, you’ll have to know just what you want to say when you say it). We’ll do prep work in advance of the first set of presentations;
      • work with a group of your colleagues on a group presentation—one presentation on each of the six literary works we will study. Presentations on the three plays will feature performances of key scenes;
      • participate in class. Come to each class with your ideas, questions, complaints, sudden insights, or expressions of puzzlement. We are working toward creating wide-ranging conversations around the questions that arise from our work together;
      • meet with me for an oral examination.
        • each exam will begin with the text or idea or question that you find most interesting and important and then will connect with other texts, ideas, and questions that we have studied
        • the oral exams are one-on-one
        • they will run for approximately 25 minutes
        • they are intensive conversations about the texts, performances, ideas, and questions that have been at the centre of the course

      Assessment:

      The best work—written, presented, or performed—exemplifies creativity, critical intelligence, commitment, and connection:

      • your creativity—your active and free approach to a text or an idea or a question. Your work is not bound within the expected terms of the course. How the professor sees things is no doubt of value, but it is the view of only one person. Your work dares to be free, original, even beautiful
      • your critical engagement never takes anything as simply true or simply given, but puts in question all ideas that are seen to be living in the object of study and/or that have been articulated by others. Your critical engagement even includes your ability to be critical about your own ideas and arguments
      • your commitment to the work that you are undertaking. It is your work after all, so you have to be ready to stand up for its cogency and its value (though always keeping an open mind about the questions and counter-arguments coming from others)
      • your ability to connect with your reader or your auditors. How are you able to meet others face to face (whether in written work, oral presentations, or performances)? Writing and speaking about what you care about needs to be “loud and clear”—able to lift your reader or your auditors out of passiveness and stillness and transform them into your active and engaged conversation partners

      I am here to lend a hand at any time. When you are preparing your group or individual presentations, writing your journal, or prepping for the oral exam, my door (the real one or the zoom door) is open for you. Of course, I’ll provide written responses to all your work, and I’ll be happy to meet with you to discuss the work that you will have done and to think with you about how to do even better.

      Literature and Disability

      Professor Wes Folkerth
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      Description: This course is designed to introduce students to Disability as an historical and social concept in literary history. We will begin by considering the history of the concept of disability, especially as it pertains to the medical and social models that developed in the 20th Century. Before venturing into literary history we will read and discuss seminal works in the field: Erving Goffman on stigma, Leslie Fielder on freaks, and David T. Mitchell and Susan L. Snyder’s ideas on narrative prosthesis and the materiality of metaphor. We will then turn our attention to disability in a variety of literary contexts, beginning with Grimm’s fairy tales. The criticism and selections of literary works we read after this will be drawn from a wide range of periods, from the Classical era to the medieval and early modern periods, the 18C, Romanticism and the 19C, through the modernist period and into the present day. Along the way we will encounter theorists such as Simi Linton, Lennard J. Davis, Tom Shakespeare, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Tobin Siebers, Ato Quayson, Robert McRuen, Michael BĂ©rubĂ©, Christopher Bell, Amy Vidali, and Eli Clare. In the final third of the course will turn our attention to Disability Studies’s many points of intersection with Feminist, Queer, Critical Race, and Postcolonial theories.

      Texts (available at the Word on Milton):

      The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability. eds. Clare Barker and Stuart Murray. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018.

      Other texts TBA.

      Evaluation:

      • Midterm Essay (30%):
      • Final Essay, 8-10 pages (30%):
      • Final Exam (30%)
      • Participation (10%)

      Format of class: lecture and class discussion.

      Average Enrolment: 30 students

      Black Feminist Theories

      Professor Amber Rose Johnson
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Description: Reading across genres several genres, this course will trace the development of Black feminisms from the mid nineteenth-century to the present. We will focus especially on contemporary contributions from the 1970s to today. Central to our exploration will be the analysis of the relationship between theory and practice, and the intersectional nature of race, gender, class, and sexuality as vectors of difference. Focusing primarily on Black women’s political struggles in the US and Canada (in addition to some engagements with the Caribbean) we will consider: The significance of transatlantic slavery to contemporary Black experiences; The ways that Black women have been subject to and resisted racism, sexism, homophobia, and economic oppression; And the ways that Black expressive cultures—visual art, literature, poetry, film, etc.—challenge dominant constructions of Black identity formations. Readings, viewings, and listenings may include: Patricia Hill Collins, Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Jamila Woods, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Dionne Brand.

      Texts: Select essays, videos and music will be made available through MyCourses.

      Evaluation: participation (15%), journal reflections (20%), mid-term collaborative paper (25%), short papers/projects (40%)

      Format: lecture and class discussion

      Postcolonial Encounters

      Professor Sandeep Banerjee
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Description:ÌęThis course provides a critical introduction to postcolonial and world literature by drawing on literary texts – novels, poems, short stories, and travelogues – from South Asia. The course examines how these texts conceive of, and represent, the lives and life-worlds of the South Asian region while situating them in relation to the critical and theoretical preoccupations of postcolonial and world literature studies. In addition, it also takes up some of the key questions and debates that have emerged in the field around, for instance, the status of English in the postcolony, the politics of reading and canonicity, the question of aesthetics in the non-west, and the ideology of form. The course also interrogates the (often contested) meanings of the term postcolonial and asks how it relates to categories such as anti-colonial and colonial. Furthermore, it considers the development of postcolonial studies in North America and relates it to the two other cognate fields, namely, the Global Anglophone and World Literature. In familiarizing students with some of the key issues and contemporary debates in the field, the course prepares students for further study in postcolonial and world literature.

      Note 1: Attendance to TA conferences is mandatory. No exceptions.

      Note 2: This course fulfils requirements for the South Asian Studies minor (Stream 1: Culture and Civilization).

      Texts (tentative):

      Novels

      • Sunlight on a Broken Column by Attia Hossain.
      • Baumgartner’s Bombay by Anita Desai.
      • Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie.
      • Age of Vice by Deepti Kapur.

      Travelogues

      • From Heaven Lake by Vikram Seth.

      Short Stories

      • Selections from Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Rabindranath Tagore, Sadaat Hasan Manto.

      Poetry

      • Selections from Rabindranath Tagore; Faiz Ahmad Faiz; GM Muktibodh; Arun Kolatkar.

      Evaluation: take-home exams, essays, participation in TA conferences

      Format: lectures and TA conferences

      Instructor TBA
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Description:ÌęThis course will introduce students to both foundational and more contemporary examples of literary and cultural theory. Combining readings of critical and literary texts, students will gain valuable skills in analyzing texts, situating them in their contexts of production and reception, and making substantive connections between art and the wider world.

      Texts:ÌęTBD by instructor

      Evaluation: TBD by instructor

      Format: lecture and seminar

      America after 1865: Fictions of Nation and Empire

      Professor Camille Owens
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Expected Student Preparation: Previous university-level course work in American Literature, preferably before 1900, or permission of instructor.

      Description: A mid-level survey of later-19th-century prose fiction representing a wide range of literary movements and modes. This course will trace how literary authors came to define, challenge, or change the shape of ‘America’ against its backdrop of racial apartheid, imperial expansion, and industrial capitalism after the Civil War. Reading works by African American and Indigenous authors in conversation with the works of “canonical” white American authors, we will look at relationships between formal, narrative, and stylistic developments in American prose, while examining the politics that surround the canonization of “American literature” and its hyphenated ethnic-American literature(s). Readings will include works by Charles Chesnutt, Mark Twain, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Theodore Dreiser, Pauline Hopkins, E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), W.E.B. Du Bois, Stephen Crane, Zitkala Sa, James Weldon Johnson, Edith Wharton, and Francis LaFlesche.

      Texts (tentative):

      • Charles Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman (1899)
      • Kate Chopin, “DesirĂ©e’s Baby” (1893)
      • Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson (1893)
      • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Iola Leroy (1892)
      • Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood (1903)
      • E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” (1893)
      • Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900)

      Evaluation (tentative): weekly discussion posts (10%), close-reading essay (15%), mid-term project/presentation (25%), final essay (35%), class participation (15%)

      Format: lectures and discussions

      Canadian Poetry to 1950

      Professor Eli MacLaren
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      Description: An in-depth consideration of Canadian poetry from its beginnings through the first half of the twentieth century. Combining historical, literary, and environmental lines of inquiry, this course will trace the growth of English-language poetry through initiatives, movements, and institutions in the country’s diverse regions, with awareness of its striving both for dominance over prior cultures Indigenous and French and for sovereignty in a wider cultural arena dominated by imperial Britain and the United States. What factors led Canadians to read and write poetry in English, and what obstacles or turns did they encounter in their writing careers? Where and how was poetry published, and what enabling or constraining effects did publication have on creativity? How did the definition of “good poetry” shift as neo-classicism ceded to romanticism and romanticism to modernism? What decisions did poets make in the fundamental matters of voice, figurative language, and form/genre as they attempted to adapt British and American models to the representation of Canadian places, sometimes for the first time in print? To what extent did a Canadian tradition (or canon) emerge or sink into oblivion and why? Such questions will guide our reading of Charles Sangster, Isabella Valancy Crawford, Charles G.D. Roberts, Archibald Lampman, Bliss Carman, Duncan Campbell Scott, E. Pauline Johnson / Tekahionwake, Susan Frances Harrison, E.J. Pratt, A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott, Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott, P.K. Page, Louis Dudek, and others. We will take the reading of poetry seriously, attending to its constituent elements (rhythm, rhyme, stanza, rhetoric) and allowing it to work not only as artifact from a bygone time but as art with powerful meanings now. Early Canadian poetry in English not only reflected but also helped constitute a diverse country changing swiftly under the pressures of colonization and modernization from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. Together we will work to retrieve it from obscurity.

      Books (tentative):

      • Gerson, Carole, and Gwendolyn Davies, eds. Canadian Poetry from the Beginnings Through the First World War. New Canadian Library. 1994. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2010
      • Brian Trehearne, ed. Canadian Poetry 1920–1960. New Canadian Library. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2010
      • Additional readings through șÚÁÏÍű Library

      Evaluation: oral presentation (15%); midterm test (20%); outline and essay (25%); participation (10%); final exam (30%)

      Format: lecture and discussion

      The Search for Vocation

      Professor Yael Halevi-Wise
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Description: Contributing to debates about ‘progress’ and ‘reform,’ English writers during the second half of the nineteenth century often set their novels about four decades back from their actual time of composition. Keeping this historical perspective in mind, we will focus on four major English novels and one paradigmatic German bildungsroman that portray a struggle for progress and reform as a meaningful search for love and employment in an era where social mobility and change became not only possible but also a necessary marker of success and identity.

      Texts:

      • The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
      • David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
      • Villette by Charlotte BrontĂ«
      • Middlemarch by George Eliot
      • Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

      Evaluation: 15% attendance and participation; 15%x4 reading responses; 25% final essay due a week after last class

      Format: lecture and discussion

      Love and Global Romanticism

      Professor Carmen Mathes
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      Description: Romanticism is a philosophical and literary movement; the Romantic era is an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historical period. The meanings, scope and timelines associated with both these statements have been oft debated and contested, particularly when it comes to Romantic-era Britain’s global reach.

      This course situates British Romanticism in a global context, and it does so by thinking about love. At a time of imperial and colonial expansion, how did Romantic novelists and poets think about the potentials and pitfalls of love? What kinds of connections—or animosities, or fantasies, or projections—might love bring to the surface or, alternatively, stifle, reject, or repress? We will read three novels (by Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and an anonymous author) and many poems by writers including Phillis Wheatley Peters, William Blake, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Mary Robinson, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron.

      Texts:

      • The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Literature, edited by Joseph Black et al., Broadview, 2016, ISBN: 9781554811311
      • Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814), edited by Claudia L. Johnson, Norton Critical Edition, ISBN: 978-0-393-96791-3
      • Anonymous, The Woman of Colour, edited by Lyndon J. Dominique, Broadview, 2007, ISBN: 9781551111766
      • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: The 1818 Edition, edited by Nick Groom, Oxford University Press, ISBN: 9780198840824

      Format: lecture and discussion

      Evaluation: in-class essay (25%); in-class poetry midterm (25%); final essay proposal (15%); final research essay (25%); participation and informed discussion (10%)

      Professor Robert Lecker
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      (Note: For English Majors, this course qualifies for the required three credits from a course in Canadian literature)

      Description: This is a course about really reading poetry, in this case, Canadian poetry. It focuses on a group of approximately ten Canadian poets who have formed and responded to the Canadian literary landscape since World War II. Most of the poets covered in the course are writers who confront modern and contemporary ideas about the nature of self, society, sexuality, gender, and art, but we also look at the ways in which these writers are trying to deal with the existential implications of new views about science, religion, and the poet’s place in a rapidly changing world. Since part of the reading involves thinking about aesthetic and theoretical issues, the course will deal with these issues, just as it will pay close attention to the meaning and resonance of particular poems. At the same time, it will consider the ways in which these poets (and us, as readers) construct the place called Canada as a metaphor that’s central to our daily lives. Students are encouraged to explore multi-media material related to each poet in question. The writing component of the course (a series of short assignments and a final paper) is designed to improve interpretive abilities and writing skills; the course encourages personal forms of critical expression. For this reason, this course will appeal to students who wish to broaden their understanding of poetry in general and will provide new ways of thinking about how poetry works. Students enrolling in this course should be prepared to participate actively in class discussion.

      Required texts: TBD

      Evaluation: two short papers (30%); final paper (40%); participation (15%); discussion boards (15%)

      Format: lecture and discussion

      Contemporary British Fiction

      Professor Allan Hepburn
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      Description: This course focusses on a selection of British novels published since 1990. Some novelists turn to the past, especially in light of Thatcherite conservatism and the Brexit crisis. Taking a longer view of history, Pat Barker reinvents the Great War and Hilary Mantel, in one of her shorter novels, reflects on Irish migration to Britain in the eighteenth century. Other novelists, especially Zadie Smith and Andrea Levy, think about race relations in Britain. These novels adopt a variety of genres: historiography, comedy, diagnosis, dossier, autofiction.

      Expected Preparation: at least two prior university courses in English literature, such as Survey (ENGL 202 and 203), Poetics (ENGL 311), or two courses at the 200 or 300 level

      Texts: A selection of six novels will be made in October 2025 from the following list.

      • Pat Barker, Regeneration (1991)
      • Hilary Mantel, The Giant, O’Brien (1998)
      • Jim Crace, Being Dead (1999)
      • Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000)
      • Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001)
      • Andrea Levy, Small Island (2004)
      • Rachel Cusk, Outline (2014)
      • Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire (2017)

      Evaluation: mid-term test (30%), essay (30%), participation (10%), final exam (30%)

      Format: lecture and discussion

      Enrolment: 40

      Instructor TBA
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Description:ÌęThis course will provide students with a survey of twenty-first-century fiction—or, at least, what we know of it thus far. Through the close study of a diverse group of writers, we will work to identify the central authors, historical contexts, and aesthetic features of what might otherwise fall under the amorphous label of “contemporary fiction.” Along the way, we will consider not only how writers have engaged with their immediate historical, political, and economic circumstances, but also how they have communed with literary history, reimagining the texts, styles, and genres that came before them.

      Texts: TBD by instructor

      Evaluation:ÌęTBD by instructor

      Format: seminar (with occasional lectures)

      Image, Mountain, Text: Literature, Culture, and the Environmental Imagination

      Professor Sandeep Banerjee
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Description:ÌęRaymond Williams tells us that the idea of “nature,” though typically contrasted from human activity, “contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history.” Williams’s statement underlines the fact that humans have intervened in the world around them from the earliest of times to transform it, and in so doing, transform the ways in which they live in nature. In the course of human history, mountains have been a key natural site that have been altered by human activity besides being a crucial subject of literary and visual depictions. Examining such depictions, the course seeks to understand how they imagine and represent mountains, and human interactions with them; how they articulate human-nonhumans relations in such locales. The course will situate these literary and visual texts in relation to, while engaging, theorizations of the production of nature and space as well as the recent debates on the Anthropocene and the capitalocene. Considering these questions will necessitate careful and patient engagement with theoretical and critical texts that will on occasion be dense and difficult.

      Texts (tentative):

      Novels

      • The Lost Horizon by James Hilton.
      • The Shadow of the Crescent Moon by Fatima Bhutto.

      Poetry

      • The Prelude (selections) by William Wordsworth.
      • Visions of Sumeru by SC Dutt.

      Non-Fiction

      • The Snow Leopard by Peter Mathiessen.
      • Among the Flowers by Jamaica Kincaid.

      Graphic Novel

      • Tintin in Tibet by HergĂ©

      Selections from the theoretical/critical works of Henri Lefebvre, Raymond Williams, David Harvey, Doreen Massey, Don Mitchell, Denis Cosgrove, Jason Moore, Marjorie Nicolson, Veronica della Dora.

      Evaluation: take-home exams, essays, participation

      Format: lectures and discussion

      Literary Montreal

      Professor Nathalie Cooke
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Description: Literary and creative depictions of Montreal suggest the city functions as a prism through which writers have visualized Canada’s shifting realities post WWII: geographical, political, economic, social, and demographic. During the term, students will familiarize themselves with Montreal’s past and present by exploring representations of the city over time, as well as by participating in creative ways of mapping the city. Class discussions will use primary texts as a lens through which to consider such questions as language choice and politics, translation and mistranslation, migration and community, shifting definitions of home and belonging.

      Because this is a literature course, we will always pay close attention to the function of literary form and the impact of writers’ choices of rhetorical device, genre, language and medium on the reading experience. Primary texts will include works of poetry, drama, fiction and non-fiction.

      Texts: The course will begin by looking at literary portraits of Montreal in WWII and its immediate aftermath (selected from works by Gabrielle Roy, Mavis Gallant, Gwethalyn Graham), next at literary maps of the city’s neighbourhoods (Leonard Cohen, David Montrose, Brian Moore, Mordecai Richler), and finally at writers using Montreal as stage for groundbreaking social commentary (Michel Tremblay). We will then touch on a selection of works from those offering a historical glance (David Fennario, Claire Rothman); or tracing particular migration stories (David Bouchet, Dimitri Nasrallah), urban realities (Ann Lambert), and imaginary trajectories (Nicolas Dickner).

      Short texts and visuals will be available on MyCourses. Approximately six full-length readings to include at least one play and one historical novel.

      Evaluation: reading journal (30%), in-class review assignment and interview (25%), individual presentation and essay (25%), group presentation involving a comparison of two works (10%), participation (10%)

      Format: lecture and discussion

      Origins of the Book Form

      Professor Michael Van Dussen
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      Description: This course examines the material circumstances and human mediations that condition how texts have been produced and used historically, as well as how innovations in the book form centuries ago still inform our reading and thinking processes. In addition to analyzing the materiality of manuscript (i.e., hand-written) and early printed texts theoretically and historically, students will gain first-hand experience working with ancient, medieval, and early modern artefacts in șÚÁÏÍű’s rare book collections. We will attend to the production, circulation, and use of texts broadly conceived—as objects that are crafted, transacted, read, seen, collected, and destroyed. We’ll consider texts in an unconventional way: not just for what they contain, but for how their physical forms and materials condition memory, interpretation, communication, and the formation of knowledge systems. One primary concern of the course will be to come to a nuanced understanding of the transition from manuscript to print and the continued coexistence of hand- and machine-made books. How does the phenomenology of manuscript texts differ from that of printed or digital forms? In what ways does a text’s physical form condition the making of meaning? How does regard for the material circumstances of textual production complicate notions of authorship, authority, and the possibilities for control over textual production?

      Most readings are selected from modern scholarship on textual forms in society. Emphasis will be placed on the first 1600 years of the History of the Book in the Common Era (ca. 1-1600 CE), with concentration on medieval advancements in the codex form, the late-medieval invention of printing with moveable type, and experimentation with print in the late-medieval and early modern periods. Several class sessions will be held in șÚÁÏÍű’s Rare Books and Special Collections and the Osler Library of the History of Medicine. In these workshops we will see original text-objects in clay, papyrus, parchment (animal skin), and paper, and we will come to an understanding of the technologies that were used to produce a variety of textual forms. For English Literature majors, this course counts toward the “theory, criticism, and methods” requirement. Medieval Studies students may receive permission for this course to count toward the MDST minor.

      Texts (provisional; all available digitally): We will read several chapters from Michael Johnston and Michael Van Dussen, eds., The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches (Cambridge University Press, 2015); studies by the following authors will also be assigned: Ann Blair, Mary Carruthers, Roger Chartier, Michael Clanchy, Robert Darnton, Elizabth Eisenstein, Philip Gaskell, Adrian Johns, D.F. McKenzie, Malcolm Parkes, James Simpson, Brian Stock, Daniel Wakelin. In addition, students will read excerpts and selections from primary sources, including texts by Geoffrey Chaucer, Margery Kempe, John Wyclif, Richard de Bury, Christine de Pizan, and John Bale.

      Evaluation (provisional): final assessment (30%), analytical essays (x2, 40%), response and discussion thread portfolio (20%), participation (10%)

      Format: lecture, discussion, workshop

      Humanity and Crisis in Early European Literature

      Professor Michael Van Dussen
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Description: This course examines several major works of European literature that significantly influenced Western understandings of the place of the individual human in society and in the cosmos. Among other things, course texts present sensitive explorations of interiority, sexuality, ethics, and justice; authors experiment with literary form, question received canons, and display radical dignity in the face of humiliating crisis. Readings include examples of literature spanning Late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages (4th through 15th centuries). We’ll read profoundly moving texts written in prison or in the rawness of regret; early romances that throw characters into impossible ethical ordeals; stories that represent flourishing creativity in a time of pandemic; and texts whose authors are torn between the sublimity of mystical ascent and the allure of human contact. This course introduces students to early literature as an object of study in its own right; it also provides important background for the study of concurrent or subsequent Western literature and culture, including in England. Most course texts were written on the European continent and will be read in modern English translation. For English Literature majors, this course counts toward the “backgrounds” requirement. Medieval Studies students may also count the course toward the MDST minor.

      Texts (provisional):

      • Augustine, Confessions
      • Boccaccio, The Decameron
      • Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
      • ChrĂ©tien de Troyes, selected Arthurian romances
      • Christine de Pizan, The City of Ladies
      • Hildegard of Bingen, selected writings
      • Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend
      • Marie de France, Lais
      • Petrarch, selected writings

      Evaluation (provisional): final assessment (30%), analytical essays (x2, 40%), close reading exercises (x2, 20%), participation (10%)

      Format: lecture and discussion

      Film of the Forties

      Professor Ned Schantz
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      Description: This course will examine American and a few European films in the context of World War II and its immediate aftermath—one of the most devastating periods in human history and an indispensable point of reference for our own difficulties. The focus will be on how the war put pressure on the main forms of social organization at every scale—from the couple and the family to the nation—and on what strategies emerged for sustaining social vitality and political resistance. Throughout the course, students will be introduced to powerful analytical tools for assessing the cultural work of film, with a special emphasis on questions of theatricality, space, and affect.

      Texts: coursepack

      Likely films include The Great Dictator, To Be or Not to Be, Casablanca, Meet Me in St. Louis, Le Corbeau, and The Best Years of Our Lives.

      Evaluation: assignments 40%, term projects 40%, class notes 5%, participation15%

      Format of class: lecture and discussion

      Contemporary Cinema

      Professor Ara Osterweil
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Description:ÌęThis course examines contemporary films made around the globe, mostly in the last five years, to understand how they address, confront, and allegorize some of the most crucial issues of our time. Be warned that this course makes no attempt to survey trends in popular cinema. On the contrary, it seizes upon exemplary texts by contemporary moving image visionaries that help us critically reflect upon about our deeply troubled world. While a few of the films will be studied as negative examples, nearly all the films selected for the course are extraordinary, and revelatory works of art.

      Films (tentative):Ìę

      • Love is the Message, the Message is Death (Arthur Jafa, US, 2016)
      • Roma Alfonso CuarĂłn, Mexico, 2018)
      • Uncut Gems (Benny & Josh Safdie, US, 2019)
      • Atlantics (Mati Diop, Senegal/ France/ Belgium, 2019)
      • Parasite (Bong Joon Ho, Korea, 2019)
      • Never Rarely Sometimes Never (Eliza Hittman, US, 2020)
      • Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Columbia/ Thailand, 2021)
      • EO (Jerry Skolimowski, Poland, 2022)
      • No Bears (Jafar Panahi, Iran, 2022)
      • Saint Omer (Alice Diop, France, 2022)
      • °ŐĂĄ°ù (Todd Field, US, 2022)
      • La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher, Italy, 2023)
      • Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (Radu Jude, Romania, 2023)
      • Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, US, 2023)
      • Emilia Perez (Jacques Audiard, France/ Mexico, 2024)
      • No Other Land (Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal, Palestine/ Israel, 2024)

      Evaluation: Students must come to class prepared with all the assigned reading and will be expected to participate verbally in class on a weekly basis. In additional to writing one ten-page final paper or making an equivalent creative project, students will be expected to write an in-class midterm and keep a journal of their thoughts and impressions of the films we watch. Journals will be reviewed at intervals throughout the course.

      Format: This course will meet twice weekly for lectures and class discussions. In addition, students must attend one mandatory in-person screening every week. Occasionally, students will be asked to view additional films either at home, or at screenings organized by the Festival du Nouveau Cinema. Students who cannot attend the weekly screening should not register for the course.

      Women and Modern Poetry

      Professor Miranda Hickman
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Preparation: Ideally, students will have taken at least one 200-level and one 300-level course in English; and ideally, will have previous work in poetry.

      Description: Until the 1980s, the canon associated with modern anglophone poetry, established by mid-twentieth-century critical work, was often assumed to consist of the work of major figures such as W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams. This mid-century consensus—now problematized but still influential—largely overlooked many women who had contributed vitally to the development of modern poetry. Yet between 1900 and 1960, many women engaged actively in the effort to revolutionize anglophone poetry: within early twentieth-century literary circles, their work was acclaimed, and they fulfilled pivotal cultural roles. This course focuses on the women that Bonnie Kime Scott has called the “forgotten and silenced makers” of modern poetry. We consider how women shaped the development of modern poetry not only as poets, but also as critics, patrons, publishers, and editors. We also engage how recent scholarship has sought to redress the historical record, return them to attention, and acknowledge their contributions.
      In addition to reckoning closely with their poetry, often involving the many forms of “difficulty” associated with modern poetry, we also engage from a literary-historical angle their contributions to the “making of modern poetry.” We address, for example, H.D.’s crucial role in the formation of the poetic movement of “Imagism,” as well as her influential critical engagements with Ancient Greek literature; tensions between Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound over command of Imagism as a movement; Millay’s “it girl” celebrity; Mina Loy’s vexed alliance with Italian Futurism and her “Feminist Manifesto” of 1914; Marianne Moore’s editorship of The Dial; collaborative relationships between H.D. and Moore, and Moore and Bishop; and Gertrude Stein’s many connections with the visual arts. We also consider how these women poets engaged the feminisms of their time, often as mediated by the early twentieth-century concept of the “New Woman.”

      Texts: Readings include poetry by Elizabeth Bishop, H.D., Dorothy Livesay, Amy Lowell, Mina Loy, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, P.K. Page, Muriel Rukeyser, Gertrude Stein, and Stevie Smith; we will also consider work by E.E. Cummings T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and W.B. Yeats.

      Evaluation (subject to revision): brief critical analysis (5-6 pp., 20%), brief essay (4-5 pp., 25%), fictional autobiography (4 pp., 15%), final essay (8 pp., 30%), participation (10%)

      Format: lecture and discussion

      Professor Sean Carney
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      Pre- or Co-requisite: ENGL 230

      Limited to students in the English Major Concentration, Drama and Theatre Option

      Description: This course examines how meaning and significance emerge in theatrical art. Beginning from the assumption that theatre, like all art, is a form of communication, our study examines the qualities unique to theatrical communication in all its forms. The course is a combination of practical analysis of play scripts and theatre, and consideration of theoretical texts.

      Commencing with Aristotle, we interrogate the premises of his Poetics and the marginalization of opsis (spectacle) in his study.

      The rest of the course is composed of a series of units: our first unit examines theatrical communication with an emphasis on the dramatic text and how the text may be broken down into minimal communicative units of action.

      Our second unit moves from the practical study of a script to the analysis of live theatre with an emphasis on how meaning emerges in the spectable. We will consider both theoretical ideas about theatrical signs and theatre semiotics, and also practical tools for analyzing theatre.

      Our third unit examines the function of the actor on stage and how the actor’s performance creates meaning and significance in theatrical communication. We also consider the dynamic relationship between humans and objects in the theatre, such as puppets or stage props, and what these elements tell us about the experience of theatre as a whole.

      Finally, our fourth unit opens us to broader questions about communication in the theatre: the implications of theatre as storytelling, the importance of the spectator’s experience of the theatre as the locus of meaning, and the function of stage and theatre spaces in theatre art. As a case study we will consider the contemporary example of Verbatim theatre. The overall goal of the course is to give you a foundational understanding of key theories of the poetics of performance, so that you may build upon this knowledge through your later studies as Theatre and Drama majors.

      Texts (Critical Readings and Plays): TBA

      Instructional Method: lecture and class discussion

      Evaluation: TBA

      Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde

      Professor Antje Chan
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Note: We will read Chaucer in the original Middle English, however no previous knowledge of the language is required. Time in class will be spent developing proficiency in Middle English.

      Description: At the beginning of Geoffrey Chaucer’s life (1340s), Europe was undergoing a period of social change in the wake of the Black Death. Global trade networks across the continent and beyond the Mediterranean facilitated cultural exchanges more than ever before. The literature produced and circulated in Chaucer’s lifetime was profoundly marked by an exchange of ideas rooted in classical, Italian, French and Middle Eastern sources. This admixture of ideas manifested in multilingual manuscripts, engaged with international political, religious, and cultural concerns. As the son of a wine merchant, and a man involved in the English wool trade, Chaucer was deeply shaped by the exchange of things and ideas between England and the continent. It is in such setting that Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde was written.

      This course will delve deeply into Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, which was considered for centuries after Chaucer’s death his masterpiece. While the poem tells the story of Troilus’ twin sorrows: his lovesickness and his despair both caused by his love for Criseyde, we will explore this poem of unusual psychological depth by considering questions such as how do we live; how porous is the nature of identity; the equivocacy of privacy/secrecy; notions of causality; as well as literary questions such as what does it mean to write fiction; how does one achieve literary authority; and what are the conventions of the art of love and of writings about love?

      Texts (provisional):

      • Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde (Norton or Riverside)
      • Boccacio, Il Filostrato
      • Robert Henryson, The Testament of Cresseid
      • Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

      Evaluation (provisional): term paper 30%; final exam 30%; commentary exercises 30%; participation 10%

      Format: lecture and discussion

      Poetics of the Image

      Professor Ara Osterweil
      Winter 2026
      Class Meeting: TBA
      Mandatory Screening: TBA

      Description: This course is designed to teach students how to meaningfully close read image-based cultural texts. Using multiple strategies of visual analysis, students will learn how to perform perceptive, informed, and medium-specific interpretations of both still and moving images. Focusing our critical lens on some of the most innovative photography and film texts of the last century, we will study the nuances of composition, color, łŸŸ±Čő±đ-±đČÔ-ČőłŠĂšČÔ±đ, framing, camera movement, editing and sound. Paying close attention to the ways in which visual language and style creates meaning, students will learn to look beyond narrative and dialogue to understand both the semiotics and poetics of the image. In addition to numerous close-reading exercises, we will be supplementing our investigation of images by reading several classical texts on photography and film by theorists such as John Berger, Roland Barthes, AndrĂ© Bazin, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Laura Marks, Christina Sharpe, Linda Williams and others. Students must come to class prepared with the assigned reading and are expected to participate verbally in class on a weekly basis.

      Evaluation:  Participation (10%); Attendance (10%); 2-page diagnostic essay (20 %); 4-5 page Sequence Analysis (25%): 4-5 page Sequence Analysis (25%)

      Films:Ìę

      • (nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, US, 1971, 38 min.)
      • La Jetee (Chris Marker, France, 1962, 28 min.)
      • The Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, USSR, 1925, 74 min.)
      • Persona (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1966, 85 min.)
      • The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928, France, 82 min.)
      • Vivre Sa Vie (Jean Luc Godard, 1962, France, 83 min.)
      • Window Water Baby Moving (Stan Brakhage, 1959, US, 13 min.)
      • Fly (Yoko Ono, 1970, 25 min.)

      Books:

      • Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
      • John Berger, Ways of Seeing
      • Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes

      Evaluation: Students must come to class prepared with all the assigned reading and will be expected to participate verbally in class on a weekly basis.

      Participation: 15%
      Conference Participation: 10%
      Two Page Diagnostic Essay (close reading of a photograph): 20%
      2 four-five page sequence analysis: 25% + 30%

      Format: Lecture/ discussion + mandatory weekly, in-person screening. Students who cannot attend the screening should not register for the course this term. Students are expected to complete the assigned reading before the class meeting. There are also mandatory conference sections that will meet throughout the term, but not weekly. Please note that this is a discussion-based class.

      Lectures will be illustrated by copious examples. In addition to lectures, there is a mandatory screening every week as well as several discussion sessions led by a Teaching Assistant throughout the semester.

      Professor Sandeep Banerjee
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      Note: This is a required course for students of the Literature Honours stream. All other students should contact me for permission to register.

      Description: This course explores several topics that are central to modern and contemporary literary criticism and theory. These include, but are not limited to, representation, narrative, interpretation, ideology, signification, discourse as well as categories of difference such as class, race, gender, and sexuality. We will read excerpts from key texts from a range of critical thinkers, schools and practices to interrogate and engage with some of the fundamental questions that have animated literary studies: What constitutes literature? Who determines what texts mean, and how? How do texts relate to broader social structures? Considering these questions will necessitate careful and patient engagement with theoretical and critical texts that will on occasion be dense and difficult.

      Texts:

      • Literary Theory: An Introduction by Terry Eagleton
      • Selections from the works of theorists such as, but not limited to, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak (provided).

      Evaluation: take-home exams, essays, participation

      Format: lectures and discussion

      Instructor Catherine Bradley
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Prerequisite: None, although permission of the Instructor is required.

      Description: Emphasis is on costume design for the theatre, and the development of the various tools used to communicate design concepts. Weekly design modules focus on tools such as script analysis, colour palette, developing a design concept, transformation of characters, design stylization - all focused on the creation of original costume designs.

      The concepts covered in class will be practiced by students in weekly skill building exercises, culminating in individual final projects. The main communication tool is sketching, using each student’s medium of choice, such as water colour paints, design markers, coloured pencils, or digital tools. It is not critical to be proficient at sketching – it is more important to have creative ideas and the motivation to communicate visually, but also verbally, and in written form.

      The various homework exercises and projects will take a steady amount of time throughout the semester and will culminate in a final project.

      Evaluation:

      • Weekly at-home exercises. The details given here are examples only. Content may vary.
      • Design Concepts, Colour Palette, Developing Base Costumes, Stylized Period, Future & Fantasy, Innovative sourcing for period costumes.
      • Participation – attendance, participating in discussions, contributing ideas, participation in workshops – 10%
      • Final project – Independent costume design which integrates all learning modules into one final creative endeavour. The assignment is based on a script of the student’s choice.
      • Final project grade value: 30%

      Format: lectures, demonstrations, collaborative learning processes, and artistic exercises.

      Readings:

      1. Midsummer Night’s Dream, by William Shakespeare – any version
      2. Free choice – sci-fi or fantasy novel or short story for Future & Fantasy Worlds project
      3. Free choice – play script for Final Costume Design project

      Enrollment: 10 students, by permission of the Instructor.

      Art Supplies: Art supplies are needed by the second week of class. Important note: any or all art supplies can be replaced by the use of a graphics program and stylus if you prefer to work digitally and have your own program.

      The Teen Film in U.S. Cinema

      Professor Derek Nystrom
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      Expected Preparation: There are no prerequisites for this course, but familiarity with concepts and terminology from film studies and cultural studies is expected.

      Description: This course will engage in a more or less chronologically organized survey of the American teen film, understood as a genre that is not only about but also made for teenagers (although a few of our screenings will test this definition). We will begin in the 1950s, when “the teenager” as a sociological category (and target market) took on a new prominence in American cultural life, and the films about them developed more intentional strategies of addressing the teen audience. As we trace the genre’s development, we will explore how it functions as an arena in which anxieties about individual subject formation and the larger social order are played out. As Jon Lewis has argued, teen films are about the breakdown of “patriarchy, law and order, and institutions like the school, the church, and the family” even as they often conclude with “the eventual discovery of viable and often traditional forms of authority.” In other words, teen films depict stories of social control and resistance while also operating as their own form of interpellation. But we will also investigate the ways in which the films provide textual resources for their young audiences that do not necessarily line up with dominant forms of power. In short, this course will examine the complex cultural work that the teen film performs.

      Required Films:

      • Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955)
      • Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955)
      • Gidget (Paul Wendkos, 1959)
      • American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973)
      • Cooley High (Michael Schultz, 1975)
      • Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982)
      • The Breakfast Club (John Hughes, 1985)
      • Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1989)
      • House Party (Reginald Hudlin, 1990)
      • Boyz N the Hood (John Singleton, 1991)
      • Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993)
      • Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995)
      • But I’m a Cheerleader (Jamie Babbit, 1999)
      • Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003)
      • Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004)
      • Easy A (Will Gluck, 2010)
      • Eighth Grade (Bo Burnham, 2018)
      • Bottoms (Emma Seligman, 2023)

      Required Texts: essays by Catherine Driscoll, Steve Bailey and James Hay, Amanda Ann Klein, Leerom Medovoi, Richard Nowell, Gayle Wald, Glen Masato Mimura, Susan Driver, Whitney Monaghan, and others

      Evaluation: short scene analysis papers, a longer final paper, participation in conferences

      Format: lecture, discussion, weekly screenings, and weekly TA-led conferences

      The Long 18-Century

      Professor Fiona Ritchie
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      Description: TBA

      Texts: TBA

      Evaluation: TBA

      Format: TBA

      US Popular Entertainments, 1820-1940

      Professor Katherine Zien
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      Description: This course explores representations and constructions of U.S. national identity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular theatre and entertainments. As the nation experienced industrialization, urbanization, immigration, changing sexual and gender norms, and cultural and racial conflicts in the afterlife of trans-Atlantic slavery and Indigenous genocide, popular entertainments attracted mass audiences and created spectacles of national inclusion and othering. Units on blackface minstrelsy, “Indian plays,” vaudeville, social dance, and other popular forms address antebellum and post-Emancipation stagings of race; frontier spectacles; freak shows and penny museums; imperialism; and the complexities of social inequity in the Gilded Age/Progressive Era. Through discussions and lectures, we will consider the place of the “popular” – in its classed, ethnic, racial, gendered, erotic, commercial, and hegemonic valences – in forging styles of U.S. citizenship and belonging that persist to the current day, albeit often in camouflage.

      Texts: All texts will be provided via MyCourses.

      • Play texts (including Metamora; The Octoroon; Uncle Tom’s Cabin)
      • Films (including The Jazz Singer; Ethnic Notions)
      • Online secondary sources including texts by W.E.B. Du Bois, Andrew Erdman, Susan Glenn, Saidiya Hartman, Julie Malnig, Nadine George-Graves, Esther Kim Lee, Robert Rydell, Bruce McConachie, Jayna Brown, SanSan Kwan, Esther Kim Lee, Bethany Hughes, Tria Blu Wakpa, and S.E. Wilmer, among others.

      Format: lectures and discussions

      Evaluation: in-class participation: 10%; midterm exam: 30%; short response essays: 30%; research paper: 30%

      Indigenous Film and Television

      Professor Marianne Stenbaek
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      Description: This course will explore the exciting and unique story of the development and influence of the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation (IBC).

      It was only with the invention and advent of satellites in Canada in the late 1960s and 1970s that several experiments in arctic communication were made possible. These elementary but pioneering experiments led to the development, in the early 1980, of the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation (IBC) as a voice for the Canadian Inuit. In spite of technical, financial, and/or regulatory obstacles in the vast Canadian Arctic, IBC became increasingly successful and has played an exceptional role in the establishment of the Canadian Inuit’s “visual and narrative sovereignty”. A success that has now been copied by other indigenous groups in Australia, Greenland, and elsewhere. It has become a model for ‘minority media.’

      IBC has revitalized the Inuktitut language, and as Inuit culture has mainly been an oral culture, it has become the repository of many cultural events and manifestations. Furthermore, IBC has created a solid group of Canadian Inuit TV and film writers and directors, TV and film production knowledge holders, and a cadre of Inuit actors and performers.

      IBC has proven that to remain the master of one’s culture, one needs to be the master of one's media.

      Texts: Articles will be posted on myCourses. TV Productions by IBC and other indigenous groups.

      Evaluation: two essays worth 25% each and a final research paper worth 50%

      Format: lectures and class discussions

      Documenting Cinematic Authorship

      Professor Trevor Ponech
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Description: This semester, we will study a small selection of nonfictional movies about cinematic authorship: Chronique d’un Ă©tĂ© / Chronicle of a Summer, Burden of Dreams, Grizzly Man, The Act of Killing, De fem Čú±đČÔČő±èĂŠČÔ»ć / The Five Obstructions, and Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse / The Gleaners and I.

      Evaluation: brief written assignments, term paper

      Format: lectures, discussions, in-class screenings

      InstructorÌęCatherine Bradley
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      Expected Preparation: None required.ÌęBy permission of the instructor only.Ìę Please contact catherine.bradley [at] mcgill.caÌę

      Description:ÌęCostuming for the Theatre II builds on skills acquired in Costuming I, including costume construction techniques, and developing efficient costume production techniques. There are two main learning modules in advanced costuming: Technical Sewing, and Draping. Sewing skills that were gained in the first semester will be built upon through specific practical exercises, and by costuming the English Department Mainstage production (TDC). Draping techniques will be practiced on half-scale mannequins and will culminate in a themed project.Ìę

      More information will become available as the Winter semester theatre production plans are solidified.Ìę

      Required Texts:ÌęOne selected play script (TBA).ÌęÌę

      čóŽÇ°ùłŸČčłÙ:  Learning through doing. Demonstrations, lectures, hands-on learning, and practical projects, experiential learning. Class time + time spent in the atelier on practical projects.Ìę

      Evaluation: ÌęIn-class participation, script analysis, hands-on projects, backstage experience (to be confirmed)Ìę

      Class size: 10 studentsÌę

      Cinema

      Professor Trevor Ponech
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Description: ENGL 380 is an opportunity to think in depth about the art of nonfictional cinema. We’ll investigate the ways in which and the reasons why nonfictional movies differ decisively from fictional ones. The differences between these two mega-categories mainly have to do with the particular ends and effects that makers design their movies to achieve. Fictional and nonfictional movies can be very similar to one another in many interesting respects. Both categories are, of course, full of works manifesting virtuoso and imaginative uses of the cinematic medium’s characteristic tools and practices. And both contain many examples of makers presenting stories in ways apt to arouse viewers’ emotions and challenge them intellectually. Yet beyond such similarities are myriad differences between fiction- and nonfiction-makers’ expressive, cognitive, and artistic projects.

      Evaluation: brief written assignments, term paper

      Format: lectures, discussions, screenings

      Zacharias Kunuk

      Professor Marianne Stenbaek
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Description: This course introduces students to the films of Canadian Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk, who is from Igloolik, Nunavut. Kunuk’s films celebrate Inuit culture and aim to provide a unique “inside” portrayal of Inuit culture and life over the last several hundred years. His films are almost exclusively in Inuktitut and use local Inuit actors, storytellers, and production assistants. His films are truly made by Inuit, as 95% of everyone involved in the many aspects of a film are Inuit and usually from Igloolik.

      He has uniquely influenced the development of Inuit film aesthetics, which he terms ‘visual sovereignty’ and narrative sovereignty. The analysis of his works, which include feature-length films, animated films, and documentaries, will explore his influence on other contemporary indigenous filmmakers in Canada and the development of Inuit films since 2000.

      °Ő±đłæłÙČő:ÌęArticles and other readings will be posted on My Courses. A list of films will be provided; we will see some films in class, and others will be assigned for viewing at home.

      Evaluation: two essays worth 25 % each and a final essay worth 50%

      Format: lectures, film viewings, class discussions

      Professor Richard So
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      Description: TBA

      °Ő±đłæłÙČő:  TBA

      Evaluation :TBA

      Format: TBA

      Restless Times: Contemporary Biopolitics of Sleep, Rest and Care

      Professor Alanna Thain
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Description: Sleep is an experience, and a form of intimacy, that we often don’t trust. We are both experts of our somatic experience of sleep, and yet access to our sleeping selves often relies on the perceptions of human and technological “others.” The stories we tell about our own sleep is undercut by a lack of conscious access to the experience itself--we can only report back from the margins of experience, impacting credibility and expertise even when it comes to our own bodies. Sleep confounds normative epistemologies and forms of control; sometimes the sleep “data” from smartphones or other monitors tell a different story than how we feel. A recently identified sleep disorder--”orthosomnia” (Abbott et al 2017), or “straight sleep” –names how “poor” sleepers attempt to conform to the biometric data of sleep monitors in order to measure up to social norms. Today, sleep is a key site for thinking about the intersections and contradictions of bodies, technologies, labour and desire. The radical vulnerability of sleep and sleepers a perpetual theme of art and philosophy, today requires that we reimagine social forms of care and collective concern for bodies and rest. This seminar examines the sleeper’s relation to the social since the 1970s, as medicalization, metrics, media and monitoring have experimented with the ability to make sleep “actionable” in the service of something other than rest (eg. dream inception, harvesting data, programming or “optimizing sleep”). Especially attentive to how sleep has increasingly become a site of work, we will also look at the critiques and resistances of attempts to exploit our off hours, when we rethink today’s sleep “crisis” through longer histories that sought to control and exploit rest, including plantation slavery, colonialism and care work. We will read recent works exploring the rise of “24/7” cultures, the history of sleep medicine, and aesthetic and political mobilizations around sleep equity, or the uneven distributions of rest and recuperation in society. We will explore how artists, scientists and technologies have sought to make sleep representable, shareable, exploitable and protected. Through late 20th and 21st century theorists and media/performance artists exploring multimedia and intersectional approaches to sleep as a sociable form across minoritarian lifeworlds, we will trace the somatics, politics and aesthetics of sleep’s intimate opacity as the contested terrain of more expansive public intimacies.

      Texts: Readings and screenings may include Tricia Hersey, Rest is Resistance; Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, Somniloquies; JosĂ© Muñoz “The Sense of Watching Tony Sleep”; Cressida Heyes, Anaesthetics of Existence; Julia Leigh, Sleeping Beauty Benjamin Reiss, Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World; Jean Ma, At the Edges of Sleep Gus Van Sant, My Own Private Idaho; Johanna Hedva, “Sick Woman Theory”; Franny Nudelman, Fighting Sleep: The War for the Mind and the US Military; Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalisms and the Ends of Sleep Apitchatpong Weerasthekul, Cemetary of Splendour; Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation; Matthew Wolff Meyer, The Slumbering Masses; Matthew Fuller, How to Sleep; Karen Russel, Sleep Donation.

      Evaluation: TBD

      Format: lecture, screenings, class discussion, workshops

      Theatre—The Thinking Machine

      Professor Paul Yachnin
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Description: At long last, it seems, human beings have created a machine that is able to think. Chatbots are astonishing Artificial Intelligence (AI) machines. They can answer just about any question you ask them. They can write like Ernest Hemingway or Gertrude Stein or dash off an essay about a subject you’re interested in or provide a useful critique of your own writing. They can even talk with you about your relationships with other humans. So they can provide council as well as information. And they also have an uncanny ability to connect with you in a way that can feel like friendship.

      The fact is, however, we have been making counsel/information/friendship large language systems for several thousand years. These precursor chatbots, for a very long while, have gone by the name of theatres.

      From antiquity to the present day, theatres have been the leading human-made thinking machines—machines whose moving parts include playwrights, actors, craftspeople, playgoers, and the spaces and accoutrements of theatrical practice working together in dynamic, mobile, and effective operation. Theatres are machines that are able to inform and to think feelingly through urgent questions across the full spectrum of psychological, spiritual, domestic, social, political, and ecological doings among people.

      In this course, in the company of plays from ancient Athens to modern Canada, we will work toward an understanding of theatre as the first and still potentially the most beneficial thinking machine. Our focus, in addition to the plays themselves, will be on playwrights, actors and the practices of performance, the space and equipment of the playhouse, and the audience. We will also be guided in our work on these moving parts of the theatre-machine by a selection of historical and theoretical readings TBD.

      There is no prohibition against the use of ChatGPT and/or similar AI systems in the course.

      Texts: Most texts will be available from Paragraph Books. Other texts and readings for the course will be available on our myCourses site and are marked with an asterisk. Note that there might be some changes in the plays on the syllabus.

      • Sophocles, Antigone*
      • Anon, York Crucifixion Play*
      • Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. George Hunter (Penguin Classics)
      • Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford)
      • Christopher Marlowe, Edward II, ed. Stephen Guy-Bray (Bloomsbury)
      • Thomas Middleton, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, ed. Alan Brissenden (New Mermaids)
      • Henrik Ibsen, The Doll’s House, in Four Major Plays, trans. James McFarlane (Oxford)
      • Michel Tremblay, Hosanna, trans. John Van Burek and Bill Glassco (Talonbooks)
      • Ann-Marie MacDonald, Good Night Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) (Vintage Canada)
      • Kent Stetson, One and the Other*
      • Jessica B. Hill, The Dark Lady (Scirocco Drama)

      Format: lecture and discussion

      Evaluation

      • Journal 30
      • Participation 10
      • Group presentation 15
      • Course paper 20
      • Oral exam 25

      Your tasks:

      • keep a journal where you can think by writing about the texts we are studying and the questions that we are developing and also relating those texts and questions to your own lived experience. It is also something you do for marks, so you have to write at least a page (about 350 words) about each week’s readings and discussions. Your journal certainly doesn’t have to be formal like an essay. After all, it is mostly for you and about your thinking, questioning, arguing. But it’s also going to be read by me, so make it reader-friendly. You’ll share your journal with me halfway through the course so that I will be able to read and respond to what you have written
        • Think about two or three questions or ideas that matter to you, and keep those questions or ideas in play from entry to entry (though never in lock step)
        • Feel most welcome to be creative with your journaling (it is your journey). Art work is welcome. So is poetry, drama, and other non-argumentative forms of writing
        • Try staging a conversation with AI about a question that you have
        • Try writing a short play in collaboration with AI
        • Think about how the works we are studying speak to who we are now, the problems we are facing now, the abiding questions that keep coming back to challenge us.
      • work with a group of your colleagues on a group presentation—one presentation on each of a number of the plays we will study. Presentations feature performances of key scenes from the play you have chosen and Q+A sessions led by your group on key questions that have arisen during your work on the play;
      • write an essay (10 pages double-spaced) that is based on the group presentation. The essay should bring together your experience as a performer of the play with your engagement with central ideas, questions, features, including possible social consequenes of the play. Your essay is due the week after you do your group presentation;
      • participate in class. Come to each class with your ideas, questions, complaints, sudden insights, or expressions of puzzlement. We are working toward creating wide-ranging conversations around the questions that arise from our work together;
      • meet with me for an oral examination
        • each exam will begin with the text or idea or question that you find most interesting and important and then will connect with other texts, ideas, and questions that we have studied
        • the oral exams are one-on-one
        • they will run for approximately 25 minutes
        • they are intensive conversations about the texts, performances, ideas, and questions that have been at the centre of the course

      Assessment

      The best work—written, presented, or performed—exemplifies creativity, critical intelligence, commitment, and connection:

      • your creativity—your active and free approach to a text or an idea or a question. Your work is not bound within the expected terms of the course. How the professor sees things is no doubt of value, but it is the view of only one person. Your work dares to be free, original, even beautiful
      • your critical engagement never takes anything as simply true or simply given, but puts in question all ideas that are seen to be living in the object of study and/or that have been articulated by others. Your critical engagement even includes your ability to be critical about your own ideas and arguments
      • your commitment to the work that you are undertaking. It is your work after all, so you have to be ready to stand up for its cogency and its value (though always keeping an open mind about the questions and counter-arguments coming from others)
      • your ability to connect with your reader or your auditors. How are you able to meet others face to face (whether in written work, oral presentations, or performances)? Writing and speaking about what you care about needs to be “loud and clear”—able to lift your reader or your auditors out of passiveness and stillness and transform them into your active and engaged conversation partners

      I am here to lend a hand at any time. When you are preparing your group presentations, writing your journal or your essay, or prepping for the oral exam, my door (the real one or the zoom door) is open for you. Of course, I’ll provide written responses to all your work, and I’ll be happy to meet with you to discuss the work that you will have done and to think with you about how to do even better.

      Professor Sean Carney
      Fall 2025
      Time: Weekday evenings throughout the Fall 2025 term, some Friday and/or Saturday afternoons (depending on rehearsal schedule)
      Locations: Rehearsal Hall and Moyse Hall Theatre

      Prerequisite: this course is restricted to students who have been cast in the Fall 2025 Department of English mainstage production and is by permission of the instructor only. Students should request to enroll in the course before the end of add/drop.

      Students may take this course more than once.

      Please contact Sean Carney at sean.carney [at] mcgill.ca for more information.

      Description: This three-credit course provides students with credit towards their Drama and Theatre majors, minors, or honors degrees. Students who are cast in the English Department’s Fall 2025 theatre production may ask for permission to enroll in ENGL 396. This is a graded course (see “Evaluation” below).

      The course may satisfy the “3 credits from a list of performance-oriented courses” requirement for Drama and Theatre Majors or the “additional credits from the Drama and Theatre option’s offerings” requirement for Drama and Theatre Majors and Minors.

      The content of the course involves attending all required rehearsals and performances for the production, required meetings with costume designers, participating in the strike on closing night, and showing dedicated commitment to the process and to the overall production.

      There is also a written component required, most likely a reflection essay at the end of the process.

      Evaluation: TBA

      400-Level
      Advanced Courses

      The 1590s

      Professor Wes Folkerth
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      Description:ÌęIn this course we will survey nondramatic literature in England the 1590s, one of the most remarkable decades in English literary history, one which saw the initial publication of major works by Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Lodge, Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Deloney, John Marston, Robert Southwell, George Chapman, Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, Richard Hooker and Sir Francis Bacon, among others. We will read and discuss examples from popular contemporary poetry and associated genres such as the sonnet sequence, the epyllion, the funeral elegy, and the pastoral. We will follow the decade’s prose as it ranges broadly from proto-novelistic romances to satirical pamphleteering, from underworld documentary to exotic travel narratives. Our literary study of the decade will also regularly cast an eye to other examples of the decade’s print culture, including contemporary news from abroad, tales of piracy on lawless seas, and accounts of witchcraft and other strange crimes.

      Texts:ÌęTBA

      Evaluation:Ìęmidterm exam (30%); final essay (30%); final exam (30%); conference participation (10%)

      Format: lecture and discussion

      British Literature of the Victorian Fin de SiĂšcle

      Professor Miranda Hickman
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Description: This course spotlights literature of the British 1890s—the Victorian “fin de siùcle”—testing received ideas about the decade’s dominant moods, keynotes, and memes against a range of fiction, poetry, and drama. The years between 1890 and 1900 are those of Stoker’s Dracula, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, controversy about the “New Woman,” the “dandy,” Aestheticism and Decadence, concerns about what George Gissing called “sexual anarchy,” the late work of Thomas Hardy, the controversial journal The Yellow Book, Aubrey Beardsley and Art Nouveau, and both the meteoric success and the trials of Oscar Wilde.

      Although the era to which the 1890s belong (called the “fin de siùcle”) is often understood as a transitional stage between Victorianism and modernism, a brief phase registering defiance of the Victorian aesthetics and mores of previous decades, we consider the period as importantly distinct from both the Victorian and modernist eras—with a cultural environment, leading concerns, guiding anxieties, structures of feeling, and aesthetic commitments of its own.

      The decade was widely understood as deriving character from its ŽÚŸ±ČÔ-»ć±đ-ČőŸ±ĂšłŠ±ô±đ position. Public discourse of the time suggested that as the nineteenth century drew to a close, the moment was ripe for speculation about what the new century might bring: commentators such as Holbrook Jackson read the era’s emphasis on iconoclasm, artifice, style, and adventure as auguring promising new beginnings. Yet others construed the times as characterized by a foreboding “sense of an ending” suggesting a culture in decline: in Degeneration (1892), Max Nordau diagnosed what he read as a diseased society through the “symptoms” of aberrant behavior, bizarre art, and a taste for what Walter Pater called “strange” sensations. As we both explore the diversity and common threads among the literature we investigate, we will consider the nature of the decade’s rejoinders—often critical, mischievous, defiant, exploratory—to earlier Victorian literature, as well as ways in which its cultural work paves the way for the innovations of modernism.

      Texts (provisional):
      Egerton, George (Mary Chavelita Dunne), Keynotes and Discords (1893-4)
      Gissing, George, The Odd Women (1893)
      Hardy, Thomas, Jude the Obscure (1896)
      James, Henry, stories (“Collaboration,” “The Real Thing”)
      Shaw, G.B., Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1894)
      Stoker, Bram, Dracula (1897)
      Wells, H.G. War of the Worlds (1898)
      Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
      Wilde, Oscar, plays: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), ł§Čč±ôŽÇłŸĂ© (1893)

      We will also read short fiction (including the work of Henry James, as well as “New Women” writers such as Mona Caird and Sarah Grand); excerpts from Gilbert & Sullivan; and poetry by Ernest Dowson, Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Oscar Wilde, and W.B. Yeats. Contextual material will treat the work of Max Nordau, Aubrey Beardsley and The Yellow Book, Walter Pater, Charles Baudelaire, and Algernon Swinburne.

      Evaluation: two brief essays (4 pp.), Keywords project (3-4 pp.), longer essay (7-8 pp.), participation

      Format: lecture and discussion

      Contemporary American Literature and Its Problems

      Professor Alexander Manshel
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      Description: Contemporary American literature has its problems. First, there is the question of how to best represent the problems of the contemporary: the pernicious effects of digital technology, growing inequality, threats to liberal democracy, and catastrophic climate change. Then, there are the problems of contemporary literary culture: conglomeration, gatekeeping, and censorship, yes, but also apathy—the encroachment of other forms of media on our limited collective attention. Finally, there are the problems of studying contemporary American literature as such. What even is “contemporary literature”? Is it a literary-historical category? An aesthetic one? An empty placeholder? What is the value of studying contemporary literature in a time of overlapping crises? Students in this course will investigate the contours of twenty-first-century American literature and its many interlocking problems by way of a handful of very contemporary works, all published in the last five or so years. This seminar-style course will be organized around class discussion, active daily participation, the writing of short weekly essays, and the preparation of a final independent research essay.

      Texts (tentative):

      • Emma Cline, The Guest (2023)
      • Vinson Cunningham, Great Expectations (2024)
      • Percival Everett, James (2024)
      • Katie Kitamura, Intimacies (2021)
      • Alexandra Kleeman, Something New Under the Sun (2021)
      • Raven Leilani, Luster (2020)
      • Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This (2021)
      • Adelle Waldman, Help Wanted (2024)
      • Zach Williams, Beautiful Days (2024)

      Evaluation (tentative):

      • class participation (20%)
      • eight single-page position papers (40%)
      • final essay (30%)
      • final manifesto (10%)

      Format: seminar

      Michael Ondaatje

      Professor Robert Lecker
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      (Note: For English Majors, this course qualifies for the required three credits from a course in Canadian literature and also qualifies for the required three credits in a course on a major author)

      Description: Michael Ondaatje started his career as a poet whose startling images and subjects defined him as a writer attracted to difference, eccentricity, lawlessness, insanity. In his early poems, Ondaatje drew on the haunting exoticism associated with his childhood years in Sri Lanka. His Canadian poems were set in strange jungles or unexplored landscapes filled with criminals and misfits. They explored bizarre transformations and imaginative realms. He liked characters who were “sane assassins” and he insisted that “My mind is pouring chaos / in nets onto the page.” His characters fall off the map. Ondaatje wants to revise history, to undermine the way we see space, to challenge the status quo when representing memory, eroticism, desire. But above all, he wants to redefine the nature of language and creativity. What does Ondaatje mean when he asks: “Why do I love most / among my heroes those / who sail to that perfect edge / where there is no social fuel”? We will answer that question. Then there are the novels, each of which explores a different literary form. In Coming through Slaughter Ondaatje captures the heated life of a Black jazz musician who is driven to madness by what he calls “the devil’s music.” In the Skin of a Lion follows the fate of revolutionaries in Toronto in the 1930s. The English Patient and its very popular film adaptation brought Ondaatje global celebrity. How did this celebrity affect the shape of his career? In Divisadero, a novel indebted to many forms of music, Ondaatje takes us into the mining regions of northern California in the gold rush years, and then to rural France. We will listen to the music that makes the novel’s soundtrack. And in fact, all of Ondaatje’s novels are in some way inspired by music, a factor we will consider in detail. The poems and novels introduce us to murderers, dreamers, executioners, seducers, and deviants, along with a host of others who are prepared to challenge us at every turn. This will not be innocent. It will not be easy. Confession may be involved. The course will intermingle poetry and fiction as we explore the evolution of Ondaatje’s career.

      Texts (tentative):

      • Poetry, to be posted on myCourses
      • The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
      • Coming through Slaughter
      • In the Skin of a Lion
      • The English Patient
      • Divisadero
      • The Cat’s Table

      Evaluation: two short papers (40%); final paper (40%); participation (10%); discussion boards (10%)

      Format: seminar

      Canadian Crime Fiction

      Professor Nathalie Cooke
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Description: Canadian crime fiction is a fascinating and remarkably diverse body of literature: engaging and eclectic. The reading load for this course is heavy (including six novels), but the novels and short stories are ‘page turners,’ so the challenge isn’t so much finishing the readings as it is remembering to slow down, read critically, and keep a pencil handy.

      Primary readings will include selections featuring some of Canada’s best-known sleuths: Maureen Jennings’ John Murdoch, Peter Robinson’s Chief Inspector Alan Banks, Giles Blunt’s John Cardinal. We will notice how some writers pay attention to document Canada, its points of pride and preoccupations: for instance, Gail Bowen’s Saskatchewan or Louise Penny’s Eastern Townships of Quebec. Students will also be introduced to literary mystery novels penned by two of Canada’s most lauded writers (Swann by Carol Shields and Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood).

      During the term, through class discussion and in reading journals, we will identify primary subgenres of crime fiction, scrutinizing point of view and its effect on the reading experience. The course will culminate in students demonstrating familiarity with the crime writer’s toolkit by using it in the service of their own preliminary story outline.

      Enrolment: cap 30

      Texts: Commentaries on crime writing and definitions of its subgenres will be available on MyCourses.

      Short fiction will also be available on MyCourses, including works by Maureen Jennings [William Murdoch], Peter Robinson [Alan Banks], and Rudy Wiebe (about NWMP hunt for the ‘mad trapper’ Albert Johnson).

      Primary readings will be selected from novels by Margaret Atwood, Samantha Bailey, Gail Bowen [Joanne Kilbourn], Giles Blunt [John Cardinal], John Farrow [Émile Cinq-Mars], Thomas King [Stumps DreadfulWater], Martin Michaud [(in translation)Victor Lessard], David Montrose [Russell Teed], Louise Penny [Armand Gamache], and Carol Shields.

      Evaluation: participation to include short exercises submitted on MyCourses 10%; reading journal, short entries following a prescribed format due for each primary reading, 45%; in-class review exercise and oral interview 20%; story outline, publisher pitch letter & in-class presentation, 25%

      Format: seminar

      Virginia Woolf

      Professor Allan Hepburn
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Description: This course surveys Virginia Woolf’s major novels and critical prose. The course will focus on Woolf’s innovations in novelistic representation. Readings in her essays will be slated alongside the novels. Topics of discussion will include Woolf’s feminism; her relations with other modernist writers; her invigoration of biography as a genre; her responses to interwar and wartime politics; her evaluation of family and sexuality; her abiding sense of grief and bereavement; her antipathy to colonialism; her appreciation of modern technologies, such as the radio, gramophone, and motorcar; her understanding of the decorative arts; her appreciation of music; her metropolitan and country lives; and her suicide.

      Expected Preparation: at least twelve credits in English literature, such as Survey (ENGL 202 and 203), Poetics (ENGL 311), and courses at the 200 or 300 level

      Enrollment: 30

      Texts: the following list of texts is provisional and a final list will be available in July 2025

      • Woolf, Jacob’s Room
      • Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
      • Woolf, To the Lighthouse
      • Woolf, Common Reader (series one and two)
      • Woolf, A Room of One’s Own + Three Guineas
      • Woolf, The Waves
      • Woolf, The Years
      • Woolf, Between the Acts

      Evaluation: essay one (30%), essay two (30%), participation (10%), final exam (30%)

      Format: lecture and discussion

      Medieval Drama

      Professor Antje Chan
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Note: We will read plays in the original Middle English, however no previous knowledge of the language is required. Time in class will be spent developing proficiency in Middle English.

      Description: Middle English did not use such a word as “drama”, but instead “plei(e)” and “enterlude”, both terms expressing either a theatrical play/performance, or a dramatic/mimetic entertainment of any kind. By focusing on the manuscript and printed drama before 1550, this course will engage with medieval play through four lenses: based on subject, whether religious or secular, legendary or moral; based on genres, whether mystery, morality plays, saints plays, civic processions, or secular interludes; on region, whether urban or provincial, northern, or East Anglian; and on materiality, whether in manuscript or in print.

      By looking at the few textual witnesses we have of medieval play, we will consider the religious, socio-political and literary contexts within which these plays were performed, received, copied and transmitted. The surviving witnesses of medieval dramatic culture being mostly textual and paratextual, this course will focus chiefly on the poetry of medieval drama, as well as aspects of performance.

      Plays (provisional):

      • The York Corpus Christi Play
      • The Chester Mystery Cycle
      • The Towneley Plays
      • The Castle of Perseverance
      • The Macro Plays: Wisdom
      • The Digby Magdalen
      • The Croxton Play of the Sacrament
      • John Lydgate’s Mummings and Entertainments

      Texts will be made available at șÚÁÏÍű Bookstore and on myCourses

      Evaluation (provisional): term paper 40%; final exam 30%; journal 20%; participation 10%

      Format: lecture and discussion

      Popular Entertainments in Long 18-Century

      Professor Fiona Ritchie
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Description: TBA

      Texts: TBA

      Evaluation: TBA

      Format: TBA

      The Novel - Bildungsroman

      Professor Yael Halevi-Wise
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      NOTE: this course fulfills the 19th Century requirement

      Prerequisites: 2 or 3 courses in English or other European literatures

      Description: When we encounter a long text in prose that has been categorized as a “Bildungsroman”--what characteristics does that labelling imply and to what extent are such labels accurate or useful? To deepen our appreciation of the historical development of the novel as a genre, this course will examine paradigmatic examples of genres that “feed” into the Bildungsroman (especially Romance and Picaresque narratives), alongside paradigmatic Bildungsromanen that we shall put into a dynamic conversation with scholarly works on this literary form. Every student will produce a series of position papers leading up to a final essay. This course will be highly interactive both among students and between literary works.

      Texts:

      • Yvain ou Le Chevalier au Lion by ChrĂ©tien de Troyes (c. 1180)
      • Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe (1722)
      • Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship by Johann Wolfgang van Goethe (1796)
      • *Selected readings on the Bildungsroman and contiguous genres
      • Each student in the class will focus on one of the following 19th Century novels:
      • Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero by William Thackeray (1847-1848)
      • Tancred, or the New Crusade by Benjamin Disraeli (1847)
      • David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1849-50)
      • Shirley: A Tale by Charlotte BrontĂ« (1849)
      • Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1860-61)
      • Felix Holt, The Radical by George Eliot (1866)
      • Tess d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (1891)

      Evaluation: series of position papers 60%; annotated bibliography 5%; essay outline or draft 10%; 12-15pp final essay 25%

      Format: seminar discussion

      Critical Readings of Children’s Literature

      Professor Camille Owens
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Expected Student Preparation: Previous university-level course work in American Literature, or permission of instructor.

      Description: Debates are ongoing in the U.S. about whether various ideas described as “critical race theory” should be allowed to enter into children’s literature, textbooks, or classrooms. This seminar troubles the underlying assumptions of this debate—that race is an adult subject, and that childhood has ever been separated from it. As we will explore in this course, children’s literature and culture were key sites for instilling the historical relations of American slavery, colonialism, and white supremacy—and they have also been major sites for challenging the effects and legacies of these histories. In this course, we will examine the dominant literary construction of white American childhood that emerged between the 18th and 20th centuries. We will also study texts that illustrate how black and Indigenous North American people fought to make a place for their children in literary, cultural, and educational spheres. By examining formations of childhood that are historically changing—and often competing—we will highlight both the ‘constructedness’ of childhood as a social category, and the literary forms through which childhood has derived coherence and cultural power. From the pictorial primer, to the coming-of-age novel, to contemporary YA graphic literature—to books frequently “banned” from children’s reading—we will advance toward an understanding of children’s literature as a major rather than minor category of American literature. Bringing questions of literacy, pedagogy, narrative structure, and social hierarchy together, we will test critical race theories and develop our own. Selected texts may include: early American picture books; Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, Francis La Flesche, The Middle Five, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Jessie Fauset and W.E.B. Du Bois, The Brownies’ Book; Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (1953); James Baldwin, Little Man, Little Man (1976); Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive (2019).

      Texts (tentative):

      • Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects (1773)
      • Frances LaFlesche, The Middle Five (1900)
      • Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (1885)
      • David F. Walker, Jim and the White Boy (2024)
      • Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (1953)
      • James Baldwin, Little Man, Little Man (1976)
      • Faith Ringgold, Tar Beach (1991)
      • Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive (2019)

      Evaluation (tentative): 1 oral presentation, annotated bibliography, final research or creative project, participation, weekly discussion questions

      Format: lectures and discussions

      Indigenous Literature and Childhood

      Professor Marianne Stenbaek
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      Description: During the last several years, many books for children and youth have been published by Canadian Inuit authors—in fact, more books for children and youth than for adults. The course will explore the reasons for this and examine the main themes and story- telling techniques of these books. Children’s TV series produced by the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation will also be examined. The premise for these developments appears to be a strong desire for the continuation and broadening of Inuit culture and language. It is generally thought that in order to have a culture survive and expand, children and youth have to be immersed in it and play an essential role in its survival.

      The course will also focus on a central figure in Canadian Inuit literature, Alootook Ipellie, who has written poetry about children and two children’s books. His work searches for meaning in a life where he lives in “two worlds” but with “one spirit.” Ipellie’s work reflects the reality for many Canadian Inuit since 1950 and its implications for children and youth.

      °Ő±đłæłÙČő:Ìę

      • Diary of Abraham Ulrikab. University of Ottawa, 2005
      • The Inuit Thought of It. Alootook Ipellie

      List of children’s and young adult books TBA.

      Evaluation: two essays worth 25% each and a final research paper worth 50%

      Format: lecture and discussion

      Romanticism’s Revolutionary Women

      Professor Carmen Mathes
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      Description: When Percy Shelley wrote, “Let a great Assembly be / Of the fearless and the free” he was responding to a 1819 massacre of peaceful protesters. The crowd included many women, some carrying banners and flags, some their children, and all hoping for change. At stake was expanding voting rights. Not to include women, mind you, but to allow their working-class brothers, husbands and fathers to have a voice in parliament. In the aftermath of the violence, perpetrated by what we might now call a volunteer police force, Shelley envisions each woman as a sort of moral compass who will “point” out the perpetrators to turn them away in shame. In Romantic era Britain, women’s roles in the political life of community and country, at home and abroad, had long been debated, characterized and caricatured, and as often as not ignored. That Shelley includes women in his “great Assembly” reflects the historical reality and raises larger questions about what women were understood to be able to contribute, and what they did contribute, to social and political movements in the “revolutionary age” of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

      This is a course about politics and gender in (mostly) British poetry and nonfiction prose. We will read works by a variety of Romantic-era authors including Mary Wollstonecraft, Edmund Burke, Olympe de Gouges, Mary Prince, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Anne Yearsley, Phillis Wheatley Peters, Percy Shelley, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and others. We will explore responses to the revolution in France and the Napoleonic wars; questions of migration and dispossession; fights over labour reform; efforts to improve women’s educations; and the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. Along the way, we will explore historical and contemporary feminism(s) and feminist literary criticism.

      Note: students who have taken ENGL 545 with Dr. Mathes cannot register for this course.

      Texts:

      • Mary Prince. The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave, edited by Sara Salih, Penguin, 2000, ISBN: 9780141908014 / 0141908017
      • Mary Robinson. A Letter to the Women of England and The Natural Daughter, edited by Sharon M. Setzer, Broadview, 2003, ISBN: 9781551112367 / 1551112361
      • Charlotte Smith. Charlotte Smith: Major Poetic Works, edited by Claire Knowles and Ingrid Horrocks, Broadview, 2017, ISBN: 9781554812844 / 1554812844
      • Mary Wollstonecraft. The Vindications: The Rights of Men and The Rights of Woman, edited by D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf, Broadview, 1997, ISBN: 9781551110882 / 1551110881

      Evaluation: book review (20%); proposal and scholarly literature review (20%); final research essay (40%); participation and informed discussion (10%)

      Format: Lecture and discussion

      /

      Otherworlds of the Medieval North

      Professor Michael Van Dussen
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      Description: A rich body of literature developed in the European Middle Ages that explored worlds or realities that stood somehow apart from the realm of everyday experience. Yet these other (or under-) worlds were never entirely separable from what people regarded as the sphere of their day-to-day lives. By exploring these worlds, authors and readers simultaneously cultivated a renewed understanding of their own experience of time, geographical space, and the ways in which their belief systems infused both with meaning. They also described or imagined contact with other cultures, races, and spiritual or otherworldly beings. In this course, students will analyze several literary accounts of worlds or landscapes that stand in some way apart from what their authors and audiences regarded as ordinary. The geographical focus will be the medieval north (Nordic regions, England, Wales, and Ireland, but also “Little Britain”, or Brittany), though course texts will sometimes draw on depictions of other regions of the known world (especially Asia, but also northern Africa). We will read dream visions, including visions of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory; we’ll encounter underworlds that are geographically contiguous with specific locations in Europe; we’ll study narratives of encounters with the exotic or marvelous; and we’ll examine the value that was (or was not) placed on direct experience or evidence of travel. Course texts were written in England, Wales, Ireland, Iceland, and on parts the European continent during the period ca. 800-1400. Some sessions will be spend examining maps and rare manuscript materials in șÚÁÏÍű’s Rare Books and Special Collections.

      While the historical scope of the course will span much of the medieval millennium (ca. 500-1500) and take in literature from the outside of England, we will focus on the later Middle Ages, and especially the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Most primary texts will be read in the original Middle English, though no previous knowledge of the language is required. Portions of several classes will be spent developing proficiency in Middle English. For English Literature majors, this course counts toward the “medieval” or “Middle English” requirement. It also satisfies the MDST 400 requirement for Medieval Studies minors.

      Texts (provisional):

      • Chaucer, The House of Fame
      • Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning
      • The Voyage of Saint Brendan
      • Saint Patrick’s Purgatory
      • The Vision of Tundale
      • Pearl
      • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
      • The Mabinogion (selections)
      • Marie de France, Lais
      • Sir Orfeo
      • The Book of John Mandeville

      Evaluation (provisional): manuscript research project (30%), analytical essays (x2, 40%), close reading exercises (x2, 20%), participation (10%)

      Format: lecture, discussion, workshop

      Garbage Media

      Professor Alanna Thain
      Fall 2025
      Time TBA

      Description: This research-creation workshop course gives students the opportunity to experiment with production in film, video and new media through exploring and defining the concept of garbage media. All semester, we will be engaging with art, artists and media practices that explore concepts of waste, disposability, sustainability, obsolete technologies and creative forms of repurposing. How can we develop techniques for hands on experimentation with media that is considered to be waste—from orphan media to leftovers to dead formats and more? We will be experimenting in practice throughout the semester, in groups and individually, using a variety of different approaches and mediums. Every two weeks students will be producing work through a series of exercises, including working with small file media, remixes, repairing and reusing broken or obsolete formats or techniques, etc. In a moment when the generation of media waste is both pervasive and invisibilized, what can recuperative, sustainable, and repurposeful approaches to making media art be? Students participating in this class should be prepared to be doing practical work on an on-going basis, both individually and in groups, and to work collaboratively and creatively throughout the term. In addition to producing biweekly responses to prompts, students will engage in peer review critiques, develop their own proposed exercise, and create a final project. No previous experience in media production is required.

      Texts: TBA

      Evaluation: bi-weekly exercises; final project; peer reviews; garbage media exercise proposition

      Format: lectures, discussion, workshops, in-class crits

      John Cassavetes and American Independent Film

      Professor Ara Osterweil
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      Description:ÌęThe maverick film director John Cassavetes (1929-1989) was one of the most important filmmakers of the 20th century, and one of the pioneering figures in modern American independent cinema. He was also an accomplished actor in film and television who used his employment within Hollywood to self-finance, produce, and distribute the films that he wrote and directed outside of the studio system. Yet rather than approaching his work sole from an auteurist point of view, this course situates Cassavetes’s films alongside other alternative American films of the 1960s and 1970s. By juxtaposing Cassavetes’s work with contemporaneous films by other American independent directors, including Shirley Clarke, Barbara Loden, Martin Scorsese, Jonas Mekas, William Greaves, and Charles Burnett, we shall seek to expand our understanding of how independent films made by female, “ethnic,” immigrant, and racialized filmmakers radically transformed American cinema in this period. Finally, by paying close attention to the creative collaboration between Cassavetes and his wife, the actress Gena Rowlands (1930-2024), this course examines how the complex relationships between art, work, life, and family are dramatized and interrogated in the films they made together.

      Films (tentative):

      • Shadows (John Cassavetes, US, 1958)
      • Pull My Daisy (Robert Frank & Alfred Leslie, US, 1959)
      • The Cool World (Shirley Clarke, US, 1963)
      • Faces (John Cassavetes, US, 1968)
      • Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, US, 1968)
      • Several Friends (Charles Burnett, US, 1969)
      • Husbands (John Cassavetes, US, 1970)
      • Wanda (Barbara Loden, US, 1970)
      • Minnie and Moskowitz (John Cassavetes, US, 1971)
      • A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, US, 1974)
      • Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, US, 1973)
      • The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes, US, 1976)
      • Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (William Greaves, US 1968)
      • Opening Night (John Cassavetes, US, 1977)
      • Gloria (John Cassavetes, US, 1980)
      • Love Streams (John Cassavetes, US, 1984)
      • Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, US, 1978)
      • Paradise Not Yet Lost (Jonas Mekas, US, 1977)

      Evaluation: Students must come to class prepared with all the assigned reading and will be expected to participate verbally in class on a weekly basis. In additional to writing one ten- to twelve-page final paper or making an equivalent creative project, students will be expected to write a take-home midterm and keep a journal of their thoughts and impressions of the films we watch. Journals will be reviewed at intervals throughout the course.

      • Participation: 15%
      • Take home midterm: 30%
      • Journal: 15%
      • Final Paper: 40%

      Format: This course will meet twice weekly for lectures and class discussions. In addition, students must attend one mandatory in-person screening every week. Students who cannot attend the screening should not register for the course.

      After Henry James

      Professor Ned Schantz
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      Description: Drawing substantially upon Narrative Theory and Queer Theory, this film and lit course will attempt to chart an important cultural problematic associated with the work of Henry James, where a view of the social world as an unwelcoming and barely penetrable murk solicits a corresponding formal investment in restricted narration and the “scenic” treatment of narrative events (showing rather than telling). Pursuing this complex in the work of writers such as Carson McCullers, Bennett Sims, and Kazuo Ishiguro, as well as in several films including Spirit of the Beehive and Eve’s Bayou, we will consistently encounter sensitive and often underaged protagonists struggling to navigate situations oversaturated with the plans and desires of others. Faced with the problem of other minds in many acute forms, these characters will help us learn how to read in the fullest possible sense, helping us try to be (as James once put it) “one of the people on whom nothing is lost.”

      Texts: coursepack and several novels

      Evaluation: viewing journals 55%, presentations 15%, participation 30%

      Format: seminar

      Professor Richard So
      Winter 2026
      Time TBA

      Description: TBA

      °Ő±đłæłÙČő:  TBA

      Evaluation : TBA

      Format: TBA

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