English 103 Variable Titles for 2022-23
Summer 2022
ENGL 103 B01: Monsters and the Other: Beowulf, Tolkien, Jackson, and Behn
Instructor: D. Bargen
Description: J. R. R. Tolkien both had a profound influence on the interpretation of Beowulf and wrote fantasy novels that were influenced by his scholarship. We will be considering how monsters, monstrosity, and otherness are represented by Tolkien, Peter Jackson, Beowulf, and Aphra Behn. You will have the opportunity to develop your own topic for research from these texts.
ENGL 103 B02: Contemporary Adaptations of Classic Fairy Tales
Instructor: A. Daignault
Description: How does research matter to reading and understanding literature, broadly conceived? In this course, we will pursue literary research through case studies in literature, print texts, and/or other media. Research helps us to understand texts in particular locations, histories, contexts, and debates. Students can expect to learn about, and put into practice, the stages in a research process, from identifying a research question or problem, to finding and evaluating useful supplementary materials, and learning about how to place their ideas in conversation with the knowledge they build from research.
Journalist and author Zora Neale Hurston once described research as “formalized curiosity…poking and prying with a purpose.” In this course we will tap into our curiosity and develop skills that will let us poke and pry at texts in a way that is both rigorous and creative. We will start small, looking at one text or one skill at a time, and build towards a final research project based on independent inquiry and knowledge generation.
In the first part of the semester, we will use classic fairy tales as an anchor point to develop skills that are foundational to the research process, and a base of shared knowledge about the fairy tale genre. In this section of the course, students can expect to read a wide variety of short texts, and to complete focused weekly assignments related to those texts. This part of the course will feature open exploration and discussion of fairy tales, and direct instruction on skills that are necessary to the research and writing process.
In the second part of the semester, each student will design and complete an independent research project. There are two options for this project: the first is to select a contemporary adaptation of one of those classic fairy tales, and write a traditional research paper about a particular aspect of that work; the second is to develop expertise about one of the classic tales and use it to write a new adaptation. In this section of the course, there will be less direct instruction from me, and more collaboration and troubleshooting among students, but I will always be available to answer questions and provide support.
ENGL 103 850: Mutual Aid
Instructor: R. Jackson
Description: The concept of mutual aid has become an important conversation in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. From op-eds in newspapers, to an outpouring of academic articles, to the daily practices of community support being enacted across the world, mutual aid is perhaps one of the most important political and social topics that has emerged over the last few tumultuous years. In short, mutual aid is the practice of communities caring for each other when the state fails to do so. While the current conditions of our world have renewed an interest in the philosophy and practice of mutual aid, it is an old idea. From the English folk-hero Robin Hood, who would famously steal from the rich to give to the poor, to the community initiatives of the Black Panther Party the Young Lords, and countless other grassroot organizations who fight systemic neglect by nurturing the capacity of communities to support each other in times of hardship, mutual aid is an old practice.
Fall 2022
ENGL 103 A01: Fantasy and Reality: Conversations and Contestations
Instructor: L. Robinson
The specific focus of this section will be on texts that explore and inhabit the complicated and shifting boundary between fantasy and reality. What are fantasy and myth for? What is the relationship between the realistic and the fantastical or the mythical? What are the moral and ethical issues at stake in the realistic and in the fantastical or the mythical? What purposes does each serve, in our lives and in the stories we tell? Through a variety of texts—including genres like the fairy tale, historical fiction, fantasy, science fiction, and horror—written across a wide period of time, from the Renaissance to the present, we will examine how and to what purposes different writers have used fantasy and the mythic in their work.
ENGL 103 A02: The Clown
Instructor: Ahsan Chowdhury
We will read William Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear and V. S. Naipaul's novel A House for Mr. Biswas in addition to a few short stories, essays, and poems about different kinds of clowns: wise clowns, holy clowns, sad clowns, scary clowns, trickster clowns, and so on. Our goal would be to understand the clown as a complex, archetypal symbol. We will also learn how to research this topic and how to engage with scholars' informed opinions about the clown.
ENGL 103 A03: Contemporary Adaptations of Classic Fairy Tales
Instructor: A. Daignault
How does research matter to reading and understanding literature, broadly conceived? In this course, we will pursue literary research through case studies in literature, print texts, and/or other media. Research helps us to understand texts in particular locations, histories, contexts, and debates. Students can expect to learn about, and put into practice, the stages in a research process, from identifying a research question or problem, to finding and evaluating useful supplementary materials, and learning about how to place their ideas in conversation with the knowledge they build from research.
Journalist and author Zora Neale Hurston once described research as “formalized curiosity…poking and prying with a purpose.” In this course we will tap into our curiosity and develop skills that will let us poke and pry at texts in a way that is both rigorous and creative. We will start small, looking at one text or one skill at a time, and build towards a final research project based on independent inquiry and knowledge generation.
In the first part of the semester, we will use classic fairy tales as an anchor point to develop skills that are foundational to the research process, and a base of shared knowledge about the fairy tale genre. In this section of the course, students can expect to read a wide variety of short texts, and to complete focused weekly assignments related to those texts. This part of the course will feature open exploration and discussion of fairy tales, and direct instruction on skills that are necessary to the research and writing process.
In the second part of the semester, each student will design and complete an independent research project. There are two options for this project: the first is to select a contemporary adaptation of one of those classic fairy tales, and write a traditional research paper about a particular aspect of that work; the second is to develop expertise about one of the classic tales and use it to write a new adaptation. In this section of the course, there will be less direct instruction from me, and more collaboration and troubleshooting among students, but I will always be available to answer questions and provide support.
ENGL 103 A04: Loneliness and Solitude
Instructor: K. McFadyen
How do we begin to truly understand loneliness? To be lonely could be a state of mind, a temporary emotion, or it could become a part of someone’s identity. It can be experienced as punitive or healing, as a choice or a necessity, in complete isolation or surrounded by others. There is no "true" sense of what it means to be lonely. What we can question are the conditions that produce our sense of loneliness and what it means for our sense of self. In this course, we will engage with a selection of works that deal, in one way or another, with loneliness and solitude. Students will be guided through the process of posing a research question, locating relevant materials, and conveying their knowledge through original work.
ENGL 103 A05: Cree and Métis Literature
Instructor: A. Van Essen
According to Indigenous scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith, “Research” “is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary” (Decolonizing Methodologies 30). Given the context of historical and ongoing colonialism in Canada, what does it mean to do research respectfully? How do we read, write about, and discuss Cree and Métis literature with care and respect? In this course, these questions will anchor our research through case studies in Cree and Métis literature. Research helps us to understand texts in particular locations, histories, contexts, and debates. Students can expect to learn about, and put into practice, the stages in a research process, from identifying a research question or problem, to finding and evaluating useful supplementary materials, and learning about how to place their ideas in conversation with the knowledge they build from research.
ENGL 103 A06: Heroes and Villains
Instructor: M. Kosman
Who gets to be a hero? More curiously, who gets to be a superhero? In this course we will investigate the social and political resonances of “heroes” and “villains” in Canadian and Western popular culture. In addition to thinking critically about what kinds of people get to be heroes and superheroes, students will develop their research skills in order to better understand how the Western superhero figure reproduces hierarchies of race, sex, ability, and class; what we understand to be the material conditions of villainy; and, ultimately, how despite opening up the category of the “hero” to previously marginalized subjects, villains continue to serve as a socially acceptable repository for oppressive discourses.
ENGL 103 A07: Race and the Black Body in Literature
Instructor: O Okome
The research focus will be the discourse of race. Defining race as a complex and intractable word, students who take this class will be encouraged to read about race from the entire spectrum of the debate around its meaning across time and space, prompting larger questions which implicate the history of the formation of race as a discursive category and the implications that the making of racial categories has had in human history. Why, for example, is race still part of everyday lived experiences in the 21st century? What role did literature play and is still playing in the dissemination of racial difference today? What, for example, does the Black Lives Matter Movement tell us about blackness and black defacement? A selected number of modern literary texts, including African literary texts, will form the research archive.
ENGL 103 A08: Retrospective Globalisms: From Satire to the Western
Instructor: S. Sucur
This course emphasizes the global and cross-cultural nature of literature and film, with focus placed on the international dissemination of ideas via selected texts ranging from satire of the late 17th century to cinema of the 1960s and 70s. Movements in thought such as the Enlightenment, Romanticism, etc., will also be given an important role in the global and comparative discussions that will form the basis of this class. The research process is foundational to this course, and students can expect an in-depth and focused approach to content and a multi-stage introduction to this process.
ENGL 103 A09: Where the Parents Aren’t: Orphans and Adoptees in Literature
Instructor: J. Sheckter
Peter Parker; Sherlock Holmes; Mowgli; Tony Stark; Oliver Twist.
What do all of these characters have in common? Their stories range wildly in terms of genre and sensibility, but they are united by the fact they are all adoptees.
But what does it mean to be adopted? Why is it such a common feature in stories? What does this tell us as readers about the way that we approach and understand the concept of adoption, and more broadly, of attachment, bonding, and parenting? How much has our understanding of adoption changed over time, and how much does it vary across cultures? What assumptions and value- systems have been and continue to be engaged in response to adoption? How do those ideas influence our understanding of what it means to construct and be part of a family, perhaps the most fundamental element of the social fabric?
ENGL 103 A10: Why Horror?
Instructor: L. Rasmussen
Although it is often derided or thought to be ‘low-brow’, horror fiction is an excellent topic for new researchers in the academy who are interested in studying how social tensions and anxieties take shape in, and are navigated through, mainstream literature and popular culture. Examples of topics we may explore in this class include teen or gateway horror, final girls, techno-horror, cryptozoology, domestic horror, misogyny in horror, portrayals of children in horror, apocalyptic horror, and others. While we will touch on some ‘horror origins,’ our focus will primarily be on contemporary writers. Additionally, we will augment the novels and short stories we study with excerpts from visual media, as we begin our semester with chapters from Mathias Clasen’s A Very Nervous Person’s Guide to Horror Movies.
ENGL 103 A1: Nothing is black and white
Instructor: M. Morris
ENGL 103 A12: Why Horror?
Instructor: L. Rasmussen
Although it is often derided or thought to be ‘low-brow’, horror fiction is an excellent topic for new researchers in the academy who are interested in studying how social tensions and anxieties take shape in, and are navigated through, mainstream literature and popular culture. Examples of topics we may explore in this class include teen or gateway horror, final girls, techno-horror, cryptozoology, domestic horror, misogyny in horror, portrayals of children in horror, apocalyptic horror, and others. While we will touch on some ‘horror origins,’ our focus will primarily be on contemporary writers. Additionally, we will augment the novels and short stories we study with excerpts from visual media, as we begin our semester with chapters from Mathias Clasen’s A Very Nervous Person’s Guide to Horror Movies.
ENGL 103 A13: The Clown
Instructor: Ahsan Chowdhury
We will read William Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear and V. S. Naipaul's novel A House for Mr. Biswas in addition to a few short stories, essays, and poems about different kinds of clowns: wise clowns, holy clowns, sad clowns, scary clowns, trickster clowns, and so on. Our goal would be to understand the clown as a complex, archetypal symbol. We will also learn how to research this topic and how to engage with scholars' informed opinions about the clown.
ENGL 103 A14: Nothing is black and white
Instructor: M. Morris
ENGL 103 A15: Where the Parents Aren’t: Orphans and Adoptees in Literature
Instructor: J. Sheckter
Peter Parker; Sherlock Holmes; Mowgli; Tony Stark; Oliver Twist.
What do all of these characters have in common? Their stories range wildly in terms of genre and sensibility, but they are united by the fact they are all adoptees.
But what does it mean to be adopted? Why is it such a common feature in stories? What does this tell us as readers about the way that we approach and understand the concept of adoption, and more broadly, of attachment, bonding, and parenting? How much has our understanding of adoption changed over time, and how much does it vary across cultures? What assumptions and value- systems have been and continue to be engaged in response to adoption? How do those ideas influence our understanding of what it means to construct and be part of a family, perhaps the most fundamental element of the social fabric?
ENGL 103 A16: The Clown
Instructor: Ahsan Chowdhury
We will read William Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear and V. S. Naipaul's novel A House for Mr. Biswas in addition to a few short stories, essays, and poems about different kinds of clowns: wise clowns, holy clowns, sad clowns, scary clowns, trickster clowns, and so on. Our goal would be to understand the clown as a complex, archetypal symbol. We will also learn how to research this topic and how to engage with scholars' informed opinions about the clown.
ENGL 103 A17: Animals and the Literary Imagination
Instructor: K. Pabst
From the biblical depictions of Lucifer as a serpent to George Orwell’s political allegory Animal Farm, animals have long occupied an important place in the literary imagination. In this section of ENGL 103, students will learn the fundamentals of academic research while exploring a range of fictional and expository prose centred on the depictions of and debates about animals, animal rights, and the human-animal relationship.
ENGL 103 A18: Scheherazade’s Daughters: Storytelling and Eco-culture
Instructor: M. Lotfabadi
In this class, we will learn about what it means to research English studies as we study A Thousand and One Nights. The main focus will be on the storytelling techniques and structure in this text which serve as the vehicles to interrogate social problems, historical atrocities, femicide, and power structures to generate an eco-cultural system based on the interconnectedness of all things. We will try to find practical approaches to questions around researching and analyzing a specific issue in the text: How do we shape a research project in which there is something important at stake, and how do we locate the arguments of others to pursue it? How do we build on the arguments of others, and how do we present and narrate our results? What does a well-researched and well-argued research paper entail in terms of the pursuit of knowledge, supported propositions, and effective writing? Apart from sections of the Nights, participants in the course can expect to encounter works set in both past and contemporary contexts, which variably facilitate conversations about relationships, desire, ideology, gender, sexuality, identity, and ethnicity. In the first half of the course, while building reading and writing skills, students will engage questions about the purpose and ethics of research and argumentation in relation to the historical perceptions, or misperceptions, of the Nights. Students will then proceed to develop research projects on the contemporary affects of the Nights in the second half through one-on-one meetings and discussions with their instructor. Students will prepare “annotated bibliographies” that track their research, and the course will culminate in the writing, revising, and final submission of a research paper with attached works cited.
ENGL 103 A19: Men and Masculinities
Instructor: W. Agorde
This section of English 103 focuses on the representation of men and masculinities in a cluster of related texts. The course examines how various literary texts and the media construct, inform and reinforce prevalent ideas about men and masculinities. We will cover topics such as media stereotypes, the prevalence of male characters in literature, TV, and film, male authority, and the role that literary texts and the media play in shaping attitudes about masculinity. Students will encounter fiction, non-fictional prose, and visual media. The course will enable students to acquire a rich sense of contexts or intellectual landscapes that shape the study of literature and culture.
ENGL 103 A20: Scheherazade’s Daughters: Storytelling and Eco-culture
Instructor: M. Lotfabadi
In this class, we will learn about what it means to research English studies as we study A Thousand and One Nights. The main focus will be on the storytelling techniques and structure in this text which serve as the vehicles to interrogate social problems, historical atrocities, femicide, and power structures to generate an eco-cultural system based on the interconnectedness of all things. We will try to find practical approaches to questions around researching and analyzing a specific issue in the text: How do we shape a research project in which there is something important at stake, and how do we locate the arguments of others to pursue it? How do we build on the arguments of others, and how do we present and narrate our results? What does a well-researched and well-argued research paper entail in terms of the pursuit of knowledge, supported propositions, and effective writing? Apart from sections of the Nights, participants in the course can expect to encounter works set in both past and contemporary contexts, which variably facilitate conversations about relationships, desire, ideology, gender, sexuality, identity, and ethnicity. In the first half of the course, while building reading and writing skills, students will engage questions about the purpose and ethics of research and argumentation in relation to the historical perceptions, or misperceptions, of the Nights. Students will then proceed to develop research projects on the contemporary affects of the Nights in the second half through one-on-one meetings and discussions with their instructor. Students will prepare “annotated bibliographies” that track their research, and the course will culminate in the writing, revising, and final submission of a research paper with attached works cited.
ENGL 103 A21: Modernism and its Environments
Instructor: R. Brazeau
ENGL 103 A22: 21st Century Fantasy Fiction
Instructor: M. Dickeson
ENGL 103 A23: Hamlet on Film
Instructor: C. Sale
This course guides students in building writing and research skills vital to success in a university degree regardless of the discipline of study. It does so in relation to the study of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In the first part of the course, we will discuss key aspects of the play while also negotiating key lessons from the writing handbook Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace. In part two of the course, we will study three films based on the play, Franco Zeffirelli’s (1991), Grigori Kozintsev’s (1964), and Michael Almeredya’s (2000), and then two quite radical adaptations, Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well (1960) and Sherwood Hu’s The Prince of the Himalayas (2006). The course assignments are designed to test the building of skills in writing, research, and literary and film analysis, with each assignment constituting a building-block for the final comparative research paper of about 2,000 words.
ENGL 103 A24: Black Prairie Freedom Dreams
Instructor: T. Zackodnik
How does research matter to reading and understanding literature? How broadly can we understand literature beyond the main genres of poetry, fiction, and drama? What does it mean to understand literature in place, as coming from a particular location and experiences shaped by it in a particular historical moment or moments? In this course, we will focus on the larger question of Black presence and writing on the Canadian prairies and in Alberta in particular, its archival preservation or lack thereof, its representation of Black people and their lived experiences, and Black prairie aesthetics, all of which form what is knowable and deemed worth knowing about the lives Black people have made and continue to make in Western Canada. By doing this, we will learn how to pursue literary research with the aim of better understanding texts in particular locations, histories, contexts, and debates. We will necessarily need to learn about Black history on the prairies and about how it has been silenced or misrepresented, since this is central to the context Black prairie writing emerges from.
ENGL 103 A25
Instructor: M. Snyder
ENGL 103 A26: Eden Robinson and Adaptation
Instructor: B. Kerfoot
In this course, we will study textual adaptation, which may include adapting oral stories to written forms, expanding and condensing stories, and adaptions that make changes to medium, genre, and audience. We will focus closely on the works of Haisla/Heiltsuk author Eden Robinson and their adaptations. Students will develop an original paper by posing a research question, finding and evaluating useful research sources, and writing a literary analysis paper that engages with ongoing scholarly discussions.
Possible Texts:
Eden Robinson, “Queen of the North,” Monkey Beach, Son of a Trickster
Loretta Todd (dir.), Monkey Beach
Trickster, created by Michelle Latimer
ENGL 103 A27: Early Modern Gender
Instructor: L. Schechter
ENGL 103 A28: Food for Thought in Literature and Culture
Instructor: J. Lim
This section will study and research on the role of food in selected literary and media texts within the context of their cultural and historical milieus.
ENGL 103 A29: Worldmaking
Instructor: B. Schaufert
Texts have the potential to register worlds beyond the one we routinely perceive. Students will learn critical reading and writing practices for the interpretation of textual worlds across genres and mediums that imagine solutions to our world's problems or depict its breakdown. Assignments in this course will instruct students on how to conduct research at the post-secondary level and will introduce students to research-creation.
ENGL 103 A30: Grounded: Research in Place(s)
Instructor: M. Oberg
This variable content course introduces methods of literary research as an in-depth process through one or more case studies. This course offers an analysis into location-specific awareness. We will be looking at the historic and current events of Alberta, the Prairies and Canada more largely. In addition to these readings, this course offers the ground-work of understanding and completing written assignments at a university level: including essays, scholarship applications, proposals and professional letters.
ENGL 103 X02: Queer-Feminist Readings in the Medical Humanities
Instructor: R. Lallouz
How can we study the lives of those who have been historically pathologized, silenced or completely excluded from Western biomedical discourses? This course uses a queer-feminist theoretical lens to examine contemporary life writing, art and other forms of cultural production that explore political and scientific legacies underpinning medicine, health and illness in our world today. Selected texts and artworks will be read as case studies exploring pertinent issues in the field of Medical Humanities, including: the medicalization of certain bodies, scientific knowledge production, disability, and medical experimentation, among other related topics.
ENGL 103 X03: Early Modern Gender
Instructor: L. Schechter
ENGL 103 800 (was X04): Modern World Literature as Socio-Political Commentary
Instructor: J. Varsava
An introduction to methods of literary research through case studies focusing on modern world literature that directly engages important socio-political issues in a variety of historical and cultural contexts. The course will consider various literary genres including the short story, the novella, and the novel, as important narrative forms.
ENGL 103 X40: Reading Resistance in Literature
Instructor: O. Ogundipe
ENGL 103 X41: Reading Resistance in Literature
Instructor: O. Ogundipe
Winter 2023
ENGL 103 B01
TBD
ENGL 103 B03
TBD
ENGL 103 B05
TBD
ENGL 103 B06: Contemporary Graphic Literature: Surveying the Field
Instructor: D. Woodman
Most people are aware of comics – from the comic strips to comic books sold in grocery stores and comic bookstores. However, there is so much more. The field of graphic literature encompasses a vast range of topics, themes, genres, and styles. In this course, we’ll explore a diverse array of contemporary graphic literature by North American/Turtle Island creators that participate in social and cultural discourses and challenge conventional ideas about representation and interpretation.
To set up the course, we’ll first review background information and terms, as well as key thinkers in the field. We’ll also look at some samples of works that are not part of our course readings to appreciate the expanse of the field, both in terms of historical developments and work with diverse genres. These will provide us with the necessary tools for exploring course texts and developing individual research projects.
Keeping in mind that a one-term course cannot cover everything, we will focus on the following works as representations of various types of graphic literary styles and investments: Joe Sacco’s journalistic work Palestine (1993), Miriam Engelberg’s memoir Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person (2006), G. Willow Wilson’s superhero comic Ms. Marvel: Vol. 1 (2014), selections from the Moonshot anthologies of Indigenous short stories (2015-2020), Bishakh Som’s memoir Spellbound: A Graphic Memoir (2020), and Damian Duffy and John Jennings’ graphic novel adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s The Parable of the Sower (2020).
ENGL 103 B07
Men and Masculinities
Instructor: W. Agorde
This section of English 103 focuses on the representation of men and masculinities in a cluster of related texts. The course examines how various literary texts and the media construct, inform and reinforce prevalent ideas about men and masculinities. We will cover topics such as media stereotypes, the prevalence of male characters in literature, TV, and film, male authority, and the role that literary texts and the media play in shaping attitudes about masculinity. Students will encounter fiction, non-fictional prose, and visual media. The course will enable students to acquire a rich sense of contexts or intellectual landscapes that shape the study of literature and culture.
ENGL 103 B08: Heroes and Villains
Instructor: M. Kosman
Who gets to be a hero? More curiously, who gets to be a superhero? In this course we will investigate the social and political resonances of “heroes” and “villains” in Canadian and Western popular culture. In addition to thinking critically about what kinds of people get to be heroes and superheroes, students will develop their research skills in order to better understand how the Western superhero figure reproduces hierarchies of race, sex, ability, and class; what we understand to be the material conditions of villainy; and, ultimately, how despite opening up the category of the “hero” to previously marginalized subjects, villains continue to serve as a socially acceptable repository for oppressive discourses.
ENGL 103 B09: Doppelgangers and Alter Egos
Instructor: L. Schechter
ENGL 103 B10: The Uncanny
Instructor: C. Bracken
This course will be a case study of the uncanny, an experience that causes a distinctive kind of fright. Not surprisingly, the uncanny is a recurring, and strikingly popular, feature of the modern horror story. In 1919, Sigmund Freud defined it as “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.” Readers of horror experience it when a familiar world appears in an unfamiliar light. Since 1919, a vast literature has accumulated around it. Your task is to suggest why the uncanny remains source of fascination for audiences today.
ENGL 103 B11: Contemporary Graphic Literature: Surveying the Field
Instructor: D. Woodman
Most people are aware of comics – from the comic strips to comic books sold in grocery stores and comic bookstores. However, there is so much more. The field of graphic literature encompasses a vast range of topics, themes, genres, and styles. In this course, we’ll explore a diverse array of contemporary graphic literature by North American/Turtle Island creators that participate in social and cultural discourses and challenge conventional ideas about representation and interpretation.
To set up the course, we’ll first review background information and terms, as well as key thinkers in the field. We’ll also look at some samples of works that are not part of our course readings to appreciate the expanse of the field, both in terms of historical developments and work with diverse genres. These will provide us with the necessary tools for exploring course texts and developing individual research projects.
Keeping in mind that a one-term course cannot cover everything, we will focus on the following works as representations of various types of graphic literary styles and investments: Joe Sacco’s journalistic work Palestine (1993), Miriam Engelberg’s memoir Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person (2006), G. Willow Wilson’s superhero comic Ms. Marvel: Vol. 1 (2014), selections from the Moonshot anthologies of Indigenous short stories (2015-2020), Bishakh Som’s memoir Spellbound: A Graphic Memoir (2020), and Damian Duffy and John Jennings’ graphic novel adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s The Parable of the Sower (2020).
ENGL 103 B12: Popular Culture across History
Instructor: N. Barnholden
This course engages with a series of case studies to understand how literature both represents and constitutes popular culture. Students should expect to learn how to generate and pursue research questions, how to enact scholarly research, and how to use popular sources to advance research-based arguments.
ENGL 103 B13: Monsters in "Beowulf", J.R.R. Tolkien, and Peter Jackson
Instructor: D. Bargen
J. R. R. Tolkien both had a profound influence on the interpretation of Beowulf and wrote fantasy novels that were influenced by his scholarship. We will be considering how monsters are represented by Tolkien, Peter Jackson, and Beowulf. You will have the opportunity to develop your own topic for research from the course texts.
ENGL 103 B14: Eden Robinson and Adaptation
Instructor: B. Kerfoot
In this course, we will study textual adaptation, which may include adapting oral stories to written forms, expanding and condensing stories, and adaptations that make changes to medium, genre, and audience. We will focus closely on the works of Haisla/Heiltsuk author Eden Robinson and their adaptations. Students will develop an original paper by posing a research question, finding and evaluating useful research sources, and writing a literary analysis paper that engages with ongoing scholarly discussions.
Possible Texts:
Eden Robinson, “Queen of the North,” Monkey Beach, Son of a Trickster
Loretta Todd (dir.), Monkey Beach
Trickster, created by Michelle Latimer
ENGL 103 B15
TBD
ENGL 103 B16: Monsters in "Beowulf", J.R.R. Tolkien, and Peter Jackson
Instructor: D. Bargen
J. R. R. Tolkien both had a profound influence on the interpretation of Beowulf and wrote fantasy novels that were influenced by his scholarship. We will be considering how monsters are represented by Tolkien, Peter Jackson, and Beowulf. You will have the opportunity to develop your own topic for research from the course texts.
ENGL 103 B17: Fantasy and Reality: Conversations and Contestations
Instructor: L. Robinson
The specific focus of this section will be on texts that explore and inhabit the complicated and shifting boundary between fantasy and reality. What are fantasy and myth for? What is the relationship between the realistic and the fantastical or the mythical? What are the moral and ethical issues at stake in the realistic and in the fantastical or the mythical? What purposes does each serve, in our lives and in the stories we tell? Through a variety of texts—including genres like the fairy tale, historical fiction, fantasy, science fiction, and horror—written across a wide period of time, from the Renaissance to the present, we will examine how and to what purposes different writers have used fantasy and the mythic in their work.
ENGL 103 B18: Scheherazade’s Daughters: Storytelling and Eco-culture
Instructor: M. Lotfabadi
In this class, we will learn about what it means to research English studies as we study A Thousand and One Nights. The main focus will be on the storytelling techniques and structure in this text which serve as the vehicles to interrogate social problems, historical atrocities, femicide, and power structures to generate an eco-cultural system based on the interconnectedness of all things. We will try to find practical approaches to question around researching and analyzing a specific issue in the text: How do we shape a research project in which there is something important at stake, and how do we locate the arguments of others to pursue it? How do we build on the arguments of others, and how do we present and narrate our results? What does a well-researched and well-argued research paper entail in terms of the pursuit of knowledge, supported propositions, and effective writing? Apart from sections of the Nights, participants in the course can expect to encounter works set in both past and contemporary contexts, which variably facilitate conversations about relationships, desire, ideology, gender, sexuality, identity, and ethnicity. In the first half of the course, while building reading and writing skills, students will engage questions about the purpose and ethics of research and argumentation in relation to the historical perceptions, or misperceptions, of the Nights. Students will then proceed to develop research projects on the contemporary affects of the Nights in the second half through one-on-one meetings and discussions with their instructor. Students will prepare “annotated bibliographies” that track their research, and the course will culminate in the writing, revising, and final submission of a research paper with attached works cited.
ENGL 103 B19:The Clown
Instructor: Ahsan Chowdhury
We will read William Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear and V. S. Naipaul's novel A House for Mr. Biswas in addition to a few short stories, essays, and poems about different kinds of clowns: wise clowns, holy clowns, sad clowns, scary clowns, trickster clowns, and so on. Our goal would be to understand the clown as a complex, archetypal symbol. We will also learn how to research this topic and how to engage with scholars' informed opinions about the clown.
ENGL 103 B20: Loneliness and Solitude
Instructor: K. McFayden
How do we begin to truly understand loneliness? To be lonely could be a state of mind, a temporary emotion, or it could become a part of someone’s identity. It can be experienced as punitive or healing, as a choice or a necessity, in complete isolation or surrounded by others. There is no "true" sense of what it means to be lonely. What we can question are the conditions that produce our sense of loneliness and what it means for our sense of self. In this course, we will engage with a selection of works that deal, in one way or another, with loneliness and solitude. Students will be guided through the process of posing a research question, locating relevant materials, and conveying their knowledge through original work.
ENGL 103 B21: Retrospective Globalisms: From Satire to the Western
Instructor: S. Sucur
This course emphasizes the global and cross-cultural nature of literature and film, with focus placed on the international dissemination of ideas via selected texts ranging from satire of the late 17th century to cinema of the 1960s and 70s. Movements in thought such as the Enlightenment, Romanticism, etc., will also be given an important role in the global and comparative discussions that will form the basis of this class. The research process is foundational to this course, and students can expect an in-depth and focused approach to content and a multi-stage introduction to this process.
ENGL 103 B22: The Clown
Instructor: Ahsan Chowdhury
We will read William Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear and V. S. Naipaul's novel A House for Mr. Biswas in addition to a few short stories, essays, and poems about different kinds of clowns: wise clowns, holy clowns, sad clowns, scary clowns, trickster clowns, and so on. Our goal would be to understand the clown as a complex, archetypal symbol. We will also learn how to research this topic and how to engage with scholars' informed opinions about the clown.
ENGL 103 B23: Retrospective Globalisms: From Satire to the Western
Instructor: S. Sucur
This course emphasizes the global and cross-cultural nature of literature and film, with focus placed on the international dissemination of ideas via selected texts ranging from satire of the late 17th century to cinema of the 1960s and 70s. Movements in thought such as the Enlightenment, Romanticism, etc., will also be given an important role in the global and comparative discussions that will form the basis of this class. The research process is foundational to this course, and students can expect an in-depth and focused approach to content and a multi-stage introduction to this process.
ENGL 103 B24: Reading Spaces in Literature
Instructor: D. Gay
Space is a basic and dynamic literary concept. The short poem “London” by William Blake (1757-1827), for example, begins with this line: “I wander through each chartered street.” The speaker moves through an urban space encountering sights, sounds, and symbols. Critical reading makes the poem an event in psychic space. Critical writing adds the activities of sharing and interpreting in the space of a classroom. We will explore our topic in the urban, natural, social, virtual, and personal spaces writers and readers create, and consider the physical spaces we encounter in our city. Our course will include a full schedule of instruction and study modules on academic writing and research.
ENGL 103 B25: Why Horror?
Instructor: L. Rasmussen
Although it is often derided or thought to be ‘low-brow’, horror fiction is an excellent topic for new researchers in the academy who are interested in studying how social tensions and anxieties take shape in, and are navigated through, mainstream literature and popular culture. Examples of topics we may explore in this class include teen or gateway horror, final girls, techno-horror, cryptozoology, domestic horror, misogyny in horror, portrayals of children in horror, apocalyptic horror, and others. While we will touch on some ‘horror origins,’ our focus will primarily be on contemporary writers. Additionally, we will augment the novels and short stories we study with excerpts from visual media, as we begin our semester with chapters from Mathias Clasen’s A Very Nervous Person’s Guide to Horror Movies.
ENGL 103 B26: Frankenstein: Intertextuality and Adaptation
Instructor: V. Savard
In this course, students can expect to learn about, and put into practice, various fundamental stages of research while focussing generally on one specific theme. In this section of English 103, we will take an in-depth look at Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). In dialogue with Shelley’s generative novel, we will consider some of the texts that inspired it and those that it inspired in turn. Frankenstein can be read from myriad perspectives through various lenses, and we will consider several of these. In this class, however, we especially note how the novel, which was conceived during a ghost story contest, has always been about storytelling.
ENGL 103 B27: Grounded: Research in Place(s)
Instructor: M. Oberg
This variable content course introduces methods of literary research as an in-depth process through one or more case studies. This course offers an analysis into location-specific awareness. We will be looking at the historic and current events of Alberta, the Prairies and Canada more largely. In addition to these readings, this course offers the ground-work of understanding and completing written assignments at a university level: including essays, scholarship applications, proposals and professional letters.
ENGL 103 B28
TBD
ENGL 103 B29: Contemporary Adaptations of Classic Fairy Tales
Instructor: A Daignault
How does research matter to reading and understanding literature, broadly conceived? In this course, we will pursue literary research through case studies in literature, print texts, and/or other media. Research helps us to understand texts in particular locations, histories, contexts, and debates. Students can expect to learn about, and put into practice, the stages in a research process, from identifying a research question or problem, to finding and evaluating useful supplementary materials, and learning about how to place their ideas in conversation with the knowledge they build from research.
Journalist and author Zora Neale Hurston once described research as “formalized curiosity…poking and prying with a purpose.” In this course we will tap into our curiosity and develop skills that will let us poke and pry at texts in a way that is both rigorous and creative. We will start small, looking at one text or one skill at a time, and build towards a final research project based on independent inquiry and knowledge generation.
In the first part of the semester, we will use classic fairy tales as an anchor point to develop skills that are foundational to the research process, and a base of shared knowledge about the fairy tale genre. In this section of the course, students can expect to read a wide variety of short texts, and to complete focused weekly assignments related to those texts. This part of the course will feature open exploration and discussion of fairy tales, and direct instruction on skills that are necessary to the research and writing process.
In the second part of the semester, each student will design and complete an independent research project. There are two options for this project: the first is to select a contemporary adaptation of one of those classic fairy tales, and write a traditional research paper about a particular aspect of that work; the second is to develop expertise about one of the classic tales and use it to write a new adaptation. In this section of the course, there will be less direct instruction from me, and more collaboration and troubleshooting among students, but I will always be available to answer questions and provide support.
ENGL 103 X51: Modern World Literature as Socio-Political Commentary
Instructor: J. Varsava
An introduction to methods of literary research through case studies focusing on modern world literature that directly engages important socio-political issues in a variety of historical and cultural contexts. The course will consider various literary genres including the short story, the novella, and the novel, as important narrative forms.
ENGL 103 X52
TBD
ENGL 103 X53: Frankenstein: Intertextuality and Adaptation
Instructor: V. Savard
In this course, students can expect to learn about, and put into practice, various fundamental stages of research while focussing generally on one specific theme. In this section of English 103, we will take an in-depth look at Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). In dialogue with Shelley’s generative novel, we will consider some of the texts that inspired it and those that it inspired in turn. Frankenstein can be read from myriad perspectives through various lenses, and we will consider several of these. In this class, however, we especially note how the novel, which was conceived during a ghost story contest, has always been about storytelling.
ENGL 103 X60: Reading Resistance in Literature
Instructor: O. Ogundipe
ENGL 103 X61: Reading Resistance in Literature
Instructor: O. Ogundipe