200 Level English

What are Canadian Literatures? How can we read them critically and responsibly? This course will introduce students to the study of Canadian literatures through a chronological survey. The course will engage critically with the nation, specifically Canada, as a framework for literary study by considering the relationship between Canadian Literature and colonization and by examining how postcolonial, diasporic and Indigenous ways of thinking about literature can help us to interpret and analyse what we read.

This course introduces students to narrative as a layered and materially grounded practice. Framing storytelling as a form of excavation, we will examine how narratives are built from traces, fragments, and rewritings that emerge across time, space, and media. Through close reading and critical analysis, students will engage with narrative as a stratigraphic process, where meaning is shaped not only by content but by the arrangement and visibility of textual layers. Drawing on narratological methods informed by stratigraphy, Derrida’s concepts of trace and archive, and Fludernik’s theory of experientiality, the course invites students to read narrative structure as an active site of memory, interpretation, and cultural work. Our materials will include fiction, nonfiction, and multimodal texts that foreground narrative layering, displacement, and reconstruction as central to how stories work.

This course offers a highly selective and shockingly fragmented motorcycle tour through English (and in translation, one recent example of Dutch) literary history, starting in the 8th century and ending in the early 21st, with brief pit stops in the early modern and Victorian periods. Our chief focus will be on the related questions of literature in history and history in literature. Our central (but hardly exclusive) organizing schema will be the paired binaries, hero-villain/heroine-virago. Our ultimate if modest goal is to temporarily escape presentist tendencies by reading and giving critical thought to a few “old” and possibly defamiliarizing texts. Filmic adaptations of Beowulf, Hamlet, and Lady Audley’s Secret will be screened in class time, offering students an opportunity to consider remediation as one way of “reading” literature across time.

Seamus Heaney (trans.), Beowulf: A New Verse Translation—W. W. Norton
William Shakespeare, Hamlet—W. W. Norton (2nd critical edition)
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret—Broadview
Herman Koch, The Dinner—Hogarth

You can never be too sure what a word will do.

–George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin

This course introduces participants to the theoretical foundations of contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Reading closely and situating texts in their intellectual contexts, we will consider a breadth of critical concepts, frameworks, and arguments from the nineteenth century to the present that have shaped practices of reading in the humanities and that you will likely encounter throughout your studies in English. Our collective task is to learn to appreciate the pleasures and frustrations, the insights and surprises, that accompany the reading and rereading of complex theoretical texts.

This course consists of three units: 

1. Language, Signification, Writing:We will begin by examining Friedrich Nietzsche’s critical assessment of the relationship between words and things before turning to Ferdinand de Saussure’s account of the arbitrary character of the linguistic sign. We will trace the impact of these interventions on understandings of language, culture, rhetoric, and writing through the theoretical upheavals of semiotics, structuralism, and deconstruction.
2. Subjectivity, Ideology, Antagonism: We will then ask: who is the subject or the “I” that acts and interprets? This question will lead us to explore the Freudian discovery of the language of the unconscious; feminist revisions of psychoanalysis and theories of gender; historical materialist accounts of ideology and the dialectic; and Black and Indigenous critical theories of raciality, colonialism, and recognition. 
3. History, Representation, Fabulation: We will conclude by taking up an exemplary problem in literary and critical theory, exploring the related issues of historicity and representation that have proved central preoccupations in English studies. 

Gender and sexuality have been situated at the heart of human experience. However, what they mean and their relationship to each other alters across time and place; what is considered true and universal at one point is dismantled and replaced at another. Thus, the focus of this course lies at the heart of human existence, its discourses, practices, education and pedagogies, medical cultures, science, social institutions, legal and juridical systems, and more. 

We will explore contemporary discussions and representations of how ideas of gender and sexuality shape human development and the surveillance of populations, resulting in exclusions, marginalizations, erasures, and violence.  The course will survey a range of texts, from Judith Butler’s arguments on gender as performance; Michel Foucault’s theories of sexuality; Indigiqueer theory in Sam McKegney, Daniel Heath Justice, and Joshua Whitehead; Nikki Sullivan’s survey of queer as being or doing; Christopher Griffin and Hannah Emerson on neuroqueer sidling and erotic poetics; Bishakh Som and Ramzi Fawaz on comics as a queer medium; Elliot Page, Jack Halberstam and Paul Preciado on trans politics and experience; Anna-Marie McLemore’s queer life as magical realism; Legacy Russell’s work on glitch feminism; and creating gender and sexuality in AI robots and Barbie dolls. These course materials cover essays, novels, graphic literature, poetry, film, and videos.

By engaging in this synchronous online course, we will spend most of our time working collaboratively in collective discussions and research, using introductory lectures and supportive material located on Canvas to build knowledge, support explorations and questions, and engage with this capacious topic. Building on this foundation, students will be well positioned to explore their own interests in essay-writing assignments that enable contribution to the field of gender and sexuality studies.

This course will introduce students to key concepts and methods for reading literary and other cultural texts for their representation of dynamics of class and ideology. In the first half of the semester, we will study short excerpts from select theoretical texts in relation to Shakespeare’s most famous play, Hamlet, as well as the 2000 film version starring Ethan Hawke (director, Michael Almereyda). The theoretical texts will include Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology (1845/6), Marx’s Capital (1867), DeBord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967), Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993), Althusser’s On the Reproduction of Capitalism (written late 1960s, published 1995), Paolo Virno’s Grammar of the Multitude (2006), and Soren Mau’s Mute Compulsion (2023). (No prior knowledge of any theory is necessary to success in this course.) In the second half of the course, as we build towards studying Kim Stanley Robinson’s blockbuster "cli-fi" novel The Ministry for the Future (2020), we will study Oscar Wilde’s “Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1891), the 2003 film The Corporation (Joel Bakan, Harold Crooks, and Mark Achbar), and selections from David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) and Jason Hickel’s Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (2020). A woman writer will offer us a blast from the past still relevant to humanity’s future when we read Isabella Whitney’s “Wyll to London” (1573). So that the focus may be on learning rather than earning, students will earn 40% of their final course grade simply by doing short assignments for completion points. The midterm essay will be on the Almereyda Hamlet and the final exam essay will be on The Ministry for the Future.

This course examines the intricate dynamics of race and ethnicity as depicted in literature, essays, films, and cultural texts produced by and about racialized communities in North America. We will examine how writers and creators use narrative and cultural strategies to reveal racism as a system of power and privilege. Through critical analysis, students will investigate how racism operates at individual, institutional, and societal levels, paying special attention to intersections with gender, sexuality, class, and religion to understand how these factors shape experiences of discrimination and privilege. The course offers a comparative perspective, focusing on the experiences of Indigenous peoples and Black communities in North America alongside selected cultural groups in Africa. Students will engage with different forms of racism—representational, ideological, discursive, and interactional—and learn to distinguish between race and ethnicity while recognizing their enduring socio-political impacts. 

Course texts

The Skin We're In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power by Desmond Cole
“Race and Racialization” from Walk a Mile (114-136) 
There's Something in the Water directed by Elliot Page & Ian Daniel (Documentary)
A Raisin in the Sun directed by Daniel Petrie
“The Space Traders”, from Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism by Derrick Bell

Arts and Sciences often seem to occupy different worlds. However, in this course, we explore how proximate these fields are through our study of “reading science” in a variety of literary forms. The course survey will look at this topic from different perspectives: by studying western science itself as embedded in colonial cultural metaphors and poetics, by learning about Indigenous practices and/as science, by reading literary texts to explore science and related topics, by exploring poetry used to represent scientific concepts and discoveries.  The main texts for this course will include:

Christian Bök, Eunoia, Xenotext I, etc. (various dates; selected poems)

Van Jensen. Arca (2023; graphic novel)

Robin Wall Kimmerer, et al. Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults : Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2022; non-fiction – excerpts; available online in library catalogue).

Nicole Redvers. The Science of the Sacred: Bridging Global Indigenous Medicine Systems and Modern Scientific Principles (2019; non-fiction--excerpts)

Judith Roof. Poetics of DNA (2007; non-fiction; available online in library catalogue)

Mary Shelley. Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus (1818; novel; available online in library catalogue)

A survey of literatures in what is now Canada.

What are “Canadian literatures”?  How can we read them critically and responsibly? This course will introduce students to the study of Canadian literatures via a series of texts, problems, and issues. It will do this introduction by engaging critically with the nation, specifically Canada, as a framework for literary study by considering the relationship between Canadian Literature and colonization and by examining how postcolonial, diasporic, and Indigenous ways of thinking about literature can help us to interpret and analyse what we read. 

This course will introduce students to both a range of genres (non-fiction, poetry, short story, and novel), as well as to a range of time periods (eighteenth century to the present). Students can expect to discuss, research, and write about ideas that emerge from these texts and to learn how to situate both ideas and texts in their cultural, social, linguistic, historical, and political contexts.

An introduction to a range of poetic forms, techniques and theories.

We will consider language and how it works and specifically how the English language works. We will consider the sounds, words, and syntax of English, and various other aspects of language such as differences among various uses of the English language. For example, we will assess the use of non-standard English in light of the concerns of those who take a rule-based approach to language and the responsibility teachers of English feel to teach Standard English. We will raise concerns about inclusivity in view of the emphasis on Standard English in schools. We may consider language acquisition, both by children and by those for whom English is not their first language. A further topic of discussion will be the differences between oral and written language. Potentially, we will discuss how language changes, considering how English has changed and is changing; the role of slang and jargon; meaning and language; technology and the digital world and language. The course will be of interest to prospective teachers, writers, and analysts of the English language and its texts. A further aim of the course is to heighten awareness of the use of language and to invite direct involvement in deliberately observing the language that we use or that is used around us.

This course introduces key theoretical concepts in Indigenous literary studies pertaining especially to questions of land, sovereignty, and kinship. We will contextualize Indigenous literary methods within the emergence of Native Studies as an academic discipline to explore the following questions: What are Indigenous literary methods and what are their theoretical entanglements with other fields? How does the academic study of Indigenous literatures change because of Native Studies? What do Indigenous literatures and methods build beyond a critique of settler colonialism? The goal of the course is to develop fluency in Indigenous literary theory and to posit a method for respectful analysis of Indigenous literatures. 

The course readings are organized around four units: 1) structuralism and essentialism; 2) poststructuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism; 3) recognition and refusal; 4) land and sovereignty.

“I believe in miracles! Where you from… You Sexy Thing!” 

–Hot Chocolate (1975) (pre-gentrified Disco singer-songwriter)

“Sex is a poetic act. It’s a metaphor… a metaphor of what?!”  

–Frank, White Lotus(current tv show)

“Queerness is infinite,” says Anna to Jules.

–EUPHORIA (current tv show)

“Love and heartbreak are f***buddies.” 

–Billy-Ray Belcourt (contemporary queer “Canadian” poet-scholar from the Driftpile Cree Nation)

Overview: This discussion-based course will provide an introduction to contemporary conceptualizations of gender and sexuality, or sexualities: A Poetics. We will study key frameworks via critical theorists, pairing these studies with our investigative encounters in literature and pop culture. 

Scope: Our intersectional explorations will engage a range of lenses/looking-glasses. We will consider the expansive phenomenon of sexuality (including ACE/asexuality) through critical frameworks such as: feminism, queer theory + transgression (query), and Subjectivity Studies, and through representations of lived realities such as: economics, race, religion, disability/ableism, beauty, entitlement. Themes will include: sex and sexuality, gender and gender expression, sexual preference, morality, power, consent, pleasure, and aesthetics.

Forum: Since “sexuality” means so very many different things, to each of us - often tied to experiences of the self, the body, privacy, safety, intimacy, morality, civility, and taboo! - our class will first develop collective parameters for respectful discussion and engagement. Students will be prepared to engage, respectfully and professionally, with experiences and worldviews which may differ, wondrously, from their own.

Texts: Together, will also assess how “forms” mirror and reify our beliefs, and how experimental essay and literary forms may assist us to re-imagine self and community.

Theoretical essays: Provided by Instructor
Contemporary poetics and lyric essays: Provided by Instructor
Possible novels (TBA): SULA by Toni Morrison, Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

An introduction to dynamics of colonization and its resistances in literary and other cultural texts, and to the critical concepts and methods key to their study.

The course provides an overview of the idea of metaphor, starting as a linguistic construct but expanding outward into other human communication systems and artifacts, and eventually even into cognition itself. Among the discussion topics included are the following: 1) ideas about what metaphor is, 2) a brief history of accounts of metaphor in language and beyond, 3) methods and general research questions in metaphor research, 4) metaphor identification procedures, 5) metaphor in major topic areas (e.g., morality, love, disease, Covid 19, war, family, politics, etc.), 6) metaphorical framing, 7) metaphor and social connection, 8) metaphor and poetics, 9) nested metaphor, and 10) resistance to and the potential ubiquity of metaphor.

The course will appeal to anyone interested in the richness, nuance, and underpinnings of meaning itself, linguistically and in thought.

A survey of literatures in what is now Canada.

What are “Canadian literatures”?  How can we read them critically and responsibly? This course will introduce students to the study of Canadian literatures via a series of texts, problems, and issues. It will do this introduction by engaging critically with the nation, specifically Canada, as a framework for literary study by considering the relationship between Canadian Literature and colonization and by examining how postcolonial, diasporic, and Indigenous ways of thinking about literature can help us to interpret and analyse what we read. 

This course will introduce students to both a range of genres (non-fiction, poetry, short story, and novel), as well as to a range of time periods (eighteenth century to the present). Students can expect to discuss, research, and write about ideas that emerge from these texts and to learn how to situate both ideas and texts in their cultural, social, linguistic, historical, and political contexts.

This course, designed to increase the student’s ability to write effective essays, both academic and personal, includes the study of mechanics and sentence, paragraph, and essay structure (please note, though, that ENGL 299 is not a remedial course), as well as the rich possibilities of the essay as a form. The study of models of prose style of widely varying periods and approaches is integrated with frequent practice in writing and editing. We’ll also spend some time thinking about how what we’re doing relates to your role as an educator. How do people get better at writing? What’s the purpose of writing instruction? What are its limitations? What’s at stake when we grade and respond to student writing? What’s the connection between becoming a better writer and teaching others how to become better writers?