300 Level English

Studies in the theories, histories, and literary practices introduced by digital culture.

Studies in the theories, histories and practices of popular culture.

English has a long history, which begins in the British Isles soon after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and still continues across the world. It also has a long prehistory: its earliest reconstructable ancestor was spoken in an area somewhere in the region of the Black and Caspian seas about five thousand years ago. This course will introduce the story of the English language. We will consider the development of the English language from its prehistoric roots to modern times. We will learn to use the Oxford English Dictionary to explore the history of English and consider the influence of women on the history of English. Students will also be exposed to samples of historical varieties of English.

Specific topics covered may include how the prehistory of English was discovered and reconstructed; how language develops historically; the ancient and persistent influence of the Roman Empire and its Latin on English; why the Celts on the British Isles influenced English only minimally; how the Viking invasion and the resulting Danelaw changed English; the impact of the Norman knights on English after their invasion in 1066 and why this branch of Vikings spoke French; political power and language change; how the printing press changed English; sound changes in language such as the Great Vowel Shift; Samuel Johnson, Noah Webster, and the influence of their dictionaries on English; grammarians and prescriptivism; approaches to the politics of language; and Canadian English.

This course will provide an opportunity to explore theoretical and literary figurations of violence and their interdisciplinary intellectual histories in order to practice methods of critical analysis while reflecting on the interrelations between power, consciousness, culture, and society. This term, we will begin with the canonical master-slave dialectic from G.W.F. Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit before tracing its intellectual history as represented in excerpts by Karl Marx and Simone de Beauvoir. In probing this legacy, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and Glen Coulthard will facilitate our critical appraisal of the “politics of recognition” and the case for violent revolt against colonial and racist domination. Comparing Walter Benjamin’s, Judith Butler’s, and Hannah Arendt’s perspectives on state authorized violence will serve as background for our consideration of Michel Foucault’s model of disciplinary power as an attempt to counteract an over-emphasis on the sovereign state in sociopolitical theory. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric will illuminate racialization and its attendant humiliations in everyday life and the public sphere while Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees will shed light on the traumatic aftereffects of a war that precipitated partition. The course will conclude with Adania Shibli’s A Minor Detail in order to reflect on representations of perpetrators and victims in the context of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

In this course we will be exploring how Indigenous writers are using cities to centre contemporary Indigenous identity. This course will focus on how Indigenous writers are pushing back against Western stereotyping, and colonial discourse around Indigeneity in urban centres and how in doing so Indigenous communities are building cultural institutions, history, language, and creating new opportunities for future Indigenous narratives. Readings will include work from Kyle Edwards, Conor Kerr, katherena vermette, Billy-Ray Belcourt and others.

This course considers kinship and corporeality in three popular genres: nature writing (how do you write the land?), autobiography (how do you write a life?), and erotica (how do you write decolonial love?). We will learn the conventions of these genres to explore what they bring into focus and how Indigenous writers use, adapt, or challenge them. We will especially consider how to read between genres to help attune ourselves to the expansive ways that Indigenous writers imagine and embody kinship.

The course will be organized around three units, each containing one primary case study paired with supplementary readings that may include academic articles, personal essays, poems, stories, and videos. Our case studies will be Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s nonfiction book Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the World Ahead, Mini Aodla Freeman’s autobiography Life Among the Qallunaat, and Billy-Ray Belcourt’s short story collection Coexistence.

This course focuses on Indigenous resurgence as it is expressed through drama, theatre, and performance-based practices. Course materials are a combination of critical theory, play texts, and recorded media that meet at the intersection of Indigenous politics and theatrical praxis. 

This course examines the status of the nation and nationalism for the contemporary Irish writer.  Reading the work of both Protestant and Catholic writers, as well writers from the North and the Republic, this course will analyze what Conor Cruise O’Brien has polemically referred to as the “unhealthy intersection” of art and politics.  Specifically, we will survey both late-Modern and contemporary work that self-consciously debates the efficacy and end of nationalism as a cultural and political force. Beginning with the movement known as cultural nationalism, and progressing through W.B. Yeats’s explicit mobilization of poetry within partisan debates, we will read the work of both well and lesser-known figures like Donagh MacDonagh, Claire Keegan, Seamus Heaney, James Joyce, and Elizabeth Bowen. Our discussion will draw on the theoretical debates that shape the study of Irish writing, and essays by prominent critics Luke Gibbons, Claire Connolly, and Terry Eagleton will help us formulate insights regarding the place of literature within modern and contemporary Ireland.

An examination of contemporary Middle Eastern writing in English with attention to critical theory and relevant cultural contexts.

This course examines a range of literature – novels, short stories, and autofiction – by diasporic writers searching to understand their identity and history in the world. Such writers often represent stories that relay what scholars have called “diasporic consciousness,” the shared memory of historical displacement and trauma, solidarity and struggle. The diasporic writer who faces this history grapples with how to represent those unresolved losses and the larger experience of dispossession. While the word “diaspora” originally references the expulsion of Jews from Palestine in 586 BC, its meaning today refers to the scattering of a people, and so both the involuntary and voluntary movement of a people from their ancestral home. We might think of the African diaspora in the Caribbean, the U.S., and Canada, the legacy of African slavery across the Atlantic, or, more recently, the plight of people fleeing war in Iraq, or civil turmoil in Haiti, as well as the economic opportunities propelling arrivants to settle in new places like Canada and the U.S..  

Looking across a range of contexts (the Caribbean; India; Iraq; Nigeria; the U.S.; Vietnam), we will investigate how diasporic writers represent their complex history and identity. We will examine how writers bear witness not just to their own life stories, but to the larger experience of trauma. How can such histories be told? What is the role of fiction and autofiction in collective history-making that both tells and complicates stories of a diaspora?

Possible texts:
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy (1990)
Anita Rau Badami, Can the Nightbird Sing? (2006)
Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth (2008)
Teju Cole, Tremor (2019)
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We are Briefly Gorgeous (2019)
Edwidge Danticat, Everything Inside: Stories (2019)
Hassan Blasim, God 99 (2020)
Sinan Antoon, The Book of Collateral Damage (2019)

The spectacle of England as a nation on the rise set the stage for an outpouring of new voices, ideas, and literary genre in the early seventeenth century. Just decades later, such political, religious, and literary experimentation seems to have imploded into revolution. This course will survey the literary innovators, men and women, of the first eight decades across a range of genres, including drama, lyric, devotional writing, and epic. We will begin with the Jacobean inheritors of the Elizabethan golden age—chiefly Shakespeare, Jonson, and Donne—before examining the controversial prose of religious and political upheaval leading to the English Civil Wars. Central to our interest is how literary genre and form respond with historical specificity. We will thus consider cavalier poetry, women’s literary friendship, and the poetry of retirement alongside the literature of dissent that culminates with Milton’s Paradise Lost and the early Restoration. Students may expect a moderate reading load, regular contributions to a commonplace book, a critical essay, and an in-person final exam.

This course will provide an introduction to a fascinating and often neglected period, the eighteenth century. We will study a range of texts, trying to understand the period on its own terms. What forms and genres dominated the period? How do these forms and genres change, and what is at stake in those changes? How do writers of the period deal with their inheritance from the past, and how do they look forward to the future? How do writers engage with the complex politics of the period, including the developing British Empire and the loss of most of Britain’s American colonies to revolution? This was a period of great prosperity and economic growth in the British Isles and its colonies, but that wealth was, of course, unevenly distributed and depended heavily on some ethically horrifying activities, such as the exploitation of the poor and the labouring classes, the violent theft of land and resources from Indigenous peoples, and the sale and labour of enslaved people; English-speaking writers and readers had to grapple with these issues as they represented and thought about their world. This is also a period in which women came to play an increasingly important role in public literary and political discourse (they were central, for example, to the development of the novel as a major literary form), and we will read some important texts by (and about) women.

major cultural, social, and aesthetic movements of the Victorian era (1837-1901). Our investigations open with the double question, “Who were the Victorians and how did they conceive of themselves?” and move on to query some of the assumptions that motivate that question. We will concern ourselves with central issues of the period as represented in a few novels and poems. Perhaps more than any other tension or aspiration generated by the development of industrialization—concerns about “women’s place,” apprehensions about a decline in Christian faith in the wake of Darwinian evolution, fears about racial contamination in the rapacious expansion of empire—the ongoing antagonism between an emerging proletariat and an increasingly entitled bourgeoisie has come to have especially profound resonance in our understanding of who the Victorians were. Class, gender, race, history, and form (what is poetry? what is the novel?) will therefore be central to our discussions. 

Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son [1848] (Oxford) 
George Eliot, Adam Bede [1859] (Broadview) 
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret [1862] (Broadview) 

Since the 2010s YA literature and media, especially material produced in English, has boomed in popularity and proven to be highly profitable for some book publishers, and streaming companies like Netflix and Amazon. Aimed at a target audience of teenagers and young adults, some content also crosses generations reaching a more heterogeneous audience.  Meanwhile, fandoms for successful TV shows and books not only suggest how and why YA matters to those who consume it, but evidence how fans help to circulate content across media, markets and languages. What then, does it mean to conceptualize YA as representing and constitutive of “youth cultures”?  Whose youth and whose cultures are centred in our understandings of adolescence and adulthood?  How does YA show under-represented readers that they have a place in the world? Why are YA texts, especially graphic books by racialized authors and those with 2SLGBTQIA+ themes so often the focus of book challenges and censorship in Alberta and beyond? In this course, we will pursue these questions, and we will investigate how YA literature and culture is produced, circulated and received within the contemporary transmedia environment. We will read theory, analyze specific texts (literature, TV and film) and critically consider the media industries, technologies and ideologies that support – and undermine - twenty-first-century YA. In its methodologies, this course combines approaches from book history, cultural studies and literary studies.  

Unit 1: Theorizing “youth”; Unit 2: Representation Matters; Unit 3: YA as /and Transmedia.

Teaching and Learning: There will be a mix of delivery methods, including lectures, small group work in class, and plenary discussions.  

Exact assignments to be confirmed, but will include: graded and ungraded writing; a research output; a team challenge.

Provisional list of course materials:

Primary texts will include: a YA novel (ideally by a Canadian author); a banned YA book; a TV show or film; a transmedia text (Heartstopper).

Other readings will include extracts from:

Alt.Kid.Lit: What Children’s Literature Might Be. (2024) edited by Kenneth B Kidd and Derritt Mason.
Banned Together: Our Fight for Readers’ Rights. (2025) edited by Ashley Hope Perez. Illustrated by Debbie Fong.
YA Anthologies: Amplifying Voices, Building Community. (2024) Melanie Ramdarshan Bold.
YA Literature: Transmedia Transformations. (2023). Sarah Mygind.

This course will introduce students to a variety of literary and cultural representations of queer and trans identities from varied locations of local, transnational and diasporic as well as nationalist orientations. Through our study of diverse primary texts across genres and media we will consider how different cultural iterations raise unexpected issues of gender and sexuality enmeshed with the exigencies of race, class, religion, nationalism, and caste. This course will also lead students to sharpen their comprehension of queer and trans political formations by engaging with emergent as well as landmark debates in relevant scholarly works. For instance, we will respond to critiques of how the very categories of “queer” and “trans” travel to the Global South and what contestations arise, how colonial ideas still circulate in insidious ways, and what it means to decolonize modes of empowerment that centre whiteness and other forms of dominance. Moreover, we will consider how we may apply extant theoretical ideas and models to our readings of literary and cultural texts to examine how differently placed queer and trans subjects speak back to, enact complicities with, and even transform structures of power. 

Probable primary texts and films you may expect in this course:

Joyland (2022) directed by Saim Sadiq
You Exist Too Much (2021) by Zaina Arafat
Apsara Engine (2020) by Bishakh Som
Felix Ever After (2020) by Kacen Callender
Moonlight (2016) directed by Barry Jenkins
Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria (2005) directed by Victor Silverman and Susan Stryker
Myself Mona Ahmed (2001) by Mona Ahmed and Dayanita Singh
Gold by the Inch (1998) by Lawrence Chua
Giovanni’s Room (1956) by James Baldwin

Comic bans are back in the Canadian news in the wake of the Alberta Provincial government’s attempt in July 2025 to order school boards to “remove” books with what it refers to as explicit images of sexual acts. Although the Alberta government stepped back its ban to centre on only “visual” depictions after the Edmonton public school board listed more than 200 books slated for banning, the Premier of Alberta insisted that four comics, three of them graphic memoirs, are examples of what are not appropriate material in Alberta schools.

But banning comics is nothing new. The history of comics worldwide includes banning and censorship as factors that influence how comics were and are made and circulated. In this course, we move from this pivotal moment in Alberta history to learn about the specific history of banning comics in Canada and the United States, from Frederic Wertham’s “scientific” conclusions about comics that led to the Comics Code Authority policies, to the mass burning of comic books across Canada and the United States in the 1950s, to the rise of alternative comics in response to censorship, to the attempts to ban queer and trans comics from entering Canada, to the rise of right-wing interest groups and their attempts in comics challenges to keep children and teens from seeing comics about Indigenous history, sexual and mental health and the life stories of queer and trans people.

We are going to learn comics history and theories of censorship along the way. And of course, we are going to read some censored and/or banned comics too. Should there be censorship at all? Why are comics so threatening to so many people? Who gets to decide what children should read? This course will answer these questions and open up new avenues for understanding what censorship is, and how it works.

English has a long history, which begins in the British Isles soon after the fall of the Roman Empire and still continues across the world. It also has a long prehistory: its earliest reconstructable ancestor was spoken in an area somewhere in the region of the Black and Caspian seas about five thousand years ago. This course will introduce the story of the English language. We will consider the development of the English language from its prehistoric roots to modern times. We will learn to use the Oxford English Dictionary to explore the history of English and consider the influence of women on the history of English. Students will also be exposed to samples of historical varieties of English.

Topics covered may include how the prehistory of English was discovered and reconstructed; how language develops historically; the ancient and persistent influence of the Roman Empire and its Latin on English; why the Celts on the British Isles influenced English only minimally; how the Viking invasion and the resulting Danelaw changed English; the impact of the Norman knights on English after their invasion in 1066 and why this branch of Vikings spoke French; political power and language change; how the printing press changed English; sound changes in language such as the Great Vowel Shift; Samuel Johnson, Noah Webster, and the influence of their dictionaries on English; grammarians and prescriptivism; approaches to the politics of language; the influence of women on the history of English; and Canadian English.

TBD

This lecture course will explore the conflation of erotic and divine love in medieval literature, with a special focus on love’s role in intellectual and moral development. We will examine influential European stories and texts in modern translation alongside medieval English texts, drawing on readings from Arthurian romance (Chrétien de Troyes, Marie de France, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), selections from Petrarch’s Canzoniere and Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio, and religious mysticism, before turning to several tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. These texts span a huge range of genres, place, and time, but are united by conceptions of courtly love, free will, religious devotion, chivalric honour, destabilized masculinity and femininity, and social satire. We will be reading mostly in modern English translation, apart from the Middle English of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. 

Note: This section is not suitable for students who took ENGL 327 in Fall 2025. Enrolment: up to 60 students.

This course will focus on the class politics of Shakespeare’s drama. Shakespeare’s England was a highly stratified society which ranged from the sovereign down to the lowliest agricultural labourers. Elite political commentators attempted to justify this culture of ‘degree’ by claiming that some persons were the greater beneficiaries of ‘nature’s light’ and therefore more ‘excellent’ than others. By this logic, some were entitled to rule over others. The class structure also derived from the Roman past and more immediately feudal culture, which allowed some persons to treat others as their property. The culture thus bestowed on some persons rights and privileges withheld from others (with these rights ranging from what one might wear to the authority one might wield in local offices). Even writing for the stage was regarded as an activity for some, not for all. This is why Shakespeare was notoriously denounced (as a man without a university degree) as an ‘upstart crow’ who dared to write for the stage. In our investigation of the Shakespearean drama’s strong interest in issues of class, we will study four plays that take us across the full range of Shakespeare’s career in writing for the stage, starting with the very early Comedy of Errors and ending with Shakespeare’s very last tragedy, Coriolanus. As we will see, the question of ‘class’ is very hard to disentangle from the question of how women were treated in early modern English culture. We will investigate how Shakespeare’s plays represent resistance, sometimes subtle and sometimes explicit, to the multi-faceted power dynamics of class and class prerogatives, and how they envision a more just and equitable society.

This course will concentrate on British women’s writing during the eighteenth century. The disruption and chaos of civil war and political and social turmoil in the seventeenth century opened up cultural space for new voices, new ideas, new stories, new freedoms, and new anxieties. Writing of the early part of this period, in particular, is characterised by a willingness to experiment and take risks. But, of course, the risks for women were rather different, and often more serious, than they were for men. We will consider women’s understanding of their position in the world during this period––as women, as members of communities, as readers, and as writers; their hopes, anxieties, and frustrations with marriage, motherhood, and domestic life; their wrestling with love and sexual desire; their engagement with politics and public life; their relationship to their bodies through experience of disease, pregnancy, and aging; and, through it all, their willingness to experiment with form and to participate fully in the world and in the literary culture of their time.

In 1856, George Eliot wrote an essay complaining about “silly novels by lady novelists,” arguing that “in novel-writing there are no barriers for incapacity to stumble against, no external criteria to prevent a writer from mistaking foolish facility for mastery.” Many of her fellow women writers, Eliot observed, did not take their work seriously enough, filling their pages with clichéd plots, “the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic.” Against this humbug, she believed that novel-writing was one of the few opportunities for Victorian women to assert their ideas on morality, philosophy, politics, and economics and insisted “that women can produce novels not only fine, but among the very finest—novels, too, that have a precious speciality, lying quite apart from masculine aptitudes and experience.”

This course examines the dynamic relationship between women writers, the novel, and the literary marketplace. We’ll explore how individual authors use the genre to question, critique, and in some cases, support the range of opportunities available for women within the dominant ideologies of gender and capital. 

Tentative Texts

Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey (1817)
Bronte, Anne. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre (1847)
Broughton, Rhoda. Cometh Up as a Flower (1868)
Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South (1855)
Grand, Sarah. The Beth Book (1897)
Schreiner, Olive. The Story of an African Farm (1883)

When in early winter 2026 the United States under Donald Trump invaded Venezuela and menaced Greenland, the naked display of imperial power serving extractive desire (for oil and minerals) restaged a well-worn drama all too familiar from US social, cultural, and political history. This course will offer students an opportunity to explore earlier versions of this drama as depicted in literary texts from the US long nineteenth century. We will consider episodes in the rise of extractive empire across five fictional narratives: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, from 1850, about whale oil pasts and futures; John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, from 1854, about gold mining, border politics, and Native American removal; Rebecca Harding Davis’ “Life in the Iron-Mills,” from 1860, about coal-fired industry; Martin Delaney’s Blake; or the Huts of America, from 1859-1862, about hemispheric resistance to slavery’s circuitry; and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, from 1905, about petroculture and finance.

This course examines the cultural and literary mo(ve)ment of Modernism through engagement with its infamous, avant-garde “little magazines.” Emphasizing the diversity of aesthetic, philosophical, and political positions represented in these periodicals, this iteration of ENGL 363 explores how Modernism emerged not as a single unified movement but as a constellation of distinct and sometimes competing ‘modernisms’ shaped by specific editors, writers, readers, and publishing networks. Working with the Modernist Journals Project website and other digital resources, students will analyze and research such magazines as The New Age, BLAST, The Little Review, The Crisis, Crucible, and Booster/Delta. Recognizable figures in Modernism emerge from these pages, including A.R. Orage, Ezra Pound, H. D., Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, Langston Hughes, W. E. B. du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Hilda and Laura Ridley, Ralph Gustafson, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, and Lawrence Durrell. Scholarly readings will contextualize each magazine within the fields of periodical studies and the New Modernist Studies, while the magazines themselves illustrate a variety of modernisms including high and low, early and late, British, American, Canadian, Black, feminist, anarchist, socialist, and mystical. In our present moment, when power, politics, and social justice are widely negotiated through social media, students may be surprised to find striking parallels between their own digital cultures and the editorial experiments of writers and publishers working nearly a century ago.

A consideration of literature's role in and responses to settler colonialism; material includes both pre- and post-1900 texts.

Children’s books are easy. Simple vocabulary, straightforward plots, colourful pictures, and happy endings. Right? Well….

In this course, we will read a broad variety of picture books and children’s books from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, asking if we really know children’s literature as well as we think we do. We will read a mixture of classic, popular, and obscure texts, testing how far the boundaries of this genre can stretch. Through theoretical readings, analytic and reflective writing, and exploratory and creative engagements with texts for young people, we will examine what exactly we mean when we talk about books “for children.”

This course explores how health, illness, medicine and the body are depicted and explored in literature such as novels and memoirs. Texts will cover topics such as patient experiences, medical practice, and what it means to be healthy or well in contemporary culture. Beginning with Kaitlin B. Curtice’s text, our discussions will, with the assistance of critical texts and theories, examine how normalcy and diagnostics, institutional and agential power, medical ethics and human suffering, etc. are grounded in cultural and social ideologies that result in power asymmetries; they are then reimagined through the power of critical and subversive storytelling.

Margaret Atwood. Oryx and Crake (2009; novel)
Boum, The Jellyfish (2024; graphic memoir)
Boyer, Anne. The Undying (2019; memoir)
Chacaby, Ma-Nee. “Two-Spirit Journey: Healing Through Story.” Indigenous Medicine Stories. (pod-cast; nd)
Curtice, Kaitlin B. Everything Is a Story: Reclaiming the Power of Stories to Heal and Shape Our Lives. (2025; available online in library catalogue)
Anne DeForest. A History of Present Illness. (2024; novel)
Mortimer, Maddie. Maps of our Spectacular Bodies (2022; novel)

In Histories of the Book, students will explore the many ways in which books are and have been produced, read, collected, borrowed, sold, destroyed, adapted, stolen, digitized, and more. The central question for this course is: How have humans throughout history interacted with books and bookish objects or text-adjacent materials? Students will be asked to consider how books influence—and have been influenced by—authorship, reading habits and abilities, and the ever-changing publishing industry. From cuneiform tablets, scrolls, and hand-copied medieval manuscripts to the invention of the printing press and mass production to contemporary digital publishing, books and reading have adapted to new technologies and, in turn, influenced the development of new technologies as well.

This course introduces students to book history, which is an interdisciplinary field that draws methods and theories from media studies, literary studies, history, information studies, communication, and digital humanities. Book history is also intrinsically linked to other disciplines such as disability studies, political science, and sociology through topics such as accessible book formats, book banning and burning, and bookish communities. These themes will run throughout the course and be considered in different temporal, political, and geographical contexts.