300 Level English

Courses at the 300 level focus predominantly on historical periods and national literatures, with some foregrounding genre or cultural categories. These courses tend to survey their topics, engaging them by means of broad coverage.

Please consult the University Calendar for a full listing of our ENGL courses, not all of which are offered in a given year. Our department also offers Film Studies and Creative Writing courses.

Fall 2024

ENGL 300 LEC A1:Social and Cultural History of the English Language

ENGL 301 LEC A1: Topics in Genre
M. Bucknor

ENGL 301 LEC A2: Topics in Genre
C. Bracken

ENGL 302 LEC A1: Topics in Literary and Critical Theory
K. Ball

ENGL 308 LEC A1: Topics in Indigenous Literature

ENGL 308 LEC A2: Topics in Indigenous Literature

ENGL 311 LEC A1: Topics in Postcolonial Literature
O.Okome

ENGL 314 LEC A1: Irish Writing in English
R. Brazeau

ENGL 315 LEC A1: South Asian Writing in English
L. Harrington

On this course we will cover a broad range of literature from South Asia, both geographically and historically. We will begin by tracing some key issues around language and indigenous traditions before examining the Progressive Writers' Movement and Partition literature. Our focus will then move to thematic issues informed by the methodologies of postcolonial literary practice, including gender and the nation, representing the subaltern, migration and diaspora, and the concept of New India. 

ENGL 337 LEC A1: Topics in Early Modern Literature
C. Sale

ENGL 341 LEC A1: Eighteenth Century Literature

ENGL 397 LEC A1: History of the Book

winter 2025

ENGL 307 LEC B1: Métis Literature
M. Dumont

ENGL 308 LEC B1: Topics in Indigenous Literature
C. Bracken

ENGL 310 LEC B1: Postcolonial Literature
T. Tomsky

ENGL 325 LEC B1: Medieval Literature

ENGL 336 LEC B1: Sixteenth-Century Literature

ENGL 339 LEC B1: Shakespeare
C. Sale

ENGL 352 LEC B1: Nineteenth-Century British Literature
P. Sinnema

Through a selective reading of literary texts, this course attempts to gain some understanding of 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.

ENGL 357 LEC B1: Topics in American Studies
M. Simpson

ENGL 363 LEC B1: Modernist Literature
R. Brazeau

ENGL 372 LEC B1: Publishing Canadian Literature
D. Fuller

How is Canadian literature printed, marketed and sold? How is the digital revolution affecting what we read? How has the world of publishing shaping what we read? Study Canadian publishing, and learn about censorship, scandals, corporate mergers, radical presses, book design, running a bookstore, the world of editing…and more! In this course, students will read four Canadian books: a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, and literary and popular texts. There will also be required readings that are variously historical, cultural and theoretical in style.  Each of the four Canadian books will also be a case study text that we will contextualise and examine as an illustration of an aspect of Canadian publishing, namely: Unit 1: Publishing, Unit 2: Selling, Unit 3: Reception and Unit 4: Circulation.  

Primary Texts/4 Case Study Texts

L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (1908) (find your own edition)

Louise Penny, Bury Your Dead (2010)

TBA: a Canada Reads 2025 book

Mini Aodla Freeman, Life Among the Qallunaat (2015)

Secondary materials will include: scholarly articles about Canadian publishing and book history; BookNet Canada and other industry research materials (including podcasts); expert visits (in person and virtual) from industry professionals and scholars.

Delivery: Classes will include various ways of learning such as lectures, seminar-style discussion, in-class small group work and independent research. 

Assessment will include short, written assignments based on research tasks, a team presentation and a research essay. 

ENGL 380 LEC B1: Writing from here
S. Krotz

ENGL 388 LEC B1: Children’s Literature

ENGL 391 LEC B1: Topics in Women’s Writing
Women writers and detective fiction
C. Devereux

In this course we will consider how women writers have worked within and have shaped the genres of detective fiction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on works in which women detectives solve the crimes. We will read texts from a range of categories of detective fiction, including the classic whodunit, cozy crime, hard-boiled or noir, police procedural, Nordic noir and Indigenous crime fiction. We will also look at some adaptations of novels and stories for film or television. With gender ideology and representation as a central concern, we will consider what characterizes the crimes, the detectives, the processes and the social and cultural structures within which women detectives are represented as working. Students will have the opportunity to read beyond the course texts for assignments that may include presentations, reports, and book and film reviews, as well as essays. 

ENGL 398 LEC B1: Histories of Reading
D. Fuller

What is the history of reading?  What is the difference between an ‘ideal’ reader and an actual reader? How is the history of print reading part of the history of colonization?  What does it mean to be a reader in the twenty-first century? This course is an introduction to the history of reading in North America and Western Europe.  It is not a traditional literary text-based course since it engages with scholarship and methods from reading studies, cultural studies and book history, but no prior knowledge of these fields is required.  We will use a variety of historical and contemporary case studies, artefacts, online resources and secondary texts (historical and theoretical) to explore the different ways that readers have acted in different geographical places and at different times in history.  The aim of the course is to provide students not only with some knowledge of the history of readers and reading, but also with a vocabulary and with conceptual frameworks that they can use to think and write critically about different cultures and practices of reading. 

The course consists of four sections: Unit 1:  What is the history of reading?; Unit 2: Theories of Readers and Reading: From ‘Ideal’ readers to Fans; Unit 3: Exploring the Reading Experience and Evidence of Reading: Communities of readers and Individual readers; Unit 4: Making Readers in the 21st century.

Classes will combine a range of teaching and learning activities including mini-lectures and lectures, “labs”; small group work, and plenary discussions.  Students will prepare by reading a selection of secondary material some of which will be historical, at other times, theoretical.  There will also be some hands-on ‘field work’ tasks often during the “labs” (e.g. experimenting with the Reading Experience Database; recording your own reading history).

Readings will include:

Selections from: Shafquat Towheed, Rosalind Crone, Katherine Halsey (eds.) The History of Reading: A Reader (2010)

Online Resources to be consulted include:

The Reading Experience Database (Open U, UK)

WHAT MIDDLETOWN READ project (www.bsu.edu/libraries/wmr) (USA)

Memories of Fiction Project (UK)

Previous Offerings

2023-24 Fall and Winter Term Courses
2022-23 Fall and Winter Term Courses

Home | About Us | People | Research | Programs | Courses | Student Groups | Meet Our Alumni