English Department

This course introduces students to the critical tools and methods of literary study, including close reading and argumentative writing. Students will learn about the history of genres (e.g. poetry, drama, and the novel) and forms of literature (e.g. tragedy, realism). Texts may include the earliest writing in English to more recent works in various media. Credit will be granted for only one of ENGL 100, ENGL 110 or ENGL 111/112. Restricted to students in the Humanities Colloquium. Six credits.

This course provides students with the key skills needed to succeed at university. You will learn how to write argumentatively; how to build a question or problem from a close-reading of a literary work; how to develop that argument by presenting and analyzing evidence; how to engage in scholarly debate; how to do university-level research. Credit will be granted for only one of ENGL 111, 100 or 110. Three credits.

This course will examine the history of speculative literature, including the relationship between science and narrative, the rise of ethnic science fiction and fantasy, and ways in which the future and the past might be imagined. Prerequisite: ENGL 100 or 111 or equivalent. Three credits.

This course will consider how modern culture, from the eighteenth century to the present, imagines sex and love. Readings will involve stories of happy and unhappy love, impossible love, unrealized love, sexual fantasies, desire and its frustration. Material covered will range from major modern novels addressed to the complexities of sexuality and desire, to recent film and television. Prerequisite: ENGL 100 or 111 or equivalent. Three credits.

Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear examine how the desire to know the truth leads to tragedy. Who killed old King Hamlet? Is my wife having an affair? Which of my daughters loves me most? How does one dispel the desire for vengeance over one’s oppressors? One never discovers the truth, so one acts blindly, which brings unbearable suffering. But suffering brings insight: the reader is instructed how to live with patience and equanimity. Prerequisite: ENGL 100 or 111 or equivalent. Three credits.

This course builds on the skills acquired in first year English. We will broaden our understanding of what literature is and how it works. We will develop our abilities to see how different approaches to texts allow us to understand their formal, gendered, historical, political, psychological, racial and sociological impacts. We will expand our practical skills by: enlarging our critical vocabularies; sharpening our argumentative writing abilities; and increasing our proficiency with sources and databases. Prerequisite: ENGL 100 or 111 or equivalent. Three credits.

Horror is closely connected to science fiction and fantasy. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the founding text of science fiction, but its central monster belongs generically to horror. In this course, we will discuss horror’s evolution, the reasons some people love scary stories while others avoid them, and how horror functions as a genre. The course will contain texts that some students may find disturbing, including violence. Prerequisite: ENGL 100 or 111 or equivalent. Three credits.

This course will consider the rich literature of the Atlantic region with particular focus on the many and diverse voices (including African Nova Scotian, Mi’kmaw, Scottish and Irish Gaelic, and Acadian in translation) emerging in the post-Centennial era of Atlantic Canada. Various genres including poetry, novels and short story along with art and film will be encountered. Prerequisite: ENGL 100 or 111 or equivalent. Three credits.

This course introduces students to current debates about television and its role in contemporary culture. We will emphasize the manner in which programs develop narratives (episodically, serially, in story arcs) and the manner in which they are received (weekly, binge watching). Subscription fees for online content providers may be required. Credit will be granted for only one of ENGL 258 or ENGL 297 offered in 2016-2017. Prerequisite: ENGL 100 or 111 or equivalent. Three credits.

What makes gender meaningful and what has literature got to do with it? How do literary works and other cultural texts (film, television, music, social media) represent and / or transform gender in a given time and place? What can such works tell us about how gender is imagined, experienced, circulated, challenged? This course will address these questions by studying selected texts in the context of historically specific understandings of masculinity, femininity and non-binary identities. Cross-listed as WMGS 259. Prerequisite: ENGL 100 or 111 or equivalent. Three credits.

Students are introduced to the techniques of writing creatively in the genres of poetry, short stories, drama, etc. Prerequisite: ENGL 100 or 111 or equivalent. Three credits.

What defines individualism? How does one become self-reliant? Is selfishness inherently wrong? What do I owe society and what can it demand of me? How are group attachments – national, racial, gendered – formed and maintained? These are questions that novelists, poets, and essayists take up with intensity. This course examines why everyone – from Joe Biden to Donald Trump to philosophers to political pundits – turn to literary works for answers to how best to organize ourselves. Prerequisite: ENGL 100 or 111 or equivalent. Three credits.

The short story is the literary form that has arguably won Canadian Literature the highest sustained international recognition both critically and popularly. This course will engage in in-depth analysis of profound expressions of the construction of the self (or selves) in the modern world. Various voices and narrative modes in dialogue with such questions will be encountered, arising in works from writers of diverse backgrounds and social strata. Prerequisite: ENGL 100 or 111 or equivalent. Three credits.

This course will provide students with an introduction to contemporary African American, Asian American, Native American and Indigenous, and Latino/a literatures in the U.S. The course will frame the literary material with examinations of current debates (and their historical antecedents) regarding race, racism, race and culture, and the politics of multiethnic literatures, and race in the age of neoliberal diversity management and multiculturalism. Prerequisite: ENGL 100 or 111 or equivalent. Three credits.

The topic for 2024-2025 is Life/Stories. A survey of 18th-century life-writing including biography, criminal biography, autobiography, spiritual autobiography, mock life writings, as well as contemporary life-writing theory, and the form’s relation to the burgeoning novel genre. The desire to understand human uniqueness and one’s place in the world drives life-writing to explore and explain exterior and interior lives. Johnson’s Life of Savage, Fielding’s The Female Husband, The Narrative of Charlotte Charke, and Defoe’s novel, Moll Flanders may be studied. Prerequisite: ENGL 100 or 111 or equivalent. Three credits.

Three credits.

This course will consider the evolution of film noir, focusing on the classic period of film noir, the 1940s and 1950s, and the crime films from this period that have come to be seen as defining film noir. Class discussions will also address the hard-boiled crime fiction of the mid-twentieth century that was intrinsic to the development of the noir aesthetic, as well as later developments of noir cinema. Prerequisite: 9 credits ENGL. Three credits.

This course introduces students to current directions and interests in literary and cultural criticism, including eco-criticism, theories of film and visual culture, gender and sexuality, psychology, and digital culture. Besides reading relevant theoretical texts, we’ll examine works of contemporary television and film, literary texts, and contemporary music. Credit will be granted for only one of ENGL 314 or ENGL 445. Prerequisite: 9 credits of ENGL; ENGL 215 recommended. Three credits.

Students will be expected to choose one genre through which they will continue to explore and develop the basic elements of creative writing in ENGL 231. Prerequisite: ENGL 100, 111 or equivalent; three credits creative writing (ENGL 267 or equivalent). Three credits.

From hot-headed heroes to terrifying monsters and death-tales, this course will examine topics and texts from medieval Irish literary tradition in detail. Credit will be granted for only one of ENGL 327 or CELT 221. Cross-listed as CELT 327. Three credits. Not offered 2024-2025.

The afterlife of slavery, Saidiya Hartman argues, is not freedom. However longed for, however storied, freedom is still a promise, still to come. How does this structure of the aftermath manifest in 21st century novels about slavery and other forms of unfreedom? How do writers reckon with “the past that is not past”? How can we think about contemporary anti-Blackness—surveillance, Black Lives Matter, the policing of the pandemic—through the lens of slavery’s afterlives? Prerequisite: 9 credits of ENGL. Three credits.

“Against Modernity.” This course will read works by Tolkien and C. S. Lewis alongside non-Inkling writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, tracking fantasy’s response to modern life, including social change, total war, and environmental concerns. Prerequisites: 9 credits ENGL. Three credits.

The libertine is the Restoration’s bad boy and its cultural icon. This course explores the character and philosophy of the libertine as depicted in several Restoration plays, and modelled on the real-life Earl of Rochester. Womanizer, drunkard, poet, wit, and master of masquerade, the libertine embodies the attractive and repulsive aspects of masculinity. Plays include Wycherley’s The Country Wife, Shadwell’s Libertine, Etherege’s Man of Mode, Behn’s The Rover, and the movie, The Libertine. Prerequisite: 9 credits ENGL. Three credits.

The topic for 2024-2025 is Personhood and Privacy. See ENGL 491 for course information. Prerequisite: 9 credits ENGL. Three credits.

The topic for 2024-2025 is Music and Modern Literature. See ENGL 492 for course information. Prerequisite: 9 credits ENGL. Three credits.

Honours students write a thesis under the supervision of a faculty thesis director. Students must meet the thesis director in March of the junior year to prepare a topic. Honours students must register for the thesis as a six-credit course in their senior year. The thesis must be submitted no later than March 31 of the senior year. See chapter 4. Six credits.

The topic for 2024-2025 is Personhood and Privacy. In this course, we will bring contemporary legal theory into conversation with literary texts to examine the ways in which the juridical and the literary help bring the entanglements involved in defining a privacy interest into focus. Novels provide a particularly useful technology for thinking through problems of privacy given the genre’s ability to represent interiority in all its sociocognitive complexity. We will examine what constitutes personhood address the thorny legal problems associated with personal privacy. Prerequisites: third-year standing and 15 credits ENGL. Three credits.

The topic for 2024-2025 is Music and Modern Literature: From 1861 to The Doors. This course examines the relationship between music and literature that develops from the second half of the nineteenth century, in particular with the advent of Wagnerism and the repercussions of Wagner’s work in the nineteenth century and beyond. We will address the perceived challenge to literature posed by music in this period-one that is both aesthetic and political. Prerequisites: third-year standing and 15 credits English. Three credits.

Advanced major students write a thesis as part of the senior seminar. See chapter 4. No credit.