An exploration of the many intersections between the worlds of literature and science. The focus will be on classic and contemporary works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and drama that have illuminated, borrowed from or been inspired by the major discoveries and growing cultural significance of the scientific enterprise.

A focused introduction to the writing of poetry. This course will enable students to explore the writing of poetry through reading, discussion, and workshop sessions.

A focused introduction to the writing of fiction. This course will enable students to explore the writing of short fiction through reading, discussion, and workshop sessions.

A focused introduction to the writing of creative non-fiction. This course will enable students to explore the writing of creative non-fiction through reading, discussion, and workshop sessions.

Building on the fundamental critical writing skills students have already mastered in English A02, English B72 is designed to advance students' critical thinking and writing skills in response to a wide range of literary texts and genres. In this context, students will learn how to compose, develop, and organize sophisticated arguments; how to integrate and engage with critical sources; and how to polish their writing craft. Ultimately, students will become more confident in their writing voices and growing abilities.

An interdisciplinary exploration of the body in art, film, photography, narrative and popular culture. This course will consider how bodies are written or visualized as "feminine" or "masculine", as heroic, as representing normality or perversity, beauty or monstrosity, legitimacy or illegitimacy, nature or culture.

This course explores the creative, interpretive, social, and political effects of our interactions and experiments with digital forms of literature: novels, short stories, plays, and poems, but also video games, online fan fiction, social media posts, and other texts typically excluded from the category of the "literary." The course attends both to texts written before the digital turn and later digitized, as well as to "born-digital" texts. It surveys the history of shifts within the media landscape - from oral to written, from manuscript to print, from print to digital. Over the course of the semesters, we will explore a variety of questions about digital literary culture, including: How does a text's medium - oral, manuscript, print and/or digital - affect its production, transmission, and reception? How do writers harness, narrate, and depict the use of digital technologies? How does digital textuality challenge earlier conceptions of "literature"? How does digitization shape our work as readers and critics? By reading "traditional" literary forms alongside newer ones, we will investigate how the digital age impacts literature, and how literature helps us grapple with the implications of our digitized world.

An examination of three or more Canadian writers. This course will draw together selected major writers of Canadian fiction or of other forms. Topics vary from year to year and might include a focused study of major women writers; major racialized and ethnicized writers such as African-Canadian or Indigenous writers; major writers of a particular regional or urban location or of a specific literary period.

An analysis of Canadian fiction with regard to the problems of representation. Topics considered may include how Canadian fiction writers have responded to and documented the local; social rupture and historical trauma; and the problematics of representation for marginalized societies, groups, and identities.

An introduction to the craft of screenwriting undertaken through discussions, readings, and workshop sessions.

This course is a creative investigation into how, through experimentation, we can change poetry, and how, through poetry, we can change the world. Our explorations are undertaken through writing assignments, discussions, readings, and workshop sessions.

An introduction to the writing of comics undertaken through discussions, readings, and workshop sessions.

A study of major Canadian playwrights with an emphasis on the creation of a national theatre, distinctive themes that emerge, and their relation to regional and national concerns. This course explores the perspectives of Québécois, feminist, Native, queer, ethnic, and Black playwrights who have shaped Canadian theatre.

This multi-genre creative writing course, designed around a specific theme or topic, will encourage interdisciplinary practice, experiential adventuring, and rigorous theoretical reflection through readings, exercises, field trips, projects, etc.

A study of contemporary Canadian poetry in English, with a changing emphasis on the poetry of particular time-periods, regions, and communities. Discussion will focus on the ways poetic form achieves meaning and opens up new strategies for thinking critically about the important social and political issues of our world.

An in-depth study of selected plays from Shakespeare's dramatic corpus combined with an introduction to the critical debates within Shakespeare studies. Students will gain a richer understanding of Shakespeare's texts and their critical reception.
Pre-1900 course

Poetry is often seen as distant from daily life. We will instead see how poetry is crucial in popular culture, which in turn impacts poetry. We will read such popular poets as Ginsberg and Plath, look at poetry in film, and consider song lyrics as a form of popular poetry.

An exploration of the tension in American literature between two conflicting concepts of self. We will examine the influence on American literature of the opposition between an abstract, "rights-based," liberal-individualist conception of the self and a more traditional, communitarian sense of the self as determined by inherited regional, familial, and social bonds.

A survey of the literature of Native Peoples, Africans, Irish, Jews, Italians, Latinos, and South and East Asians in the U.S, focusing on one or two groups each term. We will look at how writers of each group register the affective costs of the transition from "old-world" communalism to "new-world" individualism.

A study of the diverse and vibrant forms of literary expression that give voice to the Black experience in Canada, with changing emphasis on authors, time periods, Black geographies, politics and aesthetics. The range of genres considered may include the slave narrative, memoir, historical novel, Afrofuturism and “retrospeculative” fiction, poetry, drama, as well as the performance cultures of spoken word, dub, rap, DJing and turntablism.

A study of selected topics in literary criticism. Schools of criticism and critical methodologies such as New Criticism, structuralism, poststructuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, gender and sexuality studies, New Historicism, and postcolonialism will be covered, both to give students a roughly century-wide survey of the field and to provide them with a range of models applicable to their own critical work as writers and thinkers. Recommended for students planning to pursue graduate study in English literature.

A literary analysis of the Hebrew Bible (Christian Old Testament) and of texts that retell the stories of the Bible, including the Quran. We will study Biblical accounts of the creation, the fall of Adam and Eve, Noah's flood, Abraham's binding of Isaac, the Exodus from Egypt, and the Judges, Prophets, and Kings of Israel as works of literature in their own right, and we will study British, American, European, African, Caribbean, and Indigenous literary texts that, whether inspired by or reacting against Biblical narratives, retell them.
Pre-1900 course.

A literary analysis of the New Testament and the ways that the stories of Jesus have been reworked in British, American, European, African, Caribbean, and Indigenous literature and visual art. The Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Book of Revelation will be considered as literature, and we will study later literary texts that, whether inspired by or reacting against Biblical narratives, retell them.
Pre-1900 course.

Over the course of five centuries, European empires changed the face of every continent. The present world bears the traces of those empires in the form of nation-states, capitalism, population transfers, and the spread of European languages. We will consider how empire and resistance to empire have been imagined and narrated in a variety of texts.

The world is increasingly interrelated - economically, digitally, and culturally. Migrants and capitalists move across borders. So do criminals and terrorists. Writers, too, travel between countries; novels and films are set in various locales. How have writers had to re-invent generic conventions to imagine the world beyond the nation and the new links among distant places?

This course traces the evolution of the antihero trope from its earliest prototypes in pre- and early modern literature, through its Gothic and Byronic nineteenth-century incarnations, twentieth-century existentialists, noir and Beat protagonists, and up to the “difficult” men and women of contemporary film, television, and other media. We will examine the historical and cultural contexts that enabled the construction and enduring popularity of this literary archetype, particularly in relation to gender and sexuality, race, class, religion, and (post-)colonialism.

A study of major novels in the Victorian period. Authors studied might include Charles Dickens, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. Central to the study of the novel in the period are concerns about social and political justice, historical awareness, personal perspective and narration, and the development of realism.
Pre-1900 course

A study of popular fiction during the Victorian period. This course examines the nineteenth-century emergence of genres of mass-market fiction, which remain popular today, such as historical romance, mystery and detective fiction, imperial adventure, fantasy, and science fiction.
Pre-1900 course

A study of fantasy and the fantastic from 1800 to the present. Students will consider various theories of the fantastic in order to chart the complex genealogy of modern fantasy across a wide array of literary genres (fairy tales, poems, short stories, romances, and novels) and visual arts (painting, architecture, comics, and film).

This writing workshop is based on the art and craft of the personal essay, a form of creative nonfiction characterized by its commitment to self-exploration and experiment. Students will submit their own personal essays for workshop, and become acquainted with the history and contemporary resurgence of the form.