From Augustine’s Confessions to Dante’s New Life, medieval writers developed creative means of telling their life stories. This course tracks medieval life-writing from Augustine and Dante to later figures such as Margery Kempe—beer brewer, mother of fourteen, and self-proclaimed saint—Thomas Hoccleve, author of the first description of a mental breakdown in English literature, and Christian convert to Islam Anselmo Turmeda/‘Abd Allāh al-Turjumān. In these texts, life writing is used for everything from establishing a reputation to recovering from trauma to religious polemic. The course will also explore how medieval life writing can help us to understand 21st century practices of self-representation, from selfies to social media.

Pre-1900 course.

In what ways can video games be “read” and assessed as storytelling texts? And how do those video game narratives reflect historical, cultural, and social concerns? Students will explore game narratives by learning about critical and structural approaches, but also through personal reflective practices. Although active playing will be a required part of the course, all video game experience levels are welcome.

A study of the Romantic Movement in European literature, 1750-1850. This course investigates the cultural and historical origins of the Romantic Movement, its complex definitions and varieties of expression, and the responses it provoked in the wider culture. Examination of representative authors such as Goethe, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, P. B. Shelley, Keats, Byron and M. Shelley will be combined with study of the philosophical and historical backgrounds of Romanticism.
Pre-1900 course

An investigation of how nineteenth-century literature is translated into our contemporary world through art forms like music, architecture, film, television, graphic novels, or online and social media. What is it that makes us keep returning to the past, and how does each adaptation re-make the original into something new and relevant?
Pre-1900 course.

This course focuses on queer studies in a transhistorical context. It serves as an introduction to queer theory and culture, putting queer theory into conversation with a range of literary texts as well as other forms of media and culture. This course might explore contemporary LGBTQ2+ literature, media and popular culture; the history of queer theory; and literary work from early periods to recover queer literary histories.

An examination of how the law and legal practices have been imagined in literature, including the foundations of law, state constitutions, rule of law, rights, trials and judgments, ideas of justice, natural law, enforcement, and punishment. We will examine Western and non-Western experiences of the law, legal documents and works of literature. Authors may include Sophocles, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Melville, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Achebe, Soyinka, Borges, Shamsie, R. Wright, Silko.

A study of poetry written roughly between the World Wars. Poets from several nations may be considered. Topics to be treated include Modernist difficulty, formal experimentation, and the politics of verse. Literary traditions from which Modernist poets drew will be discussed, as will the influence of Modernism on postmodern writing.

An investigation of the literatures and theories of the unthinkable, the reformist, the iconoclastic, and the provocative. Satire can be conservative or subversive, corrective or anarchic. This course will address a range of satire and its theories. Writers range from Juvenal, Horace, Lucian, Erasmus, Donne, Jonson, Rochester, Dryden, Swift, Pope, Gay, Haywood, and Behn to Pynchon, Nabokov and Atwood.
Pre-1900 course

This course explores social media’s influence on literary culture and our personal lives. Engaging with contemporary novels, essays and films that deal with the social media, as well as examining social media content itself (from early web blogs, to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok), over the course of the semester, we will consider how social media shapes literary texts and our emotional, social and political selves.

Developments in American fiction from the end of the 1950's to the present: the period that produced James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Ann Beatty, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Leslie Marmon Silko, among others.

A study of Arab women writers from the late nineteenth century to the present. Their novels, short stories, essays, poems, and memoirs invite us to rethink western perceptions of Arab women. Issues of gender, religion, class, nationalism, and colonialism will be examined from the perspective of Arab women from both the Arab world and North America.

An analysis of how gender and the content and structure of poetry, prose, and drama inform each other. Taking as its starting point Virginia Woolf's claim that the novel was the genre most accessible to women because it was not entirely formed, this course will consider how women writers across historical periods and cultural contexts have contributed to specific literary genres and how a consideration of gender impacts our interpretation of literary texts.

This course introduces students to ecocriticism (the study of the relationship between literature and environment). The course is loosely structured around several topics: the environmental imagination in literature and film, ecological literary theory, the history of the environmental movement and climate activism, literary representations of natural and unnatural disasters, and climate fiction.

A study of plays by Indigenous authors (primarily Canadian), from Turtle Island, paying attention to relations between text and performance, and with an emphasis on distinctive themes that emerge, including colonialism, Indigenous resistance, and Indigenous sovereignty.

Indigenous literatures of Turtle Island course

A study of poetry by Indigenous authors (primarily Canadian) from Turtle Island. Discussion will focus on the ways poetic form and content combine to achieve meaning and open up new strategies for thinking critically, and with an emphasis on distinctive themes that emerge, including colonialism, Indigenous resistance, and Indigenous sovereignty.

Indigenous literatures of Turtle Island course

A study of short stories by Indigenous authors (primarily Canadian) from Turtle Island, examining narrative techniques, thematic concerns, and innovations, and with an emphasis on distinctive themes that emerge, including colonialism, Indigenous resistance, and Indigenous sovereignty.

Indigenous literatures of Turtle Island course

A study of the Gothic tradition in literature since 1760. Drawing on texts such as Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, and Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, this course will consider how the notion of the "Gothic" has developed across historical periods and how Gothic texts represent the supernatural, the uncanny, and the nightmares of the unconscious mind.
Pre-1900 course

An examination of twentieth-century literature, especially fiction, written out of the experience of people who leave one society to come to another already made by others. We will compare the literatures of several ethnic communities in at least three nations, the United States, Britain, and Canada.

A continuation of ENGC70H3, focusing on texts written since 1980.

This course is an introduction to the theory and practice of rhetoric, the art of persuasive writing and speech. Students will study several concepts at the core of rhetorical studies and sample thought-provoking work currently being done on disability rhetorics, feminist rhetorics, ethnic rhetorics, and visual rhetorics. A guiding principle of this course is that studying rhetoric helps one to develop or refine one’s effectiveness in speaking and writing. Toward those ends and through a 20-hour community-engaged learning opportunity in an organization of their choice, students will reflect on how this community-based writing project shapes or was shaped by their understanding of some key rhetorical concept. Students should leave the course, then, with a “rhetorical toolbox” from which they can draw key theories and concepts as they pursue future work in academic, civic, or professional contexts.

This course will explore the literary history and evolution of the superhero, from its roots in the works of thinkers such as Thomas Carlyle and Friedrich Nietzsche to the wartime birth of the modern comic book superhero to the contemporary pop culture dominance of transmedia experiments like the “universes” created by Marvel and DC. We will explore the superhero in various media, from prose to comics to film and television, and we will track the superhero alongside societal and cultural changes from the late 19th century to the present.

Advanced study of a crucial period for the development of new forms of narrative and the beginnings of formal narrative theory, in the context of accelerating modernity.

An intensive study of the writing of poetry through a selected theme, topic, or author. The course will undertake its study through discussions, readings, and workshop sessions.

An intensive study of the writing of fiction through a selected theme, topic, or author. The course will undertake its study through discussions, readings, and workshop sessions.

An advanced study of the craft of creative non-fiction. Through in-depth discussion, close reading of exceptional texts and constructive workshop sessions, students will explore special topics in the genre such as: fact versus fiction, writing real people, the moral role of the author, the interview process, and how to get published. Students will also produce, workshop and rewrite an original piece of long-form creative non-fiction and prepare it for potential publication.

This course connects writers of poetry and fiction, through discussion and workshop sessions, with artists from other disciplines in an interdisciplinary creative process, with the aim of having students perform their work.

This course pursues the in-depth study of a small set of myths. We will explore how a myth or mythological figure is rendered in a range of literary texts ancient and modern, and examine each text as both an individual work of art and a strand that makes up the fabric of each given myth.
Pre-1900 course

An exploration of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American realism and naturalism in literary and visual culture. This course will explore the work of writers such as Henry James, William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Charles Chesnutt, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Kate Chopin, and Theodore Dreiser alongside early motion pictures, photographs, and other images from the period.

This course explores the theories and practices of teaching academic writing, mostly in middle and secondary school contexts as well as university writing instruction and/or tutoring in writing. Through its 60-hour service-learning component, the course also provides student educators with the practical opportunities for the planning and delivering of these instruction techniques in different teaching contexts.

A study of selected topics in recent literary theory. Emphasis may be placed on the oeuvre of a particular theorist or on the impact of a given theoretical movement; in either case, the relation of theory to literary critical practice will be considered , as will the claims made by theory across a range of aesthetic and political discourses and in response to real world demands. Recommended for students planning to pursue graduate study in English literature.