2023-2024 Course Timetable

Courses and room assignments are listed in the Timetable Builder.

100 Level

The courses in our 100 series introduce students to the study of English literature at the university level through broad courses that introduce the major literary forms via examples drawn from different times and places. These courses aim to develop writing, reading, and critical skills, and frequently require some oral participation in tutorial groups. Essays at the 100 level typically do not require research or secondary sources.

200 Level

Courses in the 200 series provide historically, geographically, generically, or theoretically grounded introductions to the study of English literature. These include the four "gateway" courses required of Specialists and Majors--introductions to the major national-historical fields (British, Canadian, and American) that comprise literatures in English--as well as a wide range of courses that will prepared students for further study. Coursework at the 200 level may require some research and the beginnings of familiarity with scholarship on the subject. Students will often be expected to participate orally in class or in tutorial groups. English 200-level courses are open to students who have obtained standing in 1.0 ENG FCE, or ANY 4.0 University-level FCE, or who are concurrently taking one of ENG110Y1, ENG140Y1, ENG150Y1.

300 Level

At the 300 level, courses advance into a particular period or subject within a literature or literary genre: contemporary American fiction, for instance, or a particular topic in Shakespeare studies. Courses at this level introduce students to research skills and typically require essays that incorporate some secondary sources. The smaller size of many of these courses frequently demands a greater degree of oral participation. Most English 300-level courses are open to students who have obtained standing in at least 4.0 FCE, including 2.0 ENG FCE.

400 Level

Courses in the 400 series are both advanced and focused, unique courses created by Department faculty that often relate to their own research. Active student participation, including oral presentations, is an important part of these courses. Courses at the 400 level require a substantial research essay for which the student has significant input into framing the research question.

Notes on the Timetable, Enrollment Regulations and Procedures

1. For updated information regarding room assignments and course changes, consult ACORN or Timetable Builder. For updated course descriptions, please see our Undergraduate Timetable below, and follow the SECTION links when available.

Changes to Reading Lists and Instructors - Students should note that changes to scheduling, staffing, reading lists, and methods of evaluation may occur anytime thereafter. When possible, changes to the course schedule will appear on ACORN. Students should avoid purchasing texts until the reading list is confirmed by the instructor during the first week of classes. Students wishing to read listed texts in advance are advised to use copies available at both the University and public libraries.

2. Enrollment in all English courses is limited by Department policy. First-year students may enroll in any 200-series course if they are concurrently enrolled in ENG110Y1, ENG140Y1 or ENG150Y1. In some 200-series courses and all 300-series courses, priority is given to students enrolled in an English program. In 400-series courses, priority during the first round of enrollment is given to fourth-year students who require a 400-series course to satisfy program requirements. To ensure maximum availability of 400-series courses, fourth-year Specialists are allowed to enroll in only 1.0 400-series ENG FCE and fourth-year Majors are allowed to register in only 0.5 400-level ENG FCE. During the second round of enrollment the priority is lifted and the course is open to all students who meet the prerequisites.

100 Level

ENG100H1 F and S (offered both semesters) - Effective Writing

Section Number: LEC5101

Time(s): Thursday 6-9 pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

Instructor(s): TBD

Brief Description of Course: Practical tools for writing in university and beyond. Students will gain experience in generating ideas, clarifying insights, structuring arguments, composing paragraphs and sentences, critiquing and revising their writing, and communicating effectively to diverse audiences. This course may not be counted toward any English program.

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors/Texts: TBD

Method of Evaluation: TBD

ENG102H1F - Literature and the Sciences

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday 1-2 pm, Wednesday 1-3 pm

Instructor(s): TBD

Brief Description of Course: Literature has always provided a place for the imaginative exploration of science, technology, and the physical universe. For students interested in literary treatments of science and scientific problems, concerns, and methods. Assumes no background in the methods and techniques of literary scholarship. This course may not be counted toward any English program.

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors/Texts: TBD

Method of Evaluation: TBD

ENG140Y1 - Literature for Our Time

Section Number: LEC0101        

Time(s): LEC Friday 1-3 pm, TUT Friday 11 am - 12 pm or 12-1 pm

Instructor(s): Nick Mount

Office Location: JHB 703

Email: nick.mount@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: This course explores how recent literature in English responds to our world in poetry, prose, and drama. In the fall term we’ll visit some famous landmarks of early and mid-twentieth-century literature: London Bridge on a winter morning, a lighthouse off the west coast of Scotland, and a wave-washed beach in South America, among others. In the spring term, our guides will be closer to our own time, living writers and books from our century. In both terms, emphases will include literature’s reasons for being, its formal qualities, historical context, relation to other media, and relevance to our moment in time.

Required Reading: Fall term: T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems (Broadview); Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Broadview); Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (Grove); Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (HarperCollins); Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Anchor); Gabriel García Márquez, Leaf Storm and Other Stories (Harper); Sylvia Plath, Ariel (Harper). Spring term: TBA. All books will be available from the University of Toronto Bookstore.

First Three Authors/Texts: Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land; Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Beckett, Waiting for Godot.

Method of Evaluation: In-class paragraph (10%); three 1,000-1,250 word essays (60%); weekly written reading responses (15%); tutorial participation (15%).

ENG150Y1 - Literary Traditions

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): LEC Tuesday 1-3 pm; TUT Thursday 1-2 pm or 2-3 pm

Instructor(s): John Rogers

Office Location: JHB 828

Email: johnd.rogers@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: An exploration of some of some of the greatest works of literature composed over the course of the last three thousand years. In the fall term, we begin with the Mesopotamian Enuma Elish, Homer’s epic The Odyssey, the lyrics of Sappho, and selections from the Hebrew Bible. We trace the exciting and controversial influence of those ancient works on our understanding of story-telling, nation-building, the creation of the world, and the meaning of the human. The fall term concludes with the Sufi poet Rumi, Dante’s Inferno, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The winter term will be devoted to examining Milton’s Paradise Lost, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The course concludes with a study of Ling Ma’s 2018 novel Severance. Interspersed throughout the year are shorter works by Margaret Atwood and Jorge Luis Borges.

Required Reading:

First Three Authors/Texts:

Selections from Myths of Mesopotamia (Quercus)
The Book of Genesis (Quercus)
The Odyssey of Homer

Method of Evaluation:

Informal discussion posts (15%)
Participation (15%)
Two short essays (10% each)
Two brief quizzes (5% each)
Final essay (40%)

ENG196H1F - Cook the Books

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 2-5 pm

Instructor(s): Prof. Andrea Most and Chef Miriam Streiman

Office Location: JHB 827

Email: andrea.most@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: If, as a famous French philosopher once said, “You are what you eat”, then what are we? What do our food choices reveal about who we are and what we value? What story does the food we eat tell about our relationship to the world around us? In this class, we examine all kinds of stories about growing, preparing, and eating food in order to understand how culture shapes the choices we make about the food we eat. But we don’t stop there: through cooking and eating together, we begin to tell new stories about our food and our relationship to the planet that provides it. Co-taught with a professional chef, this course combines literary analysis with cooking classes, multi-sensory presentations, and food-oriented field trips.

Required Reading: Readings may include selections from Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma; Leah Penniman, Farming While Black; Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; MFK Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf; Wendell Berry, selected essays and poems; Isak Dinesen, Babette’s Feast; Joshna Maharaj, Take Back the Tray; Ratatouille; plus a smorgasbord of additional recipes, short videos, podcasts, and essays.

First Three Authors/Texts: Food Inc. [2008 Film, Robert Kenner, dir]; Michael Pollan, “The Sickness in Our Food Supply,” New York Review of Books, 11 June 2020; Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance” (Emergence Magazine, 10 Dec 2020; [subject to change]

Method of Evaluation: Class Participation and Reading Responses (25%), Short Essay (15%), Group Presentation (30%), Final Potluck and essay (30%)

ENG197H1F - Time Travel & Narrative

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Thursday 1-3 pm

Instructor(s): Thom Dancer

Office Location: JHB 713

Email: thom.dancer@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: This is a literature course focused on time travel narratives. We will read and analyse novels, short stories, television episodes, and movies that contain time travel elements. We will consider what time travel stories offer us as readers, how they might comment upon social, political, and historic issues. Though the course will occasionally take up time travel logic and paradoxes, the course is primarily a literature course and will practice skills of reading and analysis.

Required Reading: Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin. Jeffrey Landis, Greg Egan, Kate Heartfield, H.G. Wells, Max Beerbohm, Tasmyn Muir, and others.

First Three Authors/Texts: The Time Machine, “Another Story,” “Ripples in the Dirac Sea”

Method of Evaluation: Literary Analysis Paper, Time Line Assignment, Reading Quizzes, Verbal Participation

ENG198H1S - Monster Encounters: Monsters and the Monstrous in Literature

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 2-4 pm

Instructor(s): TBD

Brief Description of Course: Monsters and the monstrous have been among the most compelling and frequently recurring elements in literature, from ancient times to the present day. From Homer's Cyclops to Ridley Scott's alien, monstrous figures have terrified and transfixed all those who come upon them. In this course, we will examine the figure of the monster to see what we might gain from our own encounter with the monstrous. Readings will include epic poems, novels, and critical selections from the burgeoning field of inquiry known as "monster studies."

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors/Texts: TBD

Method of Evaluation: TBD

ENG199H1F - Tree Stories

Section Number: L0101

Time(s): Thursday 10 am -12 pm

Instructor(s): Alan Ackerman

Office Location: JHB 911

Email: alan.ackerman@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: Trees are all around us. We climb them, tell stories about them, write on paper, at desks, in homes made from them. But most people take them for granted. This course examines how we imagine trees in works of art and what trees can teach us about our own place in the world. We will study stories, essays, poems, and artistic representations of trees, as well as exploring trees around campus and the environment we share. Much class-time will be outside. The seminar will introduce students to methods of close reading, ecocriticism (interdisciplinary study of literature and the environment), ethnobotany (cultural use of plants), plus theories of wilderness and colonialism, histories of settler-indigenous relations, global warming, and ways of healing a damaged planet.

Required Reading: Dr. Seuss, The Lorax, Shel Silverstein, The Giving Tree, Grimm Brothers, “The Old Woman in the Woods,” Call of the Forest: The Forgotten Wisdom of Trees (TVO documentary), Joyce Kilmer, “Trees,” Howard Nemerov, “Learning the Trees,” Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Birches,” Emily Dickinson, “Four Trees,” Henry David Thoreau, “Wild Apples,” Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, Leanne Simpson, “Plight,” Joy Harjo, “Speaking Tree,” Charles Chesnutt, “Po’ Sandy,” selections from Gilgamesh and King James Bible, selections from Sumana Roy, How I Became a Tree. Other authors may include Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, Michael Pollan, Martin Buber, Aldo Leopold, Peter Wohlleben, & William Cronon.

First Three Authors/Texts: Joyce Kilmer, “Trees,” Call of the Forest: The Forgotten Wisdom of Trees (TVO documentary), Howard Nemerov, “Learning the Trees”

Method of Evaluation:

Informed class participation: 30%
Tree diary (with weekly responses), part 1: 35%
Tree diary (with weekly responses), part 2: 35%

200 Level

ENG202H1F - Introduction to British Literature I

Section Number: LEC0101       

Time(s): Lectures Monday 12–2 pm; TUT Wednesday 12–1pm or 1–2 pm

Instructor(s): Prof. Misha Teramura

Office Location: JHB 712

E-mail: m.teramura@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: This course surveys literature written in the British Isles from the earliest poetry in English to the late 17th century. Spanning almost a thousand years, the texts we will read in this course display an astonishing breadth of forms, genres, and styles. We will read heroic epics, bawdy tales, allegorical romance, utopian prose, religious drama, love sonnets, and scientific poetry, including both famous works and those less well known today. While the course will focus on developing strategies for reading, appreciating, and interpreting a variety of premodern texts, we will also be attentive to history, both to the changing trends in literary writing over time and to the ways literary texts responded to the political, social, and religious contexts in which they were written. We will also give special consideration to the ways we define “literature” and the implications those definitions have on our objects of study.

Required Reading: Our course textbook will be The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Concise Volume A, 3rd ed., gen. ed. Joseph Black et al. (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2017). You can use either a print or digital copy of this book.

First Three Authors/Texts: Beowulf, Judith, Marie de France

Method of Evaluation:

Two short responses
Final essay
Tutorial participation
Mini quizzes and completion of surveys

ENG202H1F - Introduction to British Literature I

Section Number: LEC0201

Time(s): Lectures Tuesday 12-2 pm; Tutorials Thursday at 12-1 pm or 1-2 pm

Instructor(s): Carroll Balot

Brief Description of Course: A survey of English literature, from its beginnings in the Anglo-Saxon period through the late seventeenth century, emphasizing major authors, movements and periods, and methods of formal analysis. Central themes will include the relationship between the ancient heroic code and Christian values; the movement from a providential to a modern cosmology; love, sacred and human; individualism and alienation in the transition to modernity; and sin, shame, and forgiveness. We will employ a variety of approaches to literary analysis, including historicism, psychoanalysis, New Criticism, and modes of political and affective reading.

Required Reading: Norton Anthology of English Literature, vols. A&B and Chris Baldick, Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms

First Three Authors/Texts: Dream of the Rood; Beowulf; Lanval

Method of Evaluation: Weekly tutorial participation, including brief written responses; one short paper; final examination.

ENG202H1S - Introduction to British Literature I

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): LEC Monday 11 am - 1 pm; TUT Wed 11 am -12 pm, 12-1 pm

Instructor(s): M. Sergi

Office Location: JHB 812 (or on Zoom; see premodernity.net/resources)

Email: sergi.utoronto@gmail.com

Brief Description of Course: ENG 202 is an introduction to early British literature, exploring works in poetry, prose, and drama, from the earliest English writing to the end of the seventeenth century. A course covering the literature of such a broad span of time — a full millennium (c. 670 through the 1660s) — must leave out many more important works than it includes; as a result, different versions of ENG 202, from one term to another, will include noticeably different approaches and arrays of readings.

This version of ENG 202 is organized around community-building, connection, and play: we will discover that the roots of British literature grow out of social practices in which texts are read among friends — and, often, composed by multiple hands or voices. The earlier we go (our readings will be in reverse chronological order, so we’ll start with the latest works first!), the more we’ll consider early literature as an occasion to convene in fellowship and fun, to co-conceive temporary or imaginary societies with fanciful rules, to step together outside of the purely reasonable into the wildernesses and otherworlds of the possible. We’ll do some of our shorter readings together in class, then, rather than sending students off to do all the readings alone. As for the readings we do on our own (longer prose and long-form poems), we’ll return repeatedly to and dwell on them in weekly Wednesday tutorials, with some student volunteers following up on secondary sources and reporting back to the group. And we will come to our readings in drama the way they were meant to be done: live and aloud, involving some student volunteers (no pressure to volunteer if you don’t want!) in live staged readings during our Monday full-class meetings. See https://premodernity.net/eng-202 for the full course syllabus!

Required Reading: Four long-form texts – Cavendish’s Blazing World, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Knight and Ohlgren’s Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, and Beowulf – in addition to an array of short-form poems and plays we read together in class.

First Three Authors/Texts: Cavendish, Blazing World; Donne, selections from Songs and Sonnets; Milton, “Lycidas”

Method of Evaluation:
Each student can choose from among three formats (essays, presentations, or performances, or a combination of these) for their main course assignments, totalling 45% (see premodernity.net/eng-202 for more info)
Final Test, 15%
Engagement and Participation in tutorial sessions, 15%
Real-Time Comprehension Questions, asked at the end of each class session, 15%
Actual Attendance during at least 20 of our 24 class sessions, 10%

ENG203H1F - Introduction to British Literature II

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): LEC Monday 2-4 pm; TUT Wednesday 2-3 pm or 3-4 pm

Instructor(s): Simon Dickie

Office Location: JHB 920

Email: dickie.office@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: Our goal in this course is to learn the conventional periodization of British literary history from 1660-1900, and the major genres and authors associated with each period. In the process, we will learn the specialized terminology of literary criticism: how to recognize verse forms, metres, and rhyme schemes; prose style, tone, point of view, allusion, adaptation, and much more. In lectures – and especially in weekly tutorials – students will practice using this terminology for detailed close reading of primary texts. This well-informed close reading will then be the focus of your essay and final exam.

Required Reading:
The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vols. C, D, & E (10th edition)
M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (11th edition [2015] or recent editions available second hand)
Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Mitchell (Penguin)
All texts are available at the U of T Bookstore, 214 College St.

First Three Authors/Texts: poems by Swift and Pope, including “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, “An Essay on Criticism,” and The Rape of the Lock.

Method of Evaluation: 3 short quizzes (5% each), short close-reading assignment (500 words, 10%) essay (1500 words, 30%), tutorial and class participation (10%), final exam (35%).

ENG203H1S - Introduction to British Literature II

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): LEC Monday 10 am - 12 pm, TUT Thursday 10-11 am or 11 am - 12 pm

Instructor(s): Michael Johnstone

Brief Description of Course: An introduction to British literature, exploring works in poetry, prose, and drama from the end of the seventeenth century into the twentieth century.

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors/Texts: TBD

Method of Evaluation: TBD

ENG203H1S - Introduction to British Literature II

Section Number: LEC0201

Time(s): LEC Tuesday 2-4 pm, TUT Thursday 2-3 pm or 3-4 pm

Instructor(s): Simon Dickie

Office Location: JHB 920

Email: dickie.office@utoronto.ca

First Three Authors/Texts: poems by Swift and Pope, including “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, “An Essay on Criticism,” and The Rape of the Lock.

Method of Evaluation: 3 short quizzes (5% each), short close-reading assignment (500 words, 10%) essay (1500 words, 30%), tutorial and class participation (10%), final exam (35%).

ENG210H1S - Introduction to the Novel

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Lecture Wed 10 am – 12 pm, Tutorials Wed 12-1 pm or 1-2 pm

Instructor(s): Thom Dancer

Office Location: JHB 713

Email: thom.dancer@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: What is the proper role of novels in the world and our lives? Do they offer escapism? Can novels help us to understand our worlds or is their fictional representation a confusion? Should novels aim for aesthetic pleasure or realistic representation of life? Should novels be about everyday kinds of people and circumstances or about gods, superheroes, and aliens? This course will pursue all of these questions in an effort to think about the place of the novel our world today.

Required Reading: Jane Austen, Elif Batuman, Zadie Smith, Virginia Woolf, Akaeke Emezi, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

First Three Authors/Texts: Northanger Abbey, The Idiot, On Beauty

Method of Evaluation: Reading responses, midterm, wrap up assignment.

ENG213H1F - The Short Story

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 11 am -1 pm; Thursday 11 am -12 pm

Instructor(s): Sarah Caskey

Office Location: JHB 802

Email: sarah.caskey@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: The short story is a dynamic literary form. Protean and flexible, the genre can accommodate a diversity of literary styles and modes of experimentation. This course will examine a selection of short stories written in English since the late nineteenth century to the present by some of the foremost practitioners as well as emerging writers in the field. In our reading, we will pay particular attention to the form of the short story itself, and to the specific ways the authors interpret and use the capacities of the genre. We will also explore what kinds of stories get told, and what large questions get asked in these narratives that span across time and place. This course assumes the critical view that short stories present a spectrum of formal and thematic possibilities, and are a powerful literary mode for exploring the authors’ complex worlds.

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors/Texts: TBD

Method of Evaluation: Passage Analysis (25%); Essay (40%); Final Assignment (25%); Participation (10%).

ENG215H1S - The Canadian Short Story

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 11 am -1 pm, Thursday 11 am -12 pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

Instructor(s): Sarah Caskey

Office Location: JHB 802

Email: sarah.caskey@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: The short story is a demanding and exhilarating art form. As the Canadian literary critic W. H. New observes, it “calls upon its readers to perceive the breadth of vision that is condensed into a small compass.” Canadian writers have made outstanding contributions to the genre and this course examines Canadian short fiction written in English since the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. The short stories selected for analysis reflect a variety of authors, as well as diverse periods, regions, literary styles, thematic interests, and experimentation within the genre. Together, the stories attest to the vitality of the genre in this country and the important role Canadians writers have played in shaping the form.

We will focus on reading individual stories closely, with attention to form and structure, and to relating seemingly disparate stories to one another, synthesizing ideas that connect them into a larger short-story literary tradition. Teaching the stories close to chronological order means we can grasp much of the history of literary influence and the growth and development of the genre in Canada within the boundaries of the syllabus. Throughout the term, we will explore the place of the short story in Canadian literary culture and its exciting intersection with issues including identity, storytelling, and art.

Required Reading: Course readings will be available on the Library Reading List through Quercus.

First Three Authors/Texts: Michael Crummey, Harry Robinson, Thomas King.

Method of Evaluation: Passage Analysis (25%); Essay (40%); Final Assignment (25%); Participation 10%).

ENG220H1S - Introduction to Shakespeare

Section Number: LEC5101

Time(s): Wednesdays 6-9 pm

Instructor(s): Carroll Balot

Brief Description of Course: An introduction to Shakespeare’s plays. We will read a selection of plays representing the various modes and periods of his corpus, with attention to the relationships between mothers and fathers and their children.

Required Reading: I Henry IV; As You Like It; King Lear; A Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest

First Three Authors/Texts: I Henry IV; As You Like It; King Lear

Method of Evaluation: Class participation; presentation; essay; term tests

ENG234H1F - Introduction to Children’s Literature

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 10 am -12 pm; Thursday 10-11 am

Instructor(s): D. Baker

Office Location: JHB 829

Email: df.baker@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: Have you ever really looked at Where the Wild Things Are? wondered why The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is still going strong? felt unease on reading Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty or Beast and the Beast? We’ll be considering these matters as well as changing notions of the child/child reader; the ways class, gender, ideology and historical context are embedded in books for the young; and how the ‘hidden adult’ may or may not work on impressionable minds.

Required Reading: Where the Wild Things Are; The Princess and the Goblin; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; My Name is Seepeetza; The Jolly Postman and others TBA.

First Three Authors/Texts: Where the Wild Things Are and others TBA

Method of Evaluation: short essays; close reading exercise; participation/discussion

ENG234H1S - Introduction to Children’s Literature

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 10 am -12 pm; Thursday 10-11 am

Instructor(s): D. Baker

Office Location: JHB 829

Email: df.baker@utoronto.ca

Required Reading: Where the Wild Things Are; The Princess and the Goblin; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; My Name is Seepeetza; The Jolly Postman and others TBA.

First Three Authors/Texts: Where the Wild Things Are and others TBA

Method of Evaluation: short essays; close reading exercise; participation/discussion

ENG235H1F - The Graphic Novel

Section Number: LEC5101

Time(s): Tuesday 6-9 pm

Instructor(s): Andrew Lesk

Brief Description of Course: An introduction to book-length sequential art, this course includes fictional and nonfictional comics, with a focus on formal properties such as narrative layout and text/art hybridity. Themes vary but may include superheroes; auto/biography; the figure of the outsider; women in comics; alienation and youth; and war reporting.

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors/Texts: TBD

Method of Evaluation: TBD

ENG235H1S - The Graphic Novel

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 3-4 pm, Thursday 3-5 pm

Instructor(s): Andrew Lesk

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors/Texts: TBD

Method of Evaluation: TBD

ENG237H1F - Science Fiction

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday 11 am -1 pm, Wednesday 11 am -12 pm

Instructor(s): Michael Johnstone

Brief Description of Course: This course explores speculative fiction that invents or extrapolates an inner or outer cosmology from the physical, life, social, and human sciences. Typical subjects include AI, alternative histories, cyberpunk, evolution, future and dying worlds, genetics, space/time travel, strange species, theories of everything, utopias, and dystopias.

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors/Texts: TBD

Method of Evaluation: TBD

ENG239H1F - Fantasy and Horror

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 11 am -1 pm, Thursday 11 am -12 pm

Instructor(s): Michael Johnstone

Brief Description of Course: This course explores speculative fiction of the fantastic, the magical, the supernatural, and the horrific. Subgenres may include alternative histories, animal fantasy, epic fantasy, the Gothic, fairy tales, magic realism, sword and sorcery, and vampire fiction.

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors/Texts: TBD

Method of Evaluation: TBD

ENG240Y1Y - Old English Language and Literature

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday, Wednesday, Friday 10 am - 11 am

Instructor(s): Fabienne Michelet

Office Location: JHB 928

Email: fabienne.michelet@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: Prepares students to read the oldest English literary forms in the original language. Introduces the earliest English poetry in a woman's voice, expressions of desire, religious fervour, and the agonies of war. Texts, written 680 - 1100, range from the epic of Beowulf the dragon-slayer to ribald riddles.

Required Reading: TBA

First Three Authors/Texts: The Colloquy on the Occupations, Ælfric, ‘Cynewulf and Cyneheard’

Method of Evaluation: weekly quizzes; mid-course test; short assignments; essay; class participation

ENG250H1F - Introduction to American Literature

Section Number: LEC5101

Time(s): LEC Monday 6-8 pm; TUT Wednesday 6-7 pm or 7-8 pm

Instructor(s): Scott Rayter

Brief Description of Course: An introduction to American literature, exploring works in a variety of genres, including poetry, fiction, essays, and slave narratives.

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors/Texts: TBD

Method of Evaluation: TBD

ENG250H1S - Introduction to American Literature

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): LEC Monday 12-2 pm; TUT Wednesday 12-1 pm or 1-2 pm

Instructor(s): Michael Cobb

Brief Description of Course: An introduction to American literature, exploring works in a variety of genres, including poetry, fiction, essays, and slave narratives.

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors/Texts: TBD

Method of Evaluation: TBD

ENG252H1F - Introduction to Canadian Literature

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): LEC Tuesday 11am -1pm TUT Thursday 11am – 12pm or 12-1 pm

Instructor(s): Smaro Kamboureli

Office Location: JHB 924

Email: smaro.kamboureli@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: This course will focus on a selection of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction to examine the various cultural, historical, and socio-political conditions that have shaped the development of literature in Canada. It will introduce students to some of the important aspects of the field, such as exploration narratives, settler colonialism, Indigenous Renaissance, multiculturalism, diaspora, decolonization, queerness, and transnationalism. Beginning with texts that take us back to the early days of what is now called Canada and ending with contemporary literary voices that invite us to radically rethink what Canada as a nation-state signifies, we’ll pay as much attention to thematic concerns as to forms and literary movements.

Required Reading: Thomas Wharton, Icefields; Dionne Brand, What We All Long For; Cherry Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves; and a course pack of poetry, short fiction, etc. (TBA).

First Three Authors/Texts: Thomas Wharton, Icefields; selection from the course pack

Method of Evaluation: (Tentative) Close reading essay 15%; essay outline 15%; essay (35%); final exam (35%).

ENG252H1S - Introduction to Canadian Literature

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): LEC Tuesday 3-5 pm; TUT Thursday 3 or 4 pm

Instructor(s): Tania Aguila-Way

Brief Description of Course: An introduction to Canadian literature, exploring works in poetry, prose, and drama from early to recent times.

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors/Texts: TBD

Method of Evaluation: TBD

ENG254H1S - Introduction to Indigenous Literatures

Section Number: LEC5101

Time(s): Tuesday 6 – 9 pm

Instructor(s): Cheryl Suzack

Office Location: JHB 913

Email: cheryl.suzack@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: This course explores literature by Indigenous writers from North America. It focuses on fiction, critical essays, and films in order to account for the ways in which Indigenous writers are in dialogue with each other as writers and to analyze how they use cultural texts as sites of contestation, appropriation, and renewal in altering how Indigenous peoples are understood by themselves and the wider public

Required Reading:

Fiction
D’Arcy McNickle, The Surrounded, 1936.
N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn, 1968.
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, 1977.
Louse Erdrich, Tracks, 1988.
Lee Maracle, Ravensong, 1993.
Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, 2007.
Deborah Miranda, Bad Indians, 2013.
Tommy Orange, There There, 2018.
Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed, 2018.

First Three Authors/Texts:

D’Arcy McNickle, The Surrounded, 1936.
N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn, 1968.
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, 1977.

Method of Evaluation: Short essays, long essay, participation, final examination.

ENG270H1F - Introduction to Colonial and Postcolonial Writing

Section Number: LEC5101

Time(s): Monday 6-9 pm

Instructor(s): Bárbara Simões

Brief Description of Course: In the imperial context, literature has long been used as a tool for exhorting cultural power. In this course, we examine the colonial archive for its representations of race, indigeneity, sexuality, and capital accumulation. We familiarize ourselves with the aesthetic and political modes of resisting colonial power around the world by studying postcolonial texts that rewrite or revise an earlier English work.

Here are some of the questions to be pursued in this course: How do postcolonial authors, with their texts, reject stereotypes or misrepresentations that might have been created by colonial literature? How can these postcolonial rewrites expose the colonial archive for alternative readings? Can these alternative readings change the way the colonial archive is interpreted and received? Besides literary texts, our objects of study may include photographs, film, and digital media.

Required Reading:

Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë); Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys); The Tempest (Shakespeare); Water with Berries (George Lamming); Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe); Foe ( J.M. Coetzee); Great Expectations (Charles Dickens); Jack Maggs (Peter Carey).

First Three Authors/Texts: Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre); Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys); The Tempest (Shakespeare)

Method of Evaluation: The first 60% of your grade will be made up of essays and in-class presentations. The remaining 40% is comprised of Engagement and Participation, Attendance (at all sessions) and Informal reading responses.

ENG270H1S - Introduction to Colonial and Postcolonial Writing

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 10 am-12 pm, Thursday 10-11 am

Instructor(s): Rijuta Mehta

Office Location: JHB 919

Email: rijuta.mehta@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: In this course, we examine the colonial archive for its representations of race, indigeneity, sexuality, and capital accumulation. We familiarize ourselves with the aesthetic and political modes of resisting colonial power around the world. Our objects of study include literature, photographs, film, and digital media, upon which we will bring to bear the techniques of textual analyses and cultural critique.

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors/Texts:

Agha Shahid Ali, “Postcard from Kashmir”

Carrie Mae Weems, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried

Rokeya Hossain, “Sultana’s Dream”

Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion

Method of Evaluation: Short Essays, Quizzes, and Class Participation

ENG273Y1Y - Queer Writing

Section Number: LEC5101

Time(s): Monday 6-9 pm

Instructor(s): Andrew Lesk

Brief Description of Course: Introducing a lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer tradition in literature and theory, this course explores classical, modern, postmodern, and contemporary literature, criticism, art, film, music, and popular culture.

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors/Texts: TBD

Method of Evaluation: TBD

ENG280H1F - Critical Approaches to Literature

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday 1-3 pm, Wednesday 1-2 pm

Instructor(s): Christopher Warley

Office Location: JHB 901

Email: chris.warley@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: This course has to negotiate two competing demands: explain why anyone would care about approaching literature in today; and offer an introduction to some influential “critical approaches.” There is no definitive solution to this dilemma. Our provisional response will be: use the first chapter of Jacques Rancière’s Aisthesis to find some reasons why you might approach literature critically today; and read as a survey of the field some critics and philosophers Rancière relies on. Readings will probably include Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Brooks, Arnold, Du Bois, Adorno, Benjamin, Barthes, Foucault, Said, Sedgwick, Auerbach.

Required Reading: TBA

First Three Authors/Texts: TBA

Method of Evaluation: TBA

ENG285H1F - English Language in the World

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday 11 am – 1pm, Wednesday 11 am – 12 pm

Instructor(s): Carol Percy

Office Location: JHB 732

Email: carol.percy@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course:

Currently, many-voiced Englishes dominate science, business, diplomacy, and popular cultures worldwide. This introductory course surveys transnational, regional, and social varieties of Later Modern English; the linguistic and social factors that have shaped them; their characteristic structures; and their uses in speech and in writing, both literary and non-literary.

Content and Goals

This introductory class is not only accessible to multilingual students from all disciplines but is dependent upon the unique experiences and expertise and interests of every student in the class. That means you! Three broad themes will guide us through the term. In a combination of lecture and discussion, and in repeatable low-stakes e-xercises and activities, we will learn how to describe and to explain social and regional varieties of contemporary Englishes. By the end of the course, you’ll be in confident command of jargon describing multilingualism, language contact, and language shift; innovation and variation in vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, spelling, and medium (online and offline); and for classifying languages (are ‘creoles’ really a special kind of language?). You’ll have some concepts to talk about language policies, ideologies, and teaching. And you’ll learn how to use online resources like dictionaries and corpora (structured collections of electronic texts) to answer questions you never knew you had about language variation, change, and authority. Low-stakes individual and group tasks will introduce and familiarize key concepts that you can use in your personal research. We will explore how authors can exploit the effects of such linguistic features as terms of address (including names, titles, and insults), jargon, slang, loanwords, and style-shifting. You will finish this

course able to integrate analysis of linguistic variation into literary analysis of some representative postcolonial texts. All term, in student-chosen projects drawn from online media, we will identify and interpret issues arising from the presence of English in specific contexts. Through the term, in various low-stakes stages, your research will be workshopped and encouraged by me and fellow students. In past years, student projects included topics as diverse and topical as “The Singular They in Academic Manuals: Changing Guidelines and Language Inclusivity”; “What Ballet Jargon and Slang Tells Us about the Profession”; “The Gendered Representation of Pussy in Rap Music and Popular Culture of the 21st Century”; “Vandalism and the Discursive Construction of Canadian Francophone Identity”; “Mangia Cake: A Quest for Identity and Authenticity among Italians in North America”; “How the Competition of Urdu and English in Pakistan’s Education System Reinforces Classist Hierarchies within Pakistan”; “BBC Pidgin as a site for West African Linguistic Self-Actualization”; “English in Songs in the Ukrainian Eurovision National Finals 2020”; “Foreign Luxury in South Korea: English and its Connection to Status”; “The Use of Singlish in Singaporean Workplaces”; “English in Chinese High School STEM Textbooks”; “Using English to Express Chinese Identity to the World – Higher Brothers;” and “AI Bias in Speech Recognition Technologies.” Generous past students have given me permission to post their papers online for you to read. And I am always happy to help you devise your topics and shape your papers.

Required Reading:

(1) To be ordered for you through the University of Toronto Bookstore: https://uoftbookstore.com/buy_textbooks.asp
Victor J. Ramraj (ed.), Concert of Voices: An Anthology of World Writing in English, 2nd ed. (broadview, 2009).

(2) Other required e-readings will be available through Quercus. These will include an e-textbook such as English in the World: History, Diversity, Change, edited by Philip Seargeant and Joan Swann (Routledge, 2011).

First Three Authors/Texts: From Concert of Voices: Kamala Das, “An Introduction”; E. Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake “The Cattle Thief”; Lee Maracle, “Charlie”.

Method of Evaluation: To reinforce your engagement and comprehension in course material generally: repeatable e-xercises and weekly CR/NCR writing tasks (10%), along with other individual and group participatory activities, including a presentation of your research in progress (10%); midterm test on literary material (35%); essay draft and optional revision (35%); 500-word take-home test (10%).

ENG286H1F - Literature and Data

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): LEC Tuesday 11 am -1 pm; TUT Thursday 11 am or 12 pm

Instructor(s): Karl Manis and Mary Pugh

Brief Description of Course: Geared toward the interests and aptitudes of humanities students, this course provides an accessible introduction to computer programming, statistics, and data science, and equips students with the practical and theoretical skills to engage critically with literary data and computation. What new insights about literary form, history, or culture might we glean from a spreadsheet of bestsellers, a database of fan fiction, or an archive containing more novels than any individual could ever read? What gaps exist in literary datasets, and what biases are enshrined in code? No programming or statistical experience required or expected.

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors/Texts: TBD

Method of Evaluation: TBD

ENG287H1S - The Digital Text

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): LEC Monday 4-6 pm; TUT Wednesday 4 or 5 pm

Instructor(s): Karl Manis

Brief Description of Course: This course explores the stakes and consequences of literature’s transition from printed to digital forms. How do digital and printed texts differ materially, and how does this affect literary form, authorship, consumption, reception — and society more broadly? What new expressive possibilities are present in “born digital” forms like webcomics, fan fiction, interactive fiction, and videogames? How do social media and online reading communities impact the way that literature is marketed and discussed? Will electronic archives make literature more accessible, or less? How do digital texts challenge existing definitions of what counts as “literature”?

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors/Texts: TBD

Method of Evaluation: TBD

ENG289H1F - Introduction to Creative Writing

Section Number: LEC5101

Time(s): Monday 6-9 pm (lecture 6-8; online 8-9)

Instructor(s): Ian Williams

Office Location: JHB 730

Email: ian.williams@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: An introduction to four major genres of creative writing: poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and drama. Students explore key principles by analyzing model texts by established authors and producing four portfolios of poems, short stories, creative nonfiction, and scripts.

Required Reading: Selections of creative nonfiction, poetry, fiction, and drama (available electronically)

First Three Authors/Texts: Selections of creative nonfiction

Method of Evaluation: creative nonfiction portfolio (20%), poetry portfolio (20%), fiction portfolio (20%), drama portfolio (10%), online exercises (30%)

ENG289H1S - Introduction to Creative Writing

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 10 am - 12 pm, Thursday 10-11 am

Instructor(s): Claire Battershill

Office Location:

Email: claire.battershill@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course:This course is an introduction to the major genres of contemporary creative writing: poetry, fiction, drama, creative nonfiction, and digital/visual forms. By the end of the course, you will have produced a portfolio of your own creative work in each of the main genres we cover. Through short weekly lectures, you will learn about the key elements of what writers often call ‘craft’ (though we will discuss and contest that term!) covering everything from structured, fixed forms like sonnets to digital storytelling games. Through close analysis of published examples in each of the genres, you will learn how to read like a writer and how to find works that suit your particular literary tastes and with which your own writing and thinking will be in conversation. Through a series of ‘poetic errands’ or creative prompts, you will learn how to begin writing and how to develop and refine a regular creative practice. Through peer editing, workshopping, and self-evaluation exercises you will learn how to revise and refine your drafts. This course will be conducted as a ‘hybrid’ course with the Tuesday sessions taking place in-person.

Required Reading: A selection of short texts by contemporary writers including, among others, Jordan Abel, Sally Rooney, Zadie Smith, George Saunders, Ocean Vuong, Charles Yu, and Kate Beaton.

First Three Authors/Texts: Lorrie Moore, Zadie Smith, George Saunders

Method of Evaluation:

20% Poetry Portfolio
20% Fiction Portfolio
20% Creative Non-Fiction Portfolio
20% Drama (Group Project) OR Visual/Virtual (Group Project)
20% Asynchronous Activities

JWE206H1S - Writing English Essays

Section Number: L0101

Time(s): Lecture: Monday 1:00 – 3:00 p.m. Tutorials: Wednesdays, 1:10-2:00; 2:10-3:00; 3:10-4:00 p.m.

Instructor(s): Cynthia Messenger

Office Location: Innis College, Room 314E

Email: cynthia.messenger@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: Students will learn to write a research-informed undergraduate humanities essay, in part by reading and analyzing other forms of the essay, including the personal essay (creative non-fiction), literary criticism, the scholarly article, and the literary review. The rhetorical differences among the various essay forms will provide opportunities to study tone, audience, voice, purpose, and rhetorical strategies, such as tropes and schemes. Analyzing persuasive strategy and genre will help students learn about the use of evidence and the cultural assumptions at play in a text.

Required Reading: The required course text is available at the U of T Bookstore. Katherine O. Acheson’s Writing Essays About Literature, 2nd edition. Weekly readings will appear on the Library Reading List page and on the Modules page on the JWE Quercus site.

First Three Authors/Texts: Virginia Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth,” Phillip Lopate’s “Introduction” in The Art of the Personal Essay, and Paul Headrick’s “Analytical Paragraphs,” in A Method for Writing Essays about Literature.

Method of Instruction: Lecture and in-class group discussion and writing; TA-led tutorials.

Students will participate in small group discussion and writing during each class.
During the term, I may a) assign unannounced reflective writing exercises and/or b) assign additional readings.

Method of Evaluation:

1. Analysis of paragraphs: 15%, due on Friday, January 26. Submit online.

2. Rhetorical analysis of an essay: 25%, due on Friday, February 16. Submit online.

3. Research-informed academic essay: 30%, due on Wednesday, March 13. Submit online.

4. Term test in the form of an in-class essay (close analysis of a personal essay), last day of

class: 20%.

5. Attendance and participation: 10%. Attendance is essential. Attendance will be taken during each lecture and tutorial

300 Level

ENG300Y1 - Chaucer

Section Number: LEC0101       

Time(s): Tuesday 11 am -12 pm, Thursday 11 am -1 pm

Instructor(s): Sebastian Sobecki

Office Location: JHB 715 & LI 315

E-mail: sebastian.sobecki@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: Geoffrey Chaucer is the most widely studied medieval English writer. His works, composed in the second half of the fourteenth century, reflect and inflect existing English and European literary traditions. French, Italian, and classical influences shimmer through Chaucer’s poems, which engage with an almost encyclopaedic range of topics and interests. Chaucer’s own life is exceptionally well-documented, and his many public roles and jobs offer a window on the social, political, and literary culture of late-medieval London, England, and Europe.

We will read his lyrics and study his major works, including not just The Canterbury Tales but also the sublime Troilus and Criseyde and the experimental House of Fame. The course will balance a concern for central questions in literary theory such as authorship, gender, or the social role of literature with an appreciation of history and literary history: we will look at his French and Italian influences – Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machaut, Deschamps – and explore fourteenth-century London and some of the controversies in Chaucer’s own life.

Required Reading: 1. David Lawton, ed., The Norton Chaucer (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019), ISBN: 9780393603477; 2. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (Original-Spelling Edition), ed. Jill Mann (London: Penguin, 2005), ISBN: 9780140422344

First Three Authors/Texts: The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, Troilus and Criseyde

Method of Evaluation: attendance and participation (20%); “adopt a lyric” research assignment (20%); short essay (20%); Chaucer’s London project (20%); final essay (20%)

ENG302Y1 - English Renaissance Literature

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday 10-11 am, Wednesday 10 am -12 pm

Instructor(s): Christopher Warley

Office Location: JHB 901

Email: chris.warley@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: An introduction to Renaissance literature in English and to the many sorts of rebirths that literature, ever since, makes possible. The poetry, prose, and drama that erupts in the sixteenth century does something completely amazing: it imagines that human beings are historically diverse, and it generates a conception of art that creates future possibilities by unraveling any claim to an absolute point of view. The course will trace these rebirths, focusing especially on the legacy of Petrarch poetics and ending with Romeo and Juliet and the 2021 film West Side Story. Writers will include Petrarch, Boccaccio, Wyatt, Luther, Montaigne, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Herrick, Milton; from the classical past Virgil, Catullus, Ovid, Augustine; and criticism including Freccero, Burckhardt, Panofsky, Auerbach, Derrida.

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors/Texts: Boccaccio, Petrarch, Wyatt

Method of Evaluation: TBD

ENG303H1F - Milton

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Thursday 1-4 pm

Instructor(s): John Rogers

Office Location: JHB 828

Email: johnd.rogers@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: A study of the poetry and prose of John Milton (1608-74), with a look at some examples of his outsized influence on the literary, political, and religious writing of succeeding centuries. The course will examine his major poetic works, paying particular attention to Paradise Lost, the epic that the blind poet wrote with the controversial ambition of rewriting the Bible and reimagining the universe.

We will explore Milton’s noisy effort to reinvent the sound and feel of English poetry. And we will confront his systematic attempts to use literature to force a rethinking of his age’s burning questions of political, religious, and cultural life, especially those of sovereignty, regicide, censorship, slavery, terrorism, physical disability, the relation of the sexes, the right to divorce, the path to heavenly salvation, and the very identity of God himself. At the term’s end, we will descend briefly into the hallucinatory world of William Blake, the Romantic poet and artist whose graphic novel in verse, The Book of Urizen, is a brilliant parody of Milton’s God and his act of creation.

Required Reading: The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. Kerrigan (Modern Library). Additional material will be made digitally available on the course’s Quercus site

First Three Authors/Texts: Milton’s “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” Comus, and the sonnets “How Soon Hath Time” and “When I Consider.” These three texts are available in the Modern Library edition, as well as downloadable from the course site on Quercus.

Method of Instruction: Lecture/Discussion

Method of Evaluation: Shorter 4-page essay (20%); longer 6-page essay (35%); two brief quizzes (10% each); two directed reading responses, posted under “Discussions” on Quercus (10% total), and spirited class participation (15%).

ENG308Y1Y - Romantic Literature

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday 11 am -12 pm; Wednesday 11 am -1 pm

Instructor(s): Karen Weisman

Office Location: JHB 925

Email: karen.weisman@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: This course will explore the poetry and prose of British Romanticism (roughly 1780-1832). The Romantic period was a time of intense intellectual, cultural, political and social activity. We will explore its many forms and themes, notably the nature of self, human rights, political revolution, the role of imagination, poetic form, and many others.

Required Reading: Selections from such authors as William Wordsworth, S.T. Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, PB Shelley, John Keats, Mary Shelley, John Clare, Mary Prince, Lord Byron, Olaudah Equiano, Felicia Hemans and others

First Three Authors/Texts: William Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” “Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads,” Lyrical Ballads, Selections from The Prelude (Norton selections of Books 1, 2, 11, and 13)

Method of Evaluation: First term: short essay; longer essay; in-class essay test. Second term: research essay (maximum length 3000 words); final exam (with focus on second term).

ENG311H1F - Medieval Literature

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 3-5 pm, Thursday 3-4 pm

Instructor(s): Carroll Balot

Office Location: JHB 734

Brief Description of Course: An introduction to non-Chaucerian medieval literature for advanced undergraduates. Although we will discuss some of the history important to understanding the literature of this period, our emphasis will be on close reading rather than a linear literary historical narrative. Our goal will be to formulate and enact a reading practice for each work that grows out of the unique demands of the text itself, considering the way these works have distinctive visions of the world and our place in it.

Required Reading: Marie de France, Lais (Broadview); Malory, Morte Darthur (Oxford UP); Langland, Piers Plowman (NCE); Pearl (Broadview); Book of Margery Kempe (Oxford UP).

First Three Authors/Texts: Marie de France, Guigemar, Bisclavret, Lanval.

Method of Evaluation: Short paper/project; two term tests; class participation.

ENG311H1S - Medieval Literature

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 3-5 pm, Thursday 3-4 pm

Instructor(s): Renée Trilling

Office Location: TBD

Email: renee.trilling@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: The literary traditions of medieval Britain encompass a broad range of languages, forms, and genres, from Celtic elegies to Old English epics and Anglo-Norman romance to Middle English drama. In this course, we will survey those traditions through one guiding question: how does medieval British literature imagine a relationship with the past? Along the way, we will explore the historical contexts (from both medieval and modern historians) and the material culture that supported the creation of these literary texts.

Required Reading: The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Volume 1: The Medieval Period, Revised Third Edition, ISBN 9781554816163

First Three Authors/Texts:

Gildas, from The Ruin of Britain
Pseudo-Nennius, from The History of the Britons
Bede, from Ecclesiastical History of the English People

Method of Evaluation:

Class participation
Two textual analysis essays
Midterm exam
Final exam

ENG320Y1 - Shakespeare

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 1-2 pm, Thursday 1-3 pm

Instructor(s): Lynne Magnusson

Office Location: JHB 922

Email: lynne.magnusson@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: A close study of selected plays and poems, this course equips students to explore Shakespeare’s themes and achievement in relation to plot construction, linguistic experimentation, genre, and stage craft. Attention will be paid to shaping influences, especially Shakespeare’s grammar-school education focused on classical literature and language arts. We will consider how the plays engage with early modern social and political contexts, including family, gender and sexuality, race and class; court, city, and country; theatre and print culture; nation and empire. We will reflect on how Shakespeare became such a major cultural icon, the continuing resonance of his work across the centuries, and re-interpretations today. The course also introduces some current developments in Shakespeare studies

Required Reading: Twelve to thirteen Shakespeare plays and some poetry, including such works as Titus Andronicus, The Taming of the Shrew, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Richard III, The Merchant of Venice, 1 Henry IV, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merry Wives of Windsor, As You Like It, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, The Tempest, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (selected); some secondary critical readings.

First Three Authors/Texts: Titus Andronicus; The Taming of the Shrew; Richard III.

Method of Evaluation: Two short assignments (10% x 2), two essays (20% x 2), two term tests (10% x 2), issue sheets (10%), class participation/discussion (10%).

ENG323H1F - Austen and Her Contemporaries

Section Number: LEC5101

Time(s): Monday 6-9 pm

Instructor(s): T. Keymer

Office Location: UC277

Email: thomas.keymer@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: Jane Austen is one of the most popular canonical novelists, yet also one of the most underestimated, often seen as a purveyor of wish-fulfilling romance. In this course we will approach Austen by asking a series of associated questions about form, content, and context. How far was her fiction constrained, and how far was it enabled, by the conventions of the novel genre and the dictates of consumer demand? What was new, distinctive, or otherwise important about her narrative technique and her social or moral vision? How far, and in what ways, was her writing conditioned by the turbulent politics of the revolutionary era? Is it right to read her as a conservative moralist, a progressive satirist and social critic, or as something of both?

Two of Austen’s major novels (Northanger Abbey and Persuasion) are at the heart of the course, and we will take the opportunity presented by the Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition to compare these works with writings left unpublished at her death, notably her epistolary story Lady Susan and the unfinished Sanditon. For context, we will also read a short novel by Austen’s radical contemporary Mary Wollstonecraft (The Wrongs of Woman) and extracts from other writers whose work Austen probably or certainly knew. As a way to understand the literary marketplace that she had to navigate, the course also includes an “adopt a book” research assignment. Using primary online resources (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, the Corvey Collection 1790-1840, and journalism databases such as 17th-18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers and 19th Century British Library Newspapers), each student will choose an obscure work of fiction or other writing published in Austen’s lifetime, analyze its literary qualities, and research its publication, newspaper marketing, and reception in reviewing periodicals

Required Reading: Jane Austen, Teenage Writings, ed. F. Johnston and K. Sutherland (Oxford World’s Classics); Austen, Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon, ed. C. Johnson (Oxford World’s Classics); Austen, Persuasion, ed. D. Lynch (Oxford World’s Classics); selections from the Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition, ed. K. Sutherland ( http://www.janeausten.ac.uk ); Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman, ed. G. Kelly (Oxford World’s Classics); brief extracts from other writers of the period (e.g. Burke, Cowper, Equiano, Radcliffe)

First Three Authors/Texts: Teenage Writings (selected); Lady Susan; Northanger Abbey

Method of Evaluation: in-class test (25%); “adopt a book” research assignment (35%); final essay (30%); informed and energetic participation (10%)

ENG323H1S - Austen and Her Contemporaries

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday 10 am -12 pm, Wednesday, 10-11 am

Instructor(s): Michael Johnstone

Brief Description of Course: A study of selected novels of Jane Austen and of works by such contemporaries as Radcliffe, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Edgeworth, Scott, and Shelley, in the context of the complex literary, social, and political relationships of that time.

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors/Texts: TBD

Method of Evaluation: TBD

ENG324Y1 - The Victorian Novel

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday 10 am -12 pm, Wednesday 10-11 am

Instructor(s): C. Schmitt

Office Location: JHB 727

Email: cannon.schmitt@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: Dull and stifling in the popular imagination, the Victorian era was in fact a time of massive social, political, and technological upheaval. The period was deeply shaped by feminism; by Marxist and other critiques of capitalism and class-based social organization; by the increased visibility of non-normative sexualities; and by the advent of anti-colonial and anti-imperial movements. Novels not only reflected these concerns in their pages, they actively contributed to them. In addition, literary form itself underwent startling changes. The wholesale remaking of fiction often attributed to the modernism of the early twentieth century began in earnest in the middle of the nineteenth. An immersive encounter, this course aspires to do justice to Victorian novels in all their thrilling diversity and complexity.

Required Reading: Novels by H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and others

First Three Authors/Texts: Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton; Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Method of Evaluation: Two papers (45%), two term tests (30%), short presentation (5%), annotation exercise (5%), participation (15%).

ENG329H1S - Contemporary British Fiction

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Friday 2-5 pm

Instructor(s): Thom Dancer

Office Location: 713 JHB

Email: thom.dancer@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: This is a course on contemporary fiction without regard to nation. This course looks at five 21st-century novels that actively thematise and reflect on what it means to be contemporary. It is a commonplace that Anglophone culture is undergoing one of the most rapid transformations in human history; developments in science, media, technology, and communication are radically revising how we understand our lives, our relationship to our physical environment, and our relations to others. We will ask how the contemporary novel at once reflects upon and prepares us for living, knowing, and acting in the unprecedented world in which we find ourselves. In order to address these concerns we will read and think about novels as they engage in larger political, scientific, and philosophical conversations about the contemporary condition.

Required Reading: David Mitchell, Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kate Atkinson, Tom McCarthy, Colson Whitehead, David Shields, (subject to change).

First Three Authors/Texts: Klara and the Sun, Cloud Atlas, On Beauty

Method of Evaluation: Research Paper, Reading Responses, Participation, Group Project

ENG330H1F - Medieval Drama

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday 2-4 pm, Wednesday 2-3 pm

Instructor(s): M. Sergi

Office Location: JHB 812 (or on Zoom; see premodernity.net/resources)

Email: sergi.utoronto@gmail.com

Brief Description of Course: Playing makes us human; all humans play. Some human play is so alive that just to witness it happening is enlivening: often, that play involves partially pre-planned, structured, or scripted role-play, performed by real bodies in real time and space — what we now call drama. Medieval English players considered all types of play and game (sports, role-play, music, gambling, etc.) to be part of the same genre, but they never called any of it “drama” or “theatre” — let alone “literature” or “high art.” As a result, few play texts were preserved with much care, and fewer were marked out in ways that make them easily identifiable as what we’d now consider to be drama. If we don’t roughen up our sense of what a dramatic text can be in the first place, then, and insist on unmediated reading, we not only fail to read medieval plays as anything but poor reflections of our own ideas about drama, but also may fail to identify what play texts survive at all: that’s part of why the list of known medieval plays is so short — and why it is still growing.

In ENG 330, we will read from edited (but not translated — we’ll spend the first five weeks training in how to read early English) versions of most of the medieval English play texts that are known to survive from before 1485, focusing on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (because so few texts survive from England before then). We will at once rely on the work of prior drama editors and learn to resist editorial assumptions about performance by interacting with rawer dramatic texts. Since most medieval plays were copied from texts meant primarily for insiders’ eyes — for players, not readers — we must attend as much to their implicit cues for action as we do to their dialogue. That kind of reading requires us to (and thus helps develop our ability to) better see the cultural concepts we take for granted — regarding drama, storytelling, belief, seriousness, taste, mortality, repression, and play — and to think outside our modernity. We’ll work through an array of concepts and resources that will help us do that reading and thinking. Check out https://premodernity.net/eng-330 for the full course syllabus and more!

Required Reading:

The ENG 330 Coursepack (course reader), including multiple readings
Two Moral Interludes: The Pride of Life and Wisdom, ed. David N. Klausner (TEAMS edition — Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2009)
The Castle of Perseverance, ed. David Klausner (TEAMS edition — Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010)
Mankind, ed. Kathleen M. Ashley and Gerard NeCastro (TEAMS edition — Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010)
Croxton Play of the Sacrament, ed. John T. Sebastian (TEAMS edition — Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2012)
John Lydgate, Mummings and Entertainments, ed. Claire Sponsler (TEAMS edition — Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010)

First Three Authors/Texts: Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham (Anonymous), The Pride of Life (Anonymous), Disguising at Hertford (Lydgate)

Method of Evaluation:

Engagement and Participation in class discussion sessions, 15%
Real-Time Comprehension Questions (CQs), asked at the end of each class session, 17.5%
Actual Attendance during at least 20 of our 24 class sessions, 10%
Translation/Edition Assignment, due during Week V (see course schedule), 17.5%
Middle English Comprehension Test, in class during Week V (see course schedule), 17.5%
Staging/Performance-Based Analysis Essay, due at the end of term, 22.5%

ENG331H1S - Drama 1485-1603

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday 2-4 pm, Wednesday 2-3 pm

Instructor(s): M. Sergi

Office Location: JHB 812 (or on Zoom; see premodernity.net/resources)

Email: sergi.utoronto@gmail.com

Brief Description of Course: Literary-dramatic history cleaves, conventionally, into periods: we can reliably call British plays composed after 1603 “modern,” of which the earlier portion is “early modern,” while we call all British plays composed before 1485 “medieval.” Such labels do not adhere as easily to the period between 1485 and 1603, during which Tudor monarchs and their administrators employed a range of strategies to consolidate prestige in the Crown, and thus in London. By 1603, London-based styles and conventions, particularly new humanist trends in dramatic performance, had largely eclipsed a diversity of other regional performance traditions, some of which faded out of fashion, and others of which were forcibly prohibited. But throughout the sixteenth century, even as the first commercial theaters began to pop up around London, marking an apparent renaissance of classical forms, other regions in Britain were performing old and new plays in ways that might strike us as more medieval. It was certainly a period of transition, but from what, and to what? What was the set of characteristics shared by those plays that now seem more continuous with future trends (“modern”) than with past ones (“medieval'“)? What is gained when drama becomes modern, and what is the cost of that gain, even now? What can be recovered? What should be left behind? Even as ENG 331 will introduce students to a representative sampling of dramatic literature generated across Britain from 1485 through 1603, it will also work through our readings to figure out how to articulate what happened to drama during this steeply shifting, and stunningly fertile, transitional period.

With frequent reference to the Records of Early English Drama — an archival project still underway at the University of Toronto, in which scholars search through England for scattered and often surprising evidence of early live performance — ENG 331 will organize its readings by geography rather than chronology, taking us not only to Tudor-era London but also through sixteenth-century Cheshire, Yorkshire, East Anglia, Cambridgeshire, Coventry, and Central Scotland. We will pay special attention to the very thing that makes our readings dramatic: the texts’ use of verbal, recorded communication to cue extra-verbal, real-time action — and their encoding of crucial meaning, power, humour, or beauty by means of that cuing.

First Three Authors/Texts: Robin Hood and the Friar/Robin Hood and the Potter (anonymous); Coventry Shearmen and Tailors’ Pageant (anonymous), Fulgens and Lucres (Medwall)

Method of Evaluation:

Engagement and Participation in class discussion sessions, 15%
Real-Time Comprehension Questions, asked at the end of each class session, 17.5%
Actual Attendance during at least 20 of our 24 class sessions, 10%
Edition Critique, due during Week V, 20%
Early English History Quiz, in class during Week V, 12.5%
Archival Research Essay, due at the end of term, 25%

ENG335H1S - Drama 1603-1642

Section Number: LEC5101

Time(s): Wednesday 6-9 pm

Instructor(s): TBD

Brief Description of Course: This course explores English drama from the death of Queen Elizabeth I to the closing of the theatres, with attention to such playwrights as Jonson, Middleton, Shakespeare, Webster.

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors/Texts: TBD

Method of Evaluation: TBD

ENG340H1F - Modern Drama

Section Number: L0101

Time(s): Monday 10 am -12 pm, Wednesday 10-11 am

Instructor(s): Dr. Philippa Sheppard

Office Location: JHB 814

Email: philippa.sheppard@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: This course explores twelve major plays of the first half of the twentieth century -- an era of rapid social and political change – in the light of new intellectual and artistic movements such as Naturalism, Surrealism, Feminism and Socialism. Using clips from filmed productions, we will delve into performance history to arrive at a better sense of what makes these seminal dramas as important today as in their own time.

Required Reading: Ibsen’s A Doll’s House; Strindberg’s Miss Julie; Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya; Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest; Yeats’ On Baile’s Strand (online); Synge’s Playboy of the Western World; Glaspell’s Trifles; Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author; Shaw’s Saint Joan; Brecht’s Galileo; O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.

First Three Authors/Texts: Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov

Method of Evaluation: One in-class essay (20%); one take-home essay (35%); one three-hour exam (35%); participation (10%). I will take attendance each class, and make note of oral contributions, to arrive at the participation mark. Attendance is important. Handing in an outline for the take-home essay is mandatory, receiving a 2 mark bonus on the essay if properly executed.

ENG341H1S - Postmodern Drama

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday 10 am -12 pm, Wednesday 10-11 am

Instructor(s): Dr. Philippa Sheppard

Office Location: JHB 814

Email: philippa.sheppard@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: This course investigates twelve major plays of the turbulent post World War II era -- an era of rapid social and political change – in the light of new intellectual and artistic movements such as: Absurdism, Feminism, and Post-Colonialism. Clips from filmed productions will act as a springboard for discussions about changing modes of performance in these exciting works of drama which are as important today as in their own time

Required Reading: Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, Miller’s The Crucible, Osborne’s Look Back In Anger, Beckett’s Happy Days; Pinter’s The Homecoming; Churchill’s Vinegar Tom; Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman; Friel’s Translations, Shepard’s True West, Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, Stoppard’s Arcadia, Ins Choi’s Kim’s Convenience.

First Three Authors/Texts: Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, Miller’s The Crucible, Osborne’s Look Back In Anger.

Method of Evaluation: One in-class essay (20%); one take-home essay (35%); one three hour exam (35%); participation (10%). I will take attendance each class, and make note of oral contributions, to arrive at the participation mark. Attendance is important. Handing in an outline for the take-home essay is mandatory and receives a 2 mark bonus on the essay grade if properly executed.

ENG349H1S - Contemporary Poetry

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 4-5 pm, Thursday 2-4 pm

Instructor(s): Ming Xie

Office Location: JHB 908

Email: ming.xie@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: This course introduces the work of post-World-War-II poets such as Bishop, O’Hara, Creeley, Plath, Hughes, Larkin, Heaney, Ashbery, Walcott, Hejinian, and Duffy, in a variety of poetic styles and movements. It aims to provide an in-depth engagement with some of their representative works and a critical understanding of their poetic, intellectual, and cultural perspectives. This course also helps students develop skills in close reading and build confidence in critical interpretation and evaluation.

Required Reading: Texts will be accessed online and through the Robarts Library e-resources.

First Three Authors/Texts: TBA

Method of Evaluation:

Participation, 15%
Essay 1, 25%
Essay 2, 35%
Final test, 25

ENG353Y1Y - Canadian Fiction

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Thursday 1-4 pm

Instructor(s): Tania Aguila-Way

Brief Description of Course: A study of ten to twelve Canadian works of fiction, primarily novels.

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors/Texts: TBD

Method of Evaluation: TBD

ENG354Y1Y - Canadian Poetry

Section Number: LEC5101

Time(s): Thursday 6-9 pm

Instructor(s): Vikki Visvis

Office Location: JHB 802

Email: vvisvis@chass.utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: A study of English-Canadian poetry from the nineteenth century to the present day. This survey course will begin with an analysis of poems from the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly the confluence of Romantic and nationalist influences in the works of Confederation Poets. We will continue with a discussion of poetry in Canada from 1920 to 1960, addressing the modernism of the Montreal Group, debates over “native” or nationalist and “cosmopolitan” or internationalist poetic influences, and mid-century women’s poetry. The course will close with an examination of late twentieth and early twenty-first-century poetry. Special attention will be given to issues of masculinity; women writing desire; formal experimentation in concrete, sound, and second-wave feminist poetry; multiculturalism, particularly Jewish-Canadian, Indigenous, and “Africadian” poets; and ecological poetry in Canada.

Required Reading: Course Reader with poetry by Charles Sangster, Isabella Valancy Crawford, Charles G. D. Roberts, Duncan Campbell Scott, Archibald Lampman, E. Pauline Johnson, A. J. M. Smith, F. R. Scott, A. M. Klein, Dorothy Livesay, E. J. Pratt, Earle Birney, Irving Layton, Raymond Souster, Louis Dudek, P. K. Page, Miriam Waddington, Margaret Avison, Jay Macpherson, Anne Wilkinson, Al Purdy, Michael Ondaatje, Patrick Lane, Margaret Atwood, Lorna Crozier, Dionne Brand, Daphne Marlatt, Betsy Warland, Phyllis Webb, bp Nichol, Lola Lemire Tostevin, bill bissett, Christian Bök, Eli Mandel, Leonard Cohen, Anne Michaels, Beth Brant, Lee Maracle, Marilyn Dumont, Gregory Scofield, Don McKay, Robert Bringhurst, Dennis Lee, and Jan Zwicky. Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (Vintage); Margaret Atwood, Journals of Susanna Moodie (Oxford); Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red (Vintage); George Elliott Clarke, Whylah Falls (Polestar). Course Reader available on course Quercus site. Texts by Ondaatje, Atwood, Carson, and Clarke available at the University of Toronto Bookstore (214 College Street, 416-640-7900)

First Three Authors/Texts: Sangster, Crawford, Scott.

Method of Evaluation:

One first-term essay (20%); one second-term essay (30%); one first-term test (15%); one final examination (25%); class participation (10%).

ENG356Y1 - African-Canadian Literature

Section Number: LEC5101

Time(s): Tuesday 6-9 pm

Instructor(s): Professor George Elliott Clarke

Email: libretto@chass.utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: Taught by the foremost expert on African (Black) Canadian Literature, namely Dr. George Elliott Clarke, this course will explore the contradictions (trenchant) of the literature and the accomplishments (stellar) of the authors. Canvassing works by George Boyd, Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke, Wayde Compton, Lorena Gale, Dany Laferriere, Zalika Reid Benta, Djanet Sears, and several others, this course will examine writers both immigrant or "long-time landed," from across the country and from throughout the Diaspora, will discuss the brutal history of slavery and the ugly reality of persistent racism, and will do so by reading plays, poetry, non-fiction, and fiction. This course will enlighten you radically.

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors/Texts: TBD

Method of Evaluation: TBD

ENG357H1F - New Writing in Canada

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 2-3 pm, Thursday 2-4 pm

Instructor(s): Dr. Vikki Visvis

Office Location: JHB, 802

Email: vvisvis@chass.utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: A study of fiction published in Canada in the twenty-first century by emerging writers. Focusing on both the novel and the short story collection, we will consider how contemporary fiction in Canada moves in new directions in its treatment of genre and in its reconceptualization of canonical preoccupations. We will begin with an analysis of speculative fiction, both Indigenous “wonderworks” and Afrofuturism, to explore the traumas of settler-colonialism, Indigenous resurgence, cross-cultural solidarity, and environmental sustainability. We will continue with a critique of the Canadian wilderness to examine how women, madness, and criminality complicate gendered constructions of the North and the adventure narrative. The course will close with a discussion of postmodernism in Canada, specifically its evolving relationship with God, humanism, and history.

Required Reading:

Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves (DCB); Wayde Compton, The Outer Harbour (Arsenal); Elizabeth Hay, Late Nights on Air (McClelland&Stewart); Gil Adamson, The Outlander (Anansi); Yann Martel, The Life of Pi (Vintage); Chester Brown, Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography (Drawn&Quarterly).

Fiction available at the University of Toronto Bookstore (214 College Street, 416-640-7900)

First Three Authors/Texts: Dimaline, Compton, Hay

Method of Evaluation: Take-home test (25%); Essay—8 pages (40%); Final exam—2 hours (25%); Participation (10%).

ENG363Y1Y - American Literature to 1900

Section Number: LEC5101

Time(s): Monday 6-9 pm

Instructor(s): Michael Cobb

Brief Description of Course: This course explores American writing in a variety of genres from the end of the Revolution to the beginning of the twentieth century.

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors/Texts: TBD

Method of Evaluation: TBD

ENG365H1S - Contemporary American Fiction

Section Number: LEC5101

Time(s): Tuesday 4-7 pm

Instructor(s): Professor Boyagoda

Office Location: JHB 921

Email: randy.boyagoda@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: Contemporary American Fiction engages immediate and systemic pressures of national life, as encountered and experienced in personal and public contexts that frequently intersect and mutually challenge. Writers deploy a variety of imaginative and formal means of engagement, including dystopia, historical fiction, and formal experiment. This course considers a series of novels, alongside two films, that suggest what it take and what it means to interrogate contemporary American life via imagination and critique.

Required Reading:

Daniels (The), Everything Everywhere All At Once. A24 Films, 2023.
Ellmann, Lucy. Ducks, Newburyport. Biblioasis, 2019.
Erdrich, Louise. Future Home of the Living God. Harper, 2017.
Field, Todd. Tár. Focus Features/Universal Pictures, 2022.
Headley, Maria Dahvana. Beowulf. MCD x FSG Originals, 2020.
Lacey, Catherine. The Biography of X. FSG, 2023.
Saunders, George. Lincoln in the Bardo. Random House, 2018.
Ward, Jesmyn. Sing, Unburied, Sing. Scribner, 2017.
Whitehead, Colson. Nickel Boys. Anchor Canada, 2019.

First Three Authors/Texts: Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo; Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God; Field, Tár.

Method of Evaluation:

Participation
Close-reading analysis
Midterm
Public reception analysis
Term paper

ENG367H1S - African Literatures in English

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday 11 am -1 pm, Wednesday 11 am - 12 pm

Instructor(s): Comfort Azubuko-Udah

Office Location: JHB 714

Email: comfort.udah@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: This course is an exploration of some of the foundational as well as emerging concerns and investments of African literatures in English. The texts we will read and discuss will allow us to dive into some of the foundational conversations in the field, while also making room for topics and voices that are newer or quieter.

Required Reading:
Aidoo, Ama Ata: Our Sister Killjoy
Emecheta, Buchi: The Joys Of Motherhood
Mbue, Imbolo How Beautiful We Were

First Three Authors/Texts:
Aidoo, Ama Ata: Our Sister Killjoy
Emecheta, Buchi: The Joys Of Motherhood
Mbue, Imbolo How Beautiful We Were

Method of Evaluation: In-class work, discussion participation, and a series of short close reading essays.

ENG371H1S - Topics in Indigenous, Postcolonial, and Transnational Literatures: Global Indigenous Women’s Writing

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday 1-3 pm, Wednesday 1-2 pm

Instructor(s): Cheryl Suzack

Office Location: JHB 913

Email: cheryl.suzack@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: Beginning with a classic text of feminist Indigenous storytelling, we will survey writing by Indigenous women from a comparative, global perspective and examine the ways in which this writing participates in broader concerns about identity, art, experience, and gender formation. We will discuss issues that include assessing memory and narrative as tools of self-representation and analyze how literary texts depict Indigenous women’s voices and identities. Our goal will be to arrive at an understanding of how Indigenous women represent their selfhood and voices through the complex intersections of race, class, gender, and community experiences.

Required Reading:

Louise Erdrich (Chippewa), Tracks (HarperPerennial) (1988)
LeAnne Howe (Choctaw), Shell Shaker (Aunt Lute) (2001)
Lee Maracle, Ravensong, (1993)
Tiya Miles (African American), The Cherokee Rose (John F. Blair) (2015)
Katherena Vermette (Métis), The Break (House of Anansi) (2016)
Alexis Wright (Waanji, Australia), Carpentaria (2006)
Doris Pilkington Garimara (Mardudjara, Australia), Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996)
Patricia Grace (Ngati Toa/Ngati Raukawa/Te Ati Awa, New Zealand), Potiki (1986)

First Three Authors/Texts:
Louise Erdrich (Chippewa), Tracks (HarperPerennial) (1988)
LeAnne Howe (Choctaw), Shell Shaker (Aunt Lute) (2001)
Tiya Miles (African American), The Cherokee Rose (John F. Blair) (2015)

Method of Evaluation: Short essays, long essay, participation, final examination.

ENG372H1F - Topics in Indigenous, Postcolonial, Transnational Literatures: Postcolonial Writing - CANCELLED

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday 10-11 am, Wednesday 10 am -12 pm

Instructor(s): S. Salih

Office Location: JHB 832

Email: sara.salih@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: During this course, we will study fictional, theoretical and non-fictional texts from a variety of contexts and geographical locales. We will survey and discuss some key postcolonial theories, and we will reflect on the relevance of these ideas for our contemporary contexts.

Required Reading:

Pramod Nayar, Postcolonial Studies
Edward Said, Orientalism
J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K
Jonathan Crary, 24/7
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
Joe Sacco, Palestine
---. Paying the Land [optional]

Films :

Edward Said, The Last Interview
Stephanie Black, Life and Debt
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis

First Three Authors/Texts: Said, Nayar intro, The Last Interview

Method of Evaluation: Abstract, mid-term essay, in-class essay, participation

ENG373H1F - Topics in Pre-1800 British Literature: Premodern Ecologies

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday 10am – 1pm

Instructor(s): Andrea Walkden

Office Location: JHB 825

Email: andrea.walkden@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: What might it mean to think with the premodern past about our environmental future? In this course, we will set literary works written before 1700 alongside contemporary reporting on the Anthropocene, the relatively new (and still contested) term for our current geological epoch, named for us and for the indelible imprint we have left on our planet. Together we will explore how recent debates about climatic change, migration, sustainability, habitation, extraction, resource depletion, and mass extinction find their unlikely counterparts and, in some instances, their conceptual beginnings in premodern practices, figurations, and modes of thought. As we extend our ecocritical inquiries backward, we will also be alert to the ways in which earlier artists, writers, and readers can challenge our current perceptions of non/human personhood, creaturely life, and the precarity of the natural world. Our course readings will be located primarily in the real (and unreal) landscapes and wetscapes of the British islands. But we will also be spending time on the frozen tundra of the Arctic, at the bottom of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and in the colonial settlements and plantations of the Caribbean.

Required Reading: selections from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Pliny’s Natural History; the medieval quest narrative, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (in modern translation); John Lyly’s gender-bending pastoral drama, Galatea; George Best’s travel narrative, A true discourse of the late voyages of discovery; the extravagant garden worlds of Spenser’s Faerie Queene; Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear; a miniature epic about two stranded whales, Edmund Waller’s The Battle of the Summer Islands; lyric cogitations on vegetable and animal life by Andrew Marvell and Margaret Cavendish; essays by the experimental scientists, naturalists, and encyclopaedists, Francis Bacon and Thomas Browne; selected landscape and floral still life paintings; cartographical illustrations; John Evelyn’s manifesto for reforestation, Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest Trees; and the creation narratives of Genesis and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Primary works will be paired with shorter readings in environmental theory, ecology, and ecocriticism.

First Three Authors/Texts: Ariel’s song from The Tempest, pastoral verse by Christopher Marlowe, Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden”

Method of Evaluation: five informal discussion posts (25%); participation, including in-class workshops and activities (15%); short essay, 3-4 pages, centred on a key term in environmental theory or on an animal, insect, bird, plant, or mineral (25%); final essay, 5-6 pages (35%)

ENG373H1S - Topics in Pre-1800 British Literature: Obscure Shakespeare

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesdays 2–3pm, Thursdays 2–4pm

Instructor(s): Prof. Misha Teramura

Office Location: JHB 712

Email: m.teramura@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: Despite Shakespeare’s reputation as the most celebrated writer in the English language, some of his works remain rarely performed and seldom read. These “forgotten” works span Shakespeare’s entire career and all of the major forms in which he wrote: poetry, comedy, history, and tragedy. Far from minor or insignificant, some of these works constitute milestones in Shakespeare’s career and reception. The blockbuster poem Venus and Adonis was his debut publication, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen were his last works for the stage, and the manuscript of Sir Thomas More preserves the only surviving literary example of Shakespeare’s handwriting. This course tracks the shape of Shakespeare’s career through an examination of his lesser-known works, asking how these historically neglected texts change our understanding of Shakespeare while also considering the critical and political forces that led to their marginalization. We will approach the plays both as literary texts and as embodied theatrical events, giving special attention to Shakespeare’s poetic language, dramaturgy, and complex treatments of power, politics, community, family, nation, race, gender, and sexuality.

Required Reading: Our course textbook will be The Norton Shakespeare: Third Edition (New York: Norton, 2016), which is available in both digital and hard-copy formats; however, free online substitutes for all of the texts will be made available.

First Three Authors/Texts: Venus and Adonis, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Method of Evaluation:

Short assignments
Final paper
Participation in discussion

ENG374H1F - Topics in Pre-1800 British Literature: Shakespeare’s Tragi-Comedies

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 10 am -12 pm, Thursday 10-11 am

Instructor(s): Dr. Philippa Sheppard

Office Location: JHB 814

Email: philippa.sheppard@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: Shakespeare, from 1608 onwards, responded to his company’s adoption of an indoor venue, Blackfriars, and new aesthetic demands from his audience, by helping to pioneer a fresh genre of drama: the tragi-comedy or romance. Influenced by Greek myths and epics, the sophisticated court masque, and folk- and fairy-tale, these five late plays are linked by common themes: reconciliation, renewal and wish-fulfilment. These tragi-comedies provoke questions about the nature of power, family identity, and the role of the arts in society. Recent productions on stage and screen will animate our study.

Required Reading: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Two Noble Kinsmen.

First Three Authors/Texts: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale.

Method of Evaluation: One in-class essay (20%); one take-home essay (35%); one three-hour exam (35%), participation (10%).

ENG374H1S - Topics in Pre-1800 British Literature: Early Modern Life-Writing

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday 11 am - 1 pm, Wednesday 11 am - 12 pm

Instructor(s): Andrea Walkden

Office Location: JHB 825

Email: andrea.walkden@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: The literary forms of biography, autobiography, and memoir are familiar to us all. But before these forms coalesced into their present shapes, there was a differently diverse and varied set of practices that constituted early modern life-writing. In this course, which covers material from 1550 to 1700, we will explore many of these alternative or emergent forms in which people experienced and represented their lives. These include diaries and daybooks, conversion narratives, martyr stories, personal essays, financial account books, recipe books, last wills and testaments, and bills of mortality (lists of the plague dead). Working with these materials, we will consider the multiple, sometimes conflicting possibilities for imagining the meaning or purpose of a life, whether one’s own or another person’s, as well as the defining events, such as persecution, war, illness, childbirth, bereavement, enslavement, destitution, and disgrace, that shaped a life’s framing in language. A further aim will be to trace the impact of the period’s radical experiments in life-writing on other literary genres, from female friendship poetry and homerotic lament to the fictionalized first-person narratives of the early novel. Throughout our explorations, we will draw inspiration from the cross-disciplinary approaches and deepening perspectives of such writers and scholars as Virginia Woolf, Saidiya Hartman, and Christina Sharpe, who have sought to narrate untold life stories in ways that confront and creatively give voice to the silences of the archive and historical record.

Required Reading: Isabella Whitney’s verse epistles, including her mock will and testament; Katherine Philips’s letters and friendship poems; Hannah Woolley’s recipe book The Ladies Directory; John Foxe’s harrowing Book of Martyrs; the ghost-written account of King Charles I’s final reflections before his execution, Eikon Basilike; the personal, philosophical, and scientific essays of Francis Bacon, Michel de Montaigne, and Thomas Browne; the diaries of the aristocratic Anne Clifford and ambitiously middle-class Samuel Pepys; John Aubrey’s scandalous Brief Lives, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.

First Three Authors/Texts: Boccaccio, “Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons,” Martha Moulsworth, “The Memorandum of Martha Moulsworth,” Montaigne, “Of Idleness”

Method of Evaluation: informal discussion posts (25%); participation, including in-class workshops and activities (15%); first essay (30%); second essay (30%)

ENG376H1S - Topics in Theory, Language, Critical Methods: Queer Methods

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 1-3 pm, Thursday 1-2 pm

Instructor(s): Dana Seitler

Brief Description of Course: Sustained study in a topic pertaining to literary theory, critical methods, or linguistics. Content varies with instructors. See Department website for current offerings. Course may not be repeated under the same subtitle.

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors/Texts: TBD

Method of Evaluation: TBD

ENG377H1S - Topics in Theory, Language, Critical Methods: The Environmental Imagination

Section Number: LEC101

Time(s): Tuesday 4-5 pm, Thursday 4-6 pm

Instructor(s): Andrea Most

Office Location: JHB 827

Email: andrea.most@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: An overview of the field of the Environmental Humanities, this experiential course introduces students to a wide variety of written texts, physical experiences, material landscapes and objects in order to better understand the stories we tell about the natural world around and within us. We will confront the hard facts about many of these stories: that they have led us to the brink of environmental catastrophe. Then, through a transformative interactive group project, we will begin to imagine a healthier relationship between humanity and the living earth which sustains us.

Required Reading: Works such as: Anthropocene (film); Rachel Carson, Silent Spring; Merchants of Doubt (film); Genesis 1-3; Thomas King, The Truth About Stories; Pocahontas (film); Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass; William Shakespeare, As You Like It; Henry David Thoreau, “Walking”; Barry Lopez, The Re-Discovery of North America; Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees; Carl Safina, Beyond Words; Rivers and Tides (film); Brigid Schulte, Overwhelmed; Paul Bogard, The End of Night; Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath; Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac.

First Three Authors/Texts: Anthropocene (2018 film); Rachel Carson, Silent Spring; Merchants of Doubt (film)

Method of Evaluation: Four Short Reflection Pieces (40%), Final Project (40%), Class Participation (20%)

ENG378H1F - Special Topics: Early Victorian Novels: from Dickens to Sensation Fiction

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday 12-3 pm

Instructor(s): Audrey Jaffe

Brief Description of Course: This course concentrates on the Victorian novel as it developed over roughly the first half of the 19th century, and is envisioned as a complement to (though independent of) ENG379H1S on the late Victorian novel. Readings include fiction by Dickens, Bronte, and Gaskell, and consider issues of class, identity, and self-making as they arise in first-person narratives, the industrial novel, and the beginnings of sensation fiction.

Required Reading: (subject to change): Dickens, Oliver Twist; Bronte, Jane Eyre; Gaskell, Mary Barton; Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret; Dickens, “A Christmas Carol.”

First Three Authors/Texts: Dickens, Bronte, Gaskell

Method of Evaluation: Two essays (20%, 25%); term test (25%); participation in class and small discussion groups (15% each).

ENG378H1F - Special Topics: Modern American Literature, 1900-1950

Section Number: LEC5101

Time(s): Wednesday 6-9 pm

Instructor(s): Scott Rayter

Brief Description of Course: Sustained study in a variety of topics, including: Canadian literature, American literature, Post-1800 British literature, and genres or themes that span across nations and periods. Content varies with instructors. See Department website for current offerings. Course may not be repeated under the same subtitle.

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors/Texts: TBD

Method of Evaluation: TBD

ENG378H1S - Special Topics: Why Do We Love Horror?

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 1-3 pm, Thursday 3-4 pm

Instructor(s): Jim Hansen

Office Location: TBD

Email: TBD

Brief Description of Course: Have you ever asked yourself: “Why do I like to be frightened?” When the novel came into being in the in middle of the eighteenth century, its most popular genre was the Gothic—the novel of horror. In fact, the modern era—the era of science, reason, and democracy—has been obsessed with terror, fear, and the unknown since its very inception. So, why do we like to be terrified? What is it about scary stories that so appeals to modern culture? Perhaps we avoid delving into such questions because they reveal to us that our pleasures often seem woefully uncivilized and terribly unseemly. Beginning with one of the earliest Gothic horror novels, the course will trace out a literary, philosophical, and filmic history. Each unit of the course will explore how a different psychological/cultural concept of terror plays out in an aesthetic context.

Required Reading:
Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
Jones, Stephen Graham. The Only Good Indians (2020)
Kunzru, Harry White Tears (2017)
LaValle, Victor. The Ballad of Black Tom (2016)
Lewis, Matthew. The Monk (1794)
Tremblay, Paul. A Head full of Ghosts (2015)

Films: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968), William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973), Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), Joe Cornish's Attack the Block (2011), Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), and Karyn Kasama’s Jennifer’s Body (2009).

First Three Authors/Texts: Matthew Lewis, The Monk; Victor Lavalle, The Ballad of Black Tom; Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

Method of Evaluation:

Work for this course will include:

Two Essays: 30%
Film Review 20%
Class Participation: 20%
Final Exam: 30%

ENG379H1F - Special Topics: Alice Munro

Section Number: LEC101

Time(s): Tuesday 3-4 pm; Thursday 3-5 pm

Instructor(s): Sarah Caskey

Office Location: JHB 802

Email: sarah.caskey@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: When Alice Munro was awarded the Nobel Laureate for Literature in 2013, she was acknowledged as a “master of the contemporary short story.” This assessment represents the widely shared view that Munro has radically reshaped and reimagined what the short story can do. By way of close readings, this course will explore Munro’s writing from early pieces to her latest, focusing on her development of the short story form. Selections from her body of work and critical reception to her writing will also reveal her investigations of gender, class, region, realism, perception, memory, and above all, the processes of storytelling. An Alice Munro story captures the fullness and complexity of life, and this course will seek to explore and analyze the fullness and complexity of Munro’s literary aesthetic.

Required Reading: Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women (1971) and Alice Munro: My Best Stories (2009) will be available from the UofT Bookstore. Other story selections will be available on the Library Reading List through Quercus.

First Three Authors/Texts: “The Peace of Utrecht,” Lives of Girls and Women, “The Beggar Maid.”

Method of Evaluation: Short Passage Analysis (25%); Essay (40%); Final Assignment (25%); Participation (10%).

ENG379H1S - Special Topics: Late Victorian Novels: From Dracula to Detective Fiction

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday 12-3 pm

Instructor(s): Audrey Jaffe

Brief Description of Course: This course focuses on the Victorian novel as it developed over roughly the second half of the 19th century and is envisioned as a complement to (though independent of) ENG378H1F on the early Victorian novel. Readings will highlight the varied genres of Victorian fiction, and include such issues as changing ideas of class, gender, and identity; the role of imperialism in Victorian culture, and the origins of detective fiction. Authors discussed include Wilde, Stoker, and Doyle.

Required Reading: (subject to change): Collins, The Moonstone; Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles; Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray; Eliot, The Lifted Veil; Stoker, Dracula; Conan Doyle, selected works.

First Three Authors/Texts: Collins, Hardy, Wilde

Method of Evaluation: Two essays (20%, 25%); term test (25%); participation in class and in small discussion groups (15% each).

ENG379H1S - Special Topics: Postmodern American Literature, 1950-Now

Section Number: LEC5101

Time(s): Wednesday 6-9 pm

Instructor(s): Scott Rayter

Required Reading: TBA

First Three Authors/Texts: TBA

Method of Evaluation: TBA

ENG382Y1Y - Literary Theory

Section Number: LEC101

Time(s): Wednesday 1-3, Friday 1-2

Instructor(s): Paul Downes

Office Location: JHB 731

Email: paul.downes@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: An introduction to some of the most influential theoretical and critical ideas about literature and literary language from the late -nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. Approaches studied may include structuralism, formalism, Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, queer theory, critical race studies, psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory and ecocriticism.

Required Reading: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (Third Edition)

First Three Authors/Texts: Saussure, Du Bois, Woolf

Method of Evaluation:

Term Tests: 2x20%
Essay (1,000 words): 20%
Essay (2,500 words): 30%
Participation: 10%

ENG385H1F - History of the English Language

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 11 am – 1pm, Thursday 11am – 12 pm

Instructor(s): Carol Percy

Office Location: JHB 732

Email: carol.percy@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course:

"This course explores English from its prehistory to the present day, emphasizing Old, Middle, and Early Modern English and the theory and terminology needed to understand their lexical, grammatical, and phonological structure; language variation and change; codification and standardization; literary and non-literary usage."

Content and Goals

This is an introductory and an interdisciplinary course. It is an ENG course, so you'll see how the course illuminates the study of literature, and the personal research essay always has ‘literary' options. But the course also deconstructs the standard English that we all have in common and decodes slang and jargon, so often attracts social science and science students. In short, this course is for everyone, and I hope that you'll all enjoy it. Indeed, it's not only accessible to multilingual students, but depends upon the unique experiences and expertise and interests of everyone in the class in the fall of 2023.

The course has a broad chronological structure, in which transferable linguistic concepts will be introduced one at a time. By the end of this twelve-week course, you won't know Old English (OE); you'll know about OE. You'll be in confident command of the jargon for describing variation, change and standardization in the vocabulary, grammar, accents, and spelling of historical, regional, and social varieties of Englishes. You'll learn how to use online resources like dictionaries and corpora (structured collections of electronic texts) to answer questions you never knew you had about language contact, variation, change, and authority. You'll have some concepts to critique the definitions of language standards (and to master them). And you'll have a sense of the external events and interactions and conflicts that influenced the developments of Englishes.

Four broad questions will guide us through the course. How can historicized varieties of English illuminate our understanding of earlier literatures and cultures? How are these earlier Englishes reflected in the present? What kind of cultural work gets done when we categorize what counts as a standard, a dialect, or a language, and/or who speaks it? And who has assumed the authority to define what is and isn't English and/or standard English, for instance in dictionaries, grammars, and the classroom?

Literary and cultural-historical texts will focus explanations and explorations of linguistic concepts in class. And low-stakes activities and tasks will familiarize methods introduced in mini-lectures. In very short "try-out" reports you can choose your own primary sources while you try out analyses of topics like loanwords, grammar wars, and slang. "Variations in Vocatives" range from thou vs you in a Shakespeare play to the dysphemism bitches among friends. "Neologisms" could include seemingly new words in an Austen novel—or on Twitter. "Style-shifting or Code-switching" (between standard English and other varieties or languages) might find you rereading a Victorian or postcolonial novel, or listening to K-Pop. Feedback on these reports should help you transform them into a final research paper and will reassure you of your progress in the course.

The cornerstone of this course remains your personal research papers, on cultural-linguistic or literary subjects, expanded from a draft that is itself expanded from one of your low-stakes "try-out" reports. Recent final paper topics have included "Apostrophe: An O'erwhelming History of the Crook't Mark," "Code-switching in English Translation: The Ojibwa Creation Story," "Translating Chaucer's Bawdy Tales: Social Norms and ‘The Reeve's Tale,'" "Reactionary Anxieties: Shakespeare's Neologisms and Othello's Gender and Sexuality Politics," “The Argument of Anti-Creationism: Satan’s Neologisms and the Rhetoric of Rebellion in Paradise Lost,” "New Word Senses and the Navy: Conversations in Persuasion," "Chemistry's Combustion Question: The Shift from Phlogiston to Oxygen," “The Oxford Comma: History, Controversy, and Its Status Today,” "Call Me By Your Name: The Expression of Identity through Code-Switching," "Aesthetic Erasure, Linguistic Reclamation: The Cultural Evolution and Prominence of the Poetess," "Inuktitut Loanwords and Cultural Contact in the Arctic," "Judge Tyco: An Exploration of Toronto Slang," and "There Isn't Nothing Wrong with a Little Double Negation." Generous past students have given me permission to post their papers online for you to read. And I am always happy to help you devise your topics and shape your papers.

Required Reading:

(1) Required e-readings will be available through Quercus. These will include:

Míša Hejná & George Walkden. 2022. A history of English (Textbooks in Language Sciences 9). Berlin: Language Science Press. https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/346

(2) TBA: if there is a required textbook, it will be ordered through the UofT Bookstore: https://uoftbookstore.com/buy_textbooks.asp

First Three Authors/Texts: Likely Hejná & Walkden chapters 1 & 2, along with a class discussion of “Lilly Singh Teaches You Canadian Slang | Vanity Fair,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lEGuJg2ckM

Method of Evaluation: To reinforce your engagement and comprehension in course material generally, there is lots of N/CR “practice”: repeatable e-xercises online (5%); participation via in-class discussion and online exit slips (10%); five “try-out” tasks, including practice test questions (5 x 2% = 10%). Midterm literary applications (20%); research essay, including an optional revision (30%); final test (25%).

ENG388H1S - Creative Writing: Poetry

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Wednesday 2-4 pm

Instructor(s): Noor Naga

Brief Description of Course: A course devoted to the craft of writing poetry, with attention to a range of forms, genres, styles, and compositional methods. The workshopping of student writing will take place alongside close-readings of individual poems, craft discussions and in-class writing exercises. Students will compose eight first drafts of poems over the semester and will have their poems workshopped thrice by their peers. Students will be expected to provide oral and written feedback in workshop and to participate in class discussion. The final portfolio will include revisions of six poems alongside an author’s statement.

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors/Texts: TBD

Method of Evaluation: TBD

ENG389H1F - Creative Writing: Short Fiction

Section Number: LEC5101

Time(s): Thursday 6-9 pm

Instructor(s): Robert McGill

Office Location: JHB 716

Email: robert.mcgill@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: Our focus will be the craft of writing short fiction. Classes will principally follow a workshop format in which we discuss students’ stories and, along with them, techniques and strategies for good writing. We’ll also read and discuss published stories with an eye to the same things. By providing oral and written feedback on fellow writers’ work, students will develop their editing skills and build editorial relationships with each other.

Required Reading: Classmates’ writing; published short fiction by authors such as Russell Banks, Jhumpa Lahiri, E. Annie Proulx, and George Saunders.

First Three Authors/Texts: (subject to change) Russell Banks, “Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story”; Jhumpa Lahiri, “A Temporary Matter”; E. Annie Proulx, “The Half-Skinned Steer.”

Method of Evaluation: Two short stories (20%); written peer feedback (15%); class participation (15%); joint presentation (10%); portfolio story (35%); portfolio preface (5%).

ENG394H1F - Creative Writing Special Topics: Literary Journalism

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Wednesday 2-4 pm

Instructor(s): Jessica Johnson

Brief Description of Course: Why do some stories stay with us long after we’ve read them? And why do others draw us in even when we’re not interested in the subject matter? This reading- and writing-focused class deconstructs the elements of compelling long-form writing through its main contemporary styles — investigative journalism, profiles, the personal essay— with a view to identifying the elements of structure, style, and voice. Weekly readings, class discussion and occasional guest speakers will trace the evolution of long-form writing over the last century, from The New Yorker to the viral web essay. As a final project, students will have the option of writing a critique of one of the articles on the syllabus or creating their own original work of writing.

Readings: Weekly readings include article selections from The New Yorker, Best Canadian Essays, The Walrus, and more. Sample readings:

"Can You Say..Hero?" Tom Junod, Esquire
One of: “Shipping Out” (A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) by David Foster Wallace (Harper’s) or “I Really Didn’t Want to Go” by Lauren Oyler (Harper’s)"When Twenty-Six Thousand Stinkbugs Invade Your Home” by Kathryn Schultz (The New Yorker)“Objectivity is a Privilege afforded to White Journalists” by Pacinthe Mattar (The Walrus)“Students for Sale” (The Shadowy Business of International Education) by Nicholas Hune-Brown (The Walrus)
“On Seeing and Being Seen.” Alicia Elliott, A Mind Spread out on the Ground
“Persuasion (2022) is a hate crime.” By BLG Taylor

Method of Evaluation:

Class Participation: 20%
Short assignments: 20%
Midterm/Quiz: 20%
Essay 40%

ENG394H1S - Creative Writing Special Topics: Language is Material: Creating Chapbooks

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Friday 1-3 pm

Instructor(s): Claire Battershill

Office Location: JHB 702

Email: claire.battershill@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: This creative writing course on chapbooks will take a project-based approach: each student will write and make their own chapbook over the course of the semester. Students will write a sequence of poems, a long poem, a short story, a series of flash fiction pieces, or sequence of experimental works and design and produce 25 copies to share with their classmates and communities. Drawing inspiration from visits to the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library and the Massey College Library, we will consider chapbooks (and related genres such as zines, literatura de cordel, small artists’ books, and small-run pamphlets) as vehicles for creative work and contextualize our own creative efforts within the rich history of small press literary production. Students in this course will be thinking about the whole of their works, designing the books intentionally to reflect the materials they’re writing about and honing their literary aesthetics as they learn how to make books. No experience in book arts or crafts is required: students will receive hands-on material education, learning from Toronto artists in the fields of papermaking, letterpress printing, and bookbinding. Through low-stakes exercises and prompts, we will also be exploring the notion of language as a material and theorizing materiality, repetition, multiples, and graphic art as these relate to writing.

Required Reading: : Examples of chapbooks from JackPine Press, Frog Hollow Press, and Ugly Duckling Presse, among others, and selected theoretical writings on the relationships between book objects and creative writing.

First Three Authors/Texts: Aisha Sasha John, To Stand at the Precipice Alone and Repeat What is Whispered; Virginia Woolf, The Mark on the Wall; Anni Albers, “Material as Metaphor”

Method of Evaluation:

30% draft and prototype book
20% process documentation and reflection on methods
20% in-class exercises and prompts
20% final edition
10% participation and collaboration

ENG394H1S - Creative Writing Special Topics: Science Fiction

Section Number: LEC5101

Time(s): Monday 6-9 pm

Instructor(s): Robert McGill

Office Location: JHB 716

Email: robert.mcgill@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: Our focus will be on the craft of writing science fiction short stories. Classes will include writing exercises, a round of workshopping, and the discussion of published short fiction, most of it from the past decade. We’ll treat the genre expansively, not least by considering the relationship between science fiction and genres such as fantasy, horror, and literary fiction.

Required Reading: Stories by authors such as Senaa Ahmad, Octavia E. Butler, Ted Chiang, Ruby Cowling, Greg Egan, Kim Fu, Frank Herbert, Nalo Hopkinson, Ursula K. Le Guin, George McWhirter, Blue Neustifter, Chelsea Vowel, and Alexander Weinstein; the film After Yang; peer short fiction.

First Three Authors/Texts: (subject to change) Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”; Herbert, “Seed Stock”; Butler, “Speech Sounds.”

Method of Evaluation: Writing exercises (10%); short story (10%); class participation (15%); written peer feedback (10%); joint presentation (10%); portfolio (35%); portfolio preface (10%).

400 Level

ENG480H1F - Advanced Studies Seminar: Fragments: A Lover's Genre

Section Number: LEC0101        

Time(s): Monday 2-4 pm

Instructor(s): Michael Cobb

Brief Description of Course: Must we use fragments to express love? Although a grand and ubiquitous emotion, we often seem to find love among partial and or degraded texts; notebooks; diaries; tentative thoughts; aphorisms; text messages; tweets; status updates; Instagram captions; lyrical poetry; ruins. What does fragmentary form reveal about love? Is it a fleeting, always-a-bit-lost feeling? Is love ever whole? Is love a small, minor emotion? Not epic? We'll ask these and other questions of Roland Barthes, Sappho, Samuel Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Anne Carson, Frank O'Hara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, Maggie Nelson, and Hilton Als (among others). We'll also draw on examples from all sorts of popular and fine cultures from antiquity, from modernity, from now.

Required Reading: Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse; Anne Carson's translation of Sappho, If Not Winter; Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha, Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red, Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts, Hilton Als, White Girls, and selections from Coleridge, Dickinson, Eliot, and Sontag

First Three Authors/Texts: Barthes, Sappho, Benjamin

Method of Instruction: Seminar Discussions

ENG480H1F - Advanced Studies Seminar: Utopia/Dystopia

Section Number: LEC0201        

Time(s): Tuesday 10am-12pm

Instructor(s): Andrea Walkden

Brief Description of Course: When Thomas More coined the word “utopia” in 1516, he exploited the way this new term, with its origin in ancient Greek, could mean either “good place” (eu-topos) or “no place” (ou-topos). Four hundred years later, readers of More’s Utopia would further complicate the meanings of the word by introducing another term “dystopia” or “bad place,” applying it sometimes to the newly imagined worlds of science fiction and sometimes to the ideal commonwealth described by More himself.

In this seminar, we will be exploring the conceptual and creative resources of utopian/dystopian fiction for reorienting perceptions of our world. Together, we will consider how this most rule-bound (and risk-taking) of literary genres works to confront readers’ understanding of the normative and the ideal by presenting a vision of a possible future or a nonexistent place that tells an alternative story of the present moment. Students will be encouraged to pursue their own lines of inquiry from among our topics of discussion. These topics will include bioethics and biopolitics, sexual communism and eugenics, climate crisis and migration, game design and utopian design, happiness as a promise, an expectation, or a duty, the closed society, global connectedness, and the drive both to discover and to occupy new worlds.

Required Reading: Thomas More, Utopia (1516), Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World (1666), Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (1923), Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2004), Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea (2016), Ling Ma, Severance (2018). Secondary readings to include selections from: Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art

First Three Authors/Texts: Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (short story); Chana Joffe-Walt, “Some Like it Dot” (podcast); Ling Ma, Severance (contemporary fiction)

Method of Evaluation: Participation, including in-class workshops (15%); generating discussion topics for three class sessions (15%); short experimental essay (25%); final project, creative or critical, to involve research and be developed in stages: proposal, partial draft, and final version (40%); class presentation about your final project (5%)

ENG480H1F - Advanced Studies Seminar: The Ethnic American Literary Anthology: Dispelling a Canon?

Section Number: LEC0301

Time(s): Tuesday 2-4 pm

Instructor(s): Lilika Ioki Kukiela

Brief Description of Course: What is the American literary canon and who is it for? What is “American” about the American literary canon and how have American writers of colour, their allies, and supporters sought to disrupt the meaning of the canon from the early twentieth century to the present day? This course seeks to answer these questions by examining a variety of literary anthologies featuring works by ethnic American writers, artists, and activists who question and speak to the power of the literary canon. These anthologies are now seminal to specific fields of interest: Asian American Studies, African American Studies, Indigenous Studies, Latinx Studies, Feminist Theory, and Critical Race Theory. By engaging with the form and content of key ethnic literary anthologies collected by editors throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century, as well as single-author literary anthologies, students will not only be introduced to the literary anthology as a genre—and its potentials and problematics—but also gain insight into Critical Ethnic Studies, multi-ethnic literature in the U.S., and the study of comparative racialization.

Required Reading: Aiiieeeee!, edited by Frank Chin, Jeffrey Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong (1974); This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (1981); But Some of Us Are Brave, edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (1982); Sister Outsider, by Audre Lorde (1984); Borderlands/La Frontera, by Gloria Anzaldúa (1987); The Displaced, edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2018); Shapes of Native Nonfiction, edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton (2019); and other scholarly articles.

First Three Authors/Texts: Aiiieeeee!, This Bridge Called My Back, and But Some of Us are Brave

Method of Evaluation: Participation (20%); Presentation (15%); Dream anthology introduction (25%); Research paper abstract (10%); Final paper (30%).

ENG480H1S - Advanced Studies Seminar: Making the Comic Novel: Fielding to Austen - CANCELLED

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday 2-4 pm

Instructor(s): Simon Dickie

Office Location: JHB 920

Email: dickie.office@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: Our aim in this course is to trace the development of comic fiction from Henry Fielding to Jane Austen (with a brief glance ahead to Dickens). Discussions will focus on form and genre; print culture and the demands of the market; gender, sexuality, and the courtship plot; the unfamiliar world of eighteenth-century humour; social hierarchies and class relations, and many other topics. Students will have ample opportunity to pursue individual research interests.

Secondary readings will take in recent scholarship on the rise of the novel, reception history, and the history of reading. We will pay special attention to the influence of women writers (notably Burney and Austen) and will persistently question the long neglect of humour and entertainment in novel studies.

Required Reading:

Fielding, Tom Jones (Books 1-9, i.e. first half only)
Smollett, Humphry Clinker
Burney, Evelina
Austen, Juvenilia and Persuasion
Online course reader of secondary readings, theory, and early-modern jokes

First Three Authors/Texts: Fielding, Smollett, Burney

Method of Evaluation: 5 discussion board posts (300-400 words each, 20%), essay proposal and annotated bibliography (2-3 pages, 20%), final paper (3000-3500 words, 45%), active and informed participation (15%).

ENG480H1S - Advanced Studies Seminar: The Novel as Empathy Machine

Section Number: LEC0201

Time(s): Tuesday 12-2 pm

Instructor(s): A. Jaffe

Office Location: JHB 910

Email: a.jaffe@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: This course will explore the idea that the novel can “teach” feeling: that the form has a special capacity to evoke empathy, sympathy, and affection for our fellow-beings by inviting attachments to imaginary persons. We will consider this issue in relation to a series of novels from Austen to AI, read alongside theoretical work on character, feeling, and the novel.

Required Reading: : Austen, Mansfield Park; Shelley, Frankenstein; George Eliot, Adam Bede; Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun.

First Three Authors/Texts: Austen, Shelley, Eliot.

Method of Evaluation: Active seminar participation (15%) ; collaborative presentation (15%); two essays (20%; 25%); term test (25%).

ENG480H1S - Advanced Studies Seminar: Literature and Reproductive Justice

Section Number: LEC0301

Time(s): Friday 11 am -1 pm

Instructor(s): Naomi Morgenstern

Office Location: JHB 607

Email: naomi.morgenstern@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: How do literary texts represent scenes of reproductive decision and help us to grapple with ethical and philosophical questions about being and relation? In this interdisciplinary course we will read poetry and novels, legal case studies, and philosophical texts as we discuss a range of issues related to the critical paradigm of Reproductive Justice. Topics for discussion will include: the phenomenology of pregnancy, reproductive slavery and its afterlives, the representation of care work and parenting, surrogacy and reproductive technology, liminal states of maternity (abortion and miscarriage), incarceration and reproductive rights, and environmentalism and the decision to reproduce. Literary characters, such as the wonderful Inez Fardo in Carola Dibbell’s The Only Ones will help us to negotiate our way through this difficult landscape with boldness and humour. In Dibbell’s apocalyptic novel, hard-boiled Inez asserts, “I had some good points as a mother, and the best one was, I was still alive.”

Required Reading: Required readings will include works by Dorothy Roberts, Saidiya Hartman, Sophie Lewis, Miriam Toews, Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, Carola Dibbell, Jesmyn Ward, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Octavia Butler.

A complete syllabus will be available upon request after July 1

Method of Evaluation: seminar participation (15%) oral presentation (15%); short essay (30%); final project (40%)

ENG480H1S - Advanced Studies Seminar: Writing About Film: The Coen Brothers

Section Number: LEC0401

Time(s): Thursday 12-2 pm

Instructor(s):Jim Hansen

Office Location: TBD

Email: TBD

Brief Description of Course: Over the last 40 years, Joel and Ethan Coen have become two of the most influential, discussed, and controversial filmmakers of their generation. A Coen Brother’s film tends to offer its viewers a pastiche of different genres. A movie like A Serious Man, for instance, is, part mid-life crisis parable, part biblical fable, and part tragicomedy. Every Coen film celebrates and denigrates older cinematic formulas. As a result, few modern filmmakers repay a careful viewing as well as the Coens. To watch their films is to see cinema history evoked and deconstructed. Their characters appear distinctly American, and the brothers’ idiosyncratic filmmaking style revolves around eccentric dialogue, repetitious story arcs, meticulous camerawork, and discomfiting humor. By examining films like Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and No Country for Old Men, we will attempt to engage not only with the formal structures of the Coen’s’ cinema, but also with the latent absurdities about our society and ourselves that their cinema seems to embody.

Required Reading:

Adams, Jeffrey: The Cinema of the Coen Brothers
Conrad, Mark T. The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers

Films:
Blood Simple (1984), Raising Arizona (1987), Miller’s Crossing (1990), Barton Fink (1992), Fargo (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998), O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000), The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), No Country for Old Men (2007), A Serious Man (2009), True Grit (2010), and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

First Three Authors/Texts: TBD

Method of Evaluation:

Work for this course will include:
Four Film Review Essays: 40%
Forum and Class Participation: 20%
Midterm Exam 20%
Final Exam: 20%

ENG481H1F - Advanced Studies Seminar: Fairy Tales, Fantasy & Adaptations for Children & Young Adults

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 1-3 pm

Instructor(s): D. Baker

Office Location: JHB 829

Email: df.baker@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: We’ll be looking at a few hardy old stories, European fairy tales, and the ways writers of fantasy for the young have reiterated, dismantled, critiqued, revitalised, re-purposed or damned canonical stories from Perrault, the Grimm brothers and others. Fairy tales were once relegated to the nursery, but contemporary writers such as Diana Wynne Jones, Gail Carson Levine and Helen Oyeyemi peel back their potential for expressing – or sometimes, forcefully constraining – the knots and shadowed complexities of adolescence, gender and race. We’ll be studying YA novels by these three as well as works by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Terry Pratchett, Meg Cabot and others.

Required Reading:

Final reading list TBA. Texts may include such works as

Classic Fairy Tales, ed. Maria Tatar (Norton)
Ella Enchanted (Gail Carson Levine)
A Little Princess (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
Maurice and his Educated Rodents (Terry Pratchett)
Fire and Hemlock (Diana Wynne Jones)
Howl’s Moving Castle (Diana Wynne Jones)
Boy, Snow, Bird (Helen Oyeyemi)

First Three Authors/Texts: Maria Tatar’s Classic Fairy Tales (Norton); others TBA

Method of Evaluation:

Short papers
Essay
Discussion/Participation
Presentation

ENG481H1F - Advanced Studies Seminar: Writing About Music

Section Number: LEC0201

Time(s): Thursday 1-3 pm

Instructor(s): Paul Downes

Office Location: JHB 731

Email: paul.downes@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: How do we describe and/or evaluate music in words? What figures of speech do writers employ to convey the force or the beauty of musical compositions? What makes for a successful or effective piece of critical or creative writing about music? This course will try to answer these questions (and others) by looking at a wide range of essays, stories and poems that celebrate, evaluate, theorize, or otherwise attempt to translate the impact of classical, jazz and popular musical performances. Students will work on two critical essays, one reviewing predominantly recorded music, one reviewing a live performance.

Required Reading: All texts will be available via Quercus

First Three Authors/Texts: Byrne, How Music Works; Adorno, “On Popular music”; Frith, “What is Bad Music?”

Method of Evaluation:

Two review essays (draft and revision for each): 2 x 30%
Seminar presentation: 20%
Participation: 20%

ENG481H1F L0301 - Advanced Studies Seminar: The Graphic Novel

Section Number: L0301

Time(s): Friday 12-2 pm

Instructor(s): A. Lesk

Office Location: JHB 814

Email: andrew.lesk@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: Many graphic novels and comics are based on what might loosely be termed "the outsider" trope. Often rooted (perhaps unsurprisingly, though not exclusively) in autobiographical narratives, these works suggest not only the artist's engagement with the liminal and the transgressive but also how their outsider bearing reflects and reflects upon the larger national psyche. The heterogeneity of the works we are studying offer unique (if not necessarily nationalist or nation-based) perspectives on art and the role of the artist.

Required Reading: TBA

First Three Authors/Texts: TBA

Method of Instruction: seminars; discussion.

Method of Evaluation: seminar and paper; test; quiz; research essay; participation.

ENG481H1S - Advanced Studies Seminar: T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 1-3 pm

Instructor(s): Ming Xie

Office Location: JHB 908

Email: ming.xie@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: This course is a comparative study of the poetry of T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) and Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) through an in-depth engagement with some of their most significant works. It aims for a critical understanding of their poetic and philosophical ideas, as well as their cultural perspectives. Topics and issues include: their relations and attitudes to romanticism, religion, and humanism, their responses to the two world wars, their engagement with philosophy and theory, and their concern with culture and civilization.

Required Reading: Texts will be accessed online and through the Robarts Library e-resources

First Three Authors/Texts: TBA

Method of Evaluation:

Participation, 20%
Oral presentation, 20%
Essay 1 20%
Essay 2 40%

ENG481H1S - Advanced Studies Seminar: Acoustic Geographies in Canadian Literature

Section Number: L0201

Time(s): Tuesday 2-4 pm

Instructor(s): Dr. Vikki Visvis

Office Location: JHB 802

Email: vvisvis@chass.utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: This course will examine representations of sound and aural engagement in contemporary Canadian fiction and poetry. We will adapt the term “acoustic geography” from music-education theorist R. Murray Schafer, who argues that a sound or a combination of sounds arises from an immersive environment, whether natural and/or urban. Expanding the definition of “acoustic geography” to include the immersive environment of literature, this course will consider literary depictions of the sounds of nature, silence, music, and speech in recent Canadian fiction and poetry. Specifically, it will explore how these sounds are represented in terms of region, genre, linguistics, stylistics, sociocultural systems, and identity. Crucially, the term “acoustic geography” also includes the listener’s perception of sounds, so this course will investigate not only the production of sound but also its reception as aural engagement.

We will begin with an examination of sound poetry in Canada, and continue by considering the sounds of North, particularly in relation to Marshall McLuhan’s concept of “acoustic space” and Glenn Gould’s notion of contrapuntal listening. We will, then, critique representations of deafness as the absence of sound and as presumed aural disability, and go on to examine the intersections between jazz and genre, such as biography and history. The course will also study linguistic and stylistic resistance to colonial sonic environments by both Jamaican-Canadian dub poets and Indigenous soundscapes. It will, then, assess what literary renderings of the theremin’s sounds reveal about capitalist and communist sociocultural systems. We will close by reviewing the influence of jazz and blues music on constructions of racial and bi-racial identity in Nazi occupied Europe.

Required Reading:
Course Reader with poetry by bill bissett, Four Horseman, Christian Bök, Louise Bennett, Lillian Allen, amuna baraka-clarke, Gregory Scofield, Marylyn Dumont, and Neal McLeod. Elizabeth Hay, Late Nights on Air (McLelland&Stewart); Frances Itani, Deafening (HarperPerenial); Michael Ondaatje, Coming through Slaughter (Vintage); Sean Michaels, Us Conductors (Random House); Esi Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues (Thomas Allen).

Novels available at the University of Toronto Bookstore (214 College Street, 416-640-7900). Poetry will be posted on the course Quercus site.

First Three Authors/Texts: bill bissett, Four Horseman, Elizabeth Hay.

Method of Evaluation: Five short response assignments (1-2 pages each) 15%; Participation 10%; Seminar presentation (15 minutes) 20%; Essay proposal and annotated bibliography 20%; Final long essay (15-18 pages) 35%.

ENG481H1S - Advanced Studies Seminar: Shakespeare’s Political Drama. The English History Plays: The Second Tetralogy

Section Number: LEC0301

Time(s): Tuesday 10 am -12 pm

Instructor(s): Dr. Philippa Sheppard

Office Location: JHB 814

Email: philippa.sheppard@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: More than a third of Shakespeare’s dramatic works are based on historical accounts, ten on English history. In this course, we explore the four finest examples of this history play genre, which Shakespeare helped to invent. While these four plays are closely interlinked, they display a variety of modes. Richard II is highly literary, aesthetic, and tragic, reminiscent in style of Shakespeare’s earlier history play, King John. Yet, this play was also very topical, so much so that one of its performances was viewed as an igniting incident in a rebellion against Elizabeth I which resulted in her favourite, the Earl of Essex’s execution. Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 incorporate much comedy and fascinate us with glimpses of London at the time of composition. Henry V divides its audience into those who believe it glorifies war and the monarchy, and those who think the opposite is true. In all four plays, the fate of England as a kingdom looms larger than the fate of individual protagonists. Using a variety of theoretical lenses such as new historicism, masculinity studies, and performance history, we will investigate what these plays suggest about the human being as a political animal.

Required Reading: Oxford editions of Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V; some excerpts from primary source material such as Holinshed’s Chronicles, The Mirror for Magistrates, The Homilies (against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion), and Machiavelli’s The Prince, and some contemporary scholarly articles.

First Three Authors/Texts: Richard II, Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2.

Method of Evaluation: The research essay will be broken down into several components: one essay proposal (10%); one annotated bibliography (10%); one seminar presentation (20%); final essay (45%), participation (15%). I will take attendance each class, and make note of oral contributions, to arrive at the participation mark. Engaged attendance is important.

ENG481H1S - Advanced Studies Seminar: Literary Toronto: Imagining and Writing the City

Section Number: LEC0401

Time(s): Thursday 1-3 pm

Instructor(s): Sarah Caskey

Office Location: JHB 802

Email: sarah.caskey@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: Writing about Toronto: exploring, mapping, and imagining Toronto are ventures that many notable contemporary writers have undertaken in their literary works. In this course, we will examine the fictional works of six contemporary writers which engage in meaningful ways with the city. These authors’ literary styles and approaches to imagining and writing Toronto are varied. But they all underscore the insight that a city should be understood as a process, idea, or imaginary space, in addition to a geographical place or physical setting.

Our explorations begin by examining Toronto as a developing multicultural city with attention to its buildings and bridges built by immigrants. We will then consider it as a vertical space that accommodates not just a multiplicity of peoples, but also the history of their personal trauma. Expanding our approach, we will consider the limits of certain discourses of the multicultural city, critiquing representations of Toronto as an urban mosaic to reveal its complex social, economic, and racial dynamics in private dwellings and on individual streets. These investigations will take account of the city as a place to locate Indigenous presence in the past and present, as well as be the site of Indigenous dreams and imaginings. We will also acknowledge the suburban spaces and natural environments often eclipsed by a monolithic view of urban Toronto, with the recognition of pluralized identities in Scarborough and its Rouge River. In all, we will consider the role of these fictional works in imagining, writing, and representing the city as dynamic and diverse.

Required Reading: Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion; Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces; Dionne Brand, What We All Long For; Michael Redhill, Consolation; Cherie Dimaline, Red Rooms; David Chariandy, Brother.

First Three Authors/Texts: Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion; Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces; Dionne Brand, What We All Long For.

Method of Evaluation: Seminar Presentation (20%); Thesis and Annotated Bibliography Assignment (30%); Final Essay Assignment (40%); Class Participation (10%).

ENG482H1F - Advanced Studies Seminar: Bearing Witness: Canadian Refugee Narratives

Section Number: LEC0201

Time(s): Wednesday 10am -12pm

Instructor(s): Smaro Kamboureli

Office Location: JHB 924

Email: smaro.kamboureli@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: Overcrowded rubber dinghies, abandoned life jackets, drowned bodies, migrant “caravans,” tent “cities,” makeshift shelters, desperate- or resilient-looking faces peering through razor wire fences raised at national borders to halt crossing—who hasn’t come across the vast repertoire of images intended to encapsulate the refugee experience? While this course will engage with the ethics and politics of visuality in the representation of refugee crises, our primary focus will be on narrative representations. Not only does refugee status largely depend on the kinds of stories displaced people tell about their circumstances, but narratives by and/or about the refugee condition play a fundamental role in the production of affect and how it contributes to humanitarian responses. With particular attention to a selection of fiction, memoirs, photographs, and films, we will examine as much the lingering trauma of dislocation, dispossession, and the liminality of refugee agency as the meaning and function of such key concepts in refugee studies as crisis, empathy, hospitality, complicity, compassion fatigue, and distant others.

Required Reading: Omar El Akkad, What Strange Paradise; Steven Heighton, Reaching Mithymna; Tima Kurdi, The Boy on the Beach; Dimitri Nasrallah, Niko; Madeleine Thien, Dogs at the Perimeter; Kim Thùy, Ru; films by Ai Weiwei and NFB (TBA); and a small selection of critical essay

First Three Authors/Texts: Niko; The Boy on the Beach.

Method of Evaluation: Journaling; research essay; informed participation (including mini class report).

ENG482H1S - Advanced Studies Seminar: Comparing Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity: Women’s Writing and Comparative Accounts of Indigenous and Black

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Wednesday 3-5 pm

Instructor(s): Cheryl Suzack

Office Location: JHB 913

Email: cheryl.suzack@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: This course explores how writing by Indigenous and Black women furthers our understanding of reconciliation and reparation by focusing on the historical legacies of Indigenous and Black dispossession. It focuses on women’s voices to examine how they represent dispossession and how they use artistic practice to help us understand dispossession’s intersecting and distinct legacies.

Required Reading:

Octavia E. Butler, Kindred (1979)
Linda Hogan, Mean Spirit (1990)
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007)
Deborah Miranda, Bad Indians (2013)
Tiya Miles, The Cherokee Rose (2015)
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016)
David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon (2017)
Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals (2019)
Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman (2020)

First Three Authors/Texts:

Octavia E. Butler, Kindred (1979)
Linda Hogan, Mean Spirit (1990)
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007)

Method of Evaluation: Participation through weekly contributions to class discussion, short essays, long essay

ENG484H1F - Advanced Studies Seminar: Romantic Pastoral

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Wednseday 3-5 pm

Instructor(s): Karen Weisman

Office Location: JHB 925

Email: karen.weisman@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: There are many competing definitions of pastoral, but we generally understand pastoral poetry to evoke a natural world of ease and simplicity within a beautiful and gentle landscape. The apparent simplicity of pastoral is frequently subjected to ironic disruption, and this course will study the aesthetic, political and cultural implications of Romantic pastoral poetry and its place within the larger historical tradition of pastoral and of nature writing

Required Reading: We will read poetry by Charlotte Smith, John Clare, William Wordsworth, and Percy Shelley

First Three Authors/Texts: William Wordsworth, “Preface to Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads,” “Tintern Abbey,” “Michael,” “The Last of the Flock,” “The Solitary Reaper,” “Anecdote for Fathers.”

Method of Evaluation: oral seminar delivery with brief write-up (25%); informed class participation (10%); written prospectus (preparation for research essay) [15%]; research essay (50%).

ENG484H1F - Advanced Studies Seminar: Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Texts, Contexts, and Adaptations

Section Number: LEC0201

Time(s): Wednesday 2-4 pm

Instructor(s): Professor Lynne Magnusson

Office Location: JHB 922

Email: lynne.magnusson@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: The focus on Shakespeare’s Sonnets allows us both to concentrate on close reading and to explore wide-ranging critical perspectives and research methods. We will dig deep into close analysis, interrogating modes of reading both as integral to literary studies and as equipment for living. We will consider interpretive methods drawing on new formalism and cultural poetics, rhetoric and discourse analysis, the history of reception, approaches to gender and race, “distant reading” or digital text analysis. Our research-oriented exploration will be supported by weekly critical readings and will also take its cues from students’ developing research projects. Topics might include: contexts and intertexts (Shakespeare plays? Lady Mary Wroth’s female-authored sonnets? Erasmus and rhetorical education?); reading and (re-)ordering the sonnet “sequence”; print and manuscript transmission; afterlives of the sonnets, including rewritings, appropriations, and creative adaptations.

Required Reading: Shakespeare’s Sonnets; a wide range of contextual and critical readings.

First Three Authors/Texts: Shakespeare’s Sonnets; The Passionate Pilgrim; reread the sonnets.

Method of Instruction: Seminar.

Method of Evaluation: Research project, developed in four stages (topic plan, research proposal, class research presentation, final paper) – 60%; oral presentation on a sonnet (10%); discussion postings on weekly readings (10%); sonnet memorization or creation exercise (10%); well-informed in-class participation (10%).

ENG484H1F - Advanced Studies Seminar: Early Modern Literature: Engagements with the Economic - CANCELLED

Section Number: LEC5101

Time(s): Wednesday 6-8 pm

Instructor(s): Prof. Peter Grav

Office Location: JHB 803

Email: peter.grav@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: This course will examine a selection of prose, poetic and dramatic works from the early modern period that seem preoccupied with how money impacts human behaviour and interactions. From the disdain of cash values in Utopia to the celebration of commerce in Jack of Newbury to the financial reductionism of love and marriage in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside to the nightmare of indebtedness in Timon of Athens, it is evident that economic concerns constitute a significant thematic thread in literature written during this time. In our consideration of these works, we’ll be focusing not only on how financial themes play out, but also on the historic economic circumstances under which these depictions of homo economicus were created.

Required Reading: Thomas More, Utopia; Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene excerpt: Book II, Canto VII; Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta; Anonymous, Arden of Faversham; Thomas Deloney, excerpts from Jack of Newbury; Thomas Middleton, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside; Ben Jonson, The Alchemist; Shakespeare and Middleton, Timon of Athens.

Texts: All of the plays listed above except for Timon are in the Norton Anthology of English Renaissance Drama, which will be available at the U of T Bookstore, along with editions of Utopia and Timon. Online links will be provided to the excerpts from The Faerie Queene and Jack of Newbury. Of course, any reputable version of the texts will be acceptable; however, as always, it’s advisable to work with versions that have good editorial work and glossings. As well, there are multiple versions of all of the works on the course available throughout the U of T Library system.

First Three Authors/Texts: Thomas More, Utopia; Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene Book II, Canto VII; Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta

Method of Instruction: Lecture / Classroom discussion / Student seminars

Method of Evaluation:

Seminar Presentation
Term Paper Proposal/Outline/Meeting
Term Paper
Participation

ENG484H1S - Advanced Studies Seminar: Modern Literary Medievalism

Section Number: L0101

Time(s): Friday 1-3 pm

Instructor(s): Carroll Balot

Brief Description of Course: Reading modern literature in conjunction with medieval texts, we will explore the idea of the Middle Ages as an imaginary scene of both utopian fantasy and destruction. The course will have four parts: making meaning in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose; The Hobbit and the trauma of history; time and memory in Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant; and Lauren Groff’s The Matrix and maternal fantasy.

Required Reading: Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose; JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit; Kazuo Ishiguro’ The Buried Giant; Lauren Groff, Matrix; Beowulf, Sir Orfeo, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; selections from Marie de France’s lais and fables; selections from Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love; selections from The Book of Margery Kempe.

First Three Authors/Texts: The Name of the Rose; Beowulf; Sir Orfeo

Method of Evaluation: Class participation; presentations; research paper.

ENG484H1S - Advanced Studies Seminar: Early Modern and Modernist Devotional Poetry

Section Number: L0201

Time(s): Thursday 1-3 pm

Instructor(s): John Rogers

Office Location: JHB 828

Email: johnd.rogers@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: This course will explore the short-lived, experimental seventeenth-century literary form, the devotional poem, and its rediscovery and resurgence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Renaissance lyric poets we’ll focus on include: John Donne, whose religious verse has been celebrated, and reviled, for its unruly sexualization of divinity and belief; George Herbert, who mused endlessly on how to craft a poem that would oblige God both to read it and to issue a response; and Thomas Traherne, whose self-induced, trance-like states made him confident he could write as someone already rapt to heaven and capable of the perspective of God himself.

These formally and thematically daring poets fell out of fashion by the end of the seventeenth century and were rarely read or discussed, until the modernist poet and critic T. S. Eliot lifted Donne and Herbert from obscurity and championed their relevance for a secular age. In the wake of the renewed interest in the intimate, experimental devotional poem, the writing of those seventeenth-century poets would exercise a striking if unlikely influence over several modern and contemporary American and Canadian poets. Throughout the term, our consideration of Donne, Herbert, and Traherne will unfold alongside our reading of many of those later poets, including Elizabeth Bishop, Frank Bidart, Anne Carson, and Louise Glück.

Required Reading: Selected poems and other writings of Donne, Herbert, Traherne, Eliot, Bishop, Bidart, and Robert Pinsky; as well as Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris, Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony and God, and Aaron Kunin’s Love Three.

First Three Authors/Texts:
A beginning selection of devotional poems by George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, and Louise Glück
John Donne, selection of erotic lyrics and Holy Sonnets
T. S. Eliot, three short essays on Donne

Method of Evaluation: short reading responses, 2 essays, class participation

ENG485H1F - Advanced Studies Seminar: Milton, Globalism, and the Post-National

Section Number: L0101

Time(s): Friday 1-3 pm

Instructor(s): Professor Paul Stevens

Office Location: JHB 628

Email: paul.stevens@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: Our century is distinguished by the degree to which the nation-state which emerged so powerfully in the early modern period has come to be perceived as undesirable, obsolete, or anachronistic. “Modernity,” says the economist Paul Collier, increasingly “strings identity between one pillar of individualism and one of globalism: many young people see themselves as both fiercely individual outsiders in their surrounding society, and as citizens of the world.” For many educated elites and young people, the imagined community is not, then, the nation but the “world,” a discursive polity imagined not through print so much as electronic media, television and the internet. This course seeks to reappraise the work of Milton and other 17th-century architects of the nation-state in the light of this dramatic new context: in particular, it seeks to understand the degree to which a new universal or global community is already taking shape in contemporary religious and political thought about the nation. The central question, if not the only question, the course seeks to address is this: is the nation-state the antithesis or the harbinger of globalism? The focus of the course is Milton but other texts to be studied include the authors of the Torah, St Paul, Virgil, and Shakespeare.

Required Reading:

Milton: Areopagitca and Paradise Lost
Virgil: Aeneid
Shakespeare: Henry V
Bible: Selections

First Three Authors/Texts:

Genesis 1-3, 9-10, 12-23, 37-45; Exodus 1-15; Leviticus 18-21.
Virgil: Aeneid

Method of Evaluation: Class Participation (15%); Seminar Presentation (30%); Research Essay (55%)

ENG485H1S - Advanced Studies Seminar: Critique and Affection

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 1-3 pm

Instructor(s): Alex Hernandez

Office Location: JHB 608

Email: alex.hernandez@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: For some time now, scholars in the humanities, liberal arts, and literary studies especially have staked a claim for their work on the basis of its ability to teach “critical thinking.” Those of us in English learn to critique, we argue, to break down texts and cultural objects, to analyze and unmask and reveal what they really mean or do. Yet many of us were drawn to literary study not for these instrumental goods, but by the far simpler fact that we loved literature, that books sparked in us a kind of devotion that can only be described in terms of attachment. Even worse—some of us fear that in undertaking sustained study in literature we’ve lost that spark.

This course wants to fan the flame again by exploring the links between critique and affection. We’ll ask, as one theorist recently put it: “Why is the affective range of criticism so limited? Why are we so hyperarticulate about our adversaries and so excruciatingly tongue-tied about our loves?” What roles, in other words, do love, pleasure, and devotion play in literary criticism? How are these sustained by affects like wonder or nostalgia or curiosity? Focusing on theoretical sources and ranging across the past couple of centuries we’ll trace the movement from amateur reading to professional reading to our own moment, in which love of literature has returned as a “postcritical” signpost. In the process, we’ll read key texts in the critical canon and work together to develop a (nevertheless critical) vocabulary for articulating the affective dynamics at play in our reading.

Required Reading: 1 or 2 chapters or essays a week

First Three Authors/Texts: Essays/excerpts by Guillory, Foucault, and Adorno

Method of Evaluation: In-class Participation, Discussion Board Posts, a Brief Presentation, and a Final Paper with Bibliography

ENG485H1S - Advanced Studies Seminar: Shakespeare and the Book

Section Number: LEC0201

Time(s): Wednesday 1–3 pm

Instructor(s): Prof. Misha Teramura

Office Location: JHB 712

Email: m.teramura@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: The year 2023 marks the 400th anniversary of one of the most celebrated publications of English literature: the 1623 “First Folio” edition of Shakespeare’s plays. However, the publication of this famous collection represents just one event in the long, intertwined histories of Shakespeare and the medium of the book. In this course, we’ll explore a wide range of ways that Shakespeare’s works and their afterlives illuminate and are illuminated by the material forms of texts, including such topics as book design, early modern printing technologies, the circulation of poems in hand-written copies, the economics and politics of the publishing industry, how readers and theatre professionals use books, how editors mediate literary texts of the past for later readers, global receptions of Shakespeare on the page, and digital remediations. We’ll read works from Shakespeare and his contemporaries as well as range of thinkers in the field of Book History, and make trips to collections of rare book around the University of Toronto campus. Along the way, we’ll consider how a focus on Shakespeare can help us think about what a “book” is and the role of books in the 21st century.

Required Reading: All texts will be accessible online through Quercus. Primary texts will likely include three Shakespeare plays and a selection of sonnets as well as shorter literary works by other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers. Secondary texts, representing a range of theoretical and historical approaches to book history, may include Margreta de Grazia, Peter Stallybrass, and Adam Smyth on the materiality of texts; Miles Grier and B. K. Adams on race and early modern print culture; Valerie Wayne and Laurie Maguire on feminist editing; Jeffrey Masten on queer philology; Margaret J. M. Ezell on women’s writing and literary history; Claire M. L. Bourne on typography; Zachary Lesser on the early modern book trade; Leah Marcus on colonialism and the global reception of Shakespeare in print; Alan Galey on Shakespeare in digital media. (Subject to change.)

First Three Authors/Texts: Our first primary text will be Titus Andronicus.

Method of Evaluation: TBD

ENG485H1S - Advanced Studies Seminar: Reading Auerbach’s Mimesis

Section Number: LEC0301

Time(s): Monday 3-5 pm

Instructor(s): Christopher Warley

Office Location: JHB 901

Email: chris.warley@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: It is no exaggeration to say that Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis is the most influential book of literary criticism ever written. Mimesis offers a tour of what Auerbach calls represented reality from Homer and the Bible to Virginia Woolf. The book, simply, is thrilling: Auerbach is a better close reader, a better historian, and a better philologist than just about anyone who has ever lived. But—almost miraculously—Mimesis is also a pleasure to read. Literary criticism, Auerbach constantly stressed, must be a work of art, and the beauty of Mimesis still takes your breath away. Today, in a world dominated by a “presentism” in which literary criticism claims the ability only to describe and bear witness to an unchanging global trauma, the beauty of Mimesis is especially vital. For the moral of Mimesis is very simple: human life is diverse and full of possibilities, and it is the task of literary criticism to remind everyone of that shifting fact.

Required Reading: Auerbach, Mimesis

First Three Authors/Texts: Auerbach

Method of Evaluation: TBA

ENG497H1 - Advanced Creative Writing Seminar: Literary Citizenship

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Thursday 1-3 pm

Instructor(s): Robert McGill

Office Location: JHB 716

Email: robert.mcgill@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: Literary citizenship involves participation in building and sustaining communities that involve literature in some way. It can include things as varied as reviewing books, creating a podcast, running a micro-press, organizing a reading series, and attending book clubs. Examining Toronto-based initiatives and organizations, some with a local focus and others with a national or transnational emphasis, we’ll investigate how and why they developed, whom they serve, and what functions they perform.

We’ll consider the economics and demographics of contemporary publishing, the effects of new media on book culture, the use of literature in fostering literacy and social justice, and the relationship between literary citizenship and the state. We’ll also practise literary citizenship ourselves through blog posts and book reviews, while students will conduct independent research into literary-citizenship initiatives. The course will cultivate expertise regarding a wide range of possibilities for literary citizenship while attending to broader issues such as the valuing of literature, labour, and community.

Required Reading: (subject to change) Lori A. May, The Write Crowd: Literary Citizenship and the Writing Life; a recent book by a Toronto author (TBD); a course reader featuring essays on literary citizenship and materials from organizations; online texts about those organizations.

First Three Authors/Texts: (subject to change) Lori A. May, The Write Crowd; Becky Tuch, “More Work, No Pay: Why I Detest ‘Literary Citizenship’”; Gail Pool, “Getting It Right.

Method of Evaluation: class participation (10%); blog post and responses (15%); book review (20%); report proposal and outline (10%); report (40%); report presentation (5%).

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Notes on the Timetable, Enrollment Regulations and Procedures

100 Level

ENG100H1 F and S (offered both semesters) - Effective Writing

ENG102H1F - Literature and the Sciences

ENG140Y1 - Literature for Our Time

ENG150Y1 - Literary Traditions

ENG196H1F - Cook the Books

ENG197H1F - Time Travel & Narrative

ENG198H1S - Monster Encounters: Monsters and the Monstrous in Literature

ENG199H1F - Tree Stories

200 Level

ENG202H1F - Introduction to British Literature I

ENG202H1F - Introduction to British Literature I

ENG202H1S - Introduction to British Literature I

ENG203H1F - Introduction to British Literature II

ENG203H1S - Introduction to British Literature II

ENG203H1S - Introduction to British Literature II

ENG210H1S - Introduction to the Novel

ENG213H1F - The Short Story

ENG215H1S - The Canadian Short Story

ENG220H1S - Introduction to Shakespeare

ENG234H1F - Introduction to Children’s Literature

ENG234H1S - Introduction to Children’s Literature

ENG235H1F - The Graphic Novel

ENG235H1S - The Graphic Novel

ENG237H1F - Science Fiction

ENG239H1F - Fantasy and Horror

ENG240Y1Y - Old English Language and Literature

ENG250H1F - Introduction to American Literature

ENG250H1S - Introduction to American Literature

ENG252H1F - Introduction to Canadian Literature

ENG252H1S - Introduction to Canadian Literature

ENG254H1S - Introduction to Indigenous Literatures

ENG270H1F - Introduction to Colonial and Postcolonial Writing

ENG270H1S - Introduction to Colonial and Postcolonial Writing

ENG273Y1Y - Queer Writing

ENG280H1F - Critical Approaches to Literature

ENG285H1F - English Language in the World

ENG286H1F - Literature and Data

ENG287H1S - The Digital Text

ENG289H1F - Introduction to Creative Writing

ENG289H1S - Introduction to Creative Writing

JWE206H1S - Writing English Essays

300 Level

ENG300Y1 - Chaucer

ENG302Y1 - English Renaissance Literature

ENG303H1F - Milton

ENG308Y1Y - Romantic Literature

ENG311H1F - Medieval Literature

ENG311H1S - Medieval Literature

ENG320Y1 - Shakespeare

ENG323H1F - Austen and Her Contemporaries

ENG323H1S - Austen and Her Contemporaries

ENG324Y1 - The Victorian Novel

ENG329H1S - Contemporary British Fiction

ENG330H1F - Medieval Drama

ENG331H1S - Drama 1485-1603

ENG335H1S - Drama 1603-1642

ENG340H1F - Modern Drama

ENG341H1S - Postmodern Drama

ENG349H1S - Contemporary Poetry

ENG353Y1Y - Canadian Fiction

ENG354Y1Y - Canadian Poetry

ENG356Y1 - African-Canadian Literature

ENG357H1F - New Writing in Canada

ENG363Y1Y - American Literature to 1900

ENG365H1S - Contemporary American Fiction

ENG367H1S - African Literatures in English

ENG371H1S - Topics in Indigenous, Postcolonial, and Transnational Literatures: Global Indigenous Women’s Writing

ENG372H1F - Topics in Indigenous, Postcolonial, Transnational Literatures: Postcolonial Writing - CANCELLED

ENG373H1F - Topics in Pre-1800 British Literature: Premodern Ecologies