Please note: courses may be subject to cancellation or modification. Consult the timetables and course descriptions for cancellations or changes, including times and locations.
Graduate students from other departments at U of T are welcome to enrol in ENG courses without completing a course add form. Non-ENG students should check with their home department to confirm if a course add form is required.
2026–2027 F/S/Y Graduate Course Offerings
Timetables for F (first-term) and S (second-term) courses can be found below the course listings. Y (year-long) courses appear in both timetables.
ENG1001HF
Introduction to Old English
Walton, A.
- Bright, Old English Grammar (online, in Google Drive folder)
- Kim, Workbook (online, in Google Drive folder)
- Baker, Introduction to Old English (online through U of T library and for sale on Amazon)
- Exploratory essay (ca. 3000 words) that contains some element of word study on an Old English text - 40%
- Midterm assessment - 15%
- Final - 25%
- Participation and quality of class contributions (including any assigned quizzes, short responses, and Blackboard posts) - 20%
ENG1100HF
At the Threshold: Witnessing and Testimony in Canadian Literature
Kamboureli, S.
This course invites you to take a deep dive into “the poetics and politics of witnessing” (Derrida). Ontologically fraught, witnessing is entangled with memory and ethical responsibility. Neither fully inside the experience witnessed nor fully outside it, the witness inhabits a threshold: the space between event and narration, between speech and silence, self and other. The paradox of witnessing as an act that is at once necessary and impossible finds expression in language as both the medium and the limit of testimony. Through close readings of both theory and Canadian literature as well as a small selection of installation videos, we will examine literature as a threshold medium, a space between fiction and authenticity where the undecidability of witnessing is not resolved but performed. The texts’ range of genres and forms—novels and short fiction, memoirs, autotheory, speculative fiction, epistolary and transmedia writing, and poetry—will allow us to examine the literary devices and tropes employed to express the irreducibility of the experience witnessed.
- Katherina Vermette, The Break
- Y-Dang Troeung, Landbridge
- Gil Courtemanche, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali
- Douglas Coupland, Microserfs
- Esi Edugyan, Washington Black
- Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
- Dionne Brand, Inventory
- Chava Rosenfarb, “Edgia’s Revenge”
- Shirley Sterling, (Nlaka’pamux Nation), My Name Is Seepeetza
- Jacques Derrida, “Poetics and Politics of Witnessing” & “Demeure: Fiction and Testimony”
- Leigh Gilmore, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (selections) & “What Was I?: Literary Witness and the Testimonial Archive”
- Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature and Psychoanalysis and History (selections)
- Paul Ricoeur, “The Documentary Phase: Archived Memory”
- Maria Nadal and Monica Calvo, eds. Trauma in Contemporary Literature: Narrative and Representation (selections)
- Frédérik Detue & Charlotte Lacoste, “What Testimony Does to Literature”
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements
- Active participation - 20%
- Seminar presentation with handout / class facilitation - 30%
- Essay proposal with annotated bibliography - 10%
- Researched paper (20 pages) - 40%
ENG1200HF
Assembling the Afro-Métis Syllabus
Clarke, G.E.
This course reads a representative sample of texts by African-Canadian writers who may be regarded as “Black and Indigenous” and/or “Afro-Métis” and/or who explore this intersectional identity that has been long-obscured, often disputed, and yet indisputably present. Indeed, as more Black Canadians claim or name this identity, so must we attend to their writing out of a dual-racial, or biracial, experience of oppression, protesting both notions of “race purity” and government definitions of who is or can be “status” Indigenous, Inuit, or Métis. For an introduction to the controversies and conundrums around this Black-and-Indigenous self-concept, see George Elliott Clarke, “Assembling the Afro-Métis Syllabus: Some Preliminary Reading,” Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien, 42 (2022), pp. 10-41.
- Atkinson, Ricky, The Hard Times and Life Crimes of Ricky Atkinson.
- Burle-Bailey, Troy, The Pierre Bonga Loops.
- Coulthard, Glen, Red Skin, White Masks.
- Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks.
- Jones, El, Abolitionist Intimacies.
- Proctor-Mills, Dorothy. Chameleon (1995) & “Born Again Indian” (2012)
- Thomas, Kai, In the Upper Country.
- Willis, Vivian, Mom Suse: Matriarch of the Preston (NS) Black Communities.
- 8 response papers (5% each) - 40%
- Research paper - 40%
- Participation - 20%
ENG2100HF
Class Migration Through Literacy in 20th-Century American Literature
Dolan, N.
Many American writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries were the first person in their families, over many generations, to acquire advanced literacy. This experience, as documented in a range of remarkable memoirs, novels, stories, and poems published up to the present, has been represented as vastly liberating, but also often acutely painful. It seems to entail both an exhilarating expansion of horizons and a difficult uprooting. In this course we will read a selection of such works in the effort to further our understanding of the ambivalent process of socialization into the modern American-liberal symbolic, and the place of reading therein. We will be especially interested in depictions of what Habermas calls “context shattering” – crisis moments in which the achievement of advanced literacy causes the “spellbinding authority” of long-established traditions to be demystified, destabilized, and perhaps transcended. Habermas argues that such “shatterings” are necessary stages in a forward path towards moral and political emancipation. We will ask whether these works support Habermas’s outlook. May we read the dis-embedded selves painfully achieved and powerfully described in these American bildungs-narratives as figures of human enlightenment? Might these works thus provide secondary symbolic orientation and cohesion for members of dispersed, individualistic, liberal communities no longer gripped and bound by archaic solidarities?
Course Reading List
- Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of… an American Slave… (1845)
- Anzia Yezierska, The Bread Givers (1925)
- Richard Wright, Black Boy (1937)
- James Farrell, My Days of Anger (1943)
- Mary Doyle Curran, The Parish and the Hill (1948)
- James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son” (1955)
- Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory (1983)
- Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)
- Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian (2009)
- Tara Westover, Educated (2018)
- Souvankham Thammavongsa, How to Spell Knife (2020)
Secondary:
- from Patrick Joyce, ed. Class [a reader with short selections from many theorists]
- from Ferdinand Tonnies, Community and Society
- from Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society
- from Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
- from Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy
- from Raymond Williams, The Country and the City
- from Jurgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action (Vol. 2)
- Frank Parkin, Marxism and Class Theory: a Bourgeois Critique
- from Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction
- from Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint
- from Rhonda Levine, When Race Meets Class
- Attendance and informed participation in discussion - 20%
- One in-class presentation - 20%
- One term paper (4,000-5,000 words) - 60%
ENG2100HS
Riot, Rebellion, Revolution: American Literatures and the Arts of Resistance
Seitler, D.
We will likely read:
- Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition
- Frank Harris, The Bomb
- Mary Heaton Vorse, Strike!
- Langston Hughes, Beaumont to Detroit: 1943
- Gwendolyn Brooks, Riot
- Claude McKay, If We Must Die
- David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives
- Juliana Spahr, Turnt
- Rebecca Hall, Wake
- Gord Hill, The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book
- M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, Everything for Everyone
Other readings will likely include:
- Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
- James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
- Audre Lorde, The Uses of Anger
- Deleuze and Guattari, What is a Minor Literature?
- Wendy Brown, Edgework
- Eithne Luibhéid, Abolitionist Intimacies.
- Seminar presentation / experimental analysis - 20%
- 3 short précis - 15%
- Conference reflection - 5%
- Participation - 20%
- Final research paper - 40%
ENG2200HF
Black Messiah
Durham, I.A.
“Black Messiah is a hell of a name for an album. It can be easily misunderstood. Many will think it’s about religion. Some will jump to the conclusion that I’m calling myself a Black Messiah. For me, the title is about all of us. It’s about the world. It’s about an idea we can aspire to. We should all aspire to be a Black Messiah.
It’s about people rising up in Ferguson and in Egypt and in Occupy Wall Street and in every place where a community has had enough and decides to make change happen. It’s not about praising one charismatic leader but celebrating thousands of them. Not every song is politically charged (though many are), but calling this album Black Messiah creates a landscape where these songs can live to the fullest. Black Messiah is not one man. It’s a feeling that, collectively, we are all that leader.”
On December 15, 2014, R&B singer D’Angelo, and his band The Vanguard, released his third studio album Black Messiah. Consisting of twelve tracks, this was his first project in close to 15 years, dating back to his previous two albums, Voodoo (2000) and Brown Sugar (1995). Black Messiah entered the charts at a fever pitch in the racial and hegemonic imaginary as outlined in the aforementioned liner notes. Yet the album is inclusive on a full scale; uses the words “we,” “all,” and “us” throughout the synopsis; situates its message in a transnational frame—all of this suggests that although the album is not about race, it is an album invested in a manner of blackness. What might this mean? This class will wrestle with that question and hopefully pose others in turn, arguing that Black Messiah stages teachable moments in the sonic genealogy of the black aesthetic and radical traditions.
Each track from the album will shape the weekly class meetings as the foundation for provoking critical theory. With the class grounding itself in an album as the ur-text, what better way to approach the album than to theoretically hit SHUFFLE and see what it has to say—the remix to an already mixed and mastered product! Likewise, we will think critically about, among other things, music and its utility as protest and affect, specifically melancholy; love and intimate community; nostalgia and projections of the future for those deemed perpetually homeless/in diaspora; and the album as homage.
- Beyoncé, “Sugar Mama”
- Rizvana Bradley, “Reinventing Capacity: Black Femininity's Lyrical Surplus and the Cinematic Limits of 12 Years a Slave”
- Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return
- Octavia Butler, “Bloodchild”
- Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
- James Cone, “Black Theology and Black Power”
- Mark Dery, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose”
- W. E. B. Du Bois, “Jesus Christ in Texas”
- Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
- Michel Foucault, “Madness, the Absence of Work”
- Sharon Holland, “(Black) (Queer) Love”
- Treva B. Lindsey and Jessica Marie Johnson, “Searching for Climax: Black Erotic Lives in Slavery and Freedom”
- Toni Morrison, Beloved
- Fred Moten, “Black Mo’nin’”
- Tavia Nyong’o, “Unburdening Representation”
- Peter Schwenger, “Phenomenology of the Scream”
- Hortense J. Spillers, “Moving on Down the Line: Variations on the African-American Sermon”
- Frank B. Wilderson, III, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal”
- Participation - 10%
- Class presentation (10-12 pp.) - 20%
- Critical reflection (3-5 pp.) - 10%
- Annotated bibliography for syllabus assignment - 20%
- Syllabus assignment - 40%
ENG4100HF
Gender, Militarization, and Ecology
Hogue, R.
- Allegories of the Anthropocene, Elizabeth DeLoughrey
- Settler Garrison, Jodi Kim
- Hot Spotter's Report, Shiloh Krupar
- Ocean Passages, Erin Suzuki
- Tonal Intelligence, Sunny Xiang
- "Bikinis and Other S/Pacific N/Oceans,” Teresia Teaiwa
- A Violent Peace, Christine Hong
- "The Pacific Proving Grounds," Aimee Bahng
- Iep Jaltok, Kathy Jetnil Kijiner
- Civilised Girl, Jully Makini
- Night is a Sharkskin Drum, Haunani Kay Trask
- Ocean Mother, Arielle Taitano Lowe
- Participation - 20%
- Weekly discussion posts - 20%
- Presentation - 25%
- Final conference paper - 35%
ENG4101HS
Kind of Like: Difference, Similarity, Comparison
Thomas, A.
- Dark Princess, by W. E. B. Du Bois
- Paradise, by Toni Morrison
- Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, by Audre Lorde
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements
- Participation - 20% (throughout the semester)
- Seminar presentation / class facilitation - 20%
- Final paper (15 pages) - 50%
- Course reflection - 10%
ENG5100HF
London Drama to 1530
Sergi, M.
- John Lydgate, Mummings and Entertainments
- Henry Medwall, Fulgens & Lucres; Nature
- John Rastell, The Four Elements
- John Heywood, probably Johan Johan and one other
- John Skelton, Magnyfycence
- And multiple anonymous works (inc. Mundus et Infans, Interlude of Youth, Hickscorner, and others), alongside readings from the three relevant Records of Early English Drama volumes (Ecclesiastical London, Inns of Court, Civic London to 1558)
- Engagement and participation in class discussions (or, if necessary, in substantial email commentary after the fact) - 20%
- Two 15-minute presentations during class discussions, 15% each - 30%
- Annotated bibliography assignment, delivered alongside your final presentation - 10%
- Final project: conference-length research / analysis paper (20 minutes of material, with an option to extend into an article-length study) - 40%
Every student must attend all class sessions (or make them up, as above), must be reachable by and responsive to an email list shared with the full class, and must read all assigned readings and have them ready to hand on the day we are scheduled to discuss them.
ENG5103HF
Piers Plowman
Gaston, K.
- The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (London, Everyman: 1995).
- Emily Steiner, Reading Piers Plowman (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements
- Participation - 15%
- Presentation - 15%
- Annotated passage - 15%
- Midterm paper - 20%
- Final paper proposal - 5%
- Final paper - 30%
ENG5103HS
Medieval Manuscript Culture
Sobecki, S.
- Gillespie, Alexandra, and Daniel Wakelin. The Production of Books in England 1350-1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
- Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, Maidie Hilmo, and Linda Olson. Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012.
- Participation - 10%
- Adopt-a-manuscript - 10%
- Presentation - 10%
- Short essay - 20%
- Final essay - 50%.
ENG5200HS
Shakespeare's Tragedies
Magnusson, L.
Texts will include:
- Titus Andronicus
- Romeo and Juliet
- Richard III
- Julius Caesar
- Hamlet
- Othello
- King Lear
- Macbeth
- Antony and Cleopatra
- Coriolanus
(Or selection thereof), supplemented by critical readings.
- Exchange short email “issue” sheets and/or brief “First Word” presentations reflecting on the weekly plays and topics - 20%
- Present one twenty-minute seminar - 25%
- Participate actively in class discussion - 10%
- Develop a short colloquium paper (possibly for a final class mini-conference), submitting a written version of about 12 pages (10% + 35%) - 45%
ENG5201HF
Writing Disability in Early Modern England
Williams, K.
This course asks: how was disability—as lived experience, as cultural concept, as object of a newly-institutional curative imaginary—represented by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English writers? The bulk of our readings comprise literary works that range across poetry, prose, and drama (by authors such as John Donne, Hester Pulter, John Milton, and Thomas Middleton, for example) and medical, legal, and philosophical texts that attempt to codify and grapple with the unruliness of embodiment (by authors such as Robert Burton and John Bulwer, for example). Alongside these examples, we will attend to artifacts of early modern culture that do not easily comport with ideas of literariness, like recipe books with medicinal applications and curative compendiums; transcriptions of diaries and other forms of life writing; edicts for relief of disabled veterans and Bethlem (or “Bedlam”) hospital records; printed ballads and “monster newes” texts; and accounts of court fooling and occasional entertainments. Theoretical and critical work from early modern disability studies and crip theory will inform our inquiry into disability, understood as both a dynamic interaction between body and environment and a prompt to literary experiment, as site of problem and possibility for writers in early modern England.
Primary texts/16th- and 17th-century English works (selected or in full) are likely to include:
- Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
- Thomas Johnson, The Works of that Famous Chirurgion Ambrose Parey
- John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions
- John Milton, Samson Agonistes
- Hester Pulter, Made When I Was Sick and other poems
- William Hay, Of Deformity
- John Bulwer, Chirologia: Or, the Naturall Language of the Hand
- Thomas Middleton, The Nice Valour, or The Passionate Madman
Along with other textual and visual artifacts.
Critical and theoretical texts (selected or in full) likely to include:
- Elizabeth Bearden, Crip Authority
- Genevieve Love, Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability
- Selections from Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (ed. Mills and Sanchez)
- Allison Hobgood; selections from Recovering Disability in Early Modern England (ed. Hobgood and Wood)
- Ellen Samuels, Fictions of Identification
- Susan Schweik, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public
- Selections from Crip Genealogies (ed. Chen, Kafer, Kim, Minich)
- Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip
- Michael Davidson, Distressing Language
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements
- Perfect attendance and engaged participation in seminar discussions - 10%
- Textual curation - 20%
- Archive activation - 20%
- Final project (paper, with collective bibliography contribution, abstract, and class presentation) - 50% (including 10% from requirements in advance of final paper)
ENG5300HS
Reading Clarissa
Dickie, S.
- Richardson, Clarissa (ed. Angus Ross), Penguin
- Five discussion-starters (300-400 words each) - 20%
- Essay proposal and annotated nibliography (2-3 pp.) - 20%
- Final paper (3,500-4,000 words) - 45%
- Active and informed participation, including follow-on discussion of your seminar starters - 15%
ENG5301HF
Literature and Censorship, Milton to Mill
Keymer, T.
- Behn, Oroonoko
- Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
- Defoe, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters
- Dryden, Satires of Juvenal
- Godwin, Caleb Williams
- Fielding, Jonathan Wild
- Haywood, Letter from H. G.
- Mill, On Liberty
- Milton, Areopagitica
- Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy
- Southey, Wat Tyler
- Swift, Gulliver's Travels
- Bricker, Libel and Lampoon
- Cummings, Bibliophobia
- Dabhoiwala, What Is Free Speech?
- Darnton, Censors at Work
- Keymer, Poetics of the Pillory
- Marsh, Word Crimes
- Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation
- Ross, Writing in Public
- Thomas, A Long Time Burning
- Tomkins, On the Law of Speaking Freely
- Seminar with oral presentations - 20%
- Informed participation in class discussion - 20%
- Essay proposal with bibliography - 10%
- 20-page research paper - 50%
ENG5400HS
Romantic Anger, Revisited
Weisman, K.
Primary source reading from the following:
- Mary Robinson, selected poetry
- Charlotte Smith, selected poetry
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, selected poetry
- Lord Byron, selected poetry
- Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince
- Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
- Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman
- Mary Hays, The Victim of Prejudice
Selected other reading from the following:
- Aristotle, Ethics, Rhetoric
- Seneca, On Anger
- Hume, Treatise of Human Nature
- Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding
- Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments
- Hobbes, Leviathan
- Mary Wollstonecraft,Vindication of the Rights of Woman
- Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
- Article review (orally delivered) - 15%
- Seminar presentation - 25%
- Class participation - 10%
- Final research paper - 50%
ENG5401HF
Melodrama: Form and Function, 1770-1890
Robinson, T.
Dramas may include:
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Pygmalion
- Thomas Holcroft, A Tale of Mystery
- Guilbert de Pixérécourt, The Dog of Montargis
- Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His Men
- John Walker, The Factory Lad
- Richard Brinsley Peake, The Fate of Frankenstein
- Jane Scott, The Iron Chest
- Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eye’d Susan
- Ira Aldridge, The Black Doctor
- Augustin Daly, Under the Gaslight
- Thomas Russell Sullivan, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and others.
Critical readings by Michael Booth, Jacky Bratton, Daphne Brooks, Peter Brooks, Jeffrey N. Cox, Michael Gamer, Jane Moody, Emma Raub, Sophie Thomas, Carolyn Williams, and more.
- Active engagement (attendance and informed participation) - 15%
- In-class presentation with handout - 15%
- Archival research exercise - 15%
- Final project proposal with annotated bibliography - 10%
- Final project - research paper - 45%
ENG5401HS
Ethics and Aesthetics: The Late Victorians
Li, H.
- Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda (1876), edited by Graham Handley. Oxford UP, 2009.
- Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure (1895), edited by Patricia Ingham. Oxford UP, 2009.
- Morris, William. News from Nowhere (1890), edited by David Leopold. Oxford UP, 2009.
- Pater, Walter. Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), edited by Matthew Beaumont. Oxford UP, 2010.
- Wilde, Oscar. Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), edited by Joseph Bristow. Oxford UP, 2008.
- Seminar presentation - 25%
- Major essay - 55%
- Informed class participation - 20%
ENG5500HF
Against the Law: Reading and Writing Male Homosexuality in Post-War England
Morra, I.
- Excerpts from the Oscar Wilde trial
- Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
- Poems by A.E. Housman, Alfred Douglas, J.A. Symonds
- Noël Coward lyrics
- Excerpts from Evelyn Waugh, Put Out More Flags
Novels and Plays:
- E.M. Forster, Maurice [1971] (London: Penguin)
- Gillian Freeman, The Leather Boys [1961] (Richmond: Valancourt)
- Rodney Garland, The Heart in Exile [1953] (Richmond: Valancourt)
- Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin [1939] (London: Penguin)
- Robin Maugham, The Servant [1948] (Richmond: Valancourt)
- Terence Rattigan, Separate Tables (Table Number Seven) [1954] (London: Nick Hern)
- Terence Rattigan, The Deep Blue Sea [1952] (London: Nick Hern)
- Mary Renault, The Charioteer [1953] (London: Virago)
- Peter Wildeblood, Against the Law [1955] (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson)
- Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man [1964] (London: Vintage)
Films:
- The Leather Boys (1964), dir. Sidney J. Furie
- The Servant (1963), dir. Joseph Losey
- Victim (1961), dir. Basil Dearden
- Final essay - 60%
- Seminar presentation - 20%
- Participation - 20%
ENG5501HS
Real Estate Fiction
Radovic, S.
- Edgar Allan Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher"
- Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in a Castle
- V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas
- Andre Dubus III, House of Sand and Fog
- J.G. Ballard, High-Rise
- Selections of theoretical texts on private property and real estate
- Adam Smith and John Locke on private property (selections)
- Various online resources and marketing publications for the current real estate market in Toronto
- Participation - 15%
- Note-taker - 5%
- Class presentation - 15%
- Essay prospectus 20%
- Final essay - 45%
ENG5503HF
Speaking of What’s Next: Climate and Dystopia in Near Future Fiction
Goldman, M.
Dystopian fiction seems to offer a starting point. Climate may be understood as an intensifier of traditional hazards that dystopian artists and thinkers have long interrogated: plague, resource conflict, brutalized social control, and the perils of new technology. This course will review fictional, near future dystopias, interpolated by recent theoretical work on climate.
Questions to be examined include: Does the traditional dichotomy between literary fiction and genre fiction remain salient in valuing future-facing texts? Have speculative forms like science fiction and dystopia acquired a new primacy ahead of “merely” literary works? Is the book-text alone still capable of mobilizing social action on subjects like climate change or is adaption to visual media now requisite? Must emotional potency come at the expense of scientific nuance? Is alarmism productive or unhelpful in climate fiction?
Course Reading List
Fiction:
- Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future
- Paaolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife
- Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
- Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behaviour
- Adam McKay, dir., Don't Look Up (film)
- Richard Powers, Bewilderment
Non-Fiction (see the weekly modules for links and PDFs to the materials listed below):
- Essay by Rebecca Solnit: "‘If You Win the Popular Imagination, You Win the Game’: Why We Need New Stories On Climate”
- Excerpts from Bruno Latour's Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climate Regime (2018).
- Excerpts from Paul Huebener's Nature's Brocken Clocks, Reimaginging Time in the Face of the Environmental Crisis (2020)
- Excerpts from David Wallace Wells's The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming (2019)
- Excerpts from Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction (2014)
- Excerpts froom Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962)
- Thomas R. Dunlap, “Environmentalism, a Secular Faith.” Environmental Values, vol. 15, no. 3, 2006, pp. 321–30
- Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), vol. 155, no. 3767, 1967, pp. 1203–07
- "Empathy," excerpt from Marlene Goldman's Performing Shame (2023)
- In-class participation (including some combination of timely responses to posts/group chat questions) - 5%.
- Eight to ten written responses (350 words approx.; 1-2 page max.) to formal discussion questions: one for each literary work - 15%
- Seminar presentation (15 min. max.) + short essay (5 pages, 1,250 words) - 30% (oral:10%; written: 20%)
- Final class presentation on research project - 5%
- Final research essay (15 pages max. not including endnotes and work cited) - 45%
ENG6100HF
After Autofiction, After Authenticity
Hammond, A.
- Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”
- Teju Cole, Open City
- Rachel Cusk, Outline
- Serge Doubvovsky, “Autobiography/Truth/Psychoanalysis”
- Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality”
- Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?
- Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle, Vol. 1.
- Ben Lerner, 10:04
- Tao Lin, Taipei
- Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul D'Ambrosio, You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity (selections)
- Lauren Oyler, “I Am the One Who Is Sitting Here, for Hours and Hours and Hours”
- Edmund White, “Today the Artist Is a Saint Who Writes His Own Life”
- Annotated bibliography – 10%
- Seminar presentation & position paper – 25%
- Research essay proposal – 5%
- Research essay – 40%
- Participation – 20%
ENG6100HS
The History of Rhyme, Medieval to Romantic
Robins, W.
Course Reading List
Primary readings, which will be chosen to match student interests, will include poems by:
- Geoffrey Chaucer
- John Skelton
- Queen Elizabeth I
- Thomas Wyatt
- Mary Herbert
- William Shakespeare
- John Milton
- John Dryden
- Anne Finch
- Alexander Pope
- Anna Letitia Barbauld
- William Blake
- William Wordsworth
- John Keats
- Felicia Hemans
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
As well as anonymous works such as:
- The Old English "Rhyming Poem"
- Pearl, select Middle English lyrics
- Select ballads from Percy’s Reliques and Mother Goose’s Melody
Secondary readings will include a wide range of linguistic, cognitive, literary, theoretical, and cultural-historical studies of poetic form.
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements
- Weekly exercises – 25%
- Book review – 5%
- Presentations – 20%
- Final essay – 40%
- Participation – 10%
ENG6552HF
Law and Literature
Stern, S.
O.W. Holmes: “The life of the law has not been logic but experience.”
O. Wilde: “Experience is the name we give to our past mistakes.”
Each week we will read several articles, along with several short stories and novels during the term. We will begin with a consideration of some of the questions and criticisms that scholars have recently raised as they have sought to justify or reorient the field. We will then look at some of the specific problems connecting law and literature at various points since the Renaissance. After a more intensive look at current theoretical debates, we will take up various problems at the intersection of law and literature: legal fictions, forms of legal writing and explanation, and the regulation of literature through copyright law. Next, we will focus on two legal problems that have also occupied literary thinkers: the problem of criminal responsibility and literature’s ability to document human thought and motives, and the question of privacy in criminal law, tort law, and fiction. We will end by considering possible future directions for law and literature. The course requirements will include a final paper and two or three response papers for presentation in class.
Course Reading List
The texts include:
- A set of readings on methodology
- A set of judicial decisions
- Several Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle
- George Sylvester Viereck, The House of the Vampire (1907)
- Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1887)
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/91)
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements
- Active engagement (attendance and informed participation) - 15%
- In-class presentation with handout - 15%
- Archival research exercise - 15%
- Final project proposal with annotated bibliography - 10%
- Final project - research paper - 45%
ENG6950Y
Workshop in Creative Writing
Williams, I. (F-Term) | Naga, N. (S-Term)
*This course is mandatory for and restricted to first-year MA CRW students.*
A sustainable creative writing practice operates in a cycle of writing, reading, revising, and sharing. In addition to workshopping, we focus on developing necessary capacities or traits that are essential to your success as a writer in the program and beyond. These capacities include self-discipline, curiosity, risk, vulnerability, empathy, courage, etc.
Course Reading List
N/A (there is no reading list)
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements
The final grade will be equally weighted between the two terms. This term’s component will be based on:
- 2 x 7/7 Project - 15%
- Iceberg Revision - 15%
- Blurb and Review - 15%
- Workshops and in-class activities - 30%
- Final Portfolio - 25%
S-Term Course Description (Prof. Naga):
This multi-genre Creative Writing course will include a combination of workshops and discussions about both craft and literary ethics. Each student will be required to submit new material for workshop, provide weekly written and oral feedback for their peers, and facilitate one conversation on a craft topic of their choosing at a scheduled date. At the end of the semester, a final portfolio of revised material will be due, along with an Author’s Statement.
Course Reading List
N/A (there is no reading list)
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements
The final grade will be equally weighted between the two terms. This term’s component will be based on:
- Workshop submissions - 20%
- Participation (including workshop feedback) - 20%
- Discussion facilitation - 20%
- Final portfolio + Author’s Statement - 40%
ENG6960HY
*CREDIT/NO CREDIT*
Advanced Creative Writing Workshop
Greene, R.
*This course is mandatory for and restricted to second-year MA CRW students.*
Reading List:
There will be no set texts for the course, but the professor will recommend to individual students readily available works that may be helpful to them in the completion of their theses.
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements
In this Credit/No Credit course, credit will be earned for:
- Class presentation - 20%
- Class participation - 20%
- Final portfolio - 60%
ENG6999YF
Critical Topographies: Theory and Practice of Contemporary Literary Studies in English
Downes, P.
- PDFs on Quercus
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements
- Participation - 20%
- Reading responses (3 x 20%) - 60%
- Presentation - 20%
ENG7100HS
Critical Theory and Science & Technology Studies
Slater, A.
- Stacey Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self
- Ruha Benjamin, excerpts from Race After Technology
- Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, excerpts from Objectivity
- Kim TallBear, “An Indigenous, Feminist Approach to DNA Politics”
- Paul Edwards, excerpts from A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming
- Alexander Galloway, excerpts from Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization
- Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”
- Evelyn Fox Keller, excerpts from Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology
- Bruno Latour, excerpts from Science in Action
- Luciana Parisi, excerpts from Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space
- N. Katherine Hayles, excerpts from How We Became Posthuman
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements
- Student presentation with discussion questions - 10%
- Short paper based on student presentation (3-4 pages, due one week after presentation) - 15%
- Active engagement during session - 10%
- Discussion posts (posted within one week of class session) - 10%
- Class conference presentation (final two sessions) - 5%
- Final paper (10-12 double-spaced pages) - 50%
ENG7101HS
Research-Creation: Theory and Practice
McGill, R.
Research-creation, also known as arts-based research or practice-led research, has been increasingly recognized as a significant form of scholarly inquiry. It has the capacity to employ unique methodologies, produce distinctive kinds of understanding, and engage non-academic communities in direct, multifaceted ways. Considering scholarship that documents and theorizes research-creation, as well as examples of research-creation involving literature and other arts, we’ll examine the many forms that research-creation can take, as well as its affordances, value, risks, and challenges. Along the way, we’ll investigate such topics as the nature of the knowledge generated by fiction; collaborative, interdisciplinary, intersectional, and community-engaged methodologies; Indigenous approaches to research-creation; peer review and questions of assessment; ethical considerations; research-creation in relation to social justice and environmental justice; and research-creation as a complement and alternative to traditional scholarly research. The major project for the course will involve each student producing a work of research-creation, accompanied by a discussion of the work’s methodology and research contributions, or writing an academic article on a subject connected to the course.
Course Reading List
- Barrett, Estelle. “Foucault’s ‘What Is an Author’: Towards a Critical Discourse of Practice as Research.” Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry. Ed. Barrett and Barbara Bolt. Bloomsbury, 2007.
- Beier, Jessie L. and Jason J. Wallin. “The Disappeared Future of Arts-Based Research, Parts I–VI: Towards a Reality-Without-Givenness.” What Is Art Education? After Deleuze and Guattari. Ed. Jan Jagodzinski. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
- Burge, Amy, et al. “‘. . . But We Are Academics!’ A Reflection on Using Arts-Based Research Activities with University Colleagues.” Teaching in Higher Education 21.6 (2016).
- Chapman, Owen and Kim Sawchuk. “Research-Creation: Intervention, Analysis and ‘Family Resemblances.’” Canadian Journal of Communication 37.1 (2012).
- Cox, Andrew et al. “Criteria of Quality in Fiction-Based Research to Promote Debate About the Use of AI and Robots in Higher Education.” Higher Education Research and Development 42.3 (2023).
- Dennett, Daniel C. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. Norton, 2013. (excerpt)
- Donnelly, Dianne. “Creative Writing Knowledge.” Key Issues in Creative Writing. Ed. Donnelly and Graeme Harper. Multilingual Matters, 2013.
- Iser, Wolfgang. “The Significance of Fictionalizing.” Anthropoetics 3.2 (1997-98).
- Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed, 2013. (excerpt)
- Leavy, Patricia. “Criteria for Evaluating Arts-Based Research.” Handbook of Arts-Based Research. Ed. Leavy. Guilford, 2017.
- Loveless, Natalie. “Polydisciplinamory.” How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation. Duke UP, 2019.
- Lowry, Glen. “Un-Settling a Research-Creation Framework.” Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation. Ed. Natalie Loveless. U of Alberta P, 2020.
- Maynard, Robyn and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. “On Letter Writing, Commune, and the End of (This) World.” Rehearsals for Living. Haymarket, 2022.
- O’Brien, M. E. and Eman Abdelhadi. Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072. Common Notions, 2022. (excerpt)
- St Hilaire, Emilie. “Who Should Care About Responsible Conduct of Research in Research-Creation?” RACAR 43.1 (2018).
- Truman, Sarah E. “Theoretical Precursors: Tracing My Methodology for Research-Creation.” Feminist Speculations and the Practice of Research-Creation: Writing Pedagogies and Intertextual Affects. Routledge, 2021.
Texts subject to change.
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements
- Class participation - 15%
- Readings-based presentation - 15%
- Project proposal - 10%
- Project presentation - 20%
- Project - 40%
ENG8100HS
Electronic Literature
Noh, J.
- bpNichol, First Screening
- Kamau Brathwaite, Ancestors
- Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl
- Jennifer Egan, “Black Box”
- Jordan Abel, Injun
- Bhanu Kapil, Ban en Banlieue
- Eugene Lim, Search History
- Vauhini Vara, Searches
Secondary Texts
- Amaranth Borsuk, The Book
- Whitney Trettien, Cut/Copy/Paste (selections)
- Garrett Stewart, Book, Text, Medium (selections)
- N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines; Postprint (selections)
- Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms; Track Changes; Bitstreams (selections)
- Lisa Nakamura, Digitizing Race (selections)
- Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression (selections)
- Sarah Brouillette, “Wattpad’s Fictions of Care” and “Wattpad, Platform Capitalism, and the Feminization of Publishing Work”
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements
- Sustained participation - 15%
- Short presentation and discussion facilitation - 25%
- Presentation handout or slides - 10%
- Short presentation (10 minutes) - 10%
- Facilitation (20 minutes) - 5%
- Final project (12+ pp. research paper, scholarly edition, or public humanities project) - 60%
- Abstract/proposal - 5%
- Project bibliography and oral exam - 15%
- Final project - 40%
ENG9100HS
Theory of the Novel
Schmitt, C.
- Benedict Anderson
- Erich Auerbach
- M. M. Bakhtin
- Roland Barthes
- Homi Bhabha
- Dorrit Cohn
- Gérard Genette
- Fredric Jameson
- Susan S. Lanser
- Georg Lukács
- Edward Said
- Ferdinand de Saussure
- Viktor Shklovsky
- Alex Woloch
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements
- Informed participation, including weekly “most important sentence” and “most puzzling sentence” - 10%
- Three short handwritten reflections (10% each x 3) - 30%
- One pastiche - 10%
- Take-home final exam - 50%
ENG9101HS
Bad English(es): A History
Percy, C.
- Ahmad, Dohra. 2007. Rotten English : A Literary Anthology. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
- Culpeper, Jonathan, Paul Kerswill, Ruth Wodak, Tony McEnery, and Francis Katamba, eds. 2018. English Language : Description, Variation and Context. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Hodson, Jane. 2014. Dialect in Film and Literature. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan International.
- Peterson, Elizabeth. 2019. Making Sense of “Bad English.” Taylor & Francis.
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements
- Anthology entry - 25%
- Proposal with bibliography - 10%
- Presentation - 15%
- Final research paper - 35%
- Credit/No Credit discussion posts and exercises - 10%
- Participation - 5%
ENG9400HF
Essential Skills Workshop Series
*CREDIT/NO CREDIT (0.25 FCE)*
Gniadek, M.
The Essential Skills Workshop Series (ESWS) introduces the incoming cohort of doctoral students to the essential skills they will need in order to succeed in the PhD program in English and beyond. ESWS meets eight times each fall, approximately once a week for two hours from mid-September through mid-November. Most meetings will feature a guest or guests, who, along with the faculty coordinator, will lead an open discussion for students embarking on the doctoral degree at U of T, moving into new pedagogic responsibilities, and entering wider professional and scholarly networks. Occasionally, there will be short, pre-circulated readings. Some sessions may provide students with tangible feedback on work (such as SSHRC proposals) they are already doing as part of their professionalization during the first year of the program.
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements
The Essential Skills Workshop Series meets over 8 weeks in the Fall Term. The course is Credit/No Credit: credit will be earned for attendance and for receiving and providing tangible feedback on a draft SSHRC proposal.
ENG9900HF
Teaching Literature
*CREDIT/NO CREDIT*
Hansen, J.
*This course is mandatory for and restricted to PhD students in either Year 2 or 3 and PhD U students in either Year 3 or 4.*
- Elaine Auyoung, “Becoming Sensitive: Literary Study and Learning to Notice”
- Patrick Carey, “A Time to Teach: Reflections upon Pedagogy in the Life of a Graduate Student”
- Patrick Collier, “Articulating Goals and Designing Integrated Courses”
- Paul Corrigan, “Reading and Responding”
- Paul Corrigan, “The State of Scholarship on Teaching Literature”
- Paul Corrigan, “Thinking About Pedagogy”
- Clark and Talbert, [selections on assessment]
- Mark Edmundson, “Teach the Conflicts”
- Patricia Eberly, [selection on syllabus design]
- Jennifer Heinert and Daniel Newman, [readings on engagement]
- bell hooks, “Engaged Pedagogy,” “Integrity,” and “Teaching as Prophetic Vision”
- Harvard Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, “Syllabus Design”
- Eszter Hargittai, “How to Prepare a Syllabus for a College Course”
- Sherry Lee Linkon, “The Literary Mind”
- Scott Nail, “What Is Good Writing”
- Ato Quayson, [selection on anti-racist pedagogy]
- Deanna Reder, “Using Indigenous-Informed Close-Reading and Research Skills to Unlearn”
- James Schaeffer, “Two Methods of Instruction”
- Elaine Showalter, [selection on seminars]
- Elaine Showalter, “The Anxiety of Teaching”
- Donald Small, “In Defense of the Lecture”
- Ted Underwood, “We Can Save What Matters About Writing at a Price”
- Center for Educational Innovation (UMN), “Writing Your Teaching Philosophy”
- David Knights, [selection on big lectures]
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements
In this Credit/No Credit course, credit will be earned for:
- Discussion
- Presentations
2026 F-Term Graduate Course Timetable
In this timetable, each course code is linked to its corresponding section heading above. Please open the section and scroll down to find the information about the specific course.
2027 S-Term Graduate Course Timetable
In this timetable, each course code is linked to its corresponding section heading above. Please open the section and scroll down to find the information about the specific course.