Summer 2023 Course Descriptions and Timetable

ENG102H1F -  Literature and the Sciences   

Section Number: LEC0101                                

Time(s): Tuesdays and Thursdays 1 pm - 3  pm ONLINE

Instructor(s): Professor Thom Dancer

Office Location: JHB 713

E-mail: thom.dancer@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: Like science fiction? Argue with your friends about the depiction of future and fictional worlds and people? Want to learn how to talk with more sophistication about what you like and dislike about art, fiction, and film? Ever wonder what science fiction novels, stories, and movies tell us about ourselves, our future as a species, the trajectory of technology? This class aims to develop a critical appreciation of popular science fiction, popular culture, and film from the perspective of literary analysis. Central to critical appreciation is the recognition of literature as carefully crafted art form, which basically means coming up with a cogent account of - what a piece of literature “means,” - what it is trying to do to/for the reader, - what technical, verbal, and structural choices the author has made and how they contribute to the overall experience of reading, and so on.

This course introduces students without a background in literary analysis or writing to basics of analysis, interpretation, and study of literature. It is a course that emphasizes the development of reading and thinking and communication skills.

Required Reading:The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin; Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer; Stories by Ursual Le Guin, Geoffrey Landis, Cixin Liu; Movies: Rogue One, Mad Max: Fury Road, Television Episodes from Futurama and Doctor Who.

First Three Authors/Texts: Liu, Le Guin, Landis

Method of Evaluation: Group Work, Quizzes, Test, Project/Presentation, Participation.

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ENG110Y1 - Narrative

Section Number: LEC0101                                

Time(s): Tuesdays and Thursdays 1 pm - 3  pm 

Instructor(s): Professor Andrew Lesk 

Office Location: JHB 814 

E-mail: andrew.lesk@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: Stories and storytelling are integral to our perceptions of and interaction with the world around us. This course examines the way that narrative functions in a variety of traditional and non-traditional forms such as the novel, fairy tales, the short story, the essay, autobiography, travel writing, journalism, film, video, and the graphic novel. 

Required Reading: Full reading list, TBA. 

First Three Authors/Texts: Milton, Shelley, Conrad. 

Method of Evaluation: Short essay, longer essay, test, quiz.

ENG202H1F - British Literature I

Section Number: LEC0101                            

Time(s): Tuesdays and Thursdays 10 am – 1 pm 

Instructor(s): Carroll Balot 

Office Location: JHB 734 

E-mail: carroll.balot@utoronto.ca 

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 formal analysis.  Central themes will include the relationship between the ancient heroic code and Christian values; the movement from a providential to a modern scientific cosmology; the many forms of love, sacred and secular; community, 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  

Website address (if applicable): Quercus 

First Three Authors/Texts: Dream of the Rood; Beowulf; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 

Method of Evaluation: short paper; midterm; final; participation

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ENG215H1F - The Canadian Short Story

Section Number: L0101                                

Time(s): Monday and Wednesday 10 am - 1 pm ONLINE

Instructor(s): Dr. Sarah Caskey     

Office Location: Room 802, Jackman Humanities Building 

E-mail: 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 intersection with issues including identity, storytelling, and art. The stories are exciting, often challenging, and demonstrate the sheer variety of voices and spectrum of possibilities within the genre.

Required Reading: All course readings are available on Quercus through the Library Reading List. 

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

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

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ENG220H1S - Introduction to Shakespeare

Section Number: LEC0101                                

Time(s): Tuesdays and Thursdays 10 am -1 pm 

Instructor(s): Carroll Balot 

Office Location: JHB 734 

E-mail: carroll.balot@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: An introduction to Shakespeare's work through a selection of representative plays.

Required Reading: Henry VI Part 1; As You Like It; King Lear; Winter’s Tale; The Tempest 

Website address (if applicable): Quercus 

First Three Authors/Texts: Henry VI Part 1; As You Like It; King Lear 

Method of Evaluation: short paper, term tests, participation 

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ENG235H1F - The Graphic Novel

Section Number: 0101                                

Time(s): Monday and Wednesdays 1 pm - 3 pm 

Instructor(s): Professor Andrew Lesk 

Office Location: JHB 814 

E-mail: andrew.lesk@utoronto.ca 

Brief Description of Course: In ENG235, an introductory course, we will examine the rhetorical uses of comics in order to think through the course theme Youth. Concomitantly, we will explore the following questions: To what rhetorical purposes are comics used? How is "truth" represented/constructed through visual and textual rhetoric? What is the relationship between the novel and its social context, and how is that represented by the visual codes of these texts? 

Required Reading: Full reading list, TBA. 

First Three Authors/Texts: Clowes, Laboucane, Barry. 

Method of Evaluation: Essay, tests, quiz.

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ENG2501F - Introduction to American Literature

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): May-June, Monday, Wednesday 2 pm - 5 pm ONLINE

Instructor(s): Scott Rayter

Office Location: UC A303 

E-mail: scott.rayter@utoronto.ca 

Brief Description of Course: This course will introduce students to a variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, essays, and slave narratives, by a number of writers seen as key figures in American literature but also some who are less well-known, and we will examine how their works reflect national and individual concerns with freedom and identity, particularly in relation to race, gender and sexuality. 

Required Reading: We will be using the shorter 10th edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature (2 vols, published July 2022), with works by writers such as Irving, Hawthorne, Jacobs, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Bierce, Gilman, James, Frost, Hemingway, Faulkner, O’Hara, Welty, Far, Morrison, Lahiri, Carver and others. 

Web Site Address (if applicable): Quercus 

First Few Authors/Texts: Irving, Hawthorne, Jacobs, Melville 

Method of Instruction: Lecture 

Method of Evaluation: Take-home Mid-term Test (20%); Essay (35%); Participation (15%); Take-home Exam (30%)

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ENG252H1F - Introduction to Canadian Literature

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tues and Thurs 1-3 pm

Instructor(s): Dr. Vikki Visvis

Office Location: JHB 802

E-mail: vvisvis@chass.utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: This course offers an introductory study of English-Canadian prose and poetry from the eighteenth century to the present day by identifying landmarks in the Canadian literary tradition and by examining the historical, cultural, and political forces that have both shaped and challenged these CanLit milestones. The course will begin by analyzing the writings of Canada’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pioneers and settlers, and will, then, revisit Canada’s settler-colonial history from Indigenous literary perspectives. We will continue by discussing the confluence of Romantic and nationalist influences in Confederation poetry during the late nineteenth century; the evolution of realist fiction during the twentieth century; the formal experimentation that modernized Canadian poetry in the mid-twentieth century; and diversity in women’s writing during the late twentieth century. The course will close by exploring contemporary multicultural narratives—within contexts such as postmodernism, Black writing, and Asian-Canadian fiction—and queer literature in Canada.

Required Reading:

1. Course Reader
2. Thomas King: Green Grass, Running Water (Harper-Collins)
3. Michael Ondaatje: In the Skin of a Lion (Vintage)
Excerpts by Samuel Hearne, David Thompson, Frances Brooke, Catharine Parr Traill, Susanna Moodie. Poetry by Charles Sangster, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott, A. J. M. Smith, P. K. Page, Irving Layton. Short stories by Sinclair Ross, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Eden Robinson, Austin Clarke, Dionne Brand, Madeleine Thien, Shyam Selvadurai, Beth Brant in Course Reader

Course Reader will be posted on Quercus. Please purchase novels by King and Ondaatje online from the University of Toronto Bookstore, Amazon, or Chapters Indigo online. Feel free to use eBooks for this course.

Web Site Address (if applicable):

First Few Authors/Texts: Hearne, Thompson, Brooke

Method of Evaluation: Short essay: 4–5 pages (25%); Long essay: 8–10 pages (40%); Final examination: 2 hours (25%); Online participation (10%).   

ENG311H1F - Medieval Literature

Section Number: LEC0101                                

Time(s): Tuesdays and Thursdays 2-5 pm 

Instructor(s): Carroll Balot 

Office Location: JHB 734 

E-mail: carroll.balot@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: an introduction to non-Chaucerian medieval literature for advanced undergraduates. Our survey of medieval English literature will include a variety of genres, including romance, elegy, and hagiography, and forms, including lai, prose, stanzaic poetry, and drama. Historically, the course is framed by Marie de France’s late 12th c. Old French romances and the fifteenth century oral autobiography, The Book of Margery Kempe. Although we will discuss some of the historical events that are 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 particular visions of the world and our place in it.

Required Reading: Marie de France, Marie de France: Poetry. Translated and edited by Dorothy Gilbert. Norton Critical Edition. Norton, 2015. 

Malory, Thomas, et al. Le Morte Darthur: The Winchester Manuscript. Edited by Helen Cooper. Oxford UP, 2008. 

Pearl: Text and Translation. Translated and edited by Jane Beal. Broadview Press, 2020. 

Mandeville, John, and Anthony Paul Bale. The Book of Marvels and Travels. Oxford University Press, 2012. 

Kempe, Margery, and Lynn Staley. The Book of Margery Kempe : a New Translation, Contexts, Criticism. Norton, 2001. 

Website address (if applicable): Quercus 

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

Method of Evaluation: Short paper, term tests, participation

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ENG323H1F -  Austen and Her Contemporaries

Time(s): Tuesday, Thursday 10 am -1 pm 

Instructor(s): Alex Hernandez 

Office Location: JHB 608 

E-mail: alex.hernandez@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: A stone slab tucked away in Winchester’s cathedral church marks Jane Austen’s grave, noting that: “the extraordinary endowments of her mind / obtained the regard of all who knew her and / the warmest love of her intimate connections.” This course explores that extraordinary mind and the culture that it brought about, placing Austen in the context of her times in several senses.  

We’ll look to situate her work in a dialogue with that of contemporaries in literature, philosophy, and aesthetics, to read closely as she traces the complex family dynamics of the late Georgian home, and to understand her work as part of a moment of global political upheaval with profound consequences even to this day. To do so, we’ll read a number of her novels, for the most part moving chronologically, making the occasional detour into the work of fellow authors while also tracing parallel secondary critical accounts. Students will learn to read her work more critically and develop some facility with the era’s literature, to demystify Austen’s body of work and return it to its larger context, as well as gain an understanding of some of the classic accounts through which scholars have understood this period. 

Required Reading: Several—but not all—of Austen’s novels (Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Persuasion), a number of relatively short supplemental works for context, and some poetry. 

First Three Authors/Texts: Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution, excerpts from gothic novels

Method of Evaluation: Robust Participation, a Short Paper, Term Tests

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ENG 331H1F - Drama 1485-1603 - CANCELLED

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday, Wednesday 2 pm - 5 pm

Instructor(s): Matt Sergi

Office Location: JHB 812   

E-mail: sergi.utoronto@gmail.com

Brief Description of Course: 

English drama before 1485 looks and feels very, very different from English drama after 1603.  Drama historians generally agree that, at some point during the Tudors’ rule over Britain from 1485 to 1603, early modern English drama emerged and medieval English drama faded away; we agree on little more than that.  ENG 331 will jump right into the tougher, unsettled questions that underlie that broadly conceived cultural transition (questions to which the professor himself can only offer contingent, unsure, debatable answers): in what year was the “some point”?  Where did it happen and why?  During the transition, what was the set of characteristics shared by those plays that now seem more continuous with future trends than with past ones?  What is “modernity” in terms of live drama?  What is gained when drama becomes modern, and what is the cost of that gain, even now?

The Tudors employed a range of strategies to consolidate prestige in the Crown, and thus in London.  By 1603, London-based styles and conventions, particularly in dramatic performances, 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 England were performing old and new plays in ways that might strike us as more medieval.

So ENG 331 will cover a selection of performance texts and traditions across a variegated Britain between 1485 and 1603 — with frequent reference to the Records of Early English Drama, our readings will be organized by geography rather than chronology, taking us not only to Tudor-era London but also through sixteenth-century Cheshire, Yorkshire, East Anglia, Cambridgeshire, and Central Scotland.

Active, real-time participation is required, but built into our class is an array of inclusive alternative avenues for participation that make room for all learning styles and needs; presence at class meetings will be crucial, too, with a minimum attendance requirement. Be prepared to engage actively during every class meeting.

Required Reading: 

Fitzgerald and Sebastian, eds., The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama; Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (McDonald edition); Marlowe, Edward II (Martin edition); Lindsay, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estatis (edition TBA); students will also be assigned a number of secondary readings electronically.

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 (CQs), asked at the midpoint and end of each class session, 17.5%; 
Actual Attendance during at least 9 of our 11 class sessions, 10%;
Close Analysis Essay (close reading), 20%;
Week 3 Quiz (Terminology and Geography), 15%;
Archival Research Essay, 22.5%

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ENG340H1F - Modern Drama

Section Number: LEC0101H1                                

Time(s): Tuesday and Thursday 10 am - 1 pm 

Instructor(s): Dr. Philippa Sheppard      

Office Location: JHB 814 

E-mail: 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, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. 

First Three Authors/Texts: Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov. 

Method of Evaluation: Two in-class essays (40%, 20% each); one essay outline (5%); one take-home essay (40%); participation (15%). I will take attendance each class, and make note of oral contributions, to arrive at the participation mark. Attendance is important.  

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ENG357H1S - New Writing in Canada

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tues and Thursday 1-4 pm

Instructor(s): Dr. Vikki Visvis

Office Location: JHB 802

E-mail: 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).

Web Site Address (if applicable):

First Few Authors/Texts: Dimaline, Compton, Hay

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

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ENG365H1S - Contermporary American Fiction

Section Number: L0101

Time(s): Monday, Wednesday 2 pm - 5 pm, July-August, ONLINE

Instructor(s): Scott Rayter

Office Location: UC A303 

E-mail: scott.rayter@utoronto.ca 

Brief Description of Course: How do contemporary American fiction writers deal with the politics of representation in their works, particularly in relation to identity—be it national, sexual, gender, ethnic, or racial—and within a larger postmodern context of questioning subjectivity itself? 

Required Reading: Works will include only recent 21st-century novels and short stories by writers such as George Saunders, Lorrie Moore, Carmen Maria Machado, Alison Bechdel, Colson Whitehead, Ha Jin, Nathan Englander, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Tommy Orange.

Web Site Address (if applicable): Quercus 

First Three Authors/Texts: Saunders, Moore, Machado 

Method of Instruction: Lecture and Discussion  

Method of Evaluation: Take-home Passage Analysis (20%); Essay (35%); Take-home Exam (30%); Participation (15%)

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ENG373H1F - Topics in Pre-1800 Literature

Subtitle for special topics and 400-series courses (if applicable): Medieval Romance 

Section Number: LEC0101                            

Time(s): Tuesdays and Thursdays 2 pm - 5 pm 

Instructor(s): Carroll Balot 

Office Location: JHB 734 

E-mail: carroll.balot@utoronto.ca 

Brief Description of Course: A selection of medieval Arthurian romances, from the earliest story of Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain to Malory’s fifteenth-century synthesis, The Morte Darthur.

Required Reading: Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain; Chretien de Troyes, Erec and Enide; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory, Le Morte Darthur.  

Website address (if applicable): Quercus 

First Three Authors/Texts: Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain; Chretien de Troyes, Erec and Enide; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 

Method of Evaluation: Term tests, seminar paper, participation. 

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ENG376H1F - Topics in Theory, Language, Critical Methods

Subtitle for special topics and 400-series courses (if applicable): Narrative Theory

Section Number: LEC0101                                

Time(s): Mondays and Wednesdays 10 am - 1 pm ONLINE

Instructor(s): Daniel Aureliano Newman

Office Location: by appointment (virtual or in person) 

E-mail: daniel.newman@utoronto.ca 

Brief Description of Course: This course offers an introduction to narrative theory, or narratology. Through readings of mainly short fiction but also film, comics, music videos and other media, we will cover the basic building blocks of narrative and some of its key techniques, focusing on character, event, plot, narration (including unreliable and weird narrators), time (including impossible temporalities) and more. In addition to gaining a better understanding of how stories “work,” students will learn how narrative theory can be used in concert with other analytical and theoretical approaches, as well as for creative writing.

Required Reading: all readings, including theory, are available free online, either through the University of Toronto Libraries or elsewhere. Theory readings will be mainly from H. Porter Abbott’s Cambridge Introduction to Narrative and Suzanne Keen’s Narrative Form. The narratives we read will be mainly 20/21-century short fiction by authors including Margaret Atwood, Teju Cole, James Joyce, Jamaica Kincaid, Thomas King, Hanif Kureishi, Sarah Polley, Claudia Rankine, Zadie Smith, Bill Watterson, Virginia Woolf and Charles Yu.

Website address (if applicable): n/a 

First Three Authors/Texts: Abbott, Chapters 1 and 2 of Cambridge Introduction to Narrative; Margaret Atwood, “Happy Endings”; Raymond Carver, “So Much Water So Close to Home”

Method of Evaluation: Short textual analyses (15% X 3 = 45%); creative narrative translation or adaptation (20%); final take-home exam (20%); participation (15%).

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ENG378H1F - Special Topics

Subtitle for special topics and 400-series courses (if applicable): Oscar Wilde

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday, Wednesday 1 pm - 4 pm

Instructor(s): Daniel Wright     

Office Location: JHB 631     

E-mail: daniel.wright@utoronto.ca

Brief Description of Course: Oscar Wilde was a poet, an essayist, a lifestyle guru, a novelist, a fabulist, a playwright, an aesthete, and a celebrity whose public persona helped to shape the modern conception of gay identity. In this course, we’ll immerse ourselves in Wilde’s wide-ranging work in order to understand how and why he intervened so boldly and definitively in the history of literature, culture, and sexual identity. Wilde’s career spans the period we call the fin-de-siècle (roughly 1880-1900), the late-Victorian moment dominated by the rebellious Aesthetic Movement and its credo of “art for art’s sake.” We’ll situate Wilde’s work and public image in relation to this vibrant epoch and its shifting aesthetic and cultural values. While Wilde is a product of his own historical moment, his work also continues to be immensely popular today, and so our discussion of Wilde will attend also to those aspects of his work and life that make him endlessly relevant: his epigrammatic wit; his critique of superficial norms and conventions; his avant-garde experimentalism; and his lasting position as an icon of gay history. 

Required Reading: 

Wilde: Selected poems and essays, “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Salomé, An Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Earnest, De Profundis, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” 

Other reading: Plato, Symposium (excerpt); essays by Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and William Morris; poems by Amy Levy and Alfred Douglas; Moisés Kaufman, Gross Indecency 

Website address (if applicable): N/A 

First Three Authors/Texts:  

Walter Pater, excerpts from The Renaissance 

Wilde, “Hélas!” and “Impression du Matin”     

Method of Evaluation:

Writing assignments, participation, take-home final exam

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ENG 385H1F - History of the English Language

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday, Wednesday 10 am -1 pm

Instructor(s): Matt Sergi

Office Location: JHB 812   

E-mail: sergi.utoronto@gmail.com

Brief Description of Course: Speakers and writers of English, across the millennia and miles through which our strange dialect of West Germanic has spread and changed, diverge so widely that we often cannot understand each other. Indeed, there are many different varieties of English (“Englishes”) spoken and written in Toronto, each connected in a different way to the language’s complex and fascinating history. Our lecture-based (but discussion-friendly) course will explore the linguistic, practical, socio-economic, and cultural history of the language itself.  By the end of term, students will learn to recognize and study (and in some cases read and understand) a range of multiple Englishes, extending across time and around the globe. They will begin to perceive, embedded in any given English word or phrase, centuries of history, politics, tradition, and struggle. They will learn and apply the laws, rules, theories, and terms by which scholars have come to understand the development of the English language.  Students will be expected to treat their own Englishes — and each other’s — as subjects of study, allowing us to better understand by the end of the semester not only how English ended up looking and sounding the way it does, but also what English actually did, and does, look and sound like.

We will begin by surveying as many present-day global and virtual Englishes as we can manage (of which Standard Written English is only one). From there, we will work backward into the richly troubled and turbulent history of English: tracing the now-Global Englishes (1800–present) back to Early Modern English (1500–1800), then Middle English (1100–1500), then Old English (c. 449–1100).  We will discuss changes in English’s core systems of phonology (sound structure), morphology (word structure), and syntax (sentence structure); in its lexicon (vocabulary and all other meaningful units in a language) and semantics (the shifting meaning of those units); and in its graphics (how the language is represented in writing).  Meanwhile, we will approach the “outer histories” of English — that is, the series of historical events that influenced the development of the language — as stories of fragmentation, conflict, creativity, and power.

ENG 385 will hone students’ mastery of present-day language standards by examining key moments in the historical development of those language standards: how they have been controlled, preserved, described, prescribed, proscribed, or rejected. Who has the authority over the rules of the language in which we write and speak? Who makes the judgment about what is standard, proper, established, important, or significant? Does good English always facilitate communication, or can it sometimes muffle it? Can bad English do the opposite? And perhaps most urgently, how have new media technologies (not only internet, television, and radio, but also and most importantly, printing and writing) shaped language standards and practices? Consider: the way we articulate ideas verbally is linked to, even synonymous with, the way we think. 

While we will often draw on literature for examples of the language in development, this is not a course about literature; rather, we will focus primarily on the language itself.  There will be a quiz and a test, and presentations of original student-driven research, but little writing (only about 1000 words) assigned in this course. This is an intensive course, condensing the usual 12 weeks of course content into 6 weeks.  Be prepared to work and read intensively.

For fuller information about this course, including assignment prompts and grading, see premodernity.net/eng-385  

Required Reading: 

Smith and Kim, This Language, A River, textbook and workbook; students will also be assigned a number of secondary readings through the U of T Library, most of them from the academic journal World Englishes.

First Three Authors/Texts:  

Usually: Seargeant and Tagg, “English on the Internet and a ‘Post‐Varieties’ Approach to Language”; Smith and Kim, “Introduction to Phonetics”; Drake, “Nice For What”    

Method of Evaluation:

Case Study Presentation, 15%; 
Engagement and Participation in class discussion sessions, 15%; 
Actual Attendance during at least 9 of our 11 class sessions, 10%; 
Real-Time Comprehension Questions (CQs), asked at the midpoint and end of each class session, 15%; 
Final Essay (about 1000 words), 15%; 
Week 2 Quiz (Mostly Phonology), 10%;  
Week 7 Test, 20%.
 

ENG481H1F - Advanced Studies Seminar

Subtitle for special topics and 400-series courses (if applicable): Shakespeare’s Political Drama. The English History Plays: The Second Tetralogy 

Section Number: LEC0101                                

Time(s): Monday and Wenesday 10 am - 12 pm 

Instructor(s): Dr. Philippa Sheppard     

Office Location: JHB 814     

E-mail: 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. 

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ENG481H1F - Advanced Studies Seminar: Climate Fiction

Section Number: L0102

Time(s):  Tuesdays/Thursdays 10 am - 12 pm:

Instructor(s): Stanka Radovic     

Office Location: JHB815 

E-mail: stanka.radovic@utoronto.ca 

Brief Description of Course: This course will explore environmental criticism through climate change fiction, popularly known as "cli-fi." In recent years, the polarizing political debate about the extent of human-driven climate change has resulted in an increased awareness of the importance and fragility of our environment. Scientific, technological, economic, and political concerns that fuel this discussion have also been reflected in climate fiction. More often than not, climate fiction takes a dystopian and speculative perspective on the relationship between humans and their physical environment. In this course, we will examine the ways in which climate fiction (re)imagines environmental crisis and what it contributes to the larger debate about the environment. Scholarly texts and works of fiction will help us engage climate change and environmental degradation as central to the ways we envision our future and reconsider our past on this planet. 

Required Reading: Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable; Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Environment (“Introduction: The Challenge”); Tony Eggleton, A Short Introduction to Climate Change (excerpts); Short stories from Guernica Magazine: Special Issue on Climate Fiction; J.G. Ballard, The Drought (aka The Burning World); Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower; China Miéville, Un Lun Dun. 

Website address (if applicable): N/A 

First Three Authors/Texts: Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable; J.G. Ballard, The Drought (aka The Burning World); Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Environment (“Introduction: The Challenge”).                 

Method of Evaluation: Class participation (10%), Class Presentation (15%), Essay 1 (15%), Essay 2 (25%), Essay 3 (35%).