Previous Courses Offered &amp; Course Outlines

1020E (002) - Understanding Literature Today
Poems, plays, and stories are the most vital way people and cultures understand themselves, and as we read together we will enter a conversation between generations of writers in English that will illuminate their different cultures and our own. You will learn the techniques of scholarly interpretation that enable us to understand writers from four hundred years ago and from our own time and you will study the forms and genres they use. You will learn to write critical and interpretative essays and how to present evidence from the works we read to support your arguments about their meaning. 2 lecture hours, 1 tutorial hour, 1.0 course

Fall/Winter

1020E / 002

1020E (003) - Understanding Literature Today
By studying a broad range of exciting and important literary works from the past and present, this course will increase your understanding and appreciation not just of the richness and power of the works themselves, but also of the role of literature in reflecting and shaping our perceptions of the world and of ourselves. 2 lecture hours, 1 tutorial hour, 1.0 course

Fall/Winter

1020E / 003 (Evening)

Syllabus

1022E - Enriched Introduction to English Literature
Why does literature matter? This course will pose this question by examining works of literature from the fourteenth century to now and through assignments that ask you to hone a range of interpretive, critical, and creative skills necessary to your future success as students and leaders. Above all the course will explore how the writing and reading of literature are inherently political acts that ask us to think through our most pressing issues – environment, sexuality, race, gender, class – with tolerance for others and hope for the future. 2 lecture hours, 1 tutorial hour, 1.0 course

Fall/Winter

1022E / 001

1027F - The Storyteller’s Art I: Introduction to Narrative POPULAR!
The act of storytelling has been essential to human culture from the time of the ancient Greeks to the present day. Stories are integral to the way we define ourselves – and manipulate others. This course will examine the story teller’s art not only through novels and short stories but also in its ancient and modern forms, ranging from the epic to more recent forms such as the graphic novel. As diverse as these stories may seem, they share a central concern with the way we represent ourselves and interpret others. 2 lecture hours, 1 tutorial hour, 0.5 course

Fall 2023	1027F / 001	Syllabus
Fall 2023	1027F / 002	Syllabus

1028G (001) - The Storyteller’s Art II | Introduction to Narrative: The Rise of the Machines POPULAR!
This course explores a particular theme, mode, or genre of storytelling. Consult the Department of English for details of current course offerings. Instruction is by lecture and tutorials; emphasis on developing strong analytical and writing skills. 2 lecture hours, 1 tutorial hour, 0.5 course

Winter 2024

1028G / 001

Syllabus

1028G (002) - The Storyteller’s Art II | Introduction to Narrative: Stories About Stories: Realism, Fantasy, Fairy Tale POPULAR!
Since the time of Jane Austen, literary excellence has been associated with realism. The nomination lists for major literary awards are often dominated by texts characterized by realistic settings, complex characters, and an attention to the small details that make up the fabric of ordinary life. Nevertheless, in recent years the cultural landscape has come to be dominated by the fantasy genre: ranging from the Harry Potter series to post-apocalyptic fantasies like The Last of Us, fantasy tropes have become increasingly central to the way we tell our stories, examine our politics, and think about our future. This course will examine the dominance of realism by looking not only at realist novels but also at texts that feature characters who are themselves authors (or artists) struggling to balance the demands of realism with the appeal of fantasy and fairy tale. 2 lecture hours, 1 tutorial hour, 0.5 course

Winter 2024

1028G / 002

2000-2099 Level Courses (No prerequisites)

2017 - Reading Popular Culture
"If Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be writing for television." This course addresses the many forms of popular culture, including television, music, popular fiction and film, urban myths, and celebrities. The aim of this course is to encourage students to develop a critical understanding of all aspects of popular culture. 1.0 course

Fall/Winter

2017 / 001

2018B - The Culture of Leadership I
This course addresses the complex nature of leadership represented in key works of literature and culture, from Malory to Alice Munro, Shakespeare to David Mamet. We will focus on the ethical dilemmas and moral choices faced by leaders to ask what role a leader plays: hero, manager, thinker, strategist, artist, figurehead, authority? 0.5 course

Winter 2024

2018B / 001

Syllabus

2033E - Children’s Literature
This course examines the development of literature for and about children from its roots in fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and nonsense literature. Animal stories, adventure tales, picture books, and domestic novels will be considered alongside visits to fantasy realms like Wonderland, Neverland, or the Land of Oz. A central focus will be the assumptions about children and childhood that shape these texts, all produced by adults based on what they believe children enjoy, want, or need. 1.0 course

Fall/Winter	2033E / 001	Syllabus
Fall/Winter	2033E / 650 (Online)	Syllabus

2041F - Special Topics in Drama: The Cherry Orchard
In this course, students participating in the Department of English and Writing Studies' Drama Production - The Cherry Orchard, explore in theory and practice approaches to text in performance. Only students working as an actor, director, stage manager, assistant stage manager, lighting, set or costume designer may enroll. Please note: Auditions are held prior to the course start date so that students can register and receive a course credit for their part in the production. See course page for more details. Permission required to enroll. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

2041F / 001

2071F and 2071G - Speculative Fiction: Science Fiction
From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, a consideration of the history and development of science fiction. Will include science fiction themes such as the Other, new technologies, chaos theory, cybernetics, paradoxes of space/time travel, first contact, and alien worlds. 0.5 course

Fall 2023	2071F / 650 (Online)	Syllabus
Winter 2024	2071G / 001	Syllabus

2072F and 2072G - Speculative Fiction: Fantasy
Wizards, vampires, fairies, and the Chosen One – these figures are no longer confined to a genre ghetto but have instead moved to the mainstream. This course examines the roots of the fantasy genre in novels such as Dracula and The Lord of the Rings and considers how the tropes of the genre have been reproduced and transformed by authors like J.K. Rowling and Angela Carter. We will examine the continuing appeal of stories about magic, whether they involve supernatural intrusions, visits to the realm of faerie, or extraordinary powers hidden in apparently ordinary places. 0.5 course

Fall 2023	2072F / 001	Syllabus
Winter 2024	2072G / 650 (Online)	Syllabus

2073G - Speculative Fiction: Utopias and Dystopias
An examination of major utopian and dystopian texts. Will concern ways in which humanity has tried to imagine a perfect world, fix the current world, or construct an exaggerated version of the world in order to demonstrate its flaws and weaknesses. 0.5 course

Winter 2024

2073G / 001

2074G - Mystery and Detective Fiction
Mystery stories aren’t just light entertainment. They explore matters of life and death. They investigate problems involving the law, justice, and morality. They address fundamental questions of security, identity, and agency. This course introduces students to the critical study of popular mystery and detective fiction from a range of historical periods and national contexts. It will examine a selection of fiction, film, television, and radio narratives. 0.5 course

Winter 2024

2074G / 001

2076G - Medieval Heroes, Villains and Other Outsiders
This course will explore the role of medieval heroes and villains in European literature and culture. We will focus our attention on the stories surrounding King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table to examine the development of models of heroism and villainy. Using Arthur himself, but also Gawain, Lancelot, Yvain, Mordred, Morgana and a rogues gallery of giants, sorcerers and witches, we will trace the developments of stories that pit good versus evil and that problematize the relationship between the two. 0.5 course

Winter 2024

2076G / 001

Syllabus

2091F - Special Topics: The Personal Essay
This is a course is for students interested in the liberal arts. We will study a particular kind of writing—the personal essay—but the goal is an introduction to the humanities. The personal essay has been called the freest form in all of literature and it covers an enormous range of topics including politics, journalistic observation, intimate confessions, and meditations on life and death. Their only commonality is that they express the personal perspective of the writer. In this course, we study the history of the personal essay from the premodern to modern era, engaging with writers of diverse backgrounds and experience. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

2091F / 001 (Evening)

2099F - The Alice Munro Chair In Creativity: The Creative Moment (cross-listed with ARTHUM 3391F)
The Creative Moment is an experimental, improvisational course in artistic creation and the development of the creative personality. Students who are interested in creative writing, especially, but in any of the arts, who would like to figure out ways to connect in a more natural and exciting and open way to their own creative process, and to other students, should consider taking this course. Rigour, curiosity, seriousness, and a sense of play will be encouraged. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

2099F / 001

2100-2999 Level Courses

2112F - Adapting Across Page, Stage, and Screen (cross-listed with Film 2212F and Theatre Studies 2212F)
How does the shape an artwork takes contribute to its aesthetic and political power? When artworks flex across form and media how do their messages change? What did Marshall McLuhan mean when he said “the medium is the message”? How do genre and form shape social and political discourse? In this course, students explore these questions and more as they investigate texts that assume multiple cultural forms and represent a diversity of perspectives. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

2112F / 001

Syllabus

2200F - History of Theory and Criticism
An introduction to important issues in the history of literary criticism and theory from Plato to the twentieth century. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

2200F / 001

2201G - Contemporary Theory and Criticism
This course builds on the historical foundations of English 2200F/G to concentrate on important issues in contemporary literary theory and criticism. English 2200F/G is recommended as preparation for English 2201F/G. 0.5 course

Winter 2024

2201G / 001

2202F - Studies in Poetics
An introduction to important issues and concepts in the theory and analysis of poetry from different periods. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

2202F / 001

Syllabus

2301E - British Literature Survey
This course investigates the changing forms of literature produced in the British Isles from the Middle Ages to the present. It addresses key movements and styles through careful analysis of both major authors, such as Shakespeare, Austen, Woolf, or Yeats, and some less well-known yet engaging figures. 1.0 course

Fall/Winter

2301E / 001

Syllabus

2401E - American Literature Survey
A survey of American literature from the contact period in North America to the postmodern era. In this class, we will read some of the most fascinating literary works of the United States in a variety of modes and genres—from novels to sentimental poetry to postmodern short stories. We will consider the aesthetic and formal properties of each text and consider how writers were shaped by the social conditions, ideological conflicts, economic forces, and political developments of their times, such as the forced displacement of Indigenous peoples and the practice of chattel slavery. As we study the evolution of major artistic movements and periods, we will also trace the development of important assumptions, myths, and fundamental beliefs about the United States that still influence American discourse today.

In this survey, we will also pay close attention to the voices that are heard—and not heard—in different moments of US history. The pressure of attempting to read 400 years of literary history will force us to pose questions about the limits of the American literary canon. Why do we read what we read, and who benefits from that? How have ideas of what constitutes “literature” (or “America,” for that matter) changed over time? What could lesser-known writers contribute to our understanding of the US nation and its literature? And is it possible to read so-called canonical writers in a way that produces new kinds of knowledge?

Readings will include novels such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar; short fiction by Herman Melville, Henry James, William Faulkner, and Alice Walker; life writing such as Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Zitkala-Sa’s Impressions of an Indian Childhood and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; and poetry by Anne Bradstreet, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Allan Ginsberg, and Sherman Alexie. 1.0 course

Fall/Winter

2401E / 002

Syllabus

2501E - Canadian Literature Survey
What does literature tell us about the making of a nation and its citizens? Spanning the period from imperial exploration to Confederation to the present day, this course examines Canada’s vibrant literary culture. Students will encounter a diverse range of genres and authors, from accounts of early explorers to current internationally acclaimed and award-winning writers. 1.0 course

Fall/Winter

2501E / 001

Syllabus REV

2601E - Global Literatures in English Survey
This course offers students a great opportunity to survey of the links between and among different literary traditions and innovations across such diverse geographic regions as Asia, Africa, Australia, South America, and the Caribbean. Through close reading of literary texts written in English, students will explore how cultures produce different--often competing--ways of making meaning. 1.0 course

Fall/Winter

2601E / 001 (Evening)

3000-3999 Level Courses

3200F - Feminist Literary Theory
An introduction to critical debates in twentieth-century feminist literary theory. Students will study (1) the diversity of feminist approaches to literature, literary production, the politics of language, questions of genre and subjectivity; and (2) the intersections among feminist literary theories, postcolonialism, Marxism, anti-racist criticism, queer theory, and post-structuralism. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

3200F / 001

Syllabus

3201G - Introduction to Cultural Studies
An introduction to cultural studies methodology and theory, and the history of cultural studies as a discipline. 0.5 course

Winter 2024

3201G / 001

Syllabus

3204F - Critical Race Theory (cross-listed with GSWS 3324F)
This course explores key concepts in critical race theory, focusing on: cultural constructions of race and their connection to settler colonialism and imperialism; the links between race, class, gender, and sexuality; processes of racialization; whiteness as an “invisible” category; the hypervisibility of racialized subjects; and anti-racist cultural production. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

3204F / 001

Syllabus

3300 - History of English Language
A study of the historical development of English phonology, morphology, orthography and syntax from Old English to the modern period. At the same time, we examine the changing roles of English (commercial, literary, and administrative) and the different varieties of the language available to its many speakers. 1.0 course

Fall/Winter

3300 / 001

3316E - Love in the Middle Ages
This course explores representations of love and desire in the culture of Europe from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. While introducing the Middle English language, we will read romances, dream visions, mystical visions, love letters, and plays in their scientific, historical, and religious contexts. 1.0 course

Fall/Winter

3316E / 001

3321F - Paradise Lost
This half-course will examine such topics as Milton’s grand style, Satan, epic heroism (is Paradise Lost an epic or anti-epic?), the nature of innocence, what it means to “fall,” and whether there can be a “fortunate fall.” Attention will also be paid to seventeenth-century politics, science and astronomy. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

3321F / 001

3327B - Remediated Shakespeare
This half-course will explore four major plays through a range of media including early and later print, staged performance, film, and live stream. Study of Shakespeare as text and performance will include students annotating, editing and staging scenes, and creating websites and/or blogs to reflect on their acts of making. 0.5 course

Winter 2024

3327B / 001

Syllabus

3330E - Shakespeare
Shakespeare has inspired poems, novels, films, and new drama, and his plays remain a touchstone of artistic achievement, both on the stage and the page. There is also much to interrogate about Shakespeare’s place in the canon of literature in English. This course, taught by one of the department’s awarding-winning professors, will introduce you to twelve of Shakespeare’s plays. We will study comedies, histories, and tragedies, beginning with Richard II, which we will see at the brilliant new Patterson Theatre at the Stratford Festival. There will be emphasis on the plays in production and students will be given the interpretive tools and confidence to make Shakespeare their own. 1.0 course

Fall/Winter

3330E / 001

3341F - Sex, Death, and Philosophy: Libertinism and Eighteenth-Century British Literature
The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 ushered in a new and sometimes frightening era of philosophical, social, and sexual freedom. This course explores Libertinism, a subversive doctrine that challenged cultural and sexual norms, through the poems, plays, and prose of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

3341F / 001

Syllabus

3349G - Topics In Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Poetry and Well Being
This course will explore a narrow topic within Restoration or eighteenth-century literature. It may concentrate on a shorter historical span, a particular genre, or use some other principle of selection. 0.5 course

Winter 2024

3349G / 001

3351G - Romantic Revolutions
Revolt, radicalism, counter-revolution, reaction, reformation; hope, crisis, peace, war, invention, imagination, catastrophe, wonder, terror. What shadows did revolution cast upon the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? This course examines a range of texts that reflect Romantic and post-Romantic transformations, upheavals, and reversals in aesthetic, socio-political, scientific, and/or psychological thought and writing. 0.5 course

Winter 2024

3351G / 001

Syllabus

3353F - The Woman Question: Nineteenth-Century Woman Writers
In the nineteenth century, women readers and women writers were an important part of the new mass market for English literature, often leading in the emergent campaign for women’s rights. This course will discuss these and other issues in fiction, non-fiction, and poetry by women from the 1790s to 1900. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

3353F / 001

3369F - Topics in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Dandies, Decadents, and the New Women
Embracing the call of "art for art’s sake,” the dandies, decadents, and New Women of late-Victorian Britain set out to redefine what it means to be modern. Drawing on the remarkable holdings of rare books and magazines in Western Libraries’ Special Collections, this course explores fiction, poetry, drama, and visual art by Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Vernon Lee, Amy Levy and many others. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

3369F / 001

3449F - Topics in Early American Literature: The American Renaissance
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the rapid territorial expansion of the United States generated intense pressure to clarify the purpose of the nation and the meaning of American identity. This expansion also produced an era of intense literary output that scholars have since termed the American Renaissance. The term has been used to identify a period between roughly 1845 and 1865 when the “‘possibilities of democracy’ became powerfully central to American literature” (Philips 1). As U.S. printing houses expanded and magazines and newspapers proliferated, U.S. authors became household names. Scholars now examine the American Renaissance as “a period and an event” (Philips 1) that fostered a sense of national self-consciousness that would permanently reshape U.S. culture.

This course will examine how key authors of the American Renaissance represented and responded to the ideals of American democracy. Some authors embraced the idea of U.S. democracy and saw the U.S. as an exceptional nation—one that could shed its historical baggage with Britain, become an egalitarian nation, and develop into a benevolent empire. Others sought to contest the success of U.S. democracy by pointing out the profoundly exclusive nature of U.S. citizenship. Our course texts will introduce us to some of the most important debates that took place in nineteenth-century U.S. culture about gender, sexuality, racial identity, class conflict, slavery, U.S. exceptionalism, and U.S. imperialism. Our class will also recognize how the process of U.S. nation formation that was celebrated by many American Renaissance authors fundamentally depended upon the enslavement of people of African descent and the domination of Indigenous peoples.

Over the course of the semester we will read some of the best-known novels, short stories, and non-fictional prose of mid-nineteenth century, including Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, Melville’s “Bartleby” and “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall. We will also study works by Ralph Waldo Emerson Margaret Fuller, and Frederick Douglass. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

3449F / 001

Syllabus

3480G - Reading America Now
How does the American literary imagination engage contemporary issues? This course approaches recent American fiction and poetry to explore national identity, sexual and racial difference, social and economic injustice, and the significance of media technology. Readings may be accompanied by studies of contemporary visual culture and music. 0.5 course

Winter 2024

3480G / 001

Syllabus

3572F - Canadian Literature and Multiculturalism
This course explores Canadian literature in relation to "multiculturalism," one of Canada's most celebrated and contested national attributes. Readings may include works published before and/or after the passing of the Official Multiculturalism Act in 1982, as well as critical debates about the term "multiculturalism" itself. 0.5 course

Fall 2022

3572F / 001

Syllabus REV

3573G - Black Writing in Canada
This course offers advanced study of writing by authors of the Black Diaspora in Canada. Its focus and scope may vary by course offering, from multiple genres (e.g., theatre, fiction, poetry, documentary film) to a single mode (e.g., Afrofuturism, neo-slave narratives) to Black writing in a particular region (e.g., the Prairies, West Coast, East Coast, Toronto) or a particular historical period (e.g., 19th century, 21st century, 1960s to 1990s). Attentive to historical, literary historical, and other contexts, the course celebrates the aesthetics and artistry of Black writing in Canada and the knowledges it produces. Anti-requisite(s): English 3579G (2021-22). 0.5 course

Winter 2024

3573G / 001

3581F - Toronto: Culture and Performance (cross-listed with Theatre 3581F and and ARTHUM 3390F)
In Toronto: Culture and Performance we explore the GTA’s contemporary theatre ecology as a city-making enterprise. We ask: how does performance help to build a city, to enable its communities to tell their stories, and to work towards the decolonization of our shared, lived spaces? We will see live performance, watch cool stuff on the internet, meet artists and creators, and explore the many provocative and empowering ways cities and their theatre and performance landscapes intertwine. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

3581F / 001

3680F - Indigenous Literatures of Turtle Island (cross-listed with Indigenous Studies 3880F)
This course engages with concepts and practices of storytelling from Indigenous nations across Turtle Island (North America) while considering the many shapes that Indigenous storytelling takes, including oral narratives, literature, and film. In many Indigenous communities, stories are an important way of teaching—they transmit knowledges and histories and offer powerful insights about how to live in good relation with each other and the world around us. Come join us in learning from the brilliance of Indigenous storytellers! 0.5 course

Fall 2023

3680F / 001

3915E - Special Topics: Lives and Literature of Black North Americans (cross-listed with GSWS )
Through reading a variety of genres (poetry, autobiographies, fiction, histories, speeches, letters, legal briefs), we consider what it means to be Black in North America. We ask: how do the experiences of Black Canadians and Black Americans compare? How do Black Canadian and Black American authors influence, engage, and respond to one another? How do the histories of each nation affect Black authors? In analyzing this rich body of literature, we contemplate the diverse experiences, including joys and sorrows, struggles and successes, of Black North Americans. The course includes field trips to local Black history sites and engagement with Black community organizations, including the Fugitive Slave Chapel at Fanshawe Pioneer Village, the Black Mecca Museum, and the London Black History Coordinating Committee. 1.0 course

Fall/Winter

3915E / 001

Syllabus

4000 Level Courses

4311E – Seminar in Medieval Language and Literature: Tolkien and Old English (cross-listed with English 9171)
When he was sixteen, Ronald Tolkien acquired an Anglo-Saxon primer from a master at King Edward’s School in Birmingham, which he devoured with enthusiasm before turning to the reading of Beowulf, then Middle English, then Old Norse, and then Germanic philology in general. After that, he turned to inventing languages. In this course, we will study Old English as Tolkien did, beginning with introductory short prose texts, then some of the shorter poems, and then Beowulf, making links with Tolkien’s life and work along the way. When we get to Beowulf, we will read his landmark Gollancz Lecture from 1936, which arguably turned the study of the poem away from the quarrying philologists and archaeologists and towards scholars of literature and culture. We will also consider the other poems which Tolkien addressed in his scholarly role as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford, and the changes he brought to the curriculum of the Faculty of English Language and Literature along with his friend C.S. Lewis. We will also engage with the works that Tolkien wrote himself, inspired by the medieval texts he studied professionally, reading The Lord of the Rings, and some of his other works. If time and energy permit, we will also delve into Tolkien’s own compositions in Old English, and his other engagements with issues of early medieval English culture. The course is set up so that individual students can learn Old English in detail, or can choose to focus more on Tolkien and his engagement with the medieval as a principal feature of the interdisciplinary subject of medievalism. 1.0 course

Fall/Winter

4311E / 001

4320G – Seminar in Renaissance Literature: Animals and the Environment in Renaissance Literature
This course engages with the current critical interest in animal studies, ecocriticism, and climate studies to investigate the poetry, prose, and drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this period, England was significantly affected by a period of global cooling we now know as the Little Ice Age, which created extreme weather patterns similar to those we experience today. In addition to climate change, early modern English relationships with animals and the environment were shaped by traditional practices of farming and hunting, as well as by the more recent developments of urbanization, industrialization, and colonialism. To explore these topics, we will look at texts such as Shakespeare’s King Lear and As You Like It; country house poems such as Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst”; and Margaret Cavendish’s anti-hunting poems and her early sci-fi prose work, The Blazing World, which depicts a land peopled with human/animal hybrids. 0.5 course

Winter 2024

4320G / 001

4350F – Seminar in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Voice, Image and Politics in Victorian Poetry
Depending who you ask, the long reign of Queen Victoria (1827-1902) was either a golden age of English poetry or its most decadent. It was period when major poets like Alfred Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were celebrities who became wealthy from the royalties on their work and whose opinions on politics and culture were quoted in the press. It was the last period in English literary history when poetry had more cultural prestige than the prose fiction, and when poetry was a medium for political art and for writing about sex with a frankness that was not allowed in popular forms like the novel. It was period of intense formal and generic innovation, which saw the reintroduction of metres from Medieval poetry as well as experiments with free verse. Victorian poets introduced important modern genres like the dramatic monologue.

This course will survey the major poets of the period, including Tennyson and Barrett Browning, as well as Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Christina Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne and others. We will discuss metre as the written expression of bodily rhythms. We consider poetic treatments of politics and sexuality and the relation between developments in poetry and developments in print technology and in the mass reproduction of images. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

4350F / 001

4351G – Seminar in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Brescia University College)
This course will explore novels by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë in the context of nineteenth-century British literature, Romanticism, Victorian social history, narrative, and ideologies of class, gender, religion, and empire. We will examine and question the myth-making which surrounds the Brontës (through biography and popular adaptation), as well as the mythic structures and patterns in their texts. Students will engage in critical analysis of narrative, stylistic, symbolic, and theoretical aspects of their writings. 0.5 course

Winter 2024

4351G / 530

4370F - Seminar in Twentieth-Century British and Irish Literature: Weird Fiction
Course description TBA. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

4370F / 001

Syllabus

4571G - Seminar in Canadian Literature: The Economics, Politics, and Aesthetics of Canadian Poetry to the First World War
Using the lenses of aesthetics, politics, and economics, this course will trace the evolution of what became Canadian literature from the writings of explorers and fur traders to the First World War. Although poetry will be the primary focus, attention will also be paid to a few of short prose works and to visual manifestations of aesthetic and economic ideas. Foci of the course will include the “picturesque,” the “four stages” theory of social development, and the “mind-cure” movement. Among the writers discussed will be a selection of Henry Kelsey, Oliver Goldsmith, Adam Kidd, Catherine Parr Traill, Susanna Moodie, Isabella Valancy Crawford, Charles G.D. Roberts, Archibald Lampman, Bliss Carman, Duncan Campbell Scott, L.M. Montgomery, and Stephen Leacock. 0.5 course

Winter 2024

4571G / 001

Syllabus

4771F - Seminar in Literary Studies: Indigenous Futurisms
What role does Indigenous storytelling in its varied forms play in envisioning—and building—futures beyond colonization? Guided by this question, our course will engage with a range of literature, drama, and film that draws upon Indigenous nation-specific knowledges, languages, and practices from across Turtle Island to imagine sovereign Indigenous futures. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

4771F / 001

4851F - Seminar in Literary Studies: Unlocking James Joyce's Ulysses (King's University College)
One of the most influential novels in the English language, Joyce's 1922 masterpiece Ulysses is also one of the most difficult. Students in this class will have the opportunity to tackle the novel with the benefit of guides, annotations, and lecture material to assist them, giving the opportunity to appreciate its richness and beauty and better understand the many literary experiments which came after it. The class will begin with a selection of stories from Joyce's collection Dubliners, as well as his first novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, before dedicating the rest of the course to Ulysses and its historical contexts. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

4851F / 570

Syllabus

4871G - Seminar in Literary Studies: (auto)affective (dis)order(s) (King's University College)
This seminar considers various forms of (auto)affective writing (e.g., creative nonfiction, lyric memoir, neoconfessional, etc.). Traditionally the purview of female, queer, dis/abled, and/or racialized communities, such self-accounts push back against the narrative assumptions and chrononormativities of auto/biographical writing, revealing the inability of the supposedly "right" kinds of “human” stories to plot the affective plurality of diverse lifeworlds. Using relevant concepts from psychoanalytic, feminist/queer/trans*, critical race, and narrative theory, we will assess the extent to which (auto)affective writings deconstruct the generic assumptions of conventional life writing and its insistence on a coherent, fully narratable individual Self. Based on shared interests, we will collaborate on a short list of required readings. Possible texts may include: Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1782); Walt Whitman's Specimen Days (1882); Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Tolkas (1933); Jean Genet, A Thief's Journal (1949); Cheryl Strayed's Wild (2012), Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (2015); Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric (2013); Carmen Maria Machado's In a Dream House (2019); Alice Wong's Year of the Tiger: An Activist's Life (2022). 0.5 course

Winter 2024

4871G / 570

Syllabus

4881F - Seminar in Literary Studies: Conflict in 20th Century and Contemporary Women's Drama (Huron University College)
This course considers how conflict intersects and reflects on changing social realities, alongside the ways in which conflict is re-imagined, redefined, and confronted in the work of twentieth-century and contemporary women’s drama by Lorraine Hansberry, Suzan-Lori Parks, Tara Beagan, Sarah Kane, Paula Vogel, and Young Jean Lee, among others. We will assess what themes, linguistic conventions, affective states, and body language emerge consistently from the varied representations studied. 0.5 course

Fall 2023

4881F / 550

Syllabus

4881G - Seminar in Literary Studies: Reading Literature Since the Digital Turn (Huron University College) - CANCELLED
How are changes in new media affecting the ways we read, study and access English literature? How is the increased availability of digitized literary drafts, notebooks and other primary documents changing our understanding and study of authorship, textual production and mise-en-page? What does it mean to read literature when the digital text combines audio, video and other media? What is the potential for social reading, annotation and editing in digital settings and how might new platforms be employed to increase global collaboration? These are just some of the questions central to Reading Literature since the Digital Turn. 0.5 course

Winter 2024

4881G / 550

Syllabus

4899G – The Alice Munro Chair in Creativity Seminar: Creative Writing Workshop POPULAR!
A workshop course directed by the Alice Munro Chair in Creativity. The course is aimed at students interested in developing a sustained creative work, whether an early draft of a prose narrative, story collection or poetry. See the Department Website for the specific focus of this year’s seminar. 0.5 course

Winter 2024

4899G / 001

See English Studies 4999E - Undergraduate Thesis

4999E - Thesis
Individual instruction in the selection of a topic, the preparation of materials, and the writing of a thesis. Students who wish to take this course must apply to the Chair of Undergraduate Studies, Department of English and Writing Studies. This course is restricted to students in fourth year of an English Program with a minimum A average. Additional registration in 4000-level English courses require permission of the Department. See English Studies 4999E - Undergraduate Thesis for details. 1.0 course

Fall/Winter

4999E / 001

Various

2023 Spring/Summer

Distance Studies (May 8-July 28)

1020E - Understanding Literature Today
By studying a broad range of exciting and important literary works from the past and present, this course will increase your understanding and appreciation not just of the richness and power of the works themselves, but also of the role of literature in reflecting and shaping our perceptions of the world and of ourselves. 1.0 course

Spring/Summer

1020E / 650

Online

M. McDayter

2033E - Children's Literature
Readings from significant books written for children, selected primarily for literary quality. Some attention will be given to the historic evolution of "Children's Literature" as a separate class, but the principal aim of the course will be to consider the nature and development of the two major genres: nonsense verse and romance. 1.0 course

Spring/Summer

2033E / 650

Online

J. Venn

2071F - Speculative Fiction: Science Fiction
From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, a consideration of the history and development of science fiction. Will include science fiction themes such as the Other, new technologies, chaos theory, cybernetics, paradoxes of space/time travel, first contact, and alien worlds. 0.5 course

Spring/Summer

2071F / 650

Online

J. Kelly

2072F - Speculative Fiction: Fantasy
A study of the purposes and historical origins of fantasy, and modern developments in fantasy: alternate worlds, horror or ghost stories, sword & sorcery, heroic fantasy. May include writers such as Tolkien, Simmons, Peake, Herbert, Beagle, Rowling. 0.5 course

Spring/Summer

2072F / 650

Online

J. Kelly

2401E - American Literature Survey
This course offers a survey of important texts and authors from the Puritan and Revolutionary periods to the present. It addresses not only the major movements and styles of American literature associated with such authors as Poe, Dickinson, Twain, Hemingway, and Morrison, but also the innovative work of less familiar Indigenous and ethnic authors. 1.0 course

Spring/Summer

2401E / 650

Online

C. Suranyi

3330E - Shakespeare
Shakespeare remains one of the most influential of English writers. This course studies plays across a range of genres. Instructors may integrate theatre-oriented exercises and/or other dramatic or non-dramatic material, depending on individual emphasis. 1.0 course

Spring/Summer

3330E / 650

Online

Intersession (May 15-June 23)

2033E - Children's Literature CANCELLED
Readings from significant books written for children, selected primarily for literary quality. Some attention will be given to the historic evolution of "Children's Literature" as a separate class, but the principal aim of the course will be to consider the nature and development of the two major genres: nonsense verse and romance. 1.0 course

Spring/Summer

2033E / 001

In-Person

Syllabus

2022-23 FALL/WINTER

1000 Level Courses

Fall/Winter	1020E / 001	J. Devereux	Syllabus
Fall/Winter	1020E / 002	J. Boulter	Syllabus
Fall/Winter	1020E / 003 (Evening)	M. McDayter	Syllabus

1022E - Enriched Introduction to English Literature
The principal aims of English 1022E are: (1) to give students an overview of English literature from the Middle Ages to the present, with some attention to recent Canadian writers; (2) to introduce students to a variety of literary genres, historical perspectives, and critical approaches; (3) to permit students to strengthen their writing and research skills and to apply them to the study of literature; (4) to enable students to deepen their interest in and enjoyment of the study and use of English. Beyond this, we will explore how the writing and reading of literature are in and of themselves inherently and intensely political acts, asking us to think through the most problematic issues of our or any time – sex, race, gender, class – with a degree of tolerance and open-mindedness rarely possible in the supposedly ‘real’ world of everyday events and happenings. See also Learning outcomes for 1000-level English Courses. 2 lecture hours, 1 tutorial hour, 1.0 course

Fall/Winter

1022E / 001

J. Faflak

Fall 2022	1027F / 001	C. Keep	Syllabus
Fall 2022	1027F / 002	A. Lee	Syllabus

Winter 2023

1028G / 001

1028G (002) - The Storyteller’s Art II | Introduction to Narrative: Disturbed Stories: Unsettling Narratives POPULAR!
This course explores a particular theme, mode, or genre of storytelling. Consult the Department of English for details of current course offerings. Instruction is by lecture and tutorials; emphasis on developing strong analytical and writing skills. 2 lecture hours, 1 tutorial hour, 0.5 course

Winter 2023

1028G / 002

A. Lee

2000-2099 Level Courses (No prerequisites)

Fall/Winter

2017 / 001 (Evening)

J. Sandhar

Fall/Winter	2033E / 001	G. Ceraldi	Syllabus
Fall/Winter	2033E / 650 (Online)	C. Suranyi	Syllabus

2041F - Special Topics in Drama: The Roaring Girl
In this course, students participating in the Department of English and Writing Studies' Drama Production - The Roaring Girl, explore in theory and practice approaches to text in performance. Only students working as an actor, director, stage manager, assistant stage manager, lighting, set or costume designer may enroll. Please note: Auditions are held prior to the course start date so that students can register and receive a course credit for their part in the production. See course page for more details. Permission of the Chair of Undergraduate Studies required to enroll. 0.5 course

Fall 2022

2041F / 001

Fall 2022	2071F / 650 (Online)	A. MacLean	Syllabus
Winter 2023	2071G / 001	J. Kelly	Syllabus

Fall 2022	2072F / 001	G. Ceraldi	Syllabus
Winter 2023	2072G / 650 (Online)	G. Ceraldi	Syllabus

Winter 2023

2073G / 001

2074F - Mystery and Detective Fiction
Mystery stories aren’t just light entertainment. They explore matters of life and death. They investigate problems involving the law, justice, and morality. They address fundamental questions of security, identity, and agency. This course introduces students to the critical study of popular mystery and detective fiction from a range of historical periods and national contexts. It will examine a selection of fiction, film, television, and radio narratives. 0.5 course

Fall 2022

2074F / 001

M. Hartley

2091G - Special Topics: Arts for a Damaged Planet
Global heating, species depletion, non-renewable resource dependency, sustainable energies – solutions to these pressing issues will require not just advances in science, new economic policies, and political will. Resolving each of these also will require changes in vision, new stories, and new ways of imagining the present and the future. The arts help us to document and understand the damaged planet we live on, and contribute to transitioning to a future earth we aspire to see. This class introduces students to a wide range of arts for a damaged planet. We will study recent works of fiction, non-fiction, graphic novels, film, and photography that helps to make legible our current planetary condition. This is also a kind of “maker class,” in that we will have short hands-on assignments, creative proposals, and experiential learning practices that involve ourselves in thinking and connecting to our environs in new ways. Our overall goal in this class is to use the arts to develop new ideas and tools to repair the damaged planet. 0.5 course

Winter 2023

2091G / 001 (Evening)

J. Schuster

2092F - Special Topics in Popular Literature: The Many Faces of Harry Potter
This course will examine the Harry Potter series in relation to the multiple genres that it draws on, including the gothic novel, detective fiction, fantasy, adventure, and even the dystopian novel. We will read all seven books alongside other novels and short stories that illustrate the generic conventions Rowling is working with. There will also be opportunity to consider the translation of the series into film. 0.5 course

Fall 2022

2092F / 001

2097B - The Madness of Creativity (cross-listed with Music 3854B)
Students will discuss theories of madness and creativity through works of culture and criticism that are situated historically and culturally. Through examining accepted cultural, social, and ethical norms of thought and behavior, students will gain a deeper understanding of how madness and creativity are critical to our humanness. 0.5 course

Winter 2023

2097B / 001

J. Faflak/B. Younker

2100-2999 Level Courses

2112F - Adapting Across Page, Stage, and Screen NEW! (cross-listed with Film 2212F and Theatre Studies 2212F)
How does the shape an artwork takes contribute to its aesthetic and political power? When artworks flex across form and media how do their messages change? What did Marshall McLuhan mean when he said “the medium is the message”? How do genre and form shape social and political discourse? In this course, students explore these questions and more as they investigate texts that assume multiple cultural forms and represent a diversity of perspectives. 0.5 course

Fall 2022

2112F / 001

A. Pero

2200F - History of Theory and Criticism
An introduction to important issues in the history of literary criticism and theory from Plato to the twentieth century. 0.5 course

Fall 2022

Winter 2023

Fall/Winter

2401E - American Literature Survey (more )
This course offers a survey of important texts and authors from the Puritan and Revolutionary periods to the present. It addresses not only the major movements and styles of American literature associated with such authors as Poe, Dickinson, Twain, Hemingway, and Morrison, but also the innovative work of less familiar Indigenous and ethnic authors. 1.0 course

Fall/Winter

Fall/Winter

Fall/Winter

2601E / 001 (Evening)

N. Joseph

3000-3999 Level Courses

ARTHUM 3200E - Knowledge Creation Through Performance INTERDISCIPLINARY COURSE
This is a pilot course led by award-winning teacher Kim Solga. It will introduce students from across campus to embodied, relational, arts-based methodologies as they help drive research and innovation in a wide range of fields.

Playwrights teaching medical students. Applied performance scholars training cops to intervene more safely in mental health crisis situations. Tech labs staffed with artists and engineers side by side. Composers helping high school kids create a record of their lived environments. And lots more.

Our class will be small (maximum 20 students!) to ensure an optimal learning environment. The fall term will be guest-speaker led: learn from experts already applying interdisciplinary models in all kinds of ways, both virtual and IRL. In our winter term, a customized CEL placement will let you bring your particular expertise to a partner in London’s arts and culture community, putting your own interdisciplinary engagement into practice! Assessments will include lots of options for letting your creative juices flow, and lots of reflection on how we learn, and what that means for our future as lifelong learners.

Find out how your discipline intersects with arts-based ways of making, doing, and thinking. Discover where in your own work you can learn to play! For more information or to join an orientation session, please contact Amala Poli: apoli@uwo.ca. 1.0 course

Fall/Winter

ARTHUM 3200E / 001

K. Solga

Syllabus

Fall 2022

3200F / 001

Syllabus

3201G - Introduction to Cultural Studies
An introduction to cultural studies methodology and theory, and the history of cultural studies as a discipline. 0.5 course

Winter 2023

3201G / 001

Syllabus

3203F - Human, All Too Human
This course considers the figure of the posthuman as it emerges in the work of contemporary theorists. Beginning with an attempt to define the posthuman, it will then move to answer a series of critical questions regarding what is at stake in posthumanism’s critique of the humanist subject. 0.5 course

Fall 2022

3203F / 001

J. Boulter

3204G - Critical Race Theory (cross-listed with ARTHUM 3390G and GSWS 3324G)
This course explores key concepts in critical race theory, focusing on: cultural constructions of race and their connection to settler colonialism and imperialism; the links between race, class, gender, and sexuality; processes of racialization; whiteness as an “invisible” category; the hypervisibility of racialized subjects; and anti-racist cultural production. 0.5 course

Winter 2023

3204G / 001

E. Lawson

Syllabus

Fall/Winter

3300 / 001

J.Toswell

3315E - Disenchanted Chaucer: Authority and Literature in Medieval England
The authority of crown, family, and church, and even the texts that supported those institutions, was questioned in the late medieval period. While introducing the Middle English language, this course will explore how Geoffrey Chaucer and his contemporaries used literature to critique social and political institutions. 1.0 course

Fall/Winter

3315E / 001

R. Moll

3320F - Desire in the Renaissance
Love and desire are complicated emotions, both today and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We will examine the profuse complexity of Renaissance love poetry, by men and women, queer and straight, including writers such as Shakespeare, Wroth, Donne, Barnfield, Spenser, Wyatt, Sidney, Marlowe, Herrick, Carew, Suckling, Marvell, and Philips. 0.5 course

Fall 2022

3320F / 001

J. Leonard

3323F - Drama After Shakespeare
The decades following Shakespeare’s retirement witnessed the production of some extraordinary drama. This half-course will range from dark tragedies, by authors such as Middleton and Ford, to improbable romances by the likes of Heywood and Fletcher. Island princesses, miraculous reunions, lycanthropy, bloody murders, sexual obsession, and redemption lie in wait. 0.5 course

Fall 2022

3323F / 001

J. Purkis

3332G - Money in Renaissance Drama
Seventeenth-century England saw enormous changes in the distribution of money. Dramatists responded in diverse ways to the social disruption caused by new patterns of wealth and impoverishment. Plays studied on this half-course present cityscapes populated by predators and swindlers, nostalgic evocations of lordly hospitable practices, and meditations on greed. 0.5 course

Winter 2023

3332G / 001

J. Purkis

3339G - Topics in Renaissance Literature: Milton's Minor Poems
Poetry and prose from the golden age of English literature: More, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Marvell, and Milton; examination of their individual achievements will be combined with studies of form and genre, with developing theories about the nature of literature, and with the surrounding historical context. 0.5 course

Winter 2023

3339G / 001

J. Leonard

3350E - The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Austen to Hardy (more )
During the nineteenth century novels became the privileged medium in which British society viewed itself as a whole made up of interrelated parts. The period also saw unprecedented change in novelistic technique and in the business of publishing novels. This course will study these and other developments in prose fiction. 1.0 course

Fall/Winter

3350E / 001

M. Rowlinson

3371G - Contemporary Experimental Literature
Several contemporary poets and fiction writers express a profound dissatisfaction with traditional literary genres, preferring to focus on radical innovations in technique. This course examines a range of texts that offer a more clinical approach to writing, inspired by such structures as dreams, arbitrary constraints, and game theory. 0.5 course

Winter 2023

3371G / 001

J. Johnston

3471F - Ballots and Bullets: U.S. Literature and Civil Rights (cross-listed with ARTHUM 3391F)
This course considers literature that produced, reflected, and reacted to the emergence of the various American civil rights movements. Approaches will vary but likely topics include: the revolution and founding; “Indian Removal” and indigenous rights; slavery, abolition, and Jim Crow; women’s rights and feminism; the sexual revolution and queer identity. 0.5 course

Fall 2022

3471F / 001

M. Green-Barteet

3490F - American Drama
What is America, as a theatrical idea? How does the stage reflect the nation, its myths and aspirations? This course explores theatre as a “public art” form in the modern and contemporary United States, reading a variety of dramatists that may include Hansberry, Kushner, Miller, O’Neill, Parks, Williams, and Wilson. 0.5 course

Fall 2022

3490F / 001

A. MacLean

3571G - Be/Longing: Global Literature in Canada
Where is “here” for writers of migrant and diasporic heritages living in Canada? How does writing from “elsewhere” reshape collective understanding? These and other questions will be studied in vibrant and provocative works by such writers as Dionne Brand, Anita Rau Badami, Rawi Hage, Michael Ondaatje, and Kim Thuy. 0.5 course

Winter 2023

3571G / 001

3580G - Canadian Literature: Creativity and the Local - CANCELLED
Eudora Welty wrote that “Location is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of ‘What happened? Who’s here? Who’s coming?’ – and that is the heart’s field.” This course the vibrant literature related to the region where we live, including writers such as Alice Munro, Dionne Brand, Emma Donoghue, Janet Rogers, Madeleine Thien, André Alexis, and Jeff Lemire. It examines the ways local writing accesses the public, builds communities, relates people to their environment, and connects local, national, and transnational networks. Students will deploy critical, creative, and experiential approaches in community engaged learning projects with artists, scholars, organizations, and communities who bring local literature to life. 0.5 course

Winter 2023

M. Jones

Fall 2022

4000 Level Courses

4201F – Seminar in Theory and Criticism | Reading the Land: Literature and Environmental Justice
Description TBA. 0.5 course

Fall 2022

4201F / 001

Syllabus

4312G – Seminar in Medieval Language and Literature: The Consolation of Philosophy and its English Afterlives (cross-listed with English 9123B) NEW!
Few works have influenced English thought and literature as profoundly or for as long as The Consolation of Philosophy, a dialogue written in the sixth century by the Roman philosopher and statesman Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius. In this seminar, we will begin by studying the Consolation in a modern English translation, with the aid of scholarship that will help us interpret the text with some understanding of its original language and context. We will then consider medieval and early modern translations of and responses to the Consolation; possible texts include The Old English Boethius (ca. 900), Geoffrey Chaucer’s Boece (1382) and various lyrics, Thomas More’s A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation (1534), John Stradling’s translation of Justus Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie (1595), and Elizabeth I’s translation of the Consolation (1598). In the third and final part of the course, we will consider some expressions of modern Stoicism (from Martha Nussbaum and Alastair MacIntyre to popular self-help guides) as well as recent texts that invoke Boethian themes, such as Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia (1993) and the film Arrival (2016). As we survey this long tradition, we will reflect on Boethian ideas that remain more or less constant over time and those that change in response to changing historical circumstances, paying careful attention to the various modes and politics of translation that shape these ideas. Some key themes that will guide our reading and discussion include: forms of consolation and desire; the nature of suffering and of the good; the problem of evil and theodicy; time and temporality; philosophy as therapy of the soul and care of the self; paradoxes of allegory and mimesis. 0.5 course

Winter 2023

4312G / 001

A. Schuurman

4321G – Seminar in Renaissance Literature | Hamlet: Then and Now
“The world’s longest ‘knock-knock’ joke” (Geoffrey Tennant, Slings and Arrows). “After all, all [Shakespeare] did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations” (H. L. Mencken). Hamlet is one of the greatest dramatic achievements in the English language and a play that is rarely out of the international theatrical repertory. Premised on revenge and preoccupied with friendship, family and betrayal, Hamlet has been performed and adapted for over four hundred years. This fourth-year seminar will give students the opportunity to do a deep dive into this tragedy, its criticism, and its stage and film legacy. 0.5 course

Winter 2023

4321G / 001

M.J. Kidnie

4350G - Seminar in Nineteenth-Century Literature | Pre-Raphaelites: Romanticism to Modernism
The principal aims and intended outcomes of the course are: (1) to give students an overview of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in literature and art, with some attention to its impact on writers and artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; (2) to introduce them to a variety of historical perspectives and critical approaches; (3) to help them to strengthen their writing and research skills and to apply them to the study of literature and art; and last, but not least, (4) to enable them to deepen their understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of literature and art. Antirequisites: English 3359F-001 (Fall/Winter 2020-21) and English 3369F (Fall/Winter 2017-18) 0.5 course

Winter 2023

4350G / 001

D. Bentley

4351F - Seminar in Nineteenth-Century Literature | Weird Science: Psychical Research and the Late-Victorian Gothic Novel
This course focuses on the ways in which late-Victorian gothic fiction imagined the encounter between the scientific and the occult, those phenomena which challenged the limits of rational enquiry, such as spirit photography, automatic writing, telepathic communication, crisis apparitions, and ectoplasm. The occult, we will argue, was not only of serious scientific investigation in this period, but the cultural site through which such vexed categories as gender, class, race, and national identity were both contested and consolidated. Texts to be studied include: Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, H. Rider’s Haggard’s She, William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, The Ghost Finder, Henry James’s The Turn of The Screw, Vernon Lee’s Hauntings, and Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan. 0.5 course

Fall 2022

4351F / 001

4471F - Seminar in American Literature - American "Metafiction": the Sixties, Seventies, and Beyond (Brescia University College)
In the post-World War II years, one of the directions American fiction moved was towards an explicit exploration of the structures of narrative and of storytelling itself. Largely subsumed into broader discussions of the postmodern, the concepts of the metafictional and of metafiction were developed in the 1960s and especially in the 1970s by William Gass, Robert Scholes, and others. As Patricia Waugh tells us in her 1984 treatment, “the practice [of metafiction] is as old (if not older) than the novel itself”, and precursors to some of the most innovative fiction of post-war American fiction can be found in works by Cervantes, Sterne, Fielding, and others. Nonetheless, in the sixties and seventies, the playful work of Barth, Barthelme, Coover, and others created the sense that literature had left the reality of the world behind as it became preoccupied with itself and the ontological status of fictional worlds and characters. The question becomes: can overtly metafictional narrative deal with the “real”—the perception of a shared environment that surrounds us-- and social and political experience? Can the techniques of metafictional storytelling offer more than a Brechtian challenge to the reality we inhabit? This seminar will explore the work of authors whose innovations have been absorbed into contemporary American storytelling even as the critical reputations of those authors find a narrower audience. 0.5 course

Fall 2022

4471F / 530

B. Diemert

Syllabus

4570F - Seminar in Canadian Literature: Diaspora in the Works of Dionne Brand
This course will study selected works by Dionne Brand for their theory and practice of the Black diaspora and for their intersections with a range of other key terms in contemporary cultural and literary studies, such as nation, place, space, temporality; form, reading, embodiment, affect; autobiography, historiography, memory, phenomenology; race, gender, sexuality, class, language. We will study together how creative work is a form of theorizing as well as aesthetic practice, and we will do so across a range of genres, with particular attention to the “poetic” elements of Brand’s work in her prose, including one work of non-fiction prose, A Map to the Door of No Return.

Questions to be pursued together include: How does her writing represent what she calls “this inexplicable space” into which slaves and their descendants stepped through “the door of no return,” the space of the diaspora created by slavery and permeated by racism and white supremacy but also by Black resistance and refusal? How might we understand Brand’s (selected) work as “a map” to this “door of no return”? How does her work facilitate understanding of “this inexplicable space”? How does her work represent being and knowing in this space? How do the formal properties of her work contribute to our understanding of the particularities of “diaspora” for Black people, past and present? How might Brand’s theorizing and practice of diaspora entail futurity for those who live in “this inexplicable space”?

While attending to the specificities of Brand’s engagements with “diaspora” and “the afterlives of slavery” (Saidiya Hartman’s phrase), we will also reflect on methods for reading, discussing, and writing that are called for by Brand’s work. Some of these methods are demonstrated in her own work, some in scholarship about her work, others are yet to be invented—perhaps by some participants in this course. Understanding and analyzing methodology, then, will be a key component of course work both in the classroom and in assignments. Students will be required to articulate their understanding of others’ and their own methodologies as the course progresses and as is appropriate to an honour’s level seminar.

Accordingly, students will be required to read the selected Brand texts alongside selected secondary sources (journal articles, book chapters) about Brand’s work and/or about key terms. A scholarly monograph, inspired in part by Brand’s work, particularly by A Map to the Door of No Return, will be required reading as well: our engagements with this monograph, Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, will help to hone our understanding of methodology as situated approaches to creative and other forms of work. Likewise, reading of selected prose essays by Brand herself will help to illuminate methods in her poetry and fiction.

The course will proceed as much as possible as a seminar, which is to say with significant informed participation during class time by all members of the class. The honing of abilities to speak about the required readings is a significant objective of the course, not only to communicate clearly and in detail, but also to be able to speculate aloud in the classroom, i.e., to consider implications arising from discussion as it occurs. Informed listening will accompany informed speaking, of course.

Everyone is expected, then, to come to class having studied the assigned materials sufficiently to engage readily in detailed discussion. Assignments are designed for just such purposes of developing or improving professional communication skills that draw on informed analytical reading skills. (Analytical reading skills will also be assessed in spoken and written work.) A significant portion of the grade is to be earned through informed participation and oral presentations (from, for example, very short reports on a component of a reading to a 15-minute presentation). The final assignment, a research essay, is designed with similar professional objectives in mind, i.e., to take you through stages of the research-writing continuum and to hone your capacities for writing yourself into scholarly conversations about the course materials.

Note: Seminars require oral work. Students who enrol to be able to study Brand’s work but who struggle to speak in class may wish to discuss alternative approaches to assessment with the instructor, though you are also encouraged to use the course as a space to develop your public voice and share your insights with others in a small group setting, grounded as we will be in shared readings. Our collective endeavours can benefit from your input, and your capacity to contribute can benefit from the collective environment. 0.5 course

Fall 2022

4570F / 001

Alice Munro Chair: Ivan Coyote

4851F - Seminar in Literary Studies - Music and Culture (Huron University College)
This course will explore the cultural impact of popular music on literature and the other arts since the beginning of the twentieth century. 0.5 course

Fall 2022

4851F / 550

J. Vanderheide

Syllabus

4871G - Seminar in Literary Studies - The Graphic Memoir: Comics and Life Writing (King's University College)
Despite the familiarity of the phrase, many of the most celebrated “graphic novels” are in fact autobiographies, personal narratives of lived experiences ranging from the mundane to the traumatic. Surveying recent examples of this burgeoning genre, this seminar will consider some of the issues arising from this distinctive form of self-representation. 0.5 course

Winter 2023

4871G / 570

B. Patton

Syllabus

4881F - Seminar in Literary Studies - Festival City: Stratford as a Hub of Canadian Literature and Drama (King's University College)
This seminar begins with a historical component about the literary formation of the community from early settlement (John Galt, William Dunlop, and Indigenous figures such as Ahyonwaeghs [Haudenausonee] and Maungwudaus [Anishinaabe]) to early residents (J.D. Barnett, Kathleen and Robina Lizars), and then connects these works to pieces about Stratford not only by canonical CanLit authors (such as James Reaney, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Al Purdy, Jane Urquhart, Andrew Pyper) but also the contributions made by Black authors and Jewish authors to this cultural hub. The seminar may also include a drama component (Findley’s Elizabeth Rex) and possibly a trip to Stratford for its fall season. 0.5 course

Fall 2022

4881F / 570

I. Rae

Syllabus

4881G - Seminar in Literary Studies: Version Control: Process, Variation and Flux in Literary Authorship (Huron University College)
This course will examine the versions and variants of poems and prose by authors such as William Blake, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Mary Shelly, William Shakespeare, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman and others. Special focus will be placed on the authorial, literary process (e.g. notetaking, drafting, visualizing) and textual variation (versions of works, differing editions, and the influence of media, e.g. works in manuscript, print and digital). 0.5 course

Winter 2023

4881G / 550

S. Schofield

Syllabus

4899G – The Alice Munro Chair in Creativity Seminar: Creative Writing Workshop - Create, Connect, and Collaborate POPULAR!
This course is taught by Ivan Coyote, the Alice Munro Chair in Creativity. It is meant for artists and creators who are serious about building and developing their art practice. Students will conceive of and craft a multi-disciplinary project and present it at the end of the semester. 0.5 course

Winter 2023

4899G / 001

Fall/Winter

4999E / 001

Various

Consent form

2022 Spring/Summer

Distance Studies (May 9-July 29)

Spring/Summer

Online

Spring/Summer

Online

Spring/Summer

Online

Syllabus

Spring/Summer

2072F / 650

Online

J. Kelly

Syllabus

Spring/Summer

2401E / 650

Online

J. Schuster

Syllabus

Spring/Summer

3330E / 650

Online

Intersession (May 16-June 3)

1010F - This University
Learn about Western, its story, its architecture, academic calendar, governance, codes of conduct, research; and learn about universities, their origins in the Middle Ages, their development and current campus issues. Read a short story by Western’s own Nobel prizewinner Alice Munro, and think about universities in the world today. Taught in a flexible hybrid format. 0.5 course

Spring/Summer (three weeks)

1010F / 200

Blended

J. Toswell

Intersession (May 16-June 24)

Spring/Summer

2033E / 001

In-Person

Syllabus

2021-22 FALL/WINTER

1000 Level Courses

Fall/Winter

1020E / 001

J. Boulter

1020E (002) - Understanding Literature Today
By studying a broad range of exciting and important literary works from the past and present, this course will increase your understanding and appreciation not just of the richness and power of the works themselves, but also of the role of literature in reflecting and shaping our perceptions of the world and of ourselves.

Fall/Winter

1020E / 002

M. Hartley

1020E (200) - Understanding Literature Today
This course serves as an introduction to the wealth and variety of literature in English over the course of some six centuries. We'll be reading a range of materials in verse, prose, and dramatic form that begin with Chaucer in the Middle Ages, and extend nearly to the current day. We’ll also be looking at one graphic novel, and experiencing verse in oral and video form.

The course is organized loosely by themes, which will include parody, colonialism, sex, death, identity, and more sex (because, oddly enough, writers have always been as obsessed with that theme as we are today). We’ll also be using a variety of different live and interactive tools to keep you engaged and connected, both with your instructors and with the community of students to which you will belong.

In addition to equipping students with a variety of critical reading skills, including an introduction to a handful of theoretical approaches to literature, the course will additionally provide some guidance on the use of scholarly tools, including essay writing and thesis design, as well as relatively advanced, university-level research skills.

Lectures will be delivered in record online form using a dynamic slide show format, and tutorials will be live and in person; additional materials will be available in PDF form. We’ll be using Zoom for community sessions and office hours and I will be available as well for live consultations. A web forum and social media will further enhance our connection to each other.

Fall/Winter

Fall/Winter

1027F - The Storyteller’s Art I: Introduction to Narrative
The act of storytelling has been essential to human culture from the time of the ancient Greeks to the present day. Stories are integral to the way we define ourselves – and manipulate others. This course will examine the story teller’s art not only through novels and short stories but also in its ancient and modern forms, ranging from the epic to more recent forms such as the graphic novel. As diverse as these stories may seem, they share a central concern with the way we represent ourselves and interpret others.

Fall 2021	1027F / 001	C. Keep	Syllabus
Fall 2021	1027F / 002	A. Lee	Syllabus

1028G (001) - The Storyteller’s Art II | Introduction to Narrative: The Rise of the Machines
This course explores a particular theme, mode, or genre of storytelling. Consult the Department of English for details of current course offerings. Instruction is by lecture and tutorials; emphasis on developing strong analytical and writing skills.

Winter 2022

1028G / 001

1028G (002) - The Storyteller’s Art II | Introduction to Narrative: Disturbed Stories: Unsettling Narratives
This course explores a particular theme, mode, or genre of storytelling. Consult the Department of English for details of current course offerings. Instruction is by lecture and tutorials; emphasis on developing strong analytical and writing skills.

Winter 2022

1028G / 002

A. Lee

Syllabus

2000-2099 Level Courses (No prerequisites)

2018A - The Culture of Leadership I
This course addresses the complex nature of leadership represented in key works of literature and culture, from Malory to Alice Munro, Shakespeare to David Mamet. We will focus on the ethical dilemmas and moral choices faced by leaders to ask what role a leader plays: hero, manager, thinker, strategist, artist, figurehead, authority?

Fall 2021

2018A / 001 (Evening)

A. MacLean

Syllabus

Fall/Winter

2033E / 650

2041F - Special Topics in Drama: The Witch of Edmonton
In this course, students participating in the Department of English and Writing Studies' Fall Theatre Production - The Witch of Edmonton, explore in theory and practice approaches to text in performance. Only students working as an actor, director, stage manager, assistant stage manager, lighting, set or costume designer may enroll. Please note: Auditions are held prior to the course start date so that students can register and receive a course credit for their part in the production. See course page for more details. Permission of the Chair of Undergraduate Studies required to enroll.

Fall 2021

2041F / 001

Fall 2021	2071F / 650	A. MacLean	Syllabus
Winter 2022	2071G / 650	A. MacLean	Syllabus

Fall 2021	2072F / 650	G. Ceraldi	Syllabus
Winter 2022	2072G / 001	G. Ceraldi	Syllabus

2076F - Medieval Heroes, Villains and Other Outsiders
Many medieval heroes and villains are alive today: Thor, Loki, Beowulf, Joan of Arc, Richard the Lionheart, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Robin Hood, Arthur, Mordred, Hildegard of Bingen, Sylvester II. This course will investigate these real-life and literary figures, considering their construction in medieval texts, and their reconstruction through the ages.

Fall 2021

2076F / 001 (Evening)

J. Toswell

Alice Munro Chair: Ivan Coyote

2091G - Special Topics | From Pixels to Papyrus: A Brief History of the Things We Read
What is a “book,” and where does it come from? How did the evolution of systems for the dissemination of information bring us to the modern printed codex and virtual e-text? What is the impact of the medium of publication — manuscript, print, and most recently code — upon how we read, write, and interpret information, textual and otherwise? And how have broader cultural institutions – the publishing industry, practices in editing, and government interventions, to name but a few – impacted on what is written, published, and read?

This course will explore the broad sweep of book history in its many facets, from early manuscript culture through to the eBook. Much of this course will be “hands-on,” working with the material artifacts or facsimiles of book culture, and we will be spending some time as well examining modern Canadian literary culture and the mechanisms that bring a book from inception to the bookshelf. Short “field trips” and guest lectures will enhance our understanding of the complexity of this enormously large and important subject.

Winter 2022

2091G / 001

M. McDayter

Course blog

2092F and 2092G - Special Topics in Popular Literature - The Many Faces of Harry Potter
This course will examine the Harry Potter series in relation to the multiple genres that it draws on, including the gothic novel, detective fiction, fantasy, adventure, and even the dystopian novel. We will read all seven books alongside other novels and short stories that illustrate the generic conventions Rowling is working with. There will also be opportunity to consider the translation of the series into film.

Fall 2021	2092F / 001	G. Ceraldi	Syllabus
Winter 2022	2092G / 001	G. Ceraldi	Syllabus

2099G - The Alice Munro Chair in Creativity | The Creative Moment (cross-listed with ARTHUM 3393G)
This course, led by the Alice Munro Chair in Creativity, will allow students to explore creativity and its role in the production and study of literature in English and the Arts and Humanities more broadly.

Winter 2022

2099G / 001 (Evening)

Syllabus

2100-2999 Level Courses

2200F - History of Theory and Criticism
This course offers an introduction to some of the most influential ideas in and about literature and the arts from Plato to the turn of the twentieth century.

Wait, let me interrupt that: this sounds dry. And the readings might seem that at times. The course won’t be, however, and you’ll find your way into the readings, too. What the course does is allow us to take a step back and ask fundamental questions about literature and the arts, as well as about what we are doing when we study them. To quote the German Romantic poetic Friedrich Hölderlin, “Wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?” (“What are poets for in wretched times”—a question for today!).

So, we’ll ask what literature is for. Why does it matter? Why does studying it matter? What is the nature of truth in literature? What is beauty? How are such central concepts arrived at? What are their implications?

While the main focus of the course will be on figures, again, from Plato to about Nietzsche, we will also introduce some contemporary readings that take these up, extend them, and often put them into question. In particular, we’ll read theory that challenges some of the assumptions of these earlier texts and their dismissal, exclusion, or reduction of class, race, and gender. And, finally, we’ll read a truly beautiful novel by Toni Morrison that sheds light on the implications of the very notion of beauty if it requires, eg., one to have blue eyes …

Fall 2021

2200F / 001

J. Plug

2201G - Contemporary Theory and Criticism
The course will examine a number of “schools” or trends in twentieth-century theory: eg., structuralism and deconstruction; psychoanalysis, feminism, and gender theory; cultural and materialist thinking about art and media; and postcolonial and critical race theory.

Most of all, the aim of the course is to challenge our assumptions: about the nature of language and its relationship to the world, as well as its use in literature; about the subject, the self, the I, and how identity is formed; about the relations between subjects, the impact upon them of social and political structures, power; about how literature and art help us think through all of these and the extent to which they engage in those structures of power or perhaps offer the hope of resistance to them.

Winter 2022

2201G / 001

J. Plug

2202G - Studies in Poetics
This course introduces students to some of the major poems in English literary history and the theoretical tools used to analyze poetics. We will be concentrating on doing attentive close readings of poems together, so class participation will be important. The poems we’ll read are among the best that has been thought and said, so we’ll get a chance to enjoy the poems while we bring out the nuances of each work. We’ll also focus on developing skills in poetics, including understanding some of the basic poetical forms in English, meter and scansion, rhetorical terms used in literary analysis, and big questions about the politics and purposes of poems.

Winter 2022

2202G / 001

MH. McMurran

Syllabus

2301E - British Literature Survey
“Literature,” writes Ezra Pound, “is news that stays news.” Pound speaks of the continued urgency of literature, suggesting that true art maintains a critical relevance across time, perhaps even across cultural contexts. Our task here will be to attend to the various ideas that mark literature as urgent, as “news.” We will, for instance, consider ideas of monstrosity, of what constitutes the monster (Beowulf, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell); we will ask how literature offers an understanding of what constitutes the self, the human subject (King Lear, Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”); we will wish to understand how literature offers ways of thinking about catastrophe, loss, and of mourning (Milton’s Paradise Lost, Beckett’s Endgame, Oswald’s Memorial); we will consider those complex, and fascinating, moments when the literature begins to reflect on its own status as literature, as art (Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Art”; Yeats’ “No Second Troy”; Heaney’s “Digging”).

Fall/Winter

Fall/Winter

Syllabus

Fall/Winter

2501E / 001

2601E - Global Literatures in English Survey
Global Literatures in English typically focuses on the novels, plays, poems and essays written in English by people from what used to be British colonies, or by people who have been, in one way or another, affected by colonialism. These texts, therefore, bear on them very clearly the marks of resistance to colonialism. They tend to be explicitly anti-racist, and insistently bear witness to the humanity and strength of traditions that were often denigrated or dismissed by the colonial powers. In a time like the present, when anti-racist struggles and the need for mutual cultural understanding have become some of the major moral imperatives in a globalized and interconnected world, such texts acquire a peculiar and lasting importance.

Fall/Winter

2601E / 001 (Evening)

N. Joseph

3000-3999 Level Courses

3200G - Feminist Literary Theory
An introduction to critical debates in twentieth-century feminist literary theory. Students will study (1) the diversity of feminist approaches to literature, literary production, the politics of language, questions of genre and subjectivity; and (2) the intersections among feminist literary theories, postcolonialism, Marxism, anti-racist criticism, queer theory, and post-structuralism.

Winter 2022

3200G / 001

Syllabus

Winter 2022

3204G / 001

J. Sandhar

Draft Syllabus

3300 - History of English Language
English has a long history which begins in the British Isles around the time of the fall of the Roman Empire and is still in progress across the world. It also has a long prehistory: its earliest reconstructable ancestor was spoken in the approximate area of what is now Ukraine about five thousand years ago. This course will tell the whole story of the language, paying particular attention to reading texts in different varieties of English from a wide chronological and geographical range. Its primary focus will be on the dynamic life of the English language: its instability and diversity; its relations with other languages; and its place in the social and cultural lives of its speakers. The course will begin by introducing students to the components of linguistic analysis; after working our way through a historical survey from Old to Modern English, we will conclude the course by exploring global forms of English and non-standard forms of English.

Fall/Winter

3300 / 001

A. Schuurman

3310 - Old English Language and Literature
This course introduces the language and literature of England as they were approximately 1000 years ago. In the Fall Term the language will be taught step by step through a reading of some texts in prose and poetry, before beginning consideration of Beowulf. In the second term students will continue to concentrate on Beowulf. Our focus for the year will be the context and historiography of thinking about Old English, with some examples of modern scholarship and with some consideration of how our thinking about Old English and early medieval England has changed in the two hundred years since scholars began considering these materials.

Fall/Winter

3310 / 001

J. Toswell

3316E - Love in the Middle Ages
Love may seem like a universal emotion, but as Chaucer notes:

Ek for to wynnen love in sondry ages,
In sondry londes, sondry ben usages.

If people express their love differently in different ages and lands, does it follow that they also feel love differently? This course will explore the different expressions and experiences of love in the medieval period. We will focus on the literature of late-medieval England, but we will place the English within a broader European context. We will also look at a variety of manifestations of love: romantic and erotic, but also familial, divine, and platonic. While exploring this most fundamental of emotional states, we will learn to read and enjoy Middle English literature. We will begin with Chaucer’s short lyric poems, which are relatively easy, and work our way to more challenging genres and dialects of the language.

Fall/Winter

Fall 2021

Syllabus

3330E - Shakespeare
This year-long course offers intensive study of one of the world’s greatest playwrights. It will range across twelve plays that illustrate the variety of writing Shakespeare produced for the stage. We will discuss how theatrical conventions and political pressures gave – and in different ways, continue to give – this drama meaning.

Fall/Winter

3330E / 001

J. Purkis

Syllabus

3331G - Adapting Shakespeare
How are two of Shakespeare’s most notorious plays adapted, reworked, and appropriated by modern artists? This course will focus on Othello and The Taming of the Shrew, and will explore, in particular, politics of race and gender as they have been interpreted for successive generations of readers and viewers. We will study forms of adaptation ranging from the novel to modern drama to film.

Winter 2022

Fall 2021

3351F - Romantic Revolutions
Revolt, radicalism, counter-revolution, reaction, reformation; hope, crisis, peace, war, invention, imagination, catastrophe, wonder, terror. What shadows did revolution cast upon the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? This course examines a range of texts that reflect Romantic and post-Romantic transformations, upheavals, and reversals in aesthetic, socio-political, scientific, and/or psychological thought and writing.

Fall 2021

3351F / 001

J. Faflak

Syllabus

3361F - Sherlock Holmes and the Fiction of Detection
This course studies the detective figure in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Possible topics include: the science of deduction; evidence and forensic practices; panopticism and the society of surveillance; the role of the detective in policing boundaries or race, class, and gender. May also include later film and tv adaptations.

Fall 2021

3361F / 001

3378G - Topics in Twentieth-Century British and Irish Literature: Forays in Fiction of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century
This course will be broad enough to provide an introduction to this historical period. However, it may concentrate on a shorter historical span, a particular genre, or use some other principle of selection.

Winter 2022

3378G / 001

J. Plug

3480F - Reading America Now (cross-listed with ARTHUM 3392F)
Can literature help us confront the most urgent injustices and pressing crises of our time? Can aesthetic responses to racial, colonial, and ecological violence motivate interventionist action? Is there such a thing as “literary activism”? These are some of the questions that will guide our study of art and activist movements in the US. In this course we will examine aesthetic strategies employed by authors, artists, and critics who frame their creative work in activist terms. In particular, we will ask what applicable resources American literary history can offer when confronting structural inequality, systemic racism, and climate upheaval as interconnected humanist failures. Drawing on such resources, we will endeavor to test both the limits and possibilities of literary activism in the context of climate justice.

Fall 2021

3480F / 001

K. Stanley

3579F - Topics in Canadian Literature: Black Writing in Canada
Explore multiple genres of contemporary Black writing in Canada, from Dionne Brand’s poetry to the prose collected in Black Writers Matter to Hassan Ghedi Santur’s novel The Youth of God to Writer-in-Residence Zuleika Reid-Benta’s short story cycle Frying Plaintain.

Fall 2021

3579F / 001

3680F - Indigenous Literatures of Turtle Island
This course will introduce students to a diverse range of Indigenous storytelling practices from Turtle Island (North America), which may include oral narratives, literature, and visual and performance arts. Students will consider how these practices both shape and are shaped by specific historical and geographical contexts.

Fall 2021

3680F / 001

P. Wakeham

Syllabus

3891G - Cultural Studies, Representation and Identity
In this course, students will be introduced to Cultural Studies theories and methods in the area of Identity and Representation with an emphasis on the study of literary and photographic texts. Through a series of “case studies,” students will learn about how identity is shaped by, and shapes, social and imaginative worlds. Topics such as sexuality, diaspora, motherhood and family, among others, may be discussed.

Winter 2022

3891G / 001

Syllabus

4000 Level Courses

4320F – Seminar in Renaissance Literature: Early Modern Food from Shakespeare to Milton
Food is part of our everyday lives, but how is it represented in literature, theory, and practice? This course opens up the exciting field of food studies through the lens of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We’ll take a new look at some familiar texts, such as Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, with its final scene of unwitting cannibalism, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, with its depiction of a world destroyed by an act of eating. But we’ll also consider lesser-known material, such as Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies, in which death is likened to a cook, and Hannah Woolley’s popular recipe book, The Queen-Like Closet. Addressing topics such as gender and class, colonialism and localism, we’ll also do some cooking and make a visit to the Western Archives.

Fall 2021

4320F / 001

M. Bassnett

4340G - Seminar in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Poetry and the Body
In this course, we will read this poetry as an inquiry into the role of embodiment in the poetry of the eighteenth century. During the eighteenth century big questions about how the body relates to the mind and soul were debated and remained unresolved. Our course will discuss those questions as they are articulated in poetic forms and language. We will especially from groups traditionally marginalized in British literary history: women and people of colour to gauge their view of the body. We will also look at the important roles of nonhumans in this poetry. NOTE: This course will include an intensive focus on research methods and writing research essays. We will have at least one class in Weldon’s Archives and Special Collections.

Winter 2022

4340G / 001

MH. McMurran

4371G –Seminar in Twentieth-Century British and Irish Literature (Huron University College)

Winter 2022

4371G / 550

J. Vanderheide

Syllabus

4470G - Seminar in American Literature: The Print Culture of the American Abolitionist Movement
This course will examine the different forms of eighteenth and nineteenth-century abolitionist print culture, primarily in a U.S. context. Over the course of the term, we will study how slavery was invoked and contested in novels, autobiographies, pamphlets, poetry, journalism, manifestoes, and letters. Texts may include Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno, Nat Turner’s Confessions, abolitionist newspapers, and poetry.

We will also spend some time learning about print culture research methods by exploring Western’s abolitionist materials in Special Collections. We will be holding 1-3 of our classes on location in Special Collections at Western, where we will learn more about the different approaches to the study of print culture. One of our class assignments will be based on further independent research on select works in Western’s holdings. In addition to this assignment, students will be asked to complete a short position paper, a seminar, and a research paper. In the event that COVID restrictions prevent us from meeting in person, this class will be held as a synchronous online class during our regular class time.

Winter 2022

4470G / 001

A. MacLean

Syllabus

4570F - Seminar in Canadian Literature: Reading the Land in Canadian and Indigenous Literatures
Students will read a selection of literatures written by Canadian and Indigenous authors such as John Richardson, Susanna Moodie, André Alexis, Jeannette Armstrong (Okanagan), Thomas King (Cherokee/Greek), Pauline Johnson (Mohawk/English), Richard Wagamese (Ojibwe) and Leanne Simpson (Anishinaabeg). Students will discuss western and Indigenous ecological approaches to and representations of the land.

Fall 2021

4570F / 001

Syllabus

4571G – Seminar in Canadian Literature (Brescia University College)

Winter 2022

4571F / 530

D. Grace

4771G – Seminar in Literary Studies: The Public Intellectual and the Culture of Hope
As one of the cornerstones of higher education, intellectualism (and intellectuals), like the Arts and Humanities, seem to be increasingly under attack, often targets of public suspicion. Whereas previously the university was a bastion of intellectual work separate from outside response or influence, increasingly we’re called upon to make our research public, to be public intellectuals. But this role goes back at least to Emile Zola’s letter to the President of France in response to the Dreyfus Affair, “J’Accuse . . . !”, even to Socrates, who was sentenced to death for refusing to renounce his beliefs. Investigating the past and present role of the public intellectual, this course thus asks: What does it mean to be an intellectual in 2022? Does, can, or should what we do in the classroom and in our research have a more direct public impact? If so, what is the role of the Arts and Humanities in making this impact? And above all, how do you see your student role as public intellectual, especially at a time when hope for the future seems more necessary than ever?

Winter 2022

4771G / 001

J. Faflak