Fall Winter 2025-26
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ENG 802 | Research Methods | Instructor: Ann Martin | Offered every 2 weeks through Fall and Winter Term
ENG 802.3 is a Research Methods course designed to support professional skills development for Master’s and Doctoral students in the Department of English. Its focus is the discipline of literary textual studies: what we research, how we analyze texts and related materials, and how we propose, plan, and communicate the findings of our research projects. As well an overview of the basics of textual scholarship, the course will address research practices and supports, data management platforms, analytical and critical paradigms, and modes of research organization and dissemination. Discipline-specific assignments will be associated with each unit, enabling the direct application of skills towards degree-related outcomes, including the Master’s Project Proposal, the Master’s Thesis proposal, and the PhD Dissertation Proposal, which represents the department’s Doctoral Candidacy Assessment.
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ENG 805 | Geoffrey Chaucer's The Book of the Tales of Canterbury | Instructor: Peter Robinson
Chaucer’s Tales is the single most significant work in English Literature before Shakespeare, and one of the those few works that do not just challenge our understanding, but force us to redefine what literature is and can’t be. This course will explore the Tales through multiple perspectives: as rooted in the historical events of the late fourteenth-century England and Chaucer’s role in them; in their alignment with contemporary and modern debates on religion, love and power. We will examine the Tales as performance works, as a milestone in the history of the book, as opening a national and vernacular literature, as an instance of manuscript culture, and as a blending of serious and comic. The course will use the resources of the Canterbury Tales project and the new Critical Edition of the Tales to bring us close to the oldest and most original forms of the text, while considering the meanings of the Tales in our very different cultural landscape.
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ENG 803 | Romantic Echoes and Afterlives | Instructor: Kandice Sharren
How are canons shaped and at whose expense? Which cultural forces shape authors’ reputations in the decades and centuries after their deaths? And, why has Romanticism struggled to shift away from the so-called Big Six, despite decades of scholarship that recovers and makes available a more diverse range of texts? This course will explore reception history as a process, contingent on readers’ own political and artistic commitments, media shifts, as well as how previous readers have engaged with a text. We’ll read Romantic writers alongside their later interpreters, from their widowed spouses to Victorian essayists to twenty-first century film adaptations in order to explore the historical, material, and media milieus that shaped—and continue to reshape—the Romantic canon. Primary readings may include work by Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, John Keats, Lord Byron, and Mary Prince.
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ENG 811 | Fallen Idols: Difficult Coversations in Canadian Literature and Culture | Instructor: Jeanette Lynes, Jessica McDonald, Kristina Bidwell, Wendy Roy
This course tackles a core question: how do we engage with literature and other narrative media created by artists who have been accused of reprehensible actions, or who have identified themselves in questionable ways? These concerns are even more fraught in relation to celebrity artists whom we deeply admire and whose work has received national and/or international recognition. While broader contexts may prove helpful, the course will focus primarily on Canadian writers but also consider artists working in other narrative media, such as music and film. Revelations about artists many of us have idolized — such as Alice Munro, Buffy Sainte Marie, and Joseph Boyden — will be discussed, along with responses to earlier Canadian writers such as Duncan Campbell Scott and Grey Owl. Related questions are the impact of biography, social media, and digital platforms (blogs, etc.). Which elements shape our responses to this art? When revelations of questionable actions or disputed identity come to light, our reactions tend to be visceral, emotional. How can we theorize ourselves as consumers and researchers of this art? How do issues of privilege, class, gender, and race play into these questions? What are, as Claire Dederer asks in her recent best-selling book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, our “ways of being an audience?” As Dederer asserts, “Our emotions, collapsed together with those of the artists we love, leave us vulnerable in ways that are entirely new in the internet era. No wonder we don’t know how to behave in this new landscape, or even how to feel.” The course will include primary texts, as well as tracking how on-line metanarratives around these artists affect our responses. Theoretical texts such as Guy Debord’s work on spectacle and Lorraine York’s analysis of literary celebrity in Canada may be included. Given the multi-faceted and, in this moment, volatile nature of celebrity, identity, and difficult conversations, the course will be team-taught to offer a range of perspectives.
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ENG 817 | Memory Studies and Diasporic Literatures| Instructor: Jay Rajiva
This course has two central mandates. First, it will introduce students to the field of memory studies, providing a critical grounding in key terms such as mediation and remediation, cultural memory, multidirectional memory, implication, and strategies of remembrance. Second, it will ask students to reflect on how theories of memory are illustrated, challenged, and/or complicated in three diasporic literary texts: Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker, Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Throughout the course, we will explore the relationship between the complexity of migrant movement and the aesthetics of memory, paying special attention to the contentious issue of the reader as “witness” to literary representations of diasporic trauma. Prior familiarity with memory studies or diasporic literature is welcome but not required for this course.
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ENG 843 | Monstrous Progeny: Adapting Horror Fiction | Instructor: Lindsey Banco
Since the earliest days of cinema, when Thomas Edison was adapting Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and F.W. Murnau was turning Bram Stoker’s Dracula into the German Expressionist classic Nosferatu, gothic and horror fiction have served as “base texts” for film. This course uses the framework and methods of adaptation theory (Linda Hutcheon, Robert Stam, Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, Simone Murray, André Bazin, Thomas Leitch) to explore more recent examples of the sometimes tenuous and sometimes torturous threads between horror fiction and film. The course will be organized around provocative individual examples of horror adaptation, as well as around a series of “clusters” (texts seen as “originary” plus their multiple adaptations). Possible examples include: The Shining (Stephen King’s novel and Stanley Kubrick’s film), Beloved (Toni Morrison’s novel and Jonathan Demme’s film), and Lovecraft Country (Matt Ruff’s novel and Misha Green’s television series). Possible clusters include: “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (Richard Matheson’s short story, Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone episode, George Miller’s retelling in Twilight Zone: The Movie, and Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone reboot); The Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson’s novel, Robert Wise’s film, Jan de Bont’s remake, and Mike Flanagan’s Netflix series); Rosemary’s Baby (Ira Levin’s novel, Roman Polanski’s film, an NBC miniseries starring Zoe Saldana); The Ring (Koji Suzuki’s novel, Hideo Nakata’s film, Gore Verbinski’s American remake); Candyman (Clive Barker’s short story “The Forbidden,” Bernard Rose’s film Candyman, several sequels, and Nia DaCosta and Jordan Peele’s remake). Throughout, we will explore questions of narrative and storytelling, relationships between textual and visual arts, and fears and anxieties over textual and personal categories of identity, including concepts such as “origins,” “legitimacy,” “authenticity,” and “doubling."
Spring 2026
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ENG 843 | Making It New: Tradition and Reinvention in Modern Poetry | Instructor: Ella Ophir
Why do people go on writing poetry? What does poetry do, exactly, that can't be done better in prose—or, for that matter, in song or paint or film? If you have wondered about the nature and value of poetry, you will find good company among the poets of the early twentieth century. They found these questions inescapable, and their poems were shaped by their efforts to offer durable answers. This course will pursue two broad aims. We will examine how the pressure to define poetic purpose and value plays out not just in subject matter but also in form, which ranges from elegant constraint to strategic deformation and disorder. We will also be evaluating the conceptions of poetry that emerge from these works, looking at how they are bound up with politically charged ideas about history, culture, community, language, and the self. Poetry may seem a marginal activity, but it involves itself in everything. While examining selected aspects of the cultural context of modernism through essays, manifestos, and scholarly criticism, we will focus on the works of five poets: W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Frost. Students who have not studied much poetry are welcomed, indeed encouraged, to take this course.
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