For Current Students

Classes at the 200 level are designed to give a broad overview of the subject area under study and may be of general interest to majors, and as electives to non-majors and students in other colleges.

Please note:

• 6 cu 100-level English is a prerequisite for 200-level English classes and is the maximum to be taken for credit
• 3 cu at the 200 level is a pre- or co-requisite for most 300-level English classes (exceptions: ENG 301, 310, and 366)
• Students interested in Honours English are encouraged to take at least one Foundations class in second year.
• Please note the University of Saskatchewan reserves the right to cancel or reschedule any classes. For the most up-to-date information, please click here.

242.3 INDIGENOUS STORYTELLING OF THE PRAIRIES

Spring Online (Jessica McDonald) – Category 4, Indigenous Learning Requirement

A study of the Indigenous storytelling traditions in the prairie region, including oral traditions and written literature.

233.3 PAGE AND STAGE

Summer TWR 13:00 (Arul Kumaran) 

This course examines English drama in performance and will be offered in conjunction with the offerings of one of Saskatoon's theatre companies. It will focus on dramaturgy, staging, and interpretation through performance and will involve live performances, film adaptations, lecture and class discussion, seminar reports, and guest lectures from theatre professionals and drama scholars.

Classes at the 200 level are designed to give a broad overview of the subject area under study and may be of general interest to majors, and as electives to non-majors and students in other colleges.

Please note:

• 6 cu 100-level English is a prerequisite for 200-level English classes and is the maximum to be taken for credit
• 3 cu at the 200 level is a pre- or co-requisite for most 300-level English classes (exceptions: ENG 301, 310, and 366)
• Students interested in Honours English are encouraged to take at least one Foundations class in second year.
• Please note the University of Saskatchewan reserves the right to cancel or reschedule any classes. For the most up-to-date information, please click here.

206.3 INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES

(Lindsey Banco) – Category 4

Cultural studies is the study of “culture,” what Raymond Williams calls “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.” Cultural studies analyzes the artistic, social, political, and material texts and objects in our lives. It assumes such objects go beyond “mere entertainment” or “mere utility” and affect how we perceive class, race, gender, and other markers of identity. As an introduction to the theory and practice of cultural studies, this course will familiarize students with some of the important thinkers and interpretive frameworks in the field. In addition to learning some of the major theoretical approaches to cultural studies, students will use some of the tools of critical analysis to analyze different forms of cultural production, including film and electronic media. Texts will include popular writing, advertising, film, television, music, photography, digital culture, and even public spaces like city streets and airports.

211.3 HISTORY AND FUTURE OF THE BOOK

(Peter Robinson) - Histories of English Classes

220.3 STUDIES IN THE CRAFT OF WRITING

(TBD) – Non-category

A study of “reading like a writer,” this course explores two genres – poetry and short fiction – through the analysis of literary technique. In addition to engaging with elements of style through lectures and workshops, students will explore the aesthetic and/or sociopolitical underpinnings of assigned readings to consider how form and content exist in a mutually enlivening relationship. The course includes both lectures and writing tutorials in which students discuss assigned readings, undertake in-class writing exercises, and engage in line-by-line editing critique of original writing by class members. Visiting authors may be invited into the classroom, and students will be encouraged to attend literary events in the community. By the course’s end students should have completed a portfolio of polished writing in two genres.

224.3 (61) SHAKESPEARE: COMEDY AND HISTORY

TR 10:00 (Arul Kumaran) – Category 2

This course focuses on the romantic comedies and English history plays that Shakespeare wrote for Elizabethan audiences in the first half of his theatre career. It also examines the darker, more tragicomic “problem comedies” that he wrote under James I. Study of the histories will demonstrate their contribution to the nationalist project of Reformation England, while study of the comedies will explore their use of humour and verbal wit in the representation of human identity.

225.3 SHAKESPARE: TRAGEDY AND ROMANCE

(Brent Nelson) – Category 2

In this course, we will revisit some of Shakespeare’s most famous plays and introduce some that are less familiar and, perhaps, a little bit surprising. In the tragedies we will examine the high stakes world of moral choice and action amid complex circumstances for both the powerful and the powerless.  In the Romances, we will enter a world apart from the centres of power and adjacent to the world and concerns of comedy.

230.3 (61) LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN

TR 13:00 (Kylee-Anne Hingston) – Non-category

This course examines children’s literature from a literary perspective, asking questions about how beliefs about children (what they are like or should be like) shape the form, style, and content of literature made for children. To interrogate how these beliefs—and the literature produced by them—have changed over time, we will learn about the history and development of children’s literature, reading folk and fairy tales that provide the roots for what we consider children’s literature, picture books aimed for young children, and novels for older children and young adults, published between the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries.

242.3 INDIGENOUS STORYTELLING OF THE PRAIRIES

(Jenna Hunnef) Category 4, Indigenous Learning Requirement

This course introduces students to the diverse storytelling traditions and literary histories of the Prairies and Great Plains regions of Turtle Island by focusing on the role of place—and more specifically the category of home—in Indigenous literary self-representation. It will also provide students with knowledge of historical and political contexts specific to the Prairies. How do Indigenous stories about relationships to the Prairies as a place—including small towns, big cities, reserves, grassy plains, and boreal forests—negotiate the multiple and often competing racial, sexual, gendered, and economic forces that seek to define Indigenous life in settler-colonial states? Furthermore, how do these representations resist settler colonialism’s investment in undoing those place-based relationships? Students will be encouraged to think about their own relationships to place through formal and informal assignments and class discussions.

260.3 CRIME AND DETECTIVE FICTION

(Lindsey Banco) – Non-category

Perhaps no genre is more concerned with the structure of society than crime and detective fiction. The protagonist of such stories—often a private eye, sometimes a killer—takes us on a journey from the dark streets and back alleys to the halls of business and government, providing readers with a guided tour of the city and the powers that shape it.

In this course, we will examine novels, short stories, and critical essays to explore the roots of the modern detective story. Along the way, we’ll examine major eras of crime and detective fiction, including the origin of detective fiction in the works of Victorian-era authors, the development of hardboiled and noir fiction in the early and mid-twentieth century, and recent examples of the genre. Authors covered may include: Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Dorothy B. Hughes, Chester Himes, Walter Mosely, Louise Erdrich, and Katherena Vermette.

282.3 (61) FEMINIST THEORY AND LITERATURE BY WOMEN

TR 11:30 (Cynthia Wallace) – Non-category

"You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it," claims Adrienne Rich in What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics. In this course, we will seek to tell a history of women’s writing that has participated in this urgency. How, for instance, did Julian of Norwich, writing in the fourteenth century, Amelia Lanyer writing in the seventeenth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning writing in the nineteenth, and Virginia Woolf writing in the twentieth century not only write their own lives into being but also invite both readers and later writers into a similar project? How have feminist theorists increasingly nuanced the question of what it is to be a woman—and a human—and how we ought to be together in the world? We will focus especially on fiction, poetry, and theoretical texts of the last fifty years, likely reading Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, Chimamanda Adichie, and Katherena Vermette.

• 200 Level Classes

Courses at the 300 level set literary texts in their historical and cultural contexts.

Please note:

• 3 cu at the 200 level is a pre-or co-requisite for most 300-level English classes (exceptions: ENG 301, 310, and 366)
• Please note the University of Saskatchewan reserves the right to cancel or reschedule any classes. For the most up-to-date information, please click here

301.3 (61) OLD ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

TR 13:00 (Michael Cichon) – Category 1

Hwaet! You, too, can learn the language of the Beowulf-poet, Caedmon the Cowheard who couldn’t sing, some Victims of the Vikings, and the earliest works of that ubiquitous poet Anonymous.  English 301.3 is the first of two half-classes intended to convey reading competence in Old English.  We will spend this class acquiring grammatical and lexical competence in the literary language of the Anglo-Saxons so that by December, successful students will be able to read simple passages in Old English with the help of a glossary and a very helpful Magic Sheet….

305.3 CANADIAN FICTION TO 1960

(Weny Roy) – Category 4, Canadian

This course studies the development of Canadian fiction in English from the end of the 18th century to 1960. We will examine the roots of Canadian fiction in exploration and settlement writing and in Indigenous orature; consider turn-of-the-century ideas about Canadian identity, politics, and social issues; and conclude with a discussion of prairie realist and modernist short stories and novels. Works will be examined in their historical and social contexts. The course focuses in particular on the ways in which Canadian short fiction, novels, and non-fictional prose narratives have responded to stylistic and structural experiments in other English literatures and have exemplified Canadian social relations and historical events. 

312.3 EARLY CHAUCER

The course examines Geoffrey Chaucer’s literary works before The Book of the Tales of Canterbury, the shorter and lyric poems, the dream visions and the romance tragedy Troilus and Criseyde. We will explore these poems as evidence of the development of a new and distinctive Chaucerian poetic, point the way to the Tales of Canterbury.

363.3 APPROACHES TO 20^TH AND 21^ST CENTURY FICTION

(Ella Ophir) – Category 4

“It’s a bad habit writing novels—it falsifies life, I think.” So Virginia Woolf confided to her diary in 1915, before proceeding to write another eight novels, each one redefining the possibilities of the form. Dissatisfied with conventional modes of narration and representation, writers of the twentieth century rethought the peculiar business of novel writing again and again, pushing the boundaries of form and subject matter in dazzling and disorienting ways. In this course we’ll read a sampling of some of the most searching and inventive reimaginings of the purpose and power of fiction and its murky borders with non-fiction. We’ll begin with James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist and traverse about a hundred years, concluding with a look at the contemporary flourishing of graphic narrative and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. 

373.3 ENGLISH FICTION TO 1800

(Allison Muri) – Category 3

Before the modern novel took shape, English fiction was a mix of romance, travelogues, rogue biographies, and political satire that resisted literary classification. In this course we will read early romances, criminal confessions, tales of shipwrecks, forbidden love, and supernatural terror. In this course we’ll encounter Aphra Behn’s radical storytelling; Daniel Defoe’s castaways and criminals; Jonathan Swift’s sharp satire; Henry Fielding’s witty, irreverent narratives; and Horace Walpole’s eerie gothic imaginings, uncovering along the way how early fiction tackled questions of race, class, gender, power, and morality. We will study how these unconventional works of early fiction reflected shifting ideas about identity, society, and power, ultimately shaping the literary forms that would give rise to the novel in its many genres today.

383.3 DECOLONIZING THEORIES AND LITERATURES

(Jay Rajiva) – Category 5

What is the “post” in postcolonial? What is the “de” in decolonizing? In this course we will seek to understand how literature and theory have responded to colonial pasts and presents in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The course will offer a foundational grounding in colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial theory, alongside the study of literary works by authors such as Akwaeke Emezi, Arundhati Roy, Tayeb Salih, and Derek Walcott. Examining hybridity, queer identity, collective trauma, nationalism, diaspora, and feminism, we will discuss how postcolonial literature presents an aesthetic and ethical challenge to the Anglo-American literary canon.

394.3 LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY

(Lindsey Banco) – Non-category

In literary and cultural studies, theory is a method and a set of tools for exploring how literature and other cultural texts produce meaning. This course offers a survey of some of the most prominent ideas in literary and cultural theory. We will study various historical and contemporary theories—including New Criticism, semiotics, Marxism, feminism and gender theory, post-colonialism, deconstruction, and ecocriticism—with an eye toward four goals: (1) developing a vocabulary of key terms and concepts used by scholars of literary and cultural studies; (2) studying theory as an object in its own right; (3) applying theoretical concepts to core literary and cultural texts; and (4) fostering a sense of self-reflexive, idiosyncratic inquiry into what we read and how we make sense of it. This course will feature considerable discussion of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula through a variety of theoretical lenses.

• 300 Level Classes

Limited to 15 students each, seminars provide opportunities for students to present papers and to engage in critical discussion of literature on a regular basis.

Please note:

• 400-level classes are seminars, with lower enrolment (limited to fifteen students) and more intensive, student-led discussion and self-directed research than is typical of 300-level classes. While they are required for students in the Honours program, they are open to senior English majors and are a wonderful experience for capable students who would enjoy a deeper dive into a focused topic. 
• 6 credit units of 300-level English and a major average of at least 70% is normally required for permission to register. If you are interested in 400-level classes, please contact the Undergraduate Chair, Professor Brent Nelson, brent.nelson@usask.ca or Professor Ella Ophir, e.ophir@usask.ca (after June 30).  

406.3 TOPICS IN 17^th CENTURY LITERATURES

W 13:30 (Arul Kumaran) – Category 2

Focus and texts vary from year to year according to the interests of instructors. See the department website or the current course handbook for 400-level course descriptions.

412.3 TOPICS IN INDIGENOUS LITERATURES

(Krsitina Bidwell) 

In his collection of essays, Wînipêk, Niigaan Sinclair argues that, when protestors toppled a statue of Queen Victoria in Winnipeg, “citizens changed the story.”  This course will explore how cities create public narratives about themselves and how writers, artists, and the public respond to, challenge, and change these stories.  Considering examples from the Canadian cities of Saskatoon, Prince Albert, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Toronto, and Corner Brook, we will analyze how Indigenous, Black, and other minoritized writers have responded to and challenged urban master narratives.  We will read works by writers such as Katherena Vermette, Maria Campbell, John Brady McDonald, Douglas Walbourne-Gough, Wayde Compton, David Chariandry, and Peter Millard.  We will also, as a class, visit public spaces and monuments on campus and in the city to “read” the stories they are telling.  Students will carry out primary research on how these sites have been publicly narrated. Finally, students will have the option to create their own narrative intervention in a public space.

Note: This course does not yet qualify for Category 5 or for the Indigenous requirement.

417.3 TOPICS IN CREATIVE WRITING

T1 (Sheri Benning) – Non-category

Students will produce a portfolio of written work. Focus and texts vary from year to year according to the interests of instructors. Watch the website for a forthcoming description.

497.0 HONOURS COLLOQUIUM

(Ella Ophir) – Non-category

The Department of English Honours Colloquium is a required (and really great) part of the Honours program. Graduating Honours and Double Honours students prepare short scholarly papers for conference-style presentation at the Colloquium, held in the first week of February. Presentations are normally adapted from essays written for 300- or 400-level courses, after consultation with the course professor or the Undergraduate Chair. Three development sessions, starting in Term 1, will provide information on the form and function of the colloquium, establish working groups, guide the process of adaptation, and review best practices for presentations as well as professional conference etiquette. Note that while this course is required for Honours and Double Honours students, it has no credit unit value. Students will receive informal feedback, but there will be no formal evaluation. Students entering the final year of the Honours program should contact the Undergraduate Chair to confirm enrolment in ENG 497: Professor Ella Ophir at e.ophir@usask.ca

• 400 Level Classes

Please note:

• 6 cu 100-level English is a prerequisite for 200-level English classes and is the maximum to be taken for credit
• 3 cu at the 200 level is a pre- or co-requisite for most 300-level English classes (exceptions: ENG 301, 310, and 366)
• Students interested in Honours English are encouraged to take at least one Foundations class in second year.
• Please note the University of Saskatchewan reserves the right to cancel or reschedule any classes. For the most up-to-date information, please click here.

210.3 LITERARY CANONS AND CULTURAL POWER

MWF 10:30 (Sarah Powrie) – Histories of English Classes

The term “literary canon” refers to a body of literary works regarded as authoritative, worthy of attention, and foundational to the study of literature. It implies that those works need to be prioritized--discussed, studied, assigned as required reading, recognized with prizes, adapted for film—since those works offer the cultural vocabulary for the discipline. Historically speaking, what counted as essential reading has been informed by cultural gatekeepers, such as editors, writers, teachers and literary critics. But as digital media, algorithms, and GenAI increasingly shape public literacies, the landscape of literary studies is being fundamentally altered. This course seeks to interrogate foundational questions about the uses of reading and writing: what forces shape our reading choices? What is the value of reading? What is the value of writing in the age of GenAI? What is at stake if those activities are disrupted? 

 220.3 STUDIES IN THE CRAFT OF WRITING

(TBD) – Non-category

A study of “reading like a writer,” this course explores two genres – poetry and short fiction – through the analysis of literary technique. In addition to engaging with elements of style through lectures and workshops, students will explore the aesthetic and/or sociopolitical underpinnings of assigned readings to consider how form and content exist in a mutually enlivening relationship. The course includes both lectures and writing tutorials in which students discuss assigned readings, undertake in-class writing exercises, and engage in line-by-line editing critique of original writing by class members. Visiting authors may be invited into the classroom, and students will be encouraged to attend literary events in the community. By the course’s end students should have completed a portfolio of polished writing in two genres.

224.3 SHAKESPEARE: COMEDY AND HISTORY

(Brent Nelson)– Category 2

This course focuses on the romantic comedies and English history plays that Shakespeare wrote for Elizabethan audiences in the first half of his theatre career. It also examines the darker, more tragicomic “problem comedies” that he wrote under James I. Study of the histories will demonstrate their contribution to the nationalist project of Reformation England, while study of the comedies will explore their use of humour and verbal wit in the representation of human identity.

232.3 GOTHIC NARRATIVE

(Allison Muri) – Non-category

This course will trace the Gothic mode, in its various forms, from its origins in Britain in the 1760s through its assimilation into mainstream literature in the nineteenth century and beyond.

243.3 INTRODUCTION TO INDIGENOUS LITERATURES

(Jenna Hunnef) - Category 4, Indigenous Learning Requirement

ENG 243 provides a broad introduction to the study of Indigenous literatures, primarily in the Canadian context, preparing students for more advanced study of Indigenous literatures in the discipline of English. Students will read and listen to a diversity of First Nations, Métis and Inuit texts and oral stories, and learn to understand them as part of Indigenous literary traditions and histories. They will learn key concepts and approaches in Indigenous literary study, including learning about the processes of settler colonialism past and present. We will take Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice’s observation that “relationship is the central ethos of Indigenous literature” (Why Indigenous Literatures Matter 158) as the broad thesis for this class, and course readings have been chosen to illustrate this guiding principle while assignments have been designed to develop students’ understanding of it.

246.3 SHORT FICTION

(Ludmilla Voitkovska) – Non-category

As a relatively new genre, the short story is a truly modern form. Its attractiveness has to do with the concision of its form and the possibility for startling turns its narrative can offer. The course will explore the history and conventions of short fiction from its origins in myth, fable, and folktale to its flourishing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will examine stories from a variety of cultural contexts representing a range of styles, themes, and social issues. Among authors studied will be Aesop, Chekhov, Maupassant, Kafka, Munro, Achebe, Poe, Joyce, Conrad, Faulkner, and Chopin.

284.3 BEOWULF AND TALES OF NORTHERN HEROES

MWF 12:30 (Michael Cichon) – Non-category

The warrior-poet, sorcerer, berserker, and farmer Egil Skallagrimsson composed his first poem at age 3 and killed his first enemy at age 7. He recited a poem for King Eirik Bloodaxe so impressive that Eirik spared Egil’s life even though Egil had killed the king’s son. Read his saga in English 284. Beowulf, the mythic wrestler of trolls, killer of hags and dragon-slayer, “was of all the kings of the world the mildest of men and the most gentle, the kindest to his folk and the most eager for fame.” Learn his story in English 284. Sigurd Volsung was descended from the god Odin, was the son of a werewolf, understood the speech of birds, and owned a twice-forged sword his ancestor pulled from a tree. He, too, killed a dragon, but was betrayed by his former lover, a Valkyrie, and murdered in his bed. Discover the tragic history of his line in English 284.

In addition to Beowulf, Egilssaga and the Saga of the Volsungs, this year we will read Icelandic outlaw and family sagas, and a work of contemporary fantasy fiction that deploys and reinterprets the themes of its medieval antecedents.

294.3 TECHNIQUES OF CANADIAN POETRY

(Jessica McDonald) – Canadian

This course instructs students in the critical methodology of the study of poetry. It examines such mechanics as rhyme, rhythm and meter, imagery and symbolism, figurative language, sound devices, and the conventions of verse forms. Students thus enhance their literary-critical vocabulary and learn a range of methods for building an understanding and appreciation of poems. The course uses as its primary texts Canadian poems that range from the sonnet to contemporary spoken word, and it engages with diverse poets, texts, and movements in Canadian poetry.

Please note:

• 3 cu at the 200 level is a pre-or co-requisite for most 300-level English classes (exceptions: ENG 301, 310, and 366)
• Please note the University of Saskatchewan reserves the right to cancel or reschedule any classes. For the most up-to-date information, please click here

308.3 CREATIVE WRITING NON-FICTION

(TBD) – Non-category

An introductory seminar/workshop in the basic techniques and methods of writing creative nonfiction. By examining the works of established writers, studying craft and history, engaging in workshop discussions, and producing a portfolio, students will be prepared to move forward to the advanced study of creative nonfiction. Participants must be prepared to have their work discussed by the instructor and their fellow students in a workshop atmosphere.

Note: Pre-requisite: ENG 220.3 or permission of the instructor. Students requesting permission should contact the Department of English, english.department@usask.ca

 310.3 OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE

(Yin Liu) – Category 1

You’ve fought the grammar, and now you get to fight the dragons. This is Old English literature in the untranslatable wealth of the original language, featuring witty metaphors, talkative inanimate objects, dejected wanderers, bloodthirsty outlaws, and women you don’t want to mess with. How does one deal with nasty winter weather, loneliness, cut-throat politics, cowardly allies, unconventional heroes, arrogant Vikings, the crushing inevitability of time passing, things that come out of the dark and eat one’s friends, and did I mention dragons? Take this course and find out how some people in early medieval England imagined facing these familiar challenges. We will read some shorter poems and prose, and all of Beowulf, in the original Old English.

Note: Pre-requisite: ENG 301.3

313.3 MIDDLE ENGLISH ROMANCES

TR 10:00 (Michael Cichon) – Category 1

English 313.3 is a study of several representative Middle English Romances, their sources, and their various contexts—genre, rhetorical technique, historical/cultural contexts, authorship, transmission and the like. The romances we will study treat such themes as nature/nurture and correction, trial and ordeal, holy war, and challenges to the Round Table. The principal poems we’ll read and analyse will illumine other works which students of medieval literature are likely to encounter, both in English and in the other vernaculars of the period.

326.3 RENAISSANCE EPIC

(Brent Nelson) – Category 2

This course explores two of the longest and most important narrative poems in English literature, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). Most famously, Paradise Lost became an influential and informing work in Romantic literature, from William Blake’s poetry to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; and The Faerie Queene was, in turn, a crucial point of departure for Milton’s own re-conceptualizing of the epic form. This course thus investigates these poems in terms of genre, examining Spenser’s and Milton’s transformation of classical epic and medieval romance forms and conventions and what epic came to mean in their historical contexts. We will look at how these poems and the epic form generally came to reflect not only public concerns of religion, politics, and nation building, but also private concerns of identity, faith, and conscience. In the process, we will examine sixteenth- and seventeenth-century negotiations of such questions as truth, justice, authority, gender relations, and the role of the author.

334.3 PROSE AND POETRY OF VICTORIAN PERIOD

MWF 9:30 (Kylee-Ann Hingston) – Category 3

By reading poems and prose essays on the hot issues of the Victorian era—imperialism, class division, prostitution, religious doubt, the rights of women, and sexuality, to name a few—students will evaluate the role that poetry and prose played in Victorian cultural debates, and they will develop an understanding of the social and cultural frameworks that shaped the prose and poetry of the period. In addition to covering the canonical works of poets and essayists such as the Brownings, Tennyson, Ruskin, and Mill, students will encounter such lesser-known writers as the factory worker Ellen Johnston and the Bengalese poet Michael Madhusdan Dutt.

335.3 EMERGENCE OF INDIGENOUS LITERATURES IN CANADA

(Jenna Hunnef) –Indigenous Learning Requirement

Many courses on Indigenous literatures begin with the “renaissance” of Indigenous writing heralded by the publication of N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn in 1968. However, by its very definition, a renaissance cannot emerge out of nothing; it is the expression of a renewed interest in an already existing artistic, intellectual, or cultural tradition. This class will introduce students to a diverse array of Indigenous oral and written traditions that pre-existed the so-called “Native American Renaissance,” and broaden students’ understanding of Indigenous political, aesthetic, and cultural concerns as they have been expressed in writing and other narrative forms since before the European invasion of Turtle Island and until the 1970s. Placing the relationship between literary form and the expression of political and personal resistance to military imperialism, settler colonialism, assimilation, (ex)termination, and legislative genocide (among other destructive forces and policies) at the centre of our discussions, we will study a selection of texts—including oral narratives, essays, letters, poems, short stories, and novels—to consider how earlier Indigenous authors and storytellers strategically mobilized and innovated upon literary and formal conventions in response to contemporary political and cultural crises.

359.3 WESTERN CANADIAN LITERATURE

Please note:

• 400-level classes are seminars, with lower enrolment (limited to fifteen students) and more intensive, student-led discussion and self-directed research than is typical of 300-level classes. While they are required for students in the Honours program, they are open to senior English majors and are a wonderful experience for capable students who would enjoy a deeper dive into a focused topic. 
• 6 credit units of 300-level English and a major average of at least 70% is normally required for permission to register. If you are interested in 400-level classes, please contact the Undergraduate Chair, Professor Brent Nelson, brent.nelson@usask.ca or Professor Ella Ophir, e.ophir@usask.ca (after June 30). 

416.3 TOPICS IN 19^TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE

(Kandice Sharren) – Category 3

In the recently rediscovered poem “Ocean,” Phillis Wheatley Peters describes the “waves on waves devolving without End” that make up a storm at sea. Written on her return to Boston from London in 1773, the poem’s sublime imagery recalls the voyage she made over a decade earlier, after being kidnapped in West Africa and enslaved at the age of seven. But if the horrors of the Middle Passage shape some writers’ representation of the ocean, other writers see its dangers as powerfully seductive, such as Kate Chopin, for whom, “The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.” From the enormous scale of the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century to the technological developments in hydropower and travel in the nineteenth-century that enabled further colonization and resource extraction, water has long had a powerful pull on the cultural imagination of the United States. This course will focus on 18th and 19th century engagements with what Herman Melville calls “the watery part of the world” in the opening lines of Moby Dick: oceans, yes, but also rivers, lakes, ponds, and swamps. Alongside current diaspora, Indigenous, and ecocritical theories, we will read authors such as Phillis Wheatley Peters, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Elizabeth Stoddard, Walt Whitman, Hannah Crafts, Charles Chesnutt and Kate Chopin.

460.3 TOPICS IN 20TH CENTURY BRITISH AND IRISH LITERATURES

(Ann Martin) – Category 4

In a scene from Virginia Woolf’s 1937 novel The Years, a character sees a photograph of Mussolini in a newspaper: “‘Damned’—Eleanor shot out suddenly, ‘bully!’” The image suggests not just the timeliness of Woolf’s texts but also the interrelatedness of the personal and the public, the local and the (inter)national, the private and the published. In Woolf’s body of work, the one influences the other in profound ways. It is this reciprocal dynamic that will inform our exploration of her not-untroubled legacy as a political writer and as an author who examines lives and experiences of the obscured. We’ll work from Woolf’s early essays and short stories, which signal her play with form and content, as she theorizes modernist techniques and explores internal as well as external realities. Against the backdrop of interwar modernity, we’ll read A Room of One’s Own (1928) and the later essay/pamphlet Three Guineas (1938) to consider how they intersect with issues she addresses in novels such as Mrs. Dalloway (1925), The Years, and Between the Acts (1941). Class discussions may at times be guided by guest speakers from other institutions, as we work from own positions here on Treaty 6 territory to engage with the current field of Woolf Studies.

496.3 (62) CAREER INTERNSHIP

M 13:30 (Sarah Powrie) – Non-category

The Career Internship Seminar is designed to assist upper-year English majors in translating their academic learning into applied skills by providing work opportunities alongside workshops on professionalization.  The course presupposes that participating students have limited work experience in English-related fields, such as communications or teaching; thus, the internship placements will be entry-level positions. The course’s primary objective is to help undergraduate students to develop employability skills and to communicate those skills convincingly to prospective employers. 

497.0 HONOURS COLLOQUIUM

(Ella Ophir) – Non-category

The Department of English Honours Colloquium is a required (and really great) part of the Honours program. Graduating Honours and Double Honours students prepare short scholarly papers for conference-style presentation at the Colloquium, held in the first week of February. Presentations are normally adapted from essays written for 300- or 400-level courses, after consultation with the course professor or the Undergraduate Chair. Three development sessions, starting in Term 1, will provide information on the form and function of the colloquium, establish working groups, guide the process of adaptation, and review best practices for presentations as well as professional conference etiquette. Note that while this course is required for Honours and Double Honours students, it has no credit unit value. Students will receive informal feedback, but there will be no formal evaluation. Students entering the final year of the Honours program should contact the Undergraduate Chair to confirm enrolment in ENG 497: Professor Ella Ophir at e.ophir@usask.ca