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.

254.3 Canadian Speculative Fiction

Spring TWR 13:30 (Wendy Roy) – Canadian Literature

Canada has recently seen an explosion of fiction that asks readers to think about their relationship with the environment, including Thomas Wharton’s 2023 novel The Book of Rain. This class will study speculative fiction in Canada, with a focus on works that can help us think in critical ways about situations like climate change, pandemics, and political strife. We will start from the premise that such dystopian and apocalyptic texts are a commentary on the present, asking readers to consider environmental, technological, medical, social, and political developments in the present, and the impact
that these might have on the future. Because of the nature of the course, many of the texts will address difficult subject matter, but hopeful narratives will also be included.

213.3 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH SOUNDS AND SPELLING

Summer TWR 08:30 (Yin Liu) - Non-category

This course surveys some aspects of the history of English as a language, from Proto-Indo-European to the present day, through exploring how English has been and is pronounced and written. We will investigate methods for studying English phonology and orthography, ways in which the human history of English speakers has shaped the language, dialect variety and standardization, and past and present controversies surrounding spoken and written forms of English around the world.

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.

(Jay Rajiva) – Category 5

This course examines a diverse body of literatures that we might call "transnational": literature written in response to patterns of migration and collective trauma, straddling national, geographical, cultural, religious, ethnic, and social borders. As we move through the course, we will learn how to read transnational literature carefully and ethically, without reducing experience to fit generalizations, truisms, and unconscious biases. In so doing, we will seek to challenge static definitions of place and belonging, studying the conditions of diaspora, critical perspectives on migration and movement, and the aesthetics of literary representation.

(Allison Muri) - Histories of English Classes

(Michael Cichon) – Non-category

The mythologies of the North are at once brutal and mystical. These stories are replete with heroic struggles, epic battles and journeys to the Otherworld. The myths of northern Europe provide a window to the mindsets of ancestral peoples, promote values like self-reliance, loyalty and wisdom, and have greatly influenced modern fantasy literature and media. This year, students in Eng 217.3 will study the Irish Cattle Raid of Cooley, the Four Branches of the Mabinogi and a native Welsh Arthurian Tale, and some Scandinavian myths, all in translation.

(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.

(Arul Kumaran) – Category 2

This course explores Shakespeare's tragedies and late romances, two dramatic genres through which he examined some of the most profound questions of human experience. In the tragedies, Shakespeare presents individuals struggling with love, ambition, revenge, jealousy, family loyalty, and political responsibility, often with devastating consequences for themselves and those around them. In the romances, written near the end of his career, Shakespeare turns toward themes of loss, forgiveness, reconciliation, and renewal.

Through close reading of a selection of plays, students will consider Shakespeare's remarkable ability to portray complex characters confronting difficult moral choices in a changing world. Attention will also be given to the historical and cultural contexts of the plays, their theatrical performance, and their continuing influence on literature, theatre, and popular culture. Together, these works reveal Shakespeare's enduring fascination with both the tragic vulnerabilities and the restorative possibilities of human life. 

From haunted princes and jealous kings to shipwrecked daughters and long-divided families, Shakespeare's plays continue to challenge and move audiences more than four centuries after they were written.

(Brad Congdon) – Non-category

Readers of genre fiction, unlike readers of what we presume to call “literary fiction,” assume a tacit contract between themselves and the writer: they understand that they will be manipulated, but the question is how? and when? and with what skill? and to what purpose? …. [L]iterary fiction makes no such promises; there is no contract between reader and writer for, in theory at least, each work of literary fiction is original, and, in essence, “about” its own language; anything can happen, or, upon occasion, nothing. Genre fiction is addictive, literary fiction, unfortunately, is not. – Joyce Carole Oates, “The King of Weird” (1996)

In this class, we shall focus on wizards, dragons, cyborgs, aliens—all of the tropes that readers have come to expect from speculative and fantasy fiction. We will examine the history, definitions, and theories that have shaped both genres, to gain a better understanding of what makes a genre, what its boundaries might be, and why it might be, as Oates states, “addictive” in a way that literary fiction is not. To that end, we’ll survey a wide selection of works, from the foundations of speculative and fantasy fiction, to recent entries into both genres.

(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.

(Peter Robinson) – Non-category

Texts studied will include Chaucer’s Tales of Canterbury, Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” and Gulliver’s Travels, various other texts from the “golden age” of English satire in the eighteenth century, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches, the films of Charles Chaplin and the current boom in satire across every medium, including late night talk show; comedy troupe (Monty Python), film (Barbie), and TikTok.

• 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

(Sheri Benning) – Non-category

This course focuses on the techniques of writing poetry in a variety of forms. We will read challenging and experimental work by a variety of writers, with the aim of developing aesthetic sensibility and writing original poetry. Class sessions will be organized around craft topics and assigned readings, covering topics essential to an advanced understanding of poetry, such as: the line, the image, compression, the prose poem, music, sound, ekphrasis, and revision. Students will learn to read poems analytically to understand poetic techniques and how they function, and students will practice various techniques and forms in their own poetic compositions. Participants must be prepared to have their poems discussed by the instructor and their fellow students in a workshop atmosphere.

(Sarah Powrie) – Category 1

An introduction to the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, with principal attention to The Canterbury Tales.

324.3 (61) RENAISSANCE DRAMA
(Arul Kumaran) – Category 2

This course examines English drama from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a period that witnessed the flowering of the public theatre and the emergence of some of the most influential plays in the English language. Through the study of representative works by playwrights such as Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, Jonson, Dekker, Middleton, and Ford, students will explore the theatrical culture of Tudor, Stuart, and Caroline England.

Particular attention will be paid to the ways Renaissance drama engages questions of power, authority, gender, religion, social identity, and self-fashioning in a rapidly changing society. Students will consider how playwrights adapted classical and medieval traditions, experimented with dramatic form, and responded to the political, religious, and intellectual debates of their age. The course will also examine the material conditions of theatrical production and performance, as well as the enduring influence of Renaissance drama on later literary and cultural traditions. 

Read together, these plays reveal a culture grappling with changing ideas of authority, gentility, individual ambition, and the place of the self within society.

(Kandice Sharren) – Category 3

First published in 1759, Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas describes a young prince whose dissatisfaction with his life of ease and luxury in the Happy Valley leads him to abandon his perfect society in search of new experiences. This tale’s ambivalent depiction of an ideal society is part of a larger eighteenth-century trend in which writers explored the possibilities and limitations of new ways of structuring society. From fictionalized travel narratives in the mode of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) to essays arguing for all-female communities of learning to sentimental novels that saw shared feeling as the basis for a more just society, the readings in this course will trace utopian impulses through the literature and thought of the eighteenth century.

(Jerry White) – Category 4

This course will be a broad introduction to Canadian (more or less) fiction written (more or less) in English.  We will begin in the pre-Confederation period and steadily move up to the present day, with some special focus on Mavis Gallant, Margaret Atwood, and George Elliott Clarke.  We will also pay attention to work from Indigenous traditions (Inuit, First Nations, and Métis) that are based in both oral and written contexts.

(Kevin Flynn) – Category 4

This course offers an in-depth exploration of Canadian drama, tracing its development from early theatrical traditions to contemporary performance. Students will examine a diverse range of plays that reflect Canada’s cultural, linguistic, and regional identities, with attention to Indigenous, Francophone, and multicultural perspectives. Through close reading and discussion, the course considers how Canadian playwrights engage with themes such as identity, nationhood, colonization, gender, and social change.

(Ella Ophir) – Category 4

Poetry has become closely identified with the expression of personal feeling, but it has a much longer history as a public form, called for on occasions of collective celebration, remembrance, and grief. That history endures in the offices of Poet Laureate in small communities and in nation states alike. And in times of public crisis, poetry still springs to the fore—quoted in news coverage, going viral on social media—as people seek words adequate to the outrage or sorrow, and comfort in the binding power of collective feeling. This course will focus on some of poetry’s most public functions and the role it has played in relation to consequential events of the past century, including wars, civil conflicts, and American presidential inaugurations. At the heart of our explorations will be questions about the particular nature and power of poetic form and the uses to which it is put in both private and public life. Students with little or no experience with poetry are welcome—indeed, encouraged—to take this course.

(Lindsey Banco) – Category 4

From the turn of the twentieth century, the United States has been marked by two important literary and cultural phenomena: modernism and postmodernism. As a survey of American literature from 1900 to the present, this course is an attempt to figure out what these two large movements look like, to understand how and why the shift from modernism to postmodernism occurred, to account for the differences and similarities between them, and, in a post-9/11 present, to ask: what’s next?

(Jay Rajiva) – Non-category

This course covers a range of different theories, methods and approaches that we can use to help understand and critically discuss literature, and which we will apply to different literary texts. Emphasizing sustained, thoughtful engagement, our approach involves a rigorous examination of the major schools of literary criticism, including but not limited to feminism, Marxism, deconstruction, postcolonial studies, and queer theory. As we read, we will foreground the significance of literary theory both to literature and to lived experience in the world.

• 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).  

(Michael Cichon) – Category 1

Chivalric writing played a crucial role in creating “class-made” modes of behaviour for the medieval aristocracies and gentry, teaching virtues like refinement, restraint, and generosity.  Both the romances and the manuals for knights offer insight into medieval concepts of honour, social hierarchy, and the integration of Christian values with martial duties, and indeed are the foundation for much of modern fantasy literature.  This year, ENG 402.3 is cross-listed with and will be run simultaneously with CMRS 401.3. We will explore narratives of chivalry (both literary and historical), their Classical antecedents and Renaissance heirs and successors.  Topics may include: romanitas and virtus; the Germanic heroic ideal; Chanson de Gestes, Arthurian romances; Chivalric manuals; Renaissance courtesy and civility.

(Kylee-Anne Hingston) Cateogory 3

In this course, students will read a sample of canonical and non-canonical British children’s books written between the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, the Golden Age of children’s literature, to examine how adult authors of time used constructions of childhood to interrogate the modern world.

(Jerry White) – Non-category

World literature, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, theories of "general" literature, postcolonialism, multilingualism, translation: these are some of the key issues of the discipline of Comparative Literature.  This seminar will introduce this discipline via readings of critical, theoretical, historical, and primary literary texts (such as work by the great literary critic George Steiner, the Swiss writer Fleur Jaeggy, or the Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante) that give students the tools to engage literary and cultural objects from multiple linguistic traditions, both dominant (such as English, German, Italian, or Spanish) and minority (such as Irish Gaelic, Catalan, or Inuktitut).  No language other than English is required, but we will certainly encourage students to bring to bear whatever linguistic skills they possess (you may have more than you think!).

(Ella Ophir) – Non-category

This course is the capstone of the English 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 preparatory sessions led by the Undergraduate Chair are held between October and January.

• 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.

(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? 

(Cynthia Wallace) - Non-category

What does a medieval woman’s account of passionate piety have to do with a twenty-first-century influencer? How do nineteenth-century letters and postmodern poetry relate to Instagram? How can writing shape a life, both on and off the page? In this course we will consider several types of life writing—autobiography and biography, essays and memoir, dairies and letters, social media and blogs—in order to explore questions of how life writing works to construct a self, why it appeals to both writers and readers, and the ways its forms have changed over time. Students will also practice some life writing of their own, in both longer formats and 140-character prose. Prerequisites: 6 cu of 100-level ENG.

(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.

(TBD) - Category 2

This course will focus on the romantic comedies and English history plays that Shakespeare wrote for Elizabethan audiences in the first half of his theatre career; it will also include the darker, more tragicomic “problem comedies” that he wrote under James I.

(Kylee-Anne Hingston) – Non-category

ENG 230 is a critical study of literature written or adopted for children and young adult readers. Emphasizing the history and development of children’s literature, the course includes folk and fairy tales that provide the roots for what we consider children’s literature, picture books aimed for young children, and longer fiction for older children and young adults. In the course, we’ll be asking such questions as What makes a particular book, story, or poem children’s literature, for children rather than for readers? How does its intended audience, and that audience's age and literacy level, shape its form, content, and style? What do the form, content, and style tell us about what adults writing, publishing, and buying this literature believe children should learn?

(Abram) - Category 4, Indigenous Learning Requirement

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

(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.

(Kevin Flynn) – Canadian

“Where is here?” is a key question posed by Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye. Frye argues that in Canada, the question of place is more central than the question of personal identity, “Who am I?” This course will interrogate and revise Frye’s assertion by examining literary works that focus not only on geographical place, but also on social and cultural positioning. We will consider prose and poetry in Canada from its earliest manifestations to the present day, highlighting Indigenous oratures; early settler perspectives on Canada; Canadian nationalism after Confederation; Canadian iterations of modernism and postmodernism; and contemporary literary works by regional writers, Indigenous writers, and diasporic writers.

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

(Michael Cichon) – Category 1

This course is an introduction to Old English grammar, with select readings in the original language. Successful completion of the course will enable students to enroll in English 310.3, where they will have the opportunity to read more Old English literary texts. Included also will be selections from Beowulf in the original language, accompanied by study of the complete poem in Modern English.

(Peter Robinson) – Category 1

Early British Drama is designed to introduce students to theatrical performance in England before Shakespeare. The course begins with the earliest European and Classical dramatic texts and traces the development of distinctive forms of English drama, performed in churches, the streets and (finally) purpose-built spaces, up to 1580. In the second half of the course we will workshop performances of scenes and segments of plays studied during the term, culminating in a live performance, possibly before a real audience. 

(TBD) – Category 2

Sixteenth-century English literature absorbed and contributed to the European Renaissance, led at Henry VIII's court by the Thomas More circle, while popular culture developed new expressions of older traditions. These rich courtly and popular traditions unite in the achievements of the Elizabethan younger generation, especially the Sidneys, Spenser, and Shakespeare. Omitting full-length drama and epic treated elsewhere, this course highlights other major genres of prose and poetry in English from 1485 to 1603.

(Allison Muri) – Category 3

This course begins in 1660 when the Stuart dynasty was restored to the kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland. In 1642 puritans had forbidden stage plays, considered to be amoral and profane, and closed the theatres. So they remained for eighteen years until King Charles II returned from exile in France and granted rights to two companies to present theatrical entertainments. The enthusiastic return of theatrical companies, playwrights, actors, and audiences to London stages initiated numerous innovations ranging from the introduction of women performers on stage, to the development of a new form called pantomime, to the construction of new playhouses with purpose-built stages and moving stage pieces. We will begin with the ribald comedies of William Wycherley and Aphra Behn, encounter one of the first musical comedies in John Gay’s deeply satirical Beggar’s Opera, then move on to the rise of sentimentalism in drama as exhibited by such authors as Susan Centlivre and Richard Steele, and finally to Henry Fielding whose political satires inspired a new form of censorship in the Licensing Act of 1737. In addition to studying plays as literary works, we will examine representations of the theatre in book illustrations, broadsides, and prints, both satirical and celebratory.

(Jenna Hunnef) – Category 4, Indigenous Learning Requirement

“Twenty-five years ago,” recalled Osage scholar Robert Warrior in 1995, “building a library of American Indian writers from books in print would have taken up no more than a few feet of shelf space. . . [T]he yield now is yards and yards” (Tribal Secrets xvi). Now, more than twenty-five years after Warrior made these remarks, even the most avid readers of contemporary Indigenous literatures cannot keep up with the pace of new releases, projects, and initiatives in the Indigenous literary arts. But what prompted this outpouring of creativity and what motivates it today? This class will discuss the influences, movements, and critical conversations that have facilitated the ongoing proliferation of Indigenous literatures in North America during the last fifty years. Our reading of a diverse, though not exhaustive, selection of literary texts from the early 1970s to the present will include works of Indigenous genre fiction, 2SLGBTQ literature and art, poetic meditations on the present, and speculative engagements with the literary past. In addition to considering the relationships within and among the literatures on our syllabus, students will also be encouraged to think about their relationships with the things they read and the places they read from.

(Kylee-Anne Hingston) - Category 3

English 362 will introduce you to the British novel from 1800 to 1850, which spans the end of the Romantic period to the early Victorian era. Moving from Edgeworth and Austen to Dickens and the Brontës, this course follows the novel’s development as the most popular literary form of the nineteenth century, tracing in particular its increasing emphasis on domestic middle-class values: industriousness, duty, sincerity, self-improvement, and social, economic, and national progress.

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). 

(Jessica McDonald) – Category 3

In Archibald Lampman’s apocalyptic poem “The City at the End of Things,” composed in 1892, the speaker tells of a city reduced to metallic machinery and fire. There, three inhuman figures are the city’s only remaining “masters,” and their constant, monotonous work is regarded by the speaker as a “hideous routine.”  Decades before Lampman’s desolate city, Oliver Goldsmith writes a poem about a “rising village” that becomes, in the speaker’s view, happily populated by industrious settler-colonizers who establish the town’s social and cultural foundations. There, a peddler opens a country store filled to delightful abundance, his mercantile work the “source of all his hopes, and all his cares” as he helps the village reach prosperity and even “fame.” These two very different poems begin to reflect the variety of ways that nineteenth-century Canadian poetry expressed attitudes about work. This course will examine such poetry in its context to explore how the poets engage with real-world work- and money-related matters of their time, including: the pursuit of wealth and the accumulation of property and other assets; the “ideal” of individual and national prosperity; and the story of Canadian settlers’ inherent industriousness (and the adjacent belief in meritocracy). Along the way, we will consider how contemporary attitudes about work and money in Canada can be traced back to these earlier contexts and to observable patterns in the poetry of early Canadian writers.

(Jay Rajiva) – Category 5

This course links the act of decolonizing literature to a careful and creative examination of voice in contemporary postcolonial fiction. Focusing primarily on African and Caribbean literary texts, we will examine how authors such as Edwidge Danticat, Marlon James, and J.M. Coetzee modulate narration, focalization (point of view), language, implied audience, and reader expectations to challenge colonial and neocolonial hegemonies. How does this literature productively destabilize assumptions of intimacy (in first-person narration) and distance (in third-person narration)? What decolonizing impulses are at work in a literary text narrated in “non-standard” English? Can decolonizing happen through “bad” or problematic narrators, and if so, what might it look like? Over the semester, we will situate these aesthetic concerns within specific historical, social, and cultural frames, such as the legacy of slavery, U.S. involvement in the Caribbean after World War II, the ongoing collective trauma caused by everyday “slow violence” (Rob Nixon), and the immediate post-apartheid period in South Africa.

(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. 

(Ella Ophir) Non-category

This course is the capstone of the English 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 preparatory sessions led by the Undergraduate Chair are held between October and January.