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.

ENG 206.3 (01) INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES

T1 MWF 11:30 (Gerald White) – Category 4

This course will introduce the broad contours of Cultural Studies as a critical approach.  We will pay special attention to work from the UK, since the field of British Cultural Studies is such an important part of the approach's heritage.  We will also read and discuss important foundational work by figures from Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and Canada.  We will be looking at literary works, but also material made for television, radio, film, and online technologies, as well as various kinds of visual art.

ENG 209.3 (61) TRANSNATIONAL LITERATURES

T1 TR 10:00 (Cynthia Wallace) - Category 5

In this course, we will read texts that figure movements across national borders and boundaries. How do the migrations—chosen and unchosen—of bodies, goods, ideas, and languages shape literary writing? And how does literary writing shape and participate in these migrations? Focusing on movements to, from, and among the Americas, we will pay special attention to the histories and hauntings of colonization, slavery, empire-building, and contested border crossings. Readings may include texts by Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo, Louise Erdrich, Chimamanda Adichie, Fred Wah, and M. NourbeSe Philip.  

ENG 212.3 (01) A HISTORY OF ENGLISH WORDS

T1 T 17:30 (Yin Liu) - Histories of English Classes

This course surveys some aspects of the history of English as a language, from Proto-Indo-European to the present day, through exploring the formation and histories of English words. Students will learn skills and knowledge to study the lexicon and morphology of English and will discover how the past of English affects its present.

220.3 (01) STUDIES IN THE CRAFT OF WRITING

T1 TR 1430 (Josiah Nelson) – 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

T1 TR 10:00 (Arul Kumaran) – 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.

230.3 (61) LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN

T1 TR 13:00 (Kylee-Anne Hingston) – Non-category

What makes a particular book, story, or poem children’s literature? That is, what makes it for children rather than for readers? How does its intended audience, and that audience's age and literacy level, shape its form? Its content? Its style? How do its form and style—including its illustrations—shape its meanings? Most importantly, since children’s literature is written, published, and purchased by adults, what cultural purposes does children’s literature serve? Who decides what is or isn’t “appropriate” for children? What is childhood? What is adulthood in relationship to childhood? And how do these definitions change over time?

242.3 (01) INDIGENOUS STORYTELLING OF THE PRAIRIES

T1 MWF 12:30 (Jessica McDonald) Category 4, Indigenous Learning Requirement

This course introduces students to a range of Indigenous storytellers from, residing in, or with relationships to the prairies, as well as to a variety of storytelling forms, including oral, musical, visual, and written through fiction, poetry, memoir, drama, and more. As we move through the course materials, we’ll pay special attention to the complex, affecting, provocative, and challenging ways that these storytellers manage the relationship between form and content, in their work, to share social, cultural, political, and emotional messages.

246.3 (01) SHORT FICTION

T1 MWF 13:30 (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.

255.3 (W01) MAPPING CANADIAN LITERATURE

T1 online (Wendy Roy) – Category 4, 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.

277.3 (61) LITERARY USES OF MYTHOLOGY

T1 MWF 09:30 (Sarah Powrie) – Non-category

 In Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy the character Athena asks, “Do myths spring fully formed from the imagination and the needs of a society?... Or are myths conscious creations by the various money-making forces?” This class will trace the literary and cultural afterlives of a selection of myths narrated in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In doing so, we will consider the symbiotic relationship between a society and its narratives: to what extent can modern writers transform the material of myth; to what extent are we unwittingly captive to the stories that we have inherited? Are myths simply relics of the past? What relevance might they hold for writers and readers in the 21st century? 

• 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

302.3 (01) CREATIVE WRITING POETRY

T1 T 17:30 (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.

307.3 (01) DIGITAL LITERATURE AND NEW MEDIA

T1 TR 13:00 (Allison Muri) – Category 4

An introduction to digital narrative, poetry, and media theory. This course investigates the ways in which text, language, and writing have been used in creative and experimental digital media, including artworks and installations, e-literature and e-poetry, video games and websites. Students will read a variety of digital works alongside critical readings in new media theory and practice.

311.3 (61) THE CANTERBURY TALES

Wine can rot your mind" warns Chaucer's Summoner. "Ignorant people like stories," claims the Pardoner, just before narrating his tale. According to the Wife of Bath, "if women had written histories, they'd ascribe more wickedness to men than all the males from Adam could defend!" And when a character named "Chaucer" has finished narrating his tale, he is told, “your awful writing isn't worth a turd!" Find out for yourself the worth of Chaucer's writing by taking this class, as we read selections from one of the most famous works of English literature, The Canterbury Tales.  

322.3 (61) RENAISSANCE LITERATURE II: THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

T1 TR 14:30 (Arul Kumaran) – Category 2

Seventeenth-century literature reflects a nation emerging into modernity through a revolution in politics and science and a reshaping of social bonds and relationships. Excluding full-length drama and epic, this course focuses on both sacred and secular poetry by such writers as John Donne, George Herbert, Aemelia Lanyer, and Ben Jonson, and prose by such writers as Francis Bacon and Thomas Browne.

338.3 (01) CONTEMPORARY NORTH AMERICAN INDIGENOUS LITERATURES

T1 TR 10:00 (Jenna Hunnef) – Category 4

“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.

380.3 (01) AMERICAN LITERATURE TO 1900

T1 M 17:30 (Kandice Sharren) – Category 3

Constance Fenimore Woolson opens the short story “Rodman the Keeper” with a character musing, “Keeper of what? Keeper of the dead? Well, it is easier to keep the dead than the living.” Written in the aftermath of the Civil War, Woolson’s story refers to the cemetery of Northern soldiers that Rodman is tasked with caretaking. However, the question of how to keep the dead can be extended to apply to the past more generally. In this course, we will explore how nineteenth-century writers in the United States inherit and reshape the colonial past to fit their present. While the emphasis will be on nineteenth-century writers, we’ll read them alongside the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors that help contextualize them. In addition to Woolson, authors we read may include Charles Brockden Brown, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, William Apess, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Elizabeth Stoddard, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt, and Edith Wharton.

382.3 (01) CANADIAN FICTION FROM 1960 TO PRESENT

T1 TR 08:30 (Lori Pollock) – Category 4, Canadian

Many writers of the 1960s and 70s embraced a renewed nationalism and were deeply invested in refashioning distinctly Canadian literature, but what does this mean? Books about beavers and bears? Maybe, because we’ll read the story of a woman and her ursine lover (you read that right) in Marian Engel’s Bear, which CBC’s Ideas calls “one of the most controversial books in the history of Canadian literature.” We’ll then discuss how changed immigration policy and the rise of the rhetoric of multiculturalism in the 1980s engaged new writers and created new audiences for Canadian literature, ones that often questioned its failure to represent the increasing heterogeneity of the nation. We’ll examine how racialized writers, as well as Indigenous authors, used short fiction and novels to put forth their own complicated and not always complimentary understanding of Canada. The remainder of the course will focus on the so-called CanLit dumpster fire, contextualizing and evaluating debates in relation to #UBCAccountable, Indigeneity, representation, and appropriation. Ultimately, we’ll discuss the future – is there a future? – of Canadian literature itself.

394.3 (01) LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY

T1 MWF 09:30 (Gerald White) – Non-category

This course will be a general survey of literary and cultural theory, beginning with antiquity and moving up to the present day.  We will begin by asking what literary theory is for and will try to how theoretically explicit approaches can enhance, or in some cases limit, the kinds of interpretive work that literary critics do.  The course will cover topics including New Criticism, Semiotics, Marxism, Feminism, Post-Colonialism, Deconstruction, Post-Modernism and canonicity.  The course textbook will be the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, and we will also draw on literary works such as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Chinua Achebe’s “The Egg,” assorted stories by Herman Melville, and a group of texts by Irish women writers.

• 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 Ella Ophir, e.ophir@usask.ca (until June 30) or Professor Brent Nelson, brent.nelson@usask.ca (after June 30).  

420.3 (01) TOPICS IN MEDIEVAL GENRES: EXTREME MEDIEVAL POETRY

T1 M 13:00 (Peter Robinson) – Category 1

This course introduces students to remarkable instances of poetry (“extreme poetry”) composed in Western Europe in the period between 500CE to 1500CE. The course asks: what is poetry and who are poets? How did the functions and types of poetry, and the roles and status of poets, differ both within the medieval period and from modern conceptions of poetry and poets? It explores these questions across examples of poetry composed in the thousand years from 500CE, in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, England, Spain, Iceland, Norway and Germany. All poetry will be read in the original language, including Old Gaelic, Old Irish, Old English, Old Spanish, Medieval Welsh, Old Norse and others. Along the way, we will learn how to read poetry in languages we have never studied, and the value of reading in the original language. The kinds of poetry we will read is as wide as the languages and histories the course covers: heroic elegy, epic, ecstatic love poetry, scathing satire and divine hymns.

464.3 (01) TOPICS IN 20TH C. AMERICAN LIT: THE AMERICAN GOTHIC

T1 W 15:30 (Lindsey Banco) – Category 4

In examining the gothic tradition in American literature, this course will seek ways that terror, the irrational, and the supernatural relate to national identity. Beginning with a brief look at the early gothic tradition in American literature and its increasing popularity in the nineteenth century, and then following it through the multitude of forms it takes—including the contemporary horror novel and film—in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this course investigates the American gothic’s central anxieties, its key questions, its primary thematic issues, and its recurring tropes. What does being American have to do with transgressing the boundaries between good and evil, safety and danger, sane and insane, and human and non- (or in-) human? What do incarnations of the American gothic tell us about those very categories? What do violence, racial and gender anxiety, ecological concerns, and regional hauntings tell us about America? Students are forewarned that the American gothic is sometimes disturbing, frightening, or violent; thus, some of the material in this course may be as well.

497.0 HONOURS COLLOQUIUM

T1/T2 (Brent Nelson) – 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 presentations 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 Brent Nelson at brent.nelson@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.

207.3 (02) INTRO TO COLONIAL AND DECOLONIZING LITERATURES

T2 TR 13:00 (Jay Rajiva) – Category 5

How do decolonizing literatures reflect on, represent, and challenge the material and discursive violence of colonization? This course provides an introduction to decolonizing literatures from Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean. As we read, we will be mindful of the historical and social conditions in which decolonizing literatures emerge, addressing topics such as border-crossings (literal and figurative), collective trauma, resistance, agency, identity and belonging, and the aesthetics of representing colonial and postcolonial violence.\

211.3 (02) HISTORY AND FUTURE OF THE BOOK

T2 online (Allison Muri) – Histories of English

This course is a journey through four thousand years of writing: from the invention of writing systems, the beginnings of literature inscribed on clay tablets, papyrus and parchment, through manuscripts and the invention of complex books, print and mass communication up to the internet, social media, and video gaming. We will see how books have changed, through many kinds of physical objects, to blinking pixels on screens. We will explore how what books contain and how we read them have changed. In sum, we will investigate how our concepts and experience of technology affect the way we read.

215.3 (62) LIFE WRITING

T2 TR 10:00 (Cynthia Wallace)

What does a medieval woman’s account of passionate piety have to do with your Facebook wall? 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, Tweets 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.

220.3 (04) STUDIES IN THE CRAFT OF WRITING

T2 TR 1430 (Sara Krahn) – 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 critiques 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 (W02) SHAKESPEARE: COMEDY AND HISTORY

T2 (online) (Ron Cooley)– 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. 

225.3 (62) SHAKESPEARE: TRAGEDY AND ROMANCE

T2 TR 10:00 (Arul Kumaran) – Category 2

Throughout his career Shakespeare wrote tragedies of romantic love, family and political conflict, and revenge, reaching his peak in this genre in the first decade of the 17th century. This course will focus on a selection of plays in this genre, and will also treat his late romances, a comic genre in which fateful adventures end in forgiveness and reconciliation between enemies.

226.3 (02) FANTASY AND SPECULATIVE FICTION

T2 MWF 14:30 (Brad Congdon)

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.

232.3 (02) GOTHIC NARRATIVE

T2 MWF 12:30 (Lindsey Banco) – Non-category

From Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein to Kyle Edward Ball’s recent experimental horror movie Skinamarink, horror fiction and film owe a significant debt to the Gothic mode. This course offers a survey of Gothic literature from its beginnings in the middle of the eighteenth century, through its enormous popularity in the nineteenth century, to the multitude of forms it takes—including the contemporary horror novel and film—in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In approaching the Gothic mode’s key questions, its main thematic issues, and its recurring stylistic features, this course will explore changes in our understanding of terror, the irrational, and the supernatural. What does it mean to transgress the boundaries between good and evil, safety and danger, sanity and insanity, and human and non- (or in-) human? What roles do violence, ghosts, decay, madness, racial and gender anxiety, ecological concerns, and regional hauntings have in our literary traditions? Students are forewarned that the Gothic is sometimes disturbing, frightening, or violent; some of the material in this course may be as well.

243.3 (02) INTRODUCTION TO INDIGENOUS LITERATURES

T2 TR 10:00 (Jenna Hunnef) - Category 4, Indigenous Learning Requirement

A broad introduction to the study of Indigenous literatures 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, Metis 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. A focus will be placed on students understanding the literatures in terms of their own position and context.

246.3 (02) SHORT FICTION

T2 MWF 11:30 (Ella Ophir) – Non-category

This course examines the development of short fiction from its origins in fable and folktale to its reinvention and flourishing within nineteenth-century magazine culture and the wild experimentalism of the early twentieth century. We will trace the form’s developing associations with social and political marginality, fragmentation, exile, and isolation, as well as consider its uses for popular genres including detective fiction, horror, and sci-fi. We may also delve into its cinematic cousin, the short film, and into contemporary forms of oral storytelling.

288.3 (02) INTRODUCTION TO FILM

T2 MWF 13:30; Lab T 16:00 (Gerald White) – Category 4

This course will seek to introduce students to the fundamentals of film analysis.  We will cover topics such as cinematography, editing, mise-en-scène, sound, etc.  We will also seek to cover a wide variety of filmmaking traditions, including documentary, animation, experimental, political cinema, etc.  There will be some focus on cinema from north of the 49th (and a bit of cinema from north of the 60th).  In addition to standard two-hour features, the screening sessions will also feature short films, and one or two very long films.

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 (02) OLD ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

T2 TR 08:30 (Yin Liu) – Category 1

This is the first of two courses in Old English (with ENG 310.3) intended to convey reading competence in Old English and to examine points of contact between the Anglo-Saxons and the Norse invaders of England. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records for the year 787 A.D. a first, non-productive interaction along the coast of Mercia between a local guard and some Norsemen. In succeeding centuries, the road of contact was rarely smooth, even after the Peace of Wedmore and the settlement of the Danes in the North and East of what was to become England. We will examine the processes of cultural interchange between these several Germanic peoples as they are presented in Old English primary sources, in translation from Latin or Old Norse where necessary, and in more recent texts of history and criticism. In order to gain the skills necessary to approach Anglo-Saxon materials in the original, we will devote this entire first course to the objective of acquiring grammatical and lexical competence in early West Saxon (c. 900), the literary language of Anglo-Saxon England.

316.3 (02) MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE OF DEFIANCE AND DISSENT

T2 T 16:00 (Peter Robinson) – Category 1

In England, the late Middle Ages (1100-1500) were a time of social and political upheaval as well as literary innovation. This course examines Middle English literary texts that reflected and participated in historical and intellectual change and debate. We will look at major authors (Chaucer, Langland, Malory) to explore how authors shaped debate about emerging political and cultural issues, and how their various approaches to the social ferment of the Middle Ages resonate to the present day.

341.3 (62) THE BRITISH NOVEL 1850 TO 1900

T2 TR 13:00 (Kylee-Anne Hingston) – Category 3

During the mid- to late-Victorian period, Britain was reeling from massive industrial, economic, and social changes begun in the first half of the century. In this turbulent time—a period of industrialization and urban growth as well as of tremendous anxieties about gender and sexuality, religion, class conflict, crime, and identity—the novel became the preeminent genre, and the novelist a potent force for social change. In this survey of British fiction from 1850 to 1900, we will examine how novelists developed and re-worked conventions of genre, narration, and narrative form to investigate their society’s cultural preoccupations.

358.3 (02) CANADIAN DRAMA

T2 MWF 10:30 (Wendy Roy) – Category 4, Canadian

This course will examine the changing place of plays in Canada's cultural and literary scene as a whole, but especially since the 1960s. The focus will be on plays that exemplify and critique distinctively Canadian thematic, historical, and social concerns, while also attending to stylistic aspects of playwriting and the material contexts and interpretive possibilities of performance. 

360.3 (02) BRITISH AND IRISH LITERATURE SINCE 1950

T2 MWF 11:30 (Ann Martin) – Category 4

In a defining moment for the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher is elected Prime Minister in 1979. The fraught cultural landscape of Thatcher’s election year will be the point of departure for this course, which will explore key works of British and Irish literature since 1950 in dialogue with texts published in and around 1979. Working from a moment that illuminated clashes of ideas surrounding Britain and Britishness that continue in this post-Brexit era, we will be addressing the status of the past as negotiated in the present, the agency of subjects and their relationships to the state, and the role of language in representations of identity. Authors will include Kingsley Amis, Sally Rooney, Zadie Smith, Philip Larkin, Liz Lochhead, Pink Floyd, and Ayub Khan-Din, and hopefully a song or two by the Clash.

366.3 (02) ADVANCED CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION

T2 W 1730 (TBD) – Non-category

This course focuses on the techniques of writing successful fiction, such as character creation, dialogue, narrative strategies, and prose style. Participants must be prepared to have their fiction 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

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 Ella Ophir, e.ophir@usask.ca (until June 30) or Professor Brent Nelson, brent.nelson@usask.ca (after June 30).  

404.3 (02) TOPICS IN 16TH CENTURY LITERATURE IN ENGLISH: MORE’S UTOPIA AND THE INVENTION OF IMAGINED WORLDS

T2 T 10:00 (Brent Nelson) – Category 2

This course considers the widely influential world of imaginative fiction in St Thomas More’s Utopia and its influence in English Renaissance literature and beyond in laying groundwork for fantasy and science fiction. We will trace the idea and formulation of eutopia/utopia in such precursors as Plato’s Republic and Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun and how More realizes the possibilities for examining and testing human social structures in a fictionalized world removed from but related to our own. We will expand our consideration of “Secondary Worlds” (taking our cue from Tolkien) into other modes of invented worlds, including imaginations of the “New World” in Montaigne and travel literature of the period, alongside Shakespeare’s The Tempest, before turning our attention to the extraterrestrial world of Francis Godwin’s Man in the Moone. We will then examine other instances of world building in selected seventeenth-century utopias, ending with the fantasy fiction of Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World.

488.3 (02) TOPICS IN GENRES AND CONTEXTS: BOOK HISTORY AND THE CRITICAL TURN

T2 W 13:30 (Kandice Sharren) – Category 3

At the heart of this course is the emerging field of critical bibliography, which Kate Ozment and Lisa Maruca define as “the intersection of critical theory and bibliographic study.” We’ll begin the semester with the fundamentals of descriptive bibliography, a methodology that involves the detailed physical description of books as material objects. Then, we’ll move on to explore how bibliography supports and informs the work of scholars in fields such as Black studies, feminist recovery, queer and trans studies, and Indigenous studies—as well as how these fields are reshaping the questions and methods of bibliography and the history of the book. We’ll pair our critical and theoretical readings with some short literary readings, as well as hands-on work with materials held in University Archives and Special Collections.

496.3 (62) CAREER INTERNSHIP

T2 M 13:30 (Sarah Powrie) – Non-category

The Career Internship course offers senior English students an opportunity to apply their skills and gain professional experience through internships with Saskatoon-based organizations and units within the University. Placements vary from year to year, but typically involve activities such as research, internal and external communications, grant writing, editing, and literacy outreach. Interns provide approximately seventy work hours to the organization in which they are placed. They also meet as a class every second week, completing assignments relating to their placements and a series of workshops on career and professional development. The Internship is an opportunity to experience, reflect on, and prepare for meaningful work after graduation.

497.0 HONOURS COLLOQUIUM

T1/T2 (Brent Nelson) – 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 Brent Nelson at brent.nelson@usask.ca