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.

200-Level Classes

HISTORIES OF ENGLISH CLASSES

Histories of English

210.3   Literary Canons and Cultural Power

T1        MWF   9:30-10:20       Sarah Powrie

The English literary canon has been a fraught and fiercely debated notion. Critics argue that the Western canon is elitist, ethnocentric, and sexist since it privileges European male voices while excluding the diverse array of postcolonial Anglophone writers. Defenders argue that the canon is non-political, that it represents the human condition, that a canon-less curriculum would erode our understanding of the literary past. This course seeks to engage this cultural debate about tradition and representation:  Whose works get read? Whose works have influence? And why does it matter?

211.3   History and Future of the Book

T2 online         Ron Cooley

This course is designed to introduce students to historical and contemporary developments in the technology and impact of the book. We will begin with oral pre-literate cultures, and move on to the invention of writing systems and scripts, the creation of papyrus and the scroll; we will explore medieval manuscripts, the invention and impact of the Gutenberg printing press, the origins (and futures) of the encyclopedia, the development of copyright law in the eighteenth century and its contemporary transformation; and move onto censorship; the social impact of mass-produced books and of digital texts; the relationships between media and literature; and the rise of social media. We will consider some recent developments in electronic literature, publishing, and book culture and the long history of the book that informed them. At every stage we will ask whether recent developments in communication technology compel us to ask new questions and seek new answers, or return us to old questions in new ways. 

200-LEVEL CLASSES

209.3   Transnational Literatures

T1        MWF  2:30-3:20          Jay Rajiva     Category 5

An introduction to literatures written between histories, geographies, and cultural practices and produced at the borders of nations and languages/lects, when authors move from one national and/or linguistic context to another, or when peoples are dispersed from their original homelands and settle in diasporic socio-cultural formations.

220.3   Studies in the Craft of Writing

T1        TR  2:30-3:50              Sara Krahn

T2        TR  2:30-3:50              Josiah Nelson     

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

T1        TR  10:00-11:20          Arul Kumaran              Category 2     

T2        online                          Ron Cooley

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   Shakespeare: Tragedy and Romance

T2        TR  10:00-11:20          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.

230.3   Literature for Children

T1        online                          Rhonda West

T2        TR  10:00-11:20          Kylee-Anne Hingston

What are the defining features of children’s literature? 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 content? And, most importantly, since children’s literature is written, published, and purchased by adults, what cultural purposes does children’s literature serve? To investigate these questions, we will learn about the history and development of children’s literature, reading folk and fairy tales that provide the genre’s roots, picture books aimed for pre-readers, and longer fiction for older children and young adults, published between the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries.

232.3   Gothic Narrative

T1        MWF   12:30-1:20       Lindsey Banco

From Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein to Kyle Edward Ball’s experimental 2022 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 considerable popularity in the nineteenth century, to the multitude of forms it takes—including contemporary horror novels and films—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 the human and non- (or in-) human? What roles do violence, ghosts, decay, madness, racial and gender anxiety, 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.

242.3   Indigenous Storytelling of the Prairies

T1        TR  10:00-11:20          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.

243.3   Introduction to Indigenous Literatures

T2        TR  2:30-3:50              Shakti Brazier-Tompkins              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   Short Fiction

T2        MWF   1:30-2:20         Ludmilla Voitkovska

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 possibilities 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.

254.3   Canadian Speculative Fiction

T1        MWF   10:30-11:20     Wendy Roy                 Category 4

When Saleema Nawaz’s Songs for the End of the World was published in spring-summer 2020, it was hailed as prophetic for how it imagined North America in the grip of a pandemic brought about by a coronavirus very much like COVID-19. This class will study speculative fiction in Canada, with a focus on dystopian and apocalyptic works that can help us think in critical ways about situations like global pandemics. We will start from the premise that such fiction is 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. The course will address Canadian short stories as well as novels; authors to be studied include Nawaz, Margaret Laurence, Hugh Hood, P.K. Page, Margaret Atwood, Wayde Compton, Cherie Dimaline, Emily St. John Mandel, and Waubgeshig Rice.

277.3   Literary Uses of Mythology

T1        online                           Jesse Stothers

An introduction to the theory of myth and selected examples of the classical and other myths most frequently adapted and reinterpreted in literature in English. The course emphasizes the ways in which different writers can find quite different kinds of significance in the same myth.

282.3   Feminist Critical Theory and Literature by Women

T1        TR  1:00-2:20              Cindy Wallace

"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? We will focus especially on fiction, poetry, and theoretical texts of the last fifty years, reading writers including Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, Chimamanda Adichie, Madeleine Thien, and Katherena Vermette.

286.3   Courtly Love and Medieval Romance

T2        MWF   2:30-3:20         Michael Cichon

Andreas Capellanus wrote that “love is a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex, which causes each one to wish above all things the embraces of the other and by common desire to carry out all of love's precepts in the other’s embrace.” Ramon Llull says that “for likewise as chivalry gives to a knight all that to him appertains, in likewise a knight ought to give all his forces to honor chivalry.” This course is a study of romantic love and chivalry in the literature of the Middle Ages. The medieval period saw the development of fundamental modes of western socialisation, including codes of chivalry and of fin’amors, or courtly love, which defines heterosexual union as the supreme experience for all who are truly gentle. Vernacular literature (writing in languages other than Latin) played a crucial role in disseminating these codes.  The course will focus on a number of medieval poems and romances which highlight the complementary and sometimes conflicting codes of chivalry and love.

288.3   Introduction to Film

T2        MWF  2:30-3:20 / Lab T 4:00-6:00     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 special 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.

294.3   Techniques of Canadian Poetry From Sonnet to Spoken Word

T2        TR  10:00-11:20          Kevin Flynn                             

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.