301.3   Old English Language and Culture

T1        TR  11:30-12:50          Michael Cichon           Category 1

English 301.3 is the first of two half-classes intended to convey reading competence in Old English.  In order to approach Anglo-Saxon materials, we will spend this entire first half-class acquiring grammatical and lexical competence in early West Saxon (c. 900), the literary language of Anglo-Saxon England. By December successful students will be able to read simple passages in Old English prose with the help of a glossary.

302.3   Creative Writing - Poetry

T2        T   6:00-8:50    Sherri Benning

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. 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 poems in varied styles and forms.

305.3   Canadian Fiction from Beginnings to 1960

T1        MWF   9:30-10:20       Kevin Flynn                 Category 4

This course studies the development of Canadian fiction in English to 1960 and may examine other forms of storytelling and non-fictional prose.

308.3   Creative Nonfiction Workshop

T1        T 6:00-8:50      Josiah Nelson

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.

310.3   Old English Literature

T2        MWF   11:30-12:20     Richard Harris             Category 1

A study of several poems and some prose passages in Old English, including elegies, battle narratives, and a more extensive consideration of Beowulf than in English 301, including its backgrounds and analogues.

312.3   Early Chaucer: Dream & Romance Tragedy

T2        MWF   9:30-10:20       Sarah Powrie              Category 1

The course investigates Chaucer’s early works: his dream visions and Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde was the Downton Abbey of its time. The narrative is part love-story, part historical drama, representing a forbidden romance within a glamorous society that is doomed but doesn’t recognize it yet.  In the dream visions, Chaucer explores the various powers of the imagination: as a source of creativity, as reserve of resilience, as a guide for living ethically. Studying Chaucer’s dream visions will help us recognize the importance of dreams in medieval culture and reflect on their significance in our own time.

331.3   Literature of the Romantic Period

T2        MWF   12:30-1:20       Kandice Sharren          Category 3

A study of British literature from 1780 to 1830, examining the nature of Romanticism and the usefulness of the term "Romantic," and emphasizing the works of such writers as William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and John Keats.

 

340.3   Eighteenth-Century British Literature

T1        MWF   10:30-11:20     Allison Muri                 Category 3

A time of rebels and reactionaries, Enlightenment Britain (1660-1800) saw writers respond to dramatic social change. In this brief but grand tour of literary modes and genres, students will encounter many of the ideas that underpin contemporary Eurocentric culture. The course will include works of satire and sentiment, amatory fiction and conduct books, political poetry, slave narratives, plays of wit, and the first periodicals. Featured authors may include Behn, Swift, Pope, Richardson, Fielding, Burney, and Johnson.

359.3   Western Canadian Literature

T2        MWF   9:30-10:20       Kevin Flynn                    Category 4

A study of Western Canadian literature in English, especially fiction, poetry, and drama, produced on the Canadian prairies.

362.3   The British Novel 1800 to 1850

T1        TR  10:00-11:20          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.

368.3   Approaches to 20th and 21st Century Poetry

T2        TR  2:30-3:50              Ella Ophir                    Category 4

Poetry has become closely identified with the expression of personal feeling, but it also has a long history as an eminently public form, suitable for occasions of collective celebration, remembrance, and grief. That history endures in the office of Poet Laureate in social organizations ranging from small communities to nation states. And in times of public crisis poetry still often springs to the fore—quoted in news coverage, going viral on social media—as people seek words adequate to their outrage or sorrow, and comfort in the binding power of collective feeling. This course will pick a path through the vast and varied terrain of twentieth and twenty-first century poetry by focussing on its public functions and the role it has played in relation to selected events, including wars, civil conflicts, and presidential inaugurations. At the heart of our explorations will be questions about the particular nature and power of poetic language, and the uses to which it is put in both private and public life. No prior knowledge of poetics will be assumed; students with little or no experience reading poetry are welcome and encouraged to take this course. I aim to have you leave this course with a strong foundation for further reading of poetry and, hopefully, a lifetime of enjoyment and enrichment from it.

377.3   Approaches to Modern and Contemporary Drama

T1        MWF   1:30-2:20         Ludmilla Voitkovska            Category 4

Reflecting the remarkable transformation of theatre in modernist and postmodern contexts, this course engages with dramatic texts and movements from the late nineteenth century through to contemporary plays and performances. While works in translation will be addressed, including those by Ibsen and Strindberg, the primary focus will be British, Irish, and American dramatists, such as Shaw, O’Neill, Beckett, Pinter, Williams, Hansberry, Stoppard, Churchill, and Kane.

381.3   American Literature from 1900 to the Present 

T1        MWF   2:30-3:20         Lindsey Banco                   Category 4

From the turn of the twentieth century, the United States has been marked by, among other things, two important literary and cultural phenomena: modernism and postmodernism. This course will focus on fiction and poetry but will examine these forms in the context of popular culture, more broadly. 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, to situate them in the contexts of traumatic events such as World Wars I and II and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and, in a post-9/11 and “post-truth” present, to ask: What’s next?

383.3   Decolonizing Theories and Literatures

T2        TR 10:00-11:20           Cindy Wallace                  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 discourses, reading such theorists as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Paul Gilroy, Gayatri Spivak, and Lee Maracle. As we seek to define key terms and trace important debates, we will approach our theoretical readings in conversation with literature, including possible texts by Jean Rhys, Chimamanda Adichie, Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott, Zadie Smith, and Thomas King.

394.3   Literary and Cultural Theory

T2        MWF   10:30-11:20     Lindsey Banco

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.