2024-2025 Course Timetable | Department of English (2024)

ENG302Y1 - English Renaissance Literature

Time(s):Monday 1-3 pm, Wednesday 1-2pm

Instructor(s):Christopher Warley

Brief Description of Course:I imagine this course as an antidote to the pessimism and resignation of contemporary life, because it introduces Renaissance literature and the many sorts of rebirths that literature, ever since, makes possible. The poetry, prose, and drama that erupts in the sixteenth century does something amazing: it imagines that human beings are historically diverse, and it generates a conception of art that creates future possibilities by unraveling any claim to an absolute point of view. The course traces these rebirths by focusing especially on the legacy of Petrarchan poetics and ending with Romeo and Juliet and the 2021 film West Side Story. Writers will probably include Petrarch, Wyatt, Luther, Montaigne, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Lanyer, Herbert, Herrick; from the classical past Virgil, Catullus, Ovid, Augustine; and criticism including Freccero, Burckhardt, Spitzer, Auerbach, Derrida, and Rancière.

Method of Evaluation: Several shorter papers, final test

ENG303H1S- Milton

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s):Thursday 1-4 pm

Instructor(s):John Rogers

Brief Description of Course:

A study of the writing of John Milton (1608-74), with a look at some examples of his outsized influence on the literary, political, and religious writing of succeeding centuries. The course will examine his major poetic works, paying particular attention to Paradise Lost, the epic that the blind poet wrote with the controversial ambition of rewriting the Bible and reimagining the universe.

We will explore Milton’s noisy effort to reinvent the sound and feel of English poetry. And we will confront his systematic attempts to use literature to force a rethinking of his age’s burning questions of political, religious, and cultural life, especially those of sovereignty, regicide, censorship, slavery, terrorism, physical disability, the relation of the sexes, the right to divorce, the path to heavenly salvation, and the very identity of God himself. At the term’s end, we will descend briefly into the hallucinatory world of William Blake, the Romantic poet and artist whose graphic novel in verse, The Book of Urizen, is a brilliant parody of Milton’s Paradise Lost. We’ll look additionally at Milton-related works of fiction by Ursula Le Guin and Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Students will find Paradise Lost especially exciting for its attempts to question and reframe traditional understandings of sexual hierarchy and cultural and religious authority.

Required Reading:The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. Kerrigan (Modern Library). Additional material will be made digitally available on the course’s Quercus site

First Three Authors/Texts:: Milton’s “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” Comus, and the sonnets “How Soon Hath Time” and “When I Consider.” These three texts are available in the Modern Library edition, as well as downloadable from the course site on Quercus.

Method of Evaluation:Shorter 4-page essay (20%); longer 6-page essay (35%); two brief quizzes (10% each); two directed reading responses, posted under “Discussions” on Quercus (10% total), and spirited class participation (15%).

ENG308Y1Y- Romantic Literature

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s):Monday 10 am -12 pm,Wednesday 10-11am

Instructor(s): Michael Johnstone

Brief Description of Course:This course will explore how writers of the British Romantic period (roughly, 1780 to 1832) responded to and participated in a time of intense and profound artistic, cultural, political, and social change at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. We’ll consider a range of themes and ideas central to the literature of the time, such as the sublime and the beautiful, revolution, gender and women’s rights, the Gothic, nature, slavery and abolition, form and genre, and imagination. Readings will focus on the works of authors such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld, William Blake, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Godwin, John Keats, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Ann Radcliffe, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Wordsworth.

Required Reading:TBD

Method of Evaluation:Fall Essay (20%), Fall Test (15%), Fall Participation (10%), Winter Essay (30%), Winter Test (15%), Winter Participation (10%)

What excites me about teaching this course isa love for the intense burst of literary experimentation and innovation and variety of the Romantic period, prompted by the experience of revolution. What is the nature of the Self? What is the power of the mind and imagination? How can literature play a direct role in changing the world for the better?

ENG311H1S-Medieval Literature

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s):Tuesday 3-5 pm, Thursday 3-4 pm

Instructor(s):Carroll Balot

Brief Description of Course:This course is an introduction to non-Chaucerian medieval literature for advanced undergraduates, with an emphasis on close reading. Our goal will be to formulate and enact a reading practice for each work that grows out of the unique demands of the text itself, considering the way these works have distinctive visions of the world and our place in it. We will also consider the meaning of the Middle Ages to modernity and the cultural impact of medievalism. Topics will include medievalism and nostalgia; death, grief, and consolation; imagining other worlds; and the sanctification of the body. This course will enable students to explore a very different worldview, characterized by a belief in an ethically comprehensible universe, and to consider the ways that our interest in the middle ages fulfills modern psychic needs.

Required Reading:The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Vol.1: The Medieval Period and Pearl (Broadview). The books are available as a package in the university bookstore.

First Three Authors/Texts:Eco, “Dreaming of the Middle Ages”; Malory, Morte Darthur (selections); Marie de France, Guigemar and Yönec.

Method of Evaluation:Short responses; 5-6 page essay; term tests; participation.

ENG320Y1 -Shakespeare

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s):Tuesday 1-2 pm, Thursday 1-3 pm

Instructor(s):Lynne Magnusson

Brief Description of Course:: A close study of selected plays and poems, this course equips students to explore Shakespeare’s themes and achievement in relation to plot construction, linguistic experimentation, genre, and stage craft. Attention will be paid to shaping influences, especially Shakespeare’s grammar-school education focused on classical literature and language arts. We will consider how the plays engage with early modern social and political contexts, including family, gender and sexuality, race and class; court, city, and country; theatre and print culture; nation and empire. We will reflect on how Shakespeare became such a major cultural icon, the continuing resonance of his work across the centuries, and re-interpretations today. The course also introduces some current developments in Shakespeare studies.

Method of Evaluation:Two short assignments (10% x 2), two essays (20% x 2), two term tests (10% x 2), issue sheets (10%), class participation/discussion (10%).

What excites me about teaching this course are the moments when – just as the rapt attention of the onlookers brings Hermione’s statue to life in The Winter’s Tale – our collaborative in-class close reading reawakens the joy of Shakespeare’s monumental art.

ENG323H1F - Austen and Her Contemporaries

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 1-3 pm,Thursday 1-2 pm

Instructor(s):TomKeymer

Brief Description of Course:Jane Austen is one of the most popular canonical novelists, yet also one of the most underestimated, often seen as a purveyor of wish-fulfilling romance. In this course we approach Austen by asking a series of associated questions about form, content, and context. How far was her fiction constrained, and how far was it enabled, by the emerging conventions of the novel genre and the dictates of consumer demand? What was new, distinctive, or otherwise important about her narrative technique and her social or moral vision? How far, and in what ways, was her writing conditioned by the turbulent politics of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars era? Is it right to read her as a conservative moralist, a progressive satirist and social critic, or as something of both?

Two of Austen’s major novels (Northanger Abbey and Persuasion) are at the heart of the course, and we will take the opportunity presented by the Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition to compare these works with writings left unpublished at her death, notably her epistolary story Lady Susan and the unfinished novel Sanditon. For context, we will also read a short novel by Austen’s radical contemporary Mary Wollstonecraft (The Wrongs of Woman) and extracts from other writers whose work Austen probably or certainly knew. As a way to understand the literary marketplace that Austen had to navigate, the course also includes an “adopt a book” research assignment. Using primary online resources (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, the Corvey Collection 1790-1840, and journalism databases such as 17th-18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers and 19th Century British Library Newspapers), each student will choose an obscure work of fiction or other writing published in Austen’s lifetime, analyze its literary qualities, and research its publication, newspaper marketing, and reception in reviewing periodicals.

Method of Evaluation: In-class commentary test (25%); “Adopt a book” research assignment (35%); Final essay (30%); Informed and energetic participation (10%).

What students will find unique about this courseis the emphasis on original individual research. Training will be provided in relevant digital humanities techniques, especially the use of full-text databases of rare books and periodicals in order to generate and analyze research results. In an age of exciting print proliferation, and when (for one Austen character) “newspapers lay everything open,” there is much to be learned through strategic use of the huge primary-source databases now available online.

ENG329H1F- Contemporary British Fiction

Section Number:LEC5101

Time(s): Monday 6-9pm

Instructor(s): Sara Salih

Brief Description of Course:During this half-year course we will be studying novels by writers based in Britain whose work addresses notions of ‘Britishness’ through the medium of fictional history and, in the case of Sebald, via investigations into memory and memorializing. All of the novels on the syllabus are to some extent preoccupied with one or both of the world wars and the ways in which these events shaped ideas about nationality, national belonging and nationalism, preoccupations which continue into the present-day. Through their fictionalizations of the past, each of these novels engages with questions of nationality, ethnicity, gender, class and sexuality, and these in turn press upon notions of Britishness. In our discussions, we will think about the unstable nature of ideas of nationality and the ways in which they may shift over time. We will also consider why representations of the past continue to be so popular in contemporary British fiction and the culture more broadly, and we will discuss the ways such representations may or may not hold a mirror up to the present.

Required Reading:

1. Pat Barker, Regeneration
2. Andrea Levy, Small Island
3. Ian McEwan, Atonement
4. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
5. W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

Method of Evaluation:Abstract, essay, in-class essay, participation

ENG329H1S- Contemporary British Fiction

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 3-6 pm

Instructor(s): Thom Dancer

Brief Description of Course:This is a course on contemporary fiction without regard to nation. This course looks at five 21st-century novels that actively thematise and reflect on what it means to be contemporary. It is a commonplace that Anglophone culture is undergoing one of the most rapid transformations in human history; developments in science, media, technology, and communication are radically revising how we understand our lives, our relationship to our physical environment, and our relations to others. We will ask how the contemporary novel at once reflects upon and prepares us for living, knowing, and acting in the unprecedented world in which we find ourselves. In order to address these concerns, we will read and think about novels as they engage in larger political, scientific, and philosophical conversations about the contemporary condition.

Required Reading:David Mitchell, Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kate Atkinson, Tom McCarthy, Colson Whitehead, David Shields, (subject to change).

First Three Authors/Texts:Klara and the Sun, Cloud Atlas, On Beauty

Method of Evaluation:Research Paper, Reading Responses, Participation, Group Project

ENG330H1F -Medieval Drama

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s):Monday 2-4 pm, Wednesday 2-3 pm

Instructor(s):Matthew Sergi

Brief Description of Course:

Medieval English players considered all types of play and game (sports, role-play, music, gambling, etc.) to be part of the same genre, but they never called any of it “drama” or “theatre” — let alone “literature” or “high art.” To strudy medieval drama, then, we have to roughen up our sense of what a dramatic text can be in the first place. In ENG 330, we will read from edited (but not translated) versions of most of the Middle English play texts that are known to survive from before 1485, focusing on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. No prior experience with Middle English (e.g., “Lyke as theos hynes, here stonding oon by oon”) is necessary: much of our first five weeks will be dedicated to Middle English translation skills. We will at once rely on the work of prior drama editors and learn to resist editorial assumptions about performance by interacting with rawer dramatic texts. Since most medieval plays were copied from texts meant primarily for insiders’ eyes — for players, not readers — we must attend as much to their implicit cues for action as we do to their dialogue, often asking volunteers (no pressure) to test out play scenes live in class. That kind of reading requires us to (and thus helps develop our ability to) better see the cultural concepts we take for granted — regarding drama, storytelling, belief, seriousness, taste, mortality, repression, and play — and to think outside our modernity.

Visit https://premodernity.net/eng-330 for ENG 330’s most recent full syllabus and schedule.

Method of Evaluation:

Engagement and Participation in class discussion sessions, 15%

Real-Time Comprehension Questions (CQs), asked at the end of each class session, 17.5%

Actual Attendance during at least 19 of our 23 class sessions, 10%

Translation/Edition Assignment, due during Week V, 17.5%

Middle English Comprehension Test, in class during Week V, 17.5%

Staging/Performance-Based Analysis Essay, due at the end of term, 22.5%

What students will find unique about this course isthat they will often be asked to overturn their prior assumptions about what a play has been, and can be.

Students will find [assigned course reading] especially interesting becausewho and how we are has always depended, and depends increasingly, on how we consume entertainment – so finding practices in the past that unsettle the given assumptions of modern entertainment can shake the conceptual furniture underneath us.

What excites me about teaching this course isthat it activates students as researchers, allowing them to uncover truly new evidence in often understudied texts.

ENG331H1S-Drama 1485-1603

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s):Monday 2-4 pm, Wednesday 2-3 pm

Instructor(s):MatthewSergi

Brief Description of Course:

We can reliably call British plays composed after 1603 “modern,” of which the earlier portion is “early modern,” while we call all British plays composed before 1485 “medieval.” Such periodizing labels do not adhere as easily to the period between 1485 and 1603, during which London-based styles and conventions gradually eclipsed a diversity of other regional performance traditions across Britain, some of which faded out of fashion, and others of which were forcibly prohibited. What is gained when drama becomes modern, and what is the cost of that gain, even now? What can be recovered? What should be left behind? ENG 331 will ask these questions in open-ended discussion, while introducing students to a representative sampling of dramatic literature generated across Britain during this steeply shifting, and stunningly fertile, transitional period, organizing its tour geographically, so that repeated returns to London are counterbalanced by drama and in-depth historical contexts from sixteenth-century Cheshire, Yorkshire, East Anglia, Cambridgeshire, Coventry, Wales, and Central Scotland. Students will learn the basics of British geography, and sixteenth-century history, in the process; many of our discussions will ask volunteers (no pressure) to act out dramatic dialogue in class. We will turn increasingly to the fascinating Records of Early English Drama to study archival evidence of the wide array of dramatic practices that did not leave play-scripts behind.

Visit https://premodernity.net/eng-331 for ENG 331’s most recent full syllabus and schedule.

Method of Evaluation:

Engagement and Participation in class discussion sessions, 15%

Real-Time Comprehension Questions (CQs), asked at the end of each class session, 17.5%

Actual Attendance during at least 20 of our 24 class sessions, 10%

Edition Critique and Recitation, due during Week VI, 20%

Early English Geography/History Test, in class during Week VI, 12.5%

Archival Research Essay, due at the end of term, 25%

What students will find unique about this course isthat it asks them to reconsider (but not reject) their own inherited aesthetic-formal habits as historical constructions – and to delve on their own into some truly raw archival material.

Students will find the assigned course readingespecially interesting because:who and how we are has always depended, and depends increasingly, on how we consume entertainment – so finding practices in the past that unsettle the given assumptions of modern entertainment can shake the conceptual furniture underneath us.

What excites me about teaching this course isthat it gives students the opportunity to challenge, critique, and reframe the “medieval”/“modern” model that I’m currently wrestling with in my own research.

ENG335H1S- Drama 1603-1642

Section Number:LEC5101

Time(s): Wednesday 6-9 pm

Instructor(s): Katherine Williams

Brief Description of Course: TBD

Required Reading:TBD

Method of Evaluation:TBD

ENG340H1S-Modern Drama

Section Number:L0101

Time(s):Monday 10 am -12 pm, Wednesday 10-11 am

Instructor(s):Philippa Sheppard

Brief Description of Course:This course explores twelve major plays of the first half of the twentieth century -- an era of rapid social and political change – in the light of new intellectual and artistic movements such as Naturalism, Surrealism, Feminism and Socialism. Using clips from filmed productions, we will delve into performance history to arrive at a better sense of what makes these seminal dramas as important today as in their own time.

Required Reading:Ibsen’sA Doll’s House; Strindberg’sMiss Julie;Chekhov’sUncle Vanya; Wilde’sThe Importance of Being Earnest; Yeats’On Baile’s Strand (online);Synge’sPlayboy of the Western World; Glaspell’sTrifles;Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author; Shaw’sSaint Joan; Brecht’sGalileo; O’Neill’sLong Day’s Journey into Night, Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.

Method of Evaluation:One in-class essay (20%); one take-home essay (35%); one three-hour exam (35%); participation (10%). I will take attendance each class, and make note of oral contributions, to arrive at the participation mark. Attendance is important. Handing in an outline for the take-home essay is mandatory, receiving a 2 mark bonus on the essay if properly executed.

What students will find unique about this course is it focuses solely on the best examples of Modern drama, instead of on novels or poems.

Students will find these plays especially interesting because they emerge from different cultures, covering a fascinating range of topics from sexual jealousy and aristocratic lifestyles to spousal murder and drug addiction.

What excites me about teaching this course is introducing plays that are consistently remounted to a new generation of students/spectators.

ENG341H1F-Postmodern Drama

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday10 am -12 pm, Thursday10-11 am

Instructor(s):Philippa Sheppard

Brief Description of Course:This course investigates twelve major plays of the turbulent post World War II era -- an era of rapid social and political change – in the light of new intellectual and artistic movements such as: Absurdism, Feminism, and Post-Colonialism. Clips from filmed productions will act as a springboard for discussions about changing modes of performance in these exciting works of drama which are as important today as in their own time.

Required Reading:Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, Miller’s The Crucible, Osborne’s Look Back In Anger, Beckett’s Happy Days; Pinter’s The Homecoming; Churchill’s Vinegar Tom; Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman; Friel’s Translations, Shepard’s True West, Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, Stoppard’s Arcadia, Ins Choi’s Kim’s Convenience.

Method of Evaluation:One in-class essay (20%); one take-home essay (35%); one three hour exam (35%); participation (10%). I will take attendance each class, and make note of oral contributions, to arrive at the participation mark. Attendance is important. Handing in an outline for the take-home essay is mandatory and receives a 2 mark bonus on the essay grade if properly executed.

What students will find unique about this course is that it focuses entirely on the best examples of drama instead of novels or poetry.

Students will find these plays especially interesting because they cover a surprising range of topics from witchcraft and Western films to tribal ritual suicide and the gentrification of Toronto neighbourhoods.

What excites me about teaching this course is introducing plays that are consistently remounted in theatres across the world to a new generation of students/spectators.

ENG347H1Y- Victorian Literature

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s): Monday11am -1pm, Wednesday11am-12pm

Instructor(s): Hao Li

Brief Description of Course:This is a critical introduction to major genres of Victorian literature. It offers an opportunity to explore how novelists, poets and (non-fictional) prose writers respond to crisis and transition: the Industrial Revolution, the Idea of Progress, and the Woman Question; conflicting claims of liberty and equality, empire and nation, theology and natural selection; the Romantic inheritance, Art for Art’s Sake, Fin de siècle, and Decadence. What students will find unique about this course is the rhetorical analysis of non-fictional prose works, which will likely help improve their own essay writing. Students will find the multi-genre setup especially interesting because they get to see how works of different genres converse with each other in responding to the same historical issues. What excites me about teaching this course is the intellectual stimulation the works will offer and the open-ended discussion they tend to generate. The reasonable course reading load will also allow students to read the works and think about them before class discussion.

Required Reading:

1. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. Ed. Stefan Collini. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.
2. Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 1847. Ed. Ian Jack. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.
3. Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. 1860-1. Ed. Margaret Cardwell. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.
4. Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. 1895. Ed. Patricia Ingham. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.
5. Victorian Prose and Poetry. Eds. Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973.
6. A Quercus course reader.

(Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 are available at the U of T Bookstore)

First Three Authors/Texts:: Emily Brontë, Tennyson, Carlyle

Method of Evaluation:Two essays, two tests, informed participation (including eight Quercus discussion board entries).

ENG348Y1 - Modern Poetry to 1960

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday12-2 pm, Thursday12-1pm

Instructor(s): Ming Xie

Brief Description of Course:This course is a special study of the representative poets of the modern(ist) period. The course aims for an in-depth engagement with some of their most significant works and a critical understanding of their poetic theories, modes, and techniques, as well as their intellectual and cultural perspectives. What students will find unique about this course is the distinction between the chronologically modern (i.e. a modern poem that is apparently more “traditional” than “modernist”) and the radically modern (i.e. “modernist”) and the tension between these two modes of consciousness. Students will find the assigned course readings especially interesting for their engagement with historical, political, and cultural issues that continue to impact our contemporary era and for their range of formal innovations and revolutionary modes of representation and reading practices. Students will be intrigued by the depth of anxieties and the variety of opportunities inherent in modern and modernist poetry. Our primary focus will be on developing skills of close reading and comparative analysis, in order to understand these challenging poetic works and their intellectual contexts.

Method of Evaluation:

• Informed participation, 10%
• First essay, 20%
• Mid-term test, 15%
• Second essay, 30%
• Final test, 25%

ENG349H1F-Contemporary Poetry

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s):Tuesday 3-4 pm, Thursday 2-4 pm

Instructor(s):Ming Xie

Brief Description of Course:This course introduces the work of contemporary poets such as Bishop, O’Hara, Creeley, Plath, Hughes, Larkin, Heaney, Ashbery, Walcott, Hejinian, and Duffy, in a variety of poetic styles and movements. It aims to provide an in-depth engagement with some of their representative works and a critical understanding of their poetic, intellectual, and cultural perspectives. What students will find unique about this course is the variety of ways of thinking about what in fact constitutes “the contemporary” and what “the poetic” might be. Students will find the assigned course readings especially interesting for their engagement with topical issues of our contemporary era, as well as their range of both traditional forms and new formal experiments. Our primary focus will be on developing skills of close reading and comparative analysis, in order to understand thought-provoking works and their intellectual contexts and to build confidence in critical interpretation and evaluation.

Method of Evaluation:Participation, 15%; essay 1, 25%; essay 2, 35%; final test, 25%.

ENG350H1S- Early Canadian Literature - CANCELLED

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s):Tuesday 2-4 pm, Thursday 2-3 pm

Instructor(s): Nick Mount

Brief Description of Course:According to the most well-known literary critic Canada has yet produced, early Canadian literature is “as innocent of literary intention as a mating loon.” Perhaps—but literature’s intentions were not always literary. This course explores the literary and extra-literary intentions of literature in Canada up to the First World War. Yes, of course we will read Anne of Green Gables. But there are stranger, bloodier, and funnier stories than Anne’s to come out of early “Canada.”

Method of Evaluation:Two essays and in-class participation.

ENG352H1F- Canadian Drama

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s):Tuesday 2-5pm

Instructor(s): George Elliott Clarke

Brief Description of Course:We will read seven Canadian playwrights who take their cues from the Bard of Avon, and who thus riff off (or rip off) Bill Shakespeare’s canon, recasting his plots and characters to address our contemporary concerns regarding classism, environmentalism, imperialism, racism, and sexism. We will examine Canadian rewrites and/or adaptations of Othello, Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, and King Lear to determine how well they ‘re-engineer’ the Elizabethan dramatist to suit our own time. The playwrights? Gass, Macdonald, O’Brien, Pierre, Sears, and Shields. We will also read Keith Garebian’s biography of William Hutt (1920-2007), perhaps Canada’s greatest Shakespearean actor, to appreciate better how Canadians have reinterpreted ‘Billy S.’(Note: Extensive knowledge of Shakespeare's plays is not a prerequisite for this course.)

Method of Evaluation:Two in-class essay-writing assignments and participation.

What excites me about teaching this course is interacting with theatre people, those devotees of acting, playwriting, stagecraft in all of its endless permutations. Moreover, teaching Canadian Drama is always a delight for me because I know that plays are the very best way to see into the psyche and the soul of the nation or culture from which they originate. Whenever and wherever a Canadian play is staged, the nation itself is put on trial–whether for tragic or for comedic effect.

ENG353Y1- Canadian Fiction

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 11 am-12pm, Thursday 11 am-12 pm

Instructor(s):Tania Aguila-Way

Brief Description of Course:This course will offer a survey of Canadian Fiction from the nineteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on novels and a few representative short stories. Lectures will situate our primary texts in their cultural and historical contexts, always paying attention to the relationship between thematic content and narrative form. Class discussions will address subjects such as the role of storytelling in building community and nation; the role of fiction in documenting the past and speculating on the future; the relationship between Canadian Fiction and Indigenous storytelling traditions; and the influence of diasporic writing in Canada.

Required Reading:Works by Chelsea Vowel, Catherine Parr Traill, Charles G.D. Roberts, Sinclair Ross, Elizabeth Smart, Mordecai Richler, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Wayson Choy, Dionne Brand, Thomson Highway, Shyam Selvadurai, Larissa Lai, Madeleine Thien, Souvankham Thammavongsa, David Chariandy, Suzette Mayr, Paola Ferrante, and Casey Plett.

First Three Authors/Texts:Chelsea Vowel, Catherine Parr Traill, Charles G.D. Roberts

Method of Evaluation:

Short Essay #1 15%

Short Essay #2 20%

Final Essay30%

In-class reading responses 20%

Class participation 15%

What students will find unique about this course is its combination of canonical texts with works by lesser known and emergent Canadian authors.

Students will find course readings especially interesting because of how they speak to longstanding, but also timely, questions regarding national identity, the ethical dimensions of writing and reading fiction, and the role of fiction in imagining more just and sustainable futures in times of crisis.

What excites me about teaching this course is sharing the richness and diversity of Canadian fiction with my students.

ENG354Y1- Canadian Poetry

Section Number:LEC5101

Time(s):Thursday 6-9 pm

Instructor(s):Vikki Visvis

Brief Description of Course:A study of English-Canadian poetry from the nineteenth century to the present day. This survey course will begin with an analysis of poems from the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly the confluence of Romantic and nationalist influences in the works of Confederation Poets. We will continue with a discussion of poetry in Canada from 1920 to 1960, addressing the modernism of the Montreal Group, debates over “native” or nationalist and “cosmopolitan” or internationalist poetic influences, and mid-century women’s poetry. The course will close with an examination of late twentieth and early twenty-first-century poetry. Special attention will be given to issues of masculinity; women writing desire; formal experimentation in concrete, sound, and second-wave feminist poetry; multiculturalism, particularly Jewish-Canadian, Indigenous, and “Africadian” poets; and ecological poetry in Canada.

Required Reading:Course Reader with poetry by Charles Sangster, Isabella Valancy Crawford, Charles G. D. Roberts, Duncan Campbell Scott, Archibald Lampman, E. Pauline Johnson, A. J. M. Smith, F. R. Scott, A. M. Klein, Dorothy Livesay, E. J. Pratt, Earle Birney, Irving Layton, Raymond Souster, Louis Dudek, P. K. Page, Miriam Waddington, Margaret Avison, Jay Macpherson, Anne Wilkinson, Al Purdy, Michael Ondaatje, Patrick Lane, Margaret Atwood, Lorna Crozier, Dionne Brand, Daphne Marlatt, Betsy Warland, Phyllis Webb, bp Nichol, Lola Lemire Tostevin, bill bissett, Christian Bök, Eli Mandel, Leonard Cohen, Anne Michaels, Beth Brant, Lee Maracle, Marilyn Dumont, Gregory Scofield, Don McKay, Robert Bringhurst, Dennis Lee, and Jan Zwicky. Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (Vintage); Margaret Atwood, Journals of Susanna Moodie (Oxford); Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red (Vintage); George Elliott Clarke, Whylah Falls (Polestar). Course Reader available on course Quercus site. Texts by Ondaatje, Atwood, Carson, and Clarke available at the University of Toronto Bookstore (214 College Street, 416-640-7900).

Method of Evaluation:One first-term essay (20%); one second-term essay (30%); one first-term test (15%); one final examination (25%); class participation (10%).

What students will find unique about this course isits combination of approaches—both historical contextualization and close formal engagement—to the study of over almost 200 years of Canadian poetry.

Students will find assigned course readings especially interesting becausethey reveal the evolutionary changes, rich diversity, and surprising uniqueness of Canadian poetry.

What excites me about teaching this course is working with students to unearth their own interpretive responses to Canadian poetry.

ENG357H1F - New Writing in Canada

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s):Thursday 1-4 pm

Instructor(s): Samaro Kamboureli

Brief Description of Course:This course is as much about “new writing” in Canada as about what “new” and “writing” can mean.

What and how does new signify—historically, culturally, socially, generically, aesthetically—when applied to writing in Canada? Is it possible to conceive of newness as referring to something entirely new, unalloyed by what came before it? New in relation to what? What happens when the new becomes old news? To answer these—and related questions—we’ll think of newness temporally and relationally: in relation to what precedes it, i.e., how it reforms or deconstructs what it departs from. And since the epithet new is inextricably related to modernity, progress, and innovation, we’ll also engage with some of the contexts and politics of these concepts.

Our discussions will focus on a selection of Canadian authors whose works will expose us to a range of “new” textualities. From the first novel by Nisga’a poet Jordan Abel that reimagines the classic settler novel The Last of the Mohicans* and the semi-fictionalized autobiography of a nude dancer that has become a cult comic to a speculative narrative by Larissa Lai about a dystopic future of bioengineering that still remains tied to ancient mythologies and to an Inuit film that invites us to view it as a visual scripting of oral literature about the last shaman in Nunavut, we’ll encounter beguiling characters, uncanny circ*mstances, and unconventional writing styles that stretch the horizon of the familiar and test the limits of the new.

Tentative Texts: Jordan Abel, Empty Spaces; Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn, dirs., The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (film); Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl; Suzette Mayr, The Sleeping Car Porter; Sylvie Rancourt, Melody: Story of a Nude Dancer; Fred Wah, Diamond Grill; and a course pack that will include a sampling of “old” and “new” avant-garde poetry as well as a small selection of critical essays.

*Not required reading but highly recommended: James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and/or its 1992 film adaptation (both available at Robarts and on the course reserve).

First two authors: Mayr, Wah

Method of Evaluation (subject to change):

• Active participation & attendance 15%
• Debate teams (collaborative project) 15%
• Essay (6-8 pp.) 35%
• “Innovative” essay (3-4 pp.) 20%
• In-class test 15%

ENG364Y1- American Literature 1900 to present

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s):Tuesday2-4 pm, Thursday 2-3 pm

Instructor(s): Augustus Durham

Brief Description of Course:

To call the color blue ubiquitous is somewhat obvious. The sky; water, ranging from lakes to oceans; clothing as ordinary as denim jeans—all of these entities and objects project blueness. And yet, the color has a cultural phenomenon that opposes these exterior realities, and instead chronicles the interior life.

Prior to the transatlantic slave trade, blue symbolized more than just a color. Whether from the mourning rituals and the material culture of textiles in western Africa to the blue devils of England and early America, blueness has moved from the simple to the complex. Encompassing the tangible and the affective, blue has a history that is as varied as its multiple uses. Therefore, this class will undertake charting what blue looks and feels like in order to explore the terrain of a color engendering character.

Utilizing various forms of media, including film, sound, television, and text, this class looks at blue in its variance: music genre, melancholic comportment, color palette, national sentiment, race play, poetic muse. Examining blue in all of its shades, the class intends to show that being kind of blue is a descriptor of everything.

Method of Evaluation:Weekly homework, Personal Essay, Midterm, Final Project

What students will find unique about this course is the specificity of how a color is experienced along lines of difference.

Students will find assigned course readingsespecially interesting because the ways of thinking about a color are more vast than one imagines.

What excites me about teaching this course is students implementing what they have learned to educate each other about a color at the end of the course.

ENG365H1S -Contemporary American Fiction

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s): Monday 2-5 pm

Instructor(s): Scott Rayter

Brief Description of Course:How do contemporary American fiction writers deal with the politics of representation in their works, particularly in relation to identity—be it national, historical, sexual, gender, ethnic, or racial—and within a larger postmodern context of questioning subjectivity itself?

Method of Evaluation:Passage analysis, essay, take-home exam, participation

ENG367H1F-African Literatures in English

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s):Monday 3-5 pm, Wednesday 3-4 pm

Instructor(s):Comfort Azubuko-Udah

Brief Description of Course:This course is an exploration of some of the foundational as well as emerging concerns and investments of African literatures in English. The texts we will read and discuss will allow us to dive into some of the foundational conversations in the field, while also making room for topics and voices that are newer or quieter. Course materials will inform introductory lessons and conversations on postcolonialism, African feminisms, nationalisms, the history of African literatures in English, the rise of the novel in Africa, oral literature and African poetry, and African genre fiction.

Method of Evaluation:Three 2-page close reading essays, in-class work and discussion participation, quizzes, and a peer review assignment.

What excites me about teaching this course is witnessing students discover and learn to appreciate a variety of texts they might not have encountered otherwise. It is also particularly exciting to witness lively participation during class discussions, which enhances the learning experience for everyone. The class atmosphere is encouraging, and class time is structured to provide ample opportunity for both small group and whole class discussions, framed by short lectures and guiding questions from me.

What students have found unique about this course is the peer review assignment, which comes with detailed and helpful guidelines for reviewing and revising an essay. Students appreciate that it provides a structured system for receiving feedback from multiple reviewers, and also emphasizes writing and close reading skills as core course objectives.

ENG371H1F-Topics in Indigenous, Postcolonial, and Transnational Literatures: Pacific Islands Literature

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s):Monday 4-5 pm, Wednesday 3-5 pm

Instructor(s): Rebecca Hogue

Brief Description of Course:This course centers Indigenous writing from the Pacific Islands, not as “islands in a far sea” but as Tongan writer Epeli Hau’ofa powerfully reinscribed, a “sea of Islands.” Engaging with a multitude of textual forms, we will be inspired by Banaban scholar/activist/poet Teresia Teaiwa’s notion of the “polygenesis” of Pacific Islands literatures; that is, how Pacific Islands literatures have multiple and intersecting artistic and historic influences. We will read oral histories, navigational charts, paintings, photographs, poetry, fiction, personal narratives, film, carvings, tattoo, and regalia. Discussions will analyze the roles of storytelling practices in historical and contemporary ecological and political relationships, including climate change, demilitarization, sovereignty, the protection of sacred sites, and more.

Required Reading:Selected readings from Patricia Grace (Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Raukawa and Te Āti Awa), Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner (ri-Majel), Albert Wendt (Samoan), Vilsoni Hereniko (Rotuman), Terisa Siagatonu (Samoan), Selina Tusitala Marsh (Samoan and Tuvaluan), Haunani-Kay Trask (Kanaka Maoli), Déwé Gorode (Kanaky), Konai Helu Thaman (Tonga), Jully Makini (Solomon Islander), Grace Mera Molisa (ni-Vanuatu), Tayi Tibble (Te Whānau ā Apanui, Ngāti Porou), Brandy Nālani McDougall (Kanaka Maoli)

Method of Evaluation:
Discussion Posts 10%
Response Papers 15%
Short Paper 25%
Participation 15%
Final Paper35%

Students will find Pacific Islands Literatures especially exciting for their creative engagements with multiple artistic forms and their interrogations of power, gender, capitalism, and environmental issues.

ENG372H1S-Topics in Indigenous, Postcolonial, and Transnational Literatures: Feminisms of Colour

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s): Thursday2-5 pm

Instructor(s): Rijuta Mehta

Brief Description of Course:What does feminism do? How does it shift the questions of race and empire? This course will introduce you to some key concepts and debates in and around the field of Feminist Cultural Studies. We will engage with texts by racialized practitioners of resistance, work through theoretical debates about speech and silence—especially focusing on why BIPOC life activities are seen as resistance acts—and bring our insights to bear upon questions of global feminist solidarity in media forms.

Method of Evaluation:Essays, Class Discussion, Media Project or Seminar Presentation

ENG373H1F-Topics in Pre-1800 British Literature: King Arthur, Britishness, and Empire

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s):Tuesdays 1-2 pm, Thursdays 1-3 pm

Instructor(s): Sebastian Sobecki

Brief Description of Course:Why has King Arthur enthralled readers for the last 1000 years? While the romances, or adventure tales, about his Knights of the Round Table may have been told and re-told across all cultural forms, medieval England’s original Arthurian literature holds up a mirror to the deepest fears and dreams of its audiences. These romances idealise adultery, negotiate the role of women, and lay the foundations for the British Empire.

More than any other variety of medieval writing, romances connect the literature of the Middle Ages with that of both earlier and later periods. They blend Classical myth with Celtic mystique, oriental exotica with local issues. Romances tell stories about King Arthur and his court, the Crusades, and ancient English princes. In this course we will explore the romance tradition in England, with special attention to the origin and development of the Arthurian canon, the political meaning of Englishness and Britishness, the self-examination of courtly ethics and gender relations, and the ideological origins of the British Empire. The course will not only examine the aristocratic culture of medieval England but will also demonstrate how premodern writings inform the literature of later periods.

Method of Evaluation: Attendance and Participation (20%); Presentation (20%); First Essay (20%); Write-A-Romance Project (20%); Final Essay (20%)

What students will find unique about this course is how it inverts their ideas of the Middle Ages.

Students will find the course reading especially interesting because it shows just how creatively medieval audiences imagined the role of women and the world human relationships, how they experimented with ideas of empire and colonialism, and how they wished to escape their own realities.

What excites me about teaching this course is that it allows students to eavesdrop on intimate relationships between medieval people and listen to their innermost secrets: their desire for power and their need to be loved.

ENG373H1F -Topics in Pre-1800 British Literature: Early Modern Romance

Section Number:LEC0201

Time(s): Wednesday 1-3 pm, Friday 1-2pm

Instructor(s):Andrea Walkden

Brief Description of Course:The narrative form known as romance was both old and new for early modern readers. Stories of knight errantry, supernatural marvels, and sexual temptations were familiar from the medieval chivalric tradition. But a rising generation of writers, including Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and Mary Wroth, transformed this popular genre into the period’s most sophisticated and outrageous mode of literary art. We will connect their experiments in narrative to the age’s debates over mobility and migration, promiscuity and chastity, gender fluidity and performance, marriage and friendship. And we’ll explore, too, how romance invites readers to extend its fictional universe, anticipating the online communities of contemporary fanfiction. Along the way, we will encounter a diverse cast of superhuman, human, and other-than-human characters as we explore the shifting landscapes of romance fiction in relation to the religious and racialized geographies of the Mediterranean basin, the African continent, the British islands, and the Atlantic world.

Method of Evaluation:five informal and exploratory discussion posts (25%), participation (15%), two essays, of around 4-6 pages (60%)

What students will find unique about this course is the opportunity to read obsessively, vicariously, propulsively—in the same way they might binge watch an entire season of a show on TV.

ENG373H1S-Topics in Pre-1800 British Literature: Shakespeare's Tragi-Comedies

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 10 am - 12 pm,Thursday 10-11 am

Instructor(s): Philippa Sheppard

Brief Description of Course:Shakespeare, from 1608 onwards, responded to his company’s adoption of an indoor venue, Blackfriars, and new aesthetic demands from his audience, by helping to pioneer a fresh genre of drama: the tragi-comedy or romance. Influenced by Greek myths and epics, the sophisticated court masque, and folk- and fairy-tale, these five late plays are linked by common themes: reconciliation, renewal and wish-fulfilment. These tragi-comedies provoke questions about the nature of power, family identity, and the role of the arts in society. Recent productions on stage and screen will animate our study.

Required Reading:Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Two Noble Kinsmen.

Method of Evaluation:One in-class essay (20%); one take-home essay (35%); one three-hour exam (35%), participation (10%). I will take attendance each class, and make note of oral contributions, to arrive at the participation mark. Attendance is important. Handing in an outline for the take-home essay is mandatory, receiving a 2 mark bonus on the essay if properly executed.

What students will find unique about this course is it brings together three relatively obscure Shakespeare plays, two co-authored, with two famous ones.

Students will find the plays especially interesting because they treat a remarkable range of topics from incest and magic to sexual rivalry and madness.

What excites me about teaching this course is that at least three of these plays will be utterly fresh to my students. More Shakespeare to love!

ENG374H1S-Topics in Pre-1800 British Literature: Premodern Ecologies - CANCELLED

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s): Monday 1-3 pm,Wednesday 1-2 pm

Instructor(s):Andrea Walkden

Brief Description of Course:What might it mean to think with the premodern past about our environmental histories and futures? In this course, we will set literary works written before 1700 alongside contemporary reporting on the Anthropocene, the relatively new (and still contested) term for our current geological epoch. Together we will explore how recent debates about climatic change, migration, habitation, population, sustainability, extraction, and resource depletion find their unlikely counterparts and, in some instances, their conceptual beginnings in premodern practices, figurations, and modes of thought. As we extend our ecocritical inquiries backward, we will also be alert to the ways in which earlier artists, writers, and readers can reorient our current perceptions of non/human personhood, the planetary Earth system, and the precarity of the living world. Our course readings will be located primarily in the real (and unreal) landscapes and wetscapes of the British islands. But we will also be spending time on the frozen tundra of the Arctic, at the bottom of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, among the interstellar colonies of the Hainish universe, and along the coastlines of the Caribbean.

Primary texts include selections from Genesis and book 1 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; the medieval quest narrative, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (in modern translation); voyage narratives by George Best and José de Acosta; John Lyly’s pastoral drama, Galatea; Shakespeare’s forest comedy, As You Like It; lyric cogitations on vegetable and animal life by Andrew Marvell, Hester Pulter, Edmund Waller, and Margaret Cavendish; and essays by the experimental scientists, naturalists, and encyclopaedists, Philemon Holland (the translator of Pliny’s Natural History), John Evelyn, and Thomas Browne. Critical, conceptual, and creative readings to include works by Rachel Carson, Amitav Ghosh, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

Method of Evaluation:five informal discussion posts (25%); in-class participation (15%); a 4-page experimental essay, creative or critical (25%); a 6-page final essay or an 8-10-page revision and expansion of the experimental essay (35%).

What excites me about teaching this course is the opportunity to explore what the premodern past can tell us about life today on our disrupted planet.

ENG374H1S -Topics in Pre-1800 British Literature: Medieval English Travel Writing

Section Number:LEC0201

Time(s): Tuesday 1-2 pm,Thursday1-3 pm

Instructor(s): Sebastian Sobecki

Brief Description of Course:Despite the lack of cars, trains, and planes, the medieval world felt, in many ways, no smaller than ours: adventurers, crusaders, fishermen, mercenaries, penitents, pilgrims, spies, students, traders, all travelled widely throughout and beyond Europe in the Middle Ages. Medieval people were fascinated with the worlds that lay beyond their town or country, beyond Europe, beyond Jerusalem, beyond the seas, beyond the known.

This course will concentrate on a range of travel accounts and voyage tales, from the Asian wonders of John Mandeville’s Travels to the role of King Richard Coeur-de-Lion during the Crusades. In addition to less familiar texts, such as the graphic war accounts of John Page’s Siege of Rouen and John Kay’s Siege of Rhodes, we will work with new editions of the oriental romance Floris and Blancheflour, the pilgrim guidebook The Stacions of Rome, Chaucer’s mysterious account of magic in The Squire's Tale, and King Arthur’s conquests in the Alliterative Morte Arthure.

In our readings we will encounter imagined places (Australia, Brazil) and real ones, such as the end of the world. Our weekly themes will follow our textbook, which was specifically written for this course: 'Places, Real and Imagined', 'Maps the Organisation of Space', 'Encounters', 'Languages and Codes', 'Trade and Exchange', and 'Politics and Diplomacy'

Method of Evaluation: Attendance and Participation (20%); ‘Adopt AMap’ Research Assignment (20%); First Essay (20%); Rome Pilgrim Project (20%); Final Essay (20%)

What students will find unique about this course is that it explores premodern ideas of race and geography, conflict and cultural encounter.

Students will find our textbook, Anthony Bale and Sebastian Sobecki, ed., Medieval English Travel: A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), especially interesting because it includes some of the most exotic and surprising literature to have survived from the Middle Ages.

What excites me about teaching this course is to see how the encounter with the global Middle Ages - its fears, monsters, and topographies – changes our own sense of self and place in the world.

ENG377H1F- Topics in Theory, Language, Critical Methods: Literature and Psychoanalysis

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday 2-3pm, Thursday 2-4 pm

Instructor(s): Carroll Balot

Brief Description of Course:As a “talking cure” involving empathetic listening, reflection, and exploratory interpretations, psychoanalysis has many similarities with literary criticism. We will read some of the foundational texts of the psychoanalytic tradition, beginning with Sigmund Freud and including Melanie Klein, Wilfrid Bion, Donald Winnicott, Thomas Ogden, and Jacqueline Rose, Joyce McDougall, Christopher Bollas, and others. Rather than developing a single psychoanalytic methodology, we will discuss the development of new perspectives and place these theories in dialogue with literary works and films such as Pat Barker’s Ghost Road, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, and Christopher Nolan’s Memento. This course will enable students to consider the psychological dynamics of creativity and the transformative experience of reading.

Method of Evaluation:Short response papers; term tests; essay; participation.

ENG378H1F-Special Topics: Victorian Realist Novels

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s): Monday 12-3 pm

Instructor(s): Audrey Jaffe

Brief Description of Course:The realist novel was the dominant genre of the Victorian period, and a powerful force in what Ian Watt dubbed “the rise of the novel” from the eighteenth-century on. And yet there is very little agreement about what realism was, and a great deal of critical debate about what constituted it. Some novels create a “reality effect” so powerful that we forget we are reading about imaginary persons and events, while others use what seem like “unreal” tactics to take on the idea of the real. Students who are interested in any aspect of novel-reading will find their understanding enhanced by this course.

Required Reading:(subject to change): Dickens, Hard Times; Eliot, Adam Bede; Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge; Trollope, An Autobiography; Gissing, New Grub Street.

Method of Evaluation:Two essays, 20% and 25%; active class participation and class presentation, 30%; Term test, 25%.

ENG378H1F-Special Topics: Paris, Harlem: 'Lost Generation' Modernist Literatures on Both Sides of the Atlantic

Section Number:LEC0201

Time(s): Monday 2-5 pm

Instructor(s): Michael Cobb

Brief Description of Course:Harlem and Paris were two important geographical points of reference for American Modernist innovation in the 1920s (and beyond). This course will investigate the differences and similarities of the work done “at” each location, and we’ll make a case for how modernist literature has always had multiracial, multi-ethnic resonances that intertwine modernist experimentation with desires for political, social, and cultural equity. Along the way, we’ll pay special attention to the ambience, mythology, excitements, and disappointments of Harlem and Paris. Authors to be studied: Ernest Hemingway, Nella Larsen, Richard Bruce Nugent, Jean Toomer, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alain Locke, among others.

Method of Evaluation:Research Paper/Project; Class Participation; Midterm Test

What excites me about teaching this course is…bringing together modernist literatures that are often taught in isolation.

Method of Evaluation:Short response papers; term tests; essay; participation.

ENG378H1F-Special Topics: African American Literature

Section Number:LEC0301

Time(s): Tuesday 10 am - 12 pm& Thursday 10-11 am

Instructor(s): Augustus Durham

Brief Description of Course:

wight

noun

1 a human being.

2 Obsolete.

a supernatural being, as a witch or sprite.

any living being; a creature.

adjective British Dialect.

3 strong and brave, especially in war.

4 active; nimble.

With consideration for the sociopolitical circ*mstances being faced in this moment—a coup against an international government amid the rise of fascism, the disproportionate deaths of and inability to vaccinate the elderly and black and brown people during a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, class stratification that may be irreversible, every exercise of -isms and phobias under the sun, climate change, and so much more—we have received renewed calls to “listen to black people.” While this seems an easy instruction, it is intriguing, particularly in spaces of “higher education,” more specifically English departments, to consider how canon formation occurs such that the very people we are encouraged to “hear” show up nowhere except during “the black week” on syllabi or, ironically enough, Black History Month. As we seek to unsettle certain thoughts about “the other,” one wonders: does the unsettling occur simply through curricular changes or by engagement with people whom we have never known and, even when known, have never believed? At the same time, what if the unsettling occurs by endowing them with the power to teach, to convict, to know something about this condition we call life, by examining what wight-ness might actually be? Said differently, can being wight be a witness for us all?

This class places at its center the people we are told to listen to chronicle through genres including autobiography, poetry, science fiction, satire, film, music, the critical essay, and fiction what it means to be wight—as a site of learning, of being alive, active, flexible, humane, haunting and haunted—despite its hom*ophone, white, suggesting mastery. By being attentive to these ideas, the goal is to equip ourselves with

Method of Evaluation:Weekly Homework, Midterm, Final Project

What students will find unique about this course is the multiple genres we will experience through the wide array of readings.

Students will find the assigned readings especially interesting because lthough much of the readings will be dated, they speak to the current moment.

What excites me about teaching this course is exposing students to texts that, while difficult, allow us to struggle with them together.

ENG378H1F-Special Topics: Early Victorian Novels: Social Problem Novels, Feminism, and Detective Fiction

Section Number:LEC0401

Time(s): Tuesday 1-2 pm, Thursday 1-3 pm

Instructor(s): Cannon Schmitt

Brief Description of Course:British novels from the middle of the nineteenth century still speak to us—in part because so many of their concerns remain our concerns: questions of gender and sexuality, social class, and race and colonialism, among many others. In this course, we will read fiction that addresses those questions and, in the process, reshapes the very form of the novel: Elizabeth Gaskell’s industrial novel, Mary Barton; Charlotte Brontë’s feminist Bildungsroman, Jane Eyre; Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, one of the founding texts of “sensation fiction”; and Charles Dickens’s first-person narrative of hope and disappointment, Great Expectations.

Method of Evaluation:Informed participation (15%), short passage analysis (20%), paper (35%), term test (30%)

ENG378H1S-Special Topics: Contemporary BIPOC Canadian Literature - CANCELLED

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s): Monday 2-4 pm, Wednesday 2-3 pm

Instructor(s): Vikki Visvis

Brief Description of Course:This course will study contemporary BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People-of-Colour) Canadian fiction and poetry. We will begin by examining literary depictions of Black bodies in motion, whether travel, escape, relocation, or migration. Specifically, we will consider how the travels of a queer, Black train porter challenge conventional representations of the Canadian Pacific Railway; how Black jazz musicians attempting to escape Nazi Europe reveal the prominence of aural responses to sound in racial discrimination; how a Black couple relocating under the strains of neoliberalism confronts the marked differences between Jamaican and American Black cultures; and how formal experimentation enacts the repercussions of forced migration during the slave trade. We will continue with an investigation of colonial legacies and cultural resurgence in works by Indigenous women writers. With an emphasis on BIPOC speculative fiction, the course will examine the legacies of residential schools and settler-colonialism, be it broken kinship relations, intergenerational trauma, or internalized racism. In response to these outcomes, we will investigate how these works emphasize the value of cultural resurgence through reclaimed custom, reserve community, and Anishinaabe law. The course will close with an analysis of states of in-betweenness in literature by People-of-Colour. By addressing the pressures of residing between a country of origin and Canada, between first- and second-generation migrants, or between a present-tense reality and a speculative future, readings will foreground the insidiousness of cultural essentialism, the strain on family relations, and the vulnerability to abuse for People-of-Colour who have immigrated to Canada.

Required Reading:Suzettte Mayr, The Sleeping Car Porter; Esi Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues; Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves; Alicia Elliott, And Then She Fell; Kevin Chong, The Double Lifeof Benson Yu; poetry and short stories by Dionne Irving, Kaie Kellough, Eden Robinson, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Rohinton Mistry, Madeleine Thien, and Djamila Ibrahim.

Method of Evaluation:Essay—4 pages (25%); Essay—8 pages (40%); Final exam—2 hours (25%); Participation (10%).

What students will find unique about this course is … its focus on writers from diverse ethnic backgrounds who reveal the cultural and aesthetic richness of contemporary Canadian literature.

Students will find assigned course readings especially interesting because … of their willingness to mine idiosyncratic experiences—both fantastic and realistic—from traditionally excluded perspectives in formally innovative ways.

What excites me about teaching this course is … collaborating with students to explore how those who have been socially marginalized can reshape our understanding of Canadian cultural and literary form.

ENG379H1F-Special Topics:The Contemporary Graphic Novel

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s): Monday 10-11 am, Wednesday 10 am-12 pm

Instructor(s): Jim Hansen

Brief Description of Course:Since the end of the cold war, we’ve witnessed the graphic novel go from a rarely discussed form to a major industry. Comics and graphic narratives offer specific visual and textual elements that differ from any other literary genre. The course will explore some of the important and award-winning texts from the post-cold war era in order to discuss the political, historical, and aesthetic implications of some of our most thought-provoking and underrecognized contemporary works of art.

Texts for the class may include: Fun Home, Superman: Red Son, Persepolis, My Favorite Things is Monsters, Gender Queer, Ducks, It’s Lonely at the Center of the Earth, I Thought You Hated Me, Palestine, and Kent State

Method of Evaluation:three short papers, online forums, and two exams.

ENG379H1F -Special Topics: Alice Munro

Section Number:LEC0201

Time(s): Tuesday 3-4 pm, Thursday 3-5 pm

Instructor(s): Sarah Caskey

Brief Description of Course:When Alice Munro was awarded the Nobel Laureate for Literature in 2013, she was acknowledged as a “master of the contemporary short story.” This assessment represents the widely shared view that Munro has radically reshaped and reimagined what the short story can do. But her achievement is not limited to innovation with the short-story genre, but extends to rethinking the place of storytelling in our lives more generally and more profoundly. By way of close readings, this course will explore Munro’s writing from early pieces to her latest. Critical reception to her writing will reveal her investigations of region, gender, social class, literary realism, modes of perception, memory, identity construction, and above all, the processes of storytelling.

Students will find it especially interesting to focus on the work of a single author. With this deeper dive, we will be able to appreciate the way Munro develops, refines, and revises her thematic concerns and narrative interests in startling ways from one collection to another and across her body of work.

What excites me about teaching this course is encountering Munro’s absolute genius in her intricately constructed stories. Munro’s narratives have multiple layers, multiple levels, and eschew a single plot or a single point of view. Instead, they offer a large vision and an exhilarating experience of trying to make sense of life’s ambiguities through storytelling. An Alice Munro story captures the fullness and complexity of life, and this course seeks to explore the fullness and complexity of Munro’s literary aesthetic.

Required Reading:Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women (1971) and Alice Munro: My Best Stories (2009) will be available from the UofT Bookstore. Other story selections will be available on the Library Reading List through Quercus.

First Three Authors/Texts:“The Peace of Utrecht,” Lives of Girls and Women, “The Beggar Maid.”

Method of Evaluation:Short Passage Analysis (25%); Essay (40%); Final Assignment (25%); Participation (10%).

ENG379H1F -Special Topics: Modern American Literature, 1900-1950

Section Number:LEC0301

Time(s): Wednesday 2-5 pm

Instructor(s): Scott Rayter

Brief Description of Course:We will look at how American writers’ works from the first half of the twentieth century reflect national and individual concerns with freedom, identity, and sexual politics. What does “America” mean during this period and how does it come to be understood in relation to “the modern” and to “modernity,” and expressed and represented though the literature of American modernist writers?

Method of Evaluation:Passage analysis, essay, take-home exam, participation

ENG379H1S-Special Topics: Late Victorian Novels: Gothics, Science Fiction, and Imperial Romances

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s):Monday 1-3 pm, Wednesday 1-2 pm

Instructor(s): Cannon Schmitt

Brief Description of Course:A time of social, political, and literary tumult, the late Victorian era witnessed the publication of novels that would come to be iconic, including H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. We will read both—as well as less universally known but equally compelling texts like Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. In every case we will have the opportunity to think through the relation between literary form and historical change, analysing how specific styles and genres emerged to treat specific political questions, such as empire, and scientific discoveries, such as evolution.

Method of Evaluation:Informed participation (15%), short passage analysis (20%), paper (35%), term test (30%)

ENG379H1S-Special Topics:Genres of Citizenship in American Literature

Section Number:LEC0201

Time(s): Tuesday 3-5 pm, Thursday 3-4pm

Instructor(s): Daniel Bergman

Brief Description of Course:What can literature tell us about what it means to belong somewhere, or about how the borders of this belonging are determined? Such questions stand at the centre of this course, which explores how U.S. fiction experiments with genre as a way of bringing political and literary definitions of group membership together. This semester, we will read works of American literature that experiment with a variety of genres (including romance, science fiction, and autobiography) to interrogate how the boundaries of citizenship are currently policed, as well as how these boundaries might be expanded. Alongside these literary texts, we will examine important theoretical contributions to the joint study of genre and citizenship. Together, our aim will be to develop definitions of literary and political citizenship capable of doing justice to the intersectional complexities of American identity-making.

Method of Evaluation: In-class close reading assignment; secondary source analysis; essay proposal; final essay; informed participation.

What students will find unique about this course is its focus on primary texts written in a wide variety of literary styles and secondary sources drawn from a wide variety of academic disciplines (literature, law, political theory, and anthropology, to name a few).

What excites me about teaching this course is the opportunity to draw connections between literary texts and real-world events.

ENG382Y1 - Literary Theory

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s): Monday 1-3 pm, Wednesday 1-2pm

Instructor(s): Jim Hansen

Brief Description of Course:This course will introduce students to some of the issues and debates central to contemporary literary studies. If you have ever wondered why people interpret texts, and even certain events, as they do, then this is the course for you. The class will begin by exploring the ways in which three profoundly different thinkers, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, introduced a peculiarly suspicious form of reading, a way of interrogating texts and the world that looks beneath the surface and doubts that what you see is what you get. We will go on to explore how literary critics in the 20th and 21st centuries reacted to this Modern “hermeneutic of suspicion,” applying it and critiquing it from a variety of political, psychological, and philosophical positions. Finally, the course will engage with literature’s relationship to the environment, to disability, and to questions of sexual and racial difference. For the most part, this course charts a history of ideas, and although we will read and refer to poems, films, and stories, the bulk of our coursework will revolve around reading, discussing, and writing about theoretical and philosophical essays.

Method of Evaluation:active class-participation, online forums, four short papers, and four exams.

ENG388H1S-Creative Writing: Poetry

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s): Wednesday 10 am-12 pm

Instructor(s):Noor Naga

Brief Description of Course:This course is for aspiring poets who wish to deepen their craft. Most seminars will feature a discussion of some aspect of craft as well as an in-class writing exercise or workshop. Students will be expected to produce six poem drafts over the course of the semester and to workshop each other’s poems in small groups, providing oral and written feedback. The final assignment is a portfolio of five revised poems introduced by an Author's Statement.

Method of Evaluation:Six poems (30%); workshop feedback (30%); class participation (10%); final portfolio (30%).

What excites me about teaching this course is the sheer scale of growth over the course of the semester. Most students arrive with very little experience reading contemporary poetry (or writing it) and leave with a sophisticated and practiced understanding of the craft.

ENG389H1F -Creative Writing: Short Fiction

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s): Wednesday 10 am-12 pm

Instructor(s): Noor Naga

Brief Description of Course:This course is for aspiring fiction writers who wish to deepen their craft. Most seminars will feature a craft discussion as well as an in-class writing exercise or workshop. Students will be expected to produce three stories of varying lengths over the course of the semester and to workshop each other’s stories in small groups, providing oral and written feedback. The final assignment is a portfolio of revised stories introduced by an Author’s Statement.

Required Reading:Classmates’ writing as well as published short fiction by authors such as NoViolet Bulawayo, Bharati Mukherjee, Anne Carson and Daniel Keyes (subject to change).

Method of Evaluation:Three short stories (25%); workshop feedback (30%); class participation (10%); final portfolio (35%).

Even students who have little experience writing fiction will be amazed at the quality of the stories they are able to produce by the end of the semester.

ENG394H1S-Creative Writing: Literary Journalism

Section Number:LEC0101

Time(s): Wednesday 2-4pm

Instructor(s): TBD

Brief Description of Course: TBD

Required Reading:TBD

Method of Evaluation: TBD

ENG394H1S-Creative Writing: Language is Material: Creating Chapbooks

Section Number:LEC0201

Time(s): Friday 1-4 pm

Instructor(s): Claire Battershill

Brief Description of Course:This creative writing course on chapbooks will take a project-based approach: each student will write and make their own small book over the course of the semester. Students will write a sequence of poems, a long poem, a short story, a series of flash fiction pieces, or sequence of experimental works and design and produce 25 copies to share with their classmates and communities. Drawing inspiration from visits to the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library and the Massey College Library, we will consider chapbooks (and related genres such as zines, literatura de cordel, small artists’ books, and small-run pamphlets) as vehicles for creative work and contextualize our own creative efforts within the rich history of small and micropress literary production. Students in this course will be thinking about the whole of their works, designing the books intentionally to reflect the materials they’re writing about and honing their literary aesthetics as they learn how to make books. No experience in book arts or crafts is required: students will receive hands-on material education, learning from Toronto artists in the fields of papermaking, letterpress printing, and bookbinding. Through low-stakes exercises and prompts, we will also be exploring the notion of language as a material and theorizing materiality, repetition, multiples, and graphic art as these relate to writing.

What students will find unique about this course is that they will have the opportunity to write and make their own books, share copies with their peers, and read their work in a public launch at the end of the semester.

Students will find Write, Fold, Print, Staple especially interesting because in it the poet Jim Johnstone connects the work we do in this class with a strong history and community of small and micropress publications in Canada.

What excites me about teaching this course is seeing the student projects come to life and watching student writing find material forms that suit the work. I also love connecting the history of books with the contemporary creative practice.

Method of Evaluation:

30% draft and prototype book

20% process documentation and reflection on methods

30% final edition

20% participation and collaboration