While all sections of the same ENGL course teach students the same set of reading and writing skills, the specific texts students read and discuss in each section depend on the instructor’s area of expertise and interests. Often, instructors choose their texts based on a particular theme or topic. Below is a list describing all the themed sections of literature and academic writing that will be offered during the Winter 2021 term.
For scheduling information about both the themed sections listed below and all other sections of English offered by the department, please refer either to the course scheduling tool or to the course catalogue.
Course Catalogue Description
In this course students will read, discuss and write about at least one major theme in literature and culture, such as crime and punishment, gender roles, immigrant experiences, or paradise lost. Works studied will include at least one of the major genres (fiction, non-fiction, poetry or drama), and at least one other type, drawn from another of the major genres or from less traditional sources, such as graphic novels, film or literary work in other media.
Topics
| Instructor | Section | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Jason Bourget |
007, 052 |
Speculating about Culture
In this course, we will explore how speculative fiction challenges what our culture tells us about ourselves and others. Using texts drawn primarily from science fiction and weird fiction, but also incorporating examples of horror and fantasy into our discussion, we will examine how the philosophical and political assumptions of our culture structure our beliefs about gender and sexuality, about race and class, and about language and intelligence. While we have this discussion, we will also note how these speculative forms of literature, like science itself, encourage a habit of mind which demands that we always question commonly accepted “truths” about the world around us. |
| Naava Smolash |
010 |
Literature and the Political Imagination: Hope in Hard Times
This class begins with the assumption that imaginative acts, creative and literary, are part of how people imagine a better world in order to bring it into being. We will read utopian and dystopian fiction, looking at novels, short stories, and film. In addition to learning tools for literary analysis, students in this class will explore the ways speculative literature can renew and revive tradition, clarify the present, warn against authoritarian futures, and generate hopeful ones. In the second half of class, students will create their own imagined worlds, first individually and then collectively, and use skills and concepts taught in class to make decisions about the world they would like to see. |
| Diane Stiles |
050, 051 |
In these sections of English 1102 we read literature that explores various aspects of identity. Our social identity is shaped by family, friends, and community, as well as factors such as gender and ethnicity. Our psychological make-up reflects our thoughts and feelings about our experiences. Philosophical and spiritual inquiry can shape our ideas of what it means to be human, and what our place is in the cosmos. And scientists are making new discoveries about the relationship between the self and the brain, or between a mind and a computer. Our course readings survey the terrain of your own lifelong voyage of discovery … toward your self. |
| Kim Trainor |
008, 009 |
We find ourselves in the middle of the 6th mass extinction, with shrinking biomass, retreating glaciers, every aspect of our lives mediated by technology, the ‘end of nature.’ What might the concept of “wild” mean to us in our daily lives? To consider this, we will read Gathering Moss—a book about Indigenous and scientific ways of knowing, and about listening to the small voices of mosses. We will study the novel Into the Forest by Jean Hegland (and screen the film of the same name by Canadian director Patricia Rozema) about a near-future apocalyptic event that strands two sisters in their remote homestead in the Pacific Northwest. And we’ll read the ecopoet Gary Snyder’s 1974 book, Turtle Island. |
Course Catalogue Description
In this course, students will read, discuss and write about fiction. Works assigned will emphasize a variety of genres, such as realism, fantasy, mystery and romance, and may reflect significant developments in the history of fiction.
Topics
| Instructor | Section | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Dorritta Fong |
003, 010 |
“One is not born, but becomes, a woman,” Simone de Beauvoir, the French feminist writer argued. While it is generally accepted that women are formed more by society than by biology, men are not so universally thought to be made by social expectations, rather than by biology. In this section of Reading Fiction, we will consider the gender roles taught to both men and women by our culture. We will read short stories and novels to analyse the ways in which women are shaped by being taught to wait for knights in shining armour, and men to try to fit themselves into those inflexible suits. We will consider if and how women and men are “Stiffed” (to use Susan Faludi’s term), or stifled, by the rather limited roles society allows.
Please be aware that we will be exploring viewpoints and ideas which may be difficult and sensitive. |
| Ryan Miller |
006, 007 |
This course aims to recognize and understand a variety of literary devices and textual elements. In service of the chosen theme of "Murder, Mystery, and Madness," we will read classic and acclaimed works of literature from the genres of horror, crime/thriller, and historical fiction. With these texts, we will consider the means by which these writers have represented criminality and mental instability in their work, as well as what significance this selection of texts might hold for us as critical readers. Online discussion topics will include (but are not limited to): the horror within, manifestations of psychopathy and/or sociopathy, double standards regarding gender and criminality, and the instructive role of evil. |
Course Catalogue Description
This course emphasizes the close reading of three genres – fiction, poetry, and drama – and examines their defining features.
Topics
| Instructor | Section | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Nate Szymanski |
005, 008 |
Witches, Ghosts, and Other Monsters in Poetry, Prose, and Drama
This course will explore the unreal—or, is it?!?—in English literature spanning an array of genres and historical periods. We will read haunted drama by William Shakespeare and Arthur Miller, quintessential vampire fiction by Bram Stoker, and a variety of poetry or short prose from Edgar Allan Poe, Christina Rossetti, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, and Sylvia Plath, among others. |
Course Catalogue Description
This course introduces students to the process of writing academic argument papers, and to strategies, assignments and exercises that develop their abilities as researchers, readers and writers of scholarly prose. Students will examine the general principles of composition, and the specific conventions of academic writing as practiced in several disciplines, particularly in the arts and humanities. Students will gain experience in locating, evaluating and using sources within their own writing.
Topics
| Instructor | Section | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Janet Allwork |
001, 002 |
Communication |
| Jason Bourget |
050, 051 |
The Ethics of Animal Rights |
| Dorritta Fong |
013, 014 |
Identity: Who Are You? |
| Trish Matson |
030, 031 036, 037 |
Happiness |
| Elizabeth McCausland |
090, 091 |
Education |
| Noëlle Phillips |
019, 020 021 |
Conspiracy Theories and Critical Thinking |
| Nancy Squair |
015, 016 |
Issues in Postsecondary Education |
| Diane Stiles |
004, 051 |
Current Events |
| Kim Trainor |
006, 052 |
Climate Change + Climate Justice |
| David Wright |
092, 093 |
Borderlands |
Admission to second-year English courses is open to all students who have taken any two university-transfer first-year English literature courses, or one university-transfer first-year English literature course and one university-transfer first-year Creative Writing or English writing course.
Course Catalogue Description
This course is a survey of major representative works of the late 17th through the early 20th centuries, studied in the context of the dramatic shifts in British culture following the Renaissance. A significant portion of the readings will be poetry, from the Restoration, Neo-Classical, Romantic and Victorian Periods, and from the beginnings of the 20th-Century Modernist era.
Topics
| Instructor | Section | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Noëlle Phillips |
001 |
Love and War, Race and Empire
This course starts just after the Middle Ages and follows the literature that accompanied the rise and then the decline of British imperialism and colonialism. We will read a variety of authors, including those whose voices have traditionally been suppressed. The identity - and the problems - of "Britishness" was developed during these centuries. |