Some ENGL and WRIT courses have specific prerequisites stated in the corresponding calendar entry. Be sure to check. In general, you may take a 3000-level course once you have completed 5.0 units of university credit, including 0.5 unit of ENGL at the 2000 level, and you may take a 4000-level course once you have completed 7.5 units of university credit, including 0.5 unit of ENGL at the 3000 level or 1.0 unit of ENGL at the 2000 level. In exceptional cases, prerequisites may be waived by obtaining the permission of the course instructor.
English Department seminar. Photo: Krista Hill
ENGL/WRIT 3221 Creative Non-Fiction Writing / 0.5 unit
Fall term
01F TTh 10:30-11:45
Instructor: Prof. N. Street
Prerequisite(s): 5.0 units of university credit, including one of the following: ENGL/WRIT 2220 or ENGL/WRIT 2221
A practical study of creative nonfiction writing. This course explores creative nonfiction through its subgenres (e.g., collage, memoir, and/or literary journalism) and rhetorical techniques and practices (e.g., style, arrangement, tropes, schemes, and/or progymnasmata). The course is driven by workshops, wherein students will share, refine, and generally practice their craft.
ENGL 3307 Romanticism and Revolution / 0.5 unit
Fall term
01F TTh 1:30-2:45
Instructor: Prof. D. Piccitto
The Romantic period (c. 1785-1835) in Britain was one shaped by the revolutions in America and in France, provoking a rethinking of socio-political structures and the rights of individuals. This course focuses on the first half of this period (roughly 1785-1810), for which the French Revolution, in particular, was a defining event that prompted numerous and varied responses, including the general demand for freedom, proto-feminist statements, and the abolition of the slave trade. We will explore the heated debates that emerged from these reactions, as well as what the idea of revolution (in practice and in art) meant to and offered writers of the time, paying special attention to issues of liberty, oppression, imagination, race, gender, sexuality, class, and large-scale change. Beginning with key political philosophies about revolutionary action, this course will focus on the poetry and prose of the first-generation Romantics, including Phillis Wheatley, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake, Olaudah Equiano, Joanna Baillie, and William Wordsworth as well as the genre of the Gothic and its relation to the period’s concerns. Please note that ENGL courses at the 3000 level typically require 5.0 units of university credit, including 0.5 unit of ENGL at the 2000 level.
ENGL 3319 Modern Poetry to 1945 / 0.5 unit
Winter term
01W MW 9:00-10:15
Instructor: Prof. G. Fraser
In this course we will examine a range of poems and poetics from the Modernist period (1900-1945). We will examine the innovations of Modernist literature against the background of 19th century poetry, and we will look into connections between Modernist poetry and other Modernist movements in art (especially visual art) and the larger cultural, scientific, philosophical, and political shifts and crises which informed the Modernist period. Modernist poetry is often intentionally difficult in terms of both its poetic form and the complexity of its ideas. It expects much of its audience and demands that its readers rise to its level and meet it on its own terms. This course is designed to confront, understand, and hopefully to enjoy these difficulties (and perhaps even to reveal them to be not so difficult after all). Some of the poets and poetic movements addressed will include: Imagism, Vorticism, Surrealism, Loy, Williams, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, H.D., Stevens, Stein, Moore, Riding, and Bishop.
Text: Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 1, 3rd ed.
ENGL 3347 Imagining America: American Nightmare / 0.5 unit
Fall term
01F MW 3:00-4:15
Instructor: Prof. K. Collier-Jarvis
If there’s an American Dream, is there an American Nightmare? Certainly, the political landscape of Trump’s America makes it seem so. In this course, we will look at a variety of contemporary narratives, from literature to film, to see how the American Dream gives way to nightmare, from its profound disillusionment to its systemic failures. In one such example, Trump’s 2017 inauguration speech coined the phrase “‘American carnage’ to vividly conjure an image of inner cities he said were affected by crime, a political elite that had forgotten ordinary people, and a landscape of rusted factories like tombstones.” If this is one such manifestation of America’s nightmare, whose fears are reflected within it, and who is silenced or rendered monstrous by it?
ENGL 3356 Seventeenth-Century Literature / 0.5 unit
Winter term
01W MW 1:30-2:45
Instructor: Prof. L. Templin
In this course, we will examine English poetry and prose written in the seventeenth century, from the end of Elizabeth I’s reign in 1603 through the English civil wars and interregnum into the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. This period includes some of England’s most turbulent political history and there were equally seismic shifts in the literature of the time. A number of literary genres mark their development in the seventeenth century, including the essay and novel, metaphysical and concrete poetry, just to name a few. We will explore these new and changing literary forms through the work of a number of authors, including several women writers. Texts will be considered for the way they engage with the major issues of the period, including the relationship between the individual, family, and society, art and nature, religion and politics, with particular attention to the treatment of gender, race, and sexuality.
ENGL 3363 Feminisms and their Literatures / 0.5 unit
Fall and Winter term
01FW TTh 3:00-4:15
Instructor: Prof. K. Macfarlane
In this year’s course, we will explore issues of autonomy, body, sexuality and resistant forms of expression in women’s writing and feminist theory. While our focus will be on twentieth and twenty first century writing, with an emphasis on international women’s literature, we will be attentive to the historical underpinnings of feminist literary theory and expression in the English tradition. To accomplish this, we will first discuss early feminist expressions from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then focus our attention on contemporary expressions and engagements with feminist theories and women’s writing from a variety of contexts. Classes will focus on active and engaged discussion with the texts on our reading list.
ENGL 3365 The Eighteenth-Century British Novel / 0.5 unit
Winter term
01W MW 12:00-1:15
Instructor: TBA
The eighteenth century saw the emergence and various developments of a new literary form in English: the novel. This new form can be understood as an aesthetic response to the formation of particular social identities arising from the flourishing of mercantile capitalism. Themes to be explored in the course may include social performances, gender roles, work, money, education, class aspiration, clothing/fashion, virtue, and reputation.
ENGL 3367 Nineteenth-Century American Literature / 0.5 unit
Winter term
01W MW 3:00-4:15
Instructor: Prof. K. Collier-Jarvis
The American Declaration of Independence (1776) states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” With these words, America created its self-image, but how well did it uphold this image? This course is a close study of American literature and culture from the long nineteenth century (1776-1914). We will examine constructions of a national identity from the Declaration of Independence to the literature of social revolt with a focus on topics of slavery, Emancipation, Indigenous relations, the frontier, and American exceptionalism.
ENGL 3376 Medieval Literature: The Legend of King Arthur / 0.5 unit
Fall term
01F TTh 12:00-1:15
Instructor: Prof. M. Roby
The once and future king? The boy who pulled the sword from the stone? The defeater of the Knights who say Ni? Just who is King Arthur and how long have stories about him gripped people’s imaginations? This course will examine some of the earliest and most influential narratives about this legendary monarch, including texts from medieval Welsh, Latin, French, and English, but it will also explore how tales of Arthur spread and morphed throughout medieval Europe and beyond, from Old Norse and Hebrew texts to the modern absurdist comedy of Monty Python. All medieval texts will be read in translation or with substantial support from the instructor.
ENGL/WOMS 4407 Queer Theory / 0.5 unit
Winter term
01W TTh 1:30-2:45
Instructor: Prof. D. Piccitto
As a theory of otherness, disruption, and alternative ways of being and acting in the world, Queer Theory offers a mode of resisting and deconstructing normative – especially heteronormative – ideologies, discourses, and practices. Addressing representations of marginal identities and experiences, it is a rich theory that continues to develop and be reshaped with contemporary investments, particularly in the context of sexuality, sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression, as well as numerous constellations of performance, articulation, and desire. In this course, we will explore the origins of queer cultural criticism as well as more recent theorizations, interrogating the relationship between theory and practice, knowledge and being, identity and embodiment. Please note that, for Queer Theory, 1.0 unit of ENGL at the 2000 level or above or 1.0 unit of WOMS at the 3000 level is normally required. Students are strongly encouraged to take ENGL 2202: Introduction to Critical Methods and to have completed at least 7.5 units of university credit before attempting this course.
ENGL 4446 Studies in Contemporary Culture / 0.5 unit
Fall term
01F MW 9:00-11:15
Instructor: Prof. G. Fraser
Walking is a way of seeing – a way of knowing. Since ancient times, peripatetic literature equated walking with the practices of thinking and writing that underscore literature itself. The rise of the modern city brought about a corresponding body of literature and theory to express the particular experience of the pedestrian exploration of the urban environment, from the Parisian flâneur of Baudelaire and Benjamin to the psychogeographical experiments of the situationists’ dérive. Wandering outwards from a core of literary and theoretical texts, the course will drift through other neighborhoods of cultural representations of the pedestrian experience, including film, visual and performance art, politics, music, architecture and urban design. We will explore the city as a textual, aesthetic space, investigating the experience of walking and lostness as embodied metaphors of the acts of reading, writing, and thinking, as ways of knowing and not-knowing.
This course may well include field work. Maps will not be required.
Tentative Text List:
Auster, City of Glass; Benjamin, Arcades Project; Calle, Double Game; Chejfec, My Two Worlds, Cole, Open City; Ford, Savage Messiah; Katchor, Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer; Karinthy, Metropole; Scott, My Paris; Sinclair, Lights out for the Territory; Solnit, Wanderlust and A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Vladislavic, Portrait With Keys; Wood, Everything Sings.
