1000-Level Course Descriptions

FALL 2024 | FALL/WINTER 2024-25 | WINTER 2025

ENGL-1000-001 | English 1A: When Books Talk Back | K. Ready
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This particular section of English 1A (subtitled “When Books Talk Back”) offers a select historical survey of poetry, fiction, and drama in English. The focus will be on texts that are engaged significantly in conversations with other texts and on contextualizing and understanding those conversations. As part of this process, students will be introduced to various critical theories and terms in order to get a sense of important developments in the history of different literary genres, of how different writers fit into literary history and culture, and, finally, of how different texts are speaking to each other within that history.

ENGL-1000-002 | English 1A | C. Lypka
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

What are the stories we tell, and how do we tell them? Through a selection of texts (both fiction and non-fiction) that engage with various literary movements, forms, and genres, this course will consider the act of narration as the selected texts fulfill and/or challenge our expectations of storytelling. Asking what power stories hold, we will interrogate what it means for a story to be “true” and which voices are allowed to tell their stories—leading us into discussions about class, race, gender, and other sociopolitical considerations of literature and the world around us. By participating in this class, students will learn to develop skills in close reading, critical thinking, and essay writing while becoming better listeners and readers of the stories that surround us.

ENGL-1000-003 | English 1A | B. Pomeroy
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

The purpose of this course is to provide a venue for discussion of literary evaluation and technique as well as use End of the World literature as a springboard to cultural and critical literary analysis. The course will look at texts about drastic societal change, such as Octavia E. Butler's "Speech Sounds" and Dale Pendell's The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse. End of the world texts are adventure stories, in that they propose a person, or by times groups, pitted against great odds. They are also reflective works which examine contemporaneous culture as well as their narrative. Typically dystopian in intent, they offer the reader more than mere fanciful stories. They examine society in ways that move beyond dire warnings to engage their reader in imaginative dialogues about change.

This course will rely on class discussion as well as a critically informed evaluation of text in the research and non-research assignments in order to come to an understanding of how texts are understood and constructed.

Although we will be discussing literary concerns, as well as using the Internet, no previous or specialized knowledge is necessary, but all English 1A students are required to engage actively and thoughtfully with the assigned readings, in class writing workshops, and research papers.

ENGL-1000-004 | English 1A | S. Goodhand
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course offers an introduction to literary studies, with a thematic focus on characters who are very extreme, morally, dramatically, and aesthetically. The literary heroes and monsters we’ll study have a lot in common. They are all extraordinary, expanding the limits of what is humanly possible, to such a degree that often they are not human at all: they possess traits associated with animals, demons, angels, trees, rocks, the sea, the cosmos, or weird combinations of all of these. The extremity, oddness, and sometimes grossness of literary heroes and monsters allows us to consider two aesthetic categories that are really interesting if hard to define: the sublime and the grotesque. We’ll read broadly at a nice, introductory pace from works spanning The Epic of Gilgamesh to Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. Some of the texts will be challenging, and others will be pitched for younger readers. As we examine the complex relationship between form and content and between texts and historical contexts, including the influence of literary tradition, we will ask questions like: what are the limits of possibility, if any, when it comes to literature? In what way is fiction “real” or “alive”? How does it work on us aesthetically, morally, emotionally, intellectually? In what way is literature a technology? How does literature not just “mirror” the world, but help to create it?

The course’s overall goal is to give students the skills to puzzle out any text, no matter its age, genre, or difficulty. We also practice beginner academic writing skills and close-reading in a series of workshops.

ENGL-1000-005 | English 1A | J. Scoles
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course will introduce students to reading, researching, and writing about English literature by major authors in three distinct literary periods: Romantic, Victorian and Modern. A broad scope of genres will be considered—a significant amount of poetry, several short stories, and a novel, from authors such as Letitia Barbauld & Charlotte Smith, William Blake & Felicia Hemans, John Keats & Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson & Seamus Heaney, Alice Munro & James Joyce—with lectures and assignments anchored in world history. We will examine the relationship between texts and contexts, and explore how specific narratives are represented and structured in relation to others in world literature & across the three major literary periods. We’ll also interrogate the evolving ‘landscapes’ of identity & conflict in our world over the years, with a focus on the forces (colonial, political, social, etc.) that shape and re- shape history. Students will gain skills & experience in close reading, analyzing texts & literary criticism, among other elements of literary study.

ENGL-1000-005 | English 1A | C. Manfredi
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

Love, lust, cruelty, spirituality, and power are themes that dominate the British poetry that we will study in this course. This course serves as an introduction to literary study, with an emphasis on the “close reading” of a wide range of poems written primarily during the Early Modern period (1500-1700). The course is based on the premise that we can only understand what a poem “means” (or whether it means anything) through a careful analysis of diction, style, sound, and poetic devices. Each class will focus on one to two poems in order to grasp terms such as rhyme, meter, metaphor, tone, and persona as well as basic verse forms such as the sonnet.

ENGL-1000-770| English 1A | N. Decter
Course Delivery: ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

This course will explore the concept of borders in literature. We will read texts from across the creative literary genres (novel, short fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction) that contain many types of borders: between nations, between childhood and adulthood, and between literary genres. Students will be encouraged to reflect upon how these works examine the divide between cultures, social classes, nations and especially what occurs in the liminal spaces in between. We will study the formal elements of each genre, and question how form can influence the meaning of a text. Research techniques will be emphasized, and students will be introduced to and practice a variety of critical literary theories, while also considering the historical context in which the texts were produced. Assignments will reinforce the fundamentals of essay writing technique while preparing students for more advanced literary study.

ENGL-1003-001 | Intro Topics in Literature: Crime Fiction | Z. Izydorczyk
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course introduces students to reading and writing about creative literature through the study of poems, plays, short stories, and novels about crime, victims, investigators, and perpetrators. Students will be encouraged to reflect on the meaning of innocence and monstrosity, sanity and madness, reality and fiction, culture and nature, while at the same time exploring a wide range of narrative structures, stylistic conventions, cultural contexts, and literary approaches. Readings will be drawn from past and contemporary literature in a variety of genres and will include such works as Poe’s short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess,” Glaspell’s play Trifles, and Preston and Child’s novel White Fire.

This course will be taught in person though a combination of lecture-discussions, practical exercises and assignments, quizzes, and a research paper. The textbook will be supplemented by additional readings available online.

ENGL-1003-002 | Intro Topics in Literature: Childhood and Adolescence | H. Snell
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course introduces students to a variety of creative literature (poetry, drama, and/or fiction) through the lens of a particular theme, genre, nationality or period. This section focuses on literature that explores childhood and adolescence. Literary representations of children and adolescents often reflect dominant ideas about childhood and youth circulating in specific times and places, but they can also challenge such ideas. Beginning with nineteenth-century literary engagements with youth and ending with a variety of twenty-first century texts, we examine depictions of the relationship between children and the environment; the recruitment of child figures to imperialist ideology; uses of the child as a vehicle of anticolonial, anti-racist, queer resistance; characterizations of children in dramatic texts; performances of childishness; the poetics of teen rebellion; and, finally, the function of the child figure as an evocation of a future whose contours become less clear as climate change intensifies. Our primary focus is on exploring literary engagements with youth in various forms and genres, including poetry, novellas, and short stories, but we also consider how some iconic literary figures spill over into the world outside the text, contributing to cultures of the everyday.

ENGL-1004-001 | Reading Culture | C. Tosenberger
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

In this course, we will study narratives of the supernatural: ghosts, monsters, devilry, witchcraft, and assorted creepy things. We’ll examine the links and disjunctions between folk narratives and popular mass-mediated discourse; of special interest are the cultural "conspiracy theories" that create a fertile landscape for real-life persecution and prosecution, particularly the early modern European witchcraft craze and the "Satanic panic" of the 1980's. Throughout, we will examine how these narratives circulate in both folk and "official" culture, as well as within fictionalized mass media.

ENGL-1004-002 | Reading Culture | S. Namayanja
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

In this course, we shall explore the changing trends in the reading cultures of the literary world. The course considers how culture has continued to interact with different forms of texts such as the oral, and the written, (or even pictorial) as represented through poems, short stories, and Novels, and their influence on the reader's perception of the context that surrounds them. By tracing some of the key concepts in rhetoric and literary theory and briefly analyzing the dynamics embedded in cultural theory students shall attempt to uncover how cultures continue to be the material for the oral and written texts. Students shall have an opportunity to explore and contrast the comic aspects of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, with the paranoia in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies as well as dive into developments in reading as a culture and changes that have occurred since the advent of digital media. Throughout the duration of the course, we shall try to investigate some of the trends that have occurred in reading as a culture on a global scene.

By the end of the course, students will have developed a practical approach to reading and the ability to critique and appreciate different works of art.

ENGL-1004-770 | Reading Culture | B. Cornellier
Course Delivery: ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS

This course considers original ways cultural texts are created from diverse historical and ideological practices of adaptation and recoding of existing cultural material. Students shall explore the long and convoluted cultural history of Princess Salome and the beheading of John the Baptist, from the New Testament to 19th Century Orientalist art, Oscar Wilde’s theatre, 20th Century “camp,” and Rita Hayworth’s peculiar performance of the femme fatale in 1950s Hollywood. By introducing some of the key concepts in cultural theory, this course shall provide students with an opportunity to expand their understanding of different textual practices and modes of cultural production, including theatre, cinema, visual arts, popular culture, subcultural production, and digital remix. Our focus will be on the complex chains of production linking texts, cultural contexts, and audiences/readers together. As a result, students will be invited to reflect on what readers, consumers, and artists do with culture.

ENGL-1005-001 | Reading to Write: Literature, Like Allegory, Is Not Meant To Be Taken Literally | C. Anyaduba
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course introduces students to university-level literary study. Students read a variety of creative literature to explore and analyze writers’ techniques, and to gain a broader understanding of the art and craft of writing. The focus of this course is allegorical literature, which is a peculiar form of literature that lends itself to different moral, political, and cultural meanings. Allegories generally invite metaphorical and symbolic reading and interpretation. As the famous Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz puts it, “an allegory is not meant to be taken literally. There is a great lack of comprehension on the part of some readers.” In this course, therefore, we will read literary works as allegories to both contemplate and comprehend their deeper symbolic significance. How can we, for example, comprehend a story about farm animals who revolt against their human oppressors, only to have the pigs among them become even worse than the humans? Or the story of a man who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into an insect? Or a story about a zombie-like creature in Canada with a poisonous bite that can turn Indigenous children into zombies? Or the story about a woman who must tell unfinished tales to a brutal emperor in order to stay alive? Allegories challenge us as readers to think and write imaginatively, encouraging us to explore the multiple possible meanings that a piece of literature may hold. Through a variety of reading methods and approaches, we will explore the interpretive potential of some exciting allegorical stories, examining the literary strategies employed by writers to allegorize human and non-human experiences.

ENGL-1005-002 | Reading To Write: Flash Forms | S. Pool
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

In this introductory course, students will explore and analyze flash forms -types of writing characterized by length (1000 words or less). In this workshop class we’ll read many examples of flash forms by writers from diverse backgrounds and explore scholarly criticism of the genre. By the end of this writing workshop course, students will have produced a portfolio of flash writing and developed a critical understanding of the literary potential of flash forms, Students will learn to manipulate tools such as structure, intensity of language, word choice and voice. Classes will be comprised of short craft talks, discussion of assigned texts, and workshopping. Students must come to class with the appropriate texts in hand and be prepared for discussion and productive workshopping.

ENGL-1005-003 | Reading to Write: Frenemies, First Loves, and Family Binds | L. Wong
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course introduces students to university-level literary study and the writing workshop. Students read a variety of creative literature (contemporary adult fiction, nonfiction, and young adult fiction) from a writerly perspective, to explore and analyze writers' techniques, and to gain a broader understanding of the art and craft of writing. Topics may include dramatic action, narrative strategies, organizational principles, imagery, setting, characterization, and voice. The themes of the readings and writing assignments emphasize “coming-of-age narratives” about young narrators who examine their relationships with peers and family members during adolescence and in early adulthood. Students will also have the opportunity to workshop their writing in small groups of four, and will be responsible for giving thoughtful feedback on their classmates’ creative output. This course may be of special interest to students who plan to take Creative Writing courses at the 2000 level.

FALL/WINTER 2024-25

ENGL-1001-001 | English 1 | J. Ball
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This class provides students with an introduction to university-level literary study. We will study a range of material that suggests the vast diversity of literary work. We will discuss the theory and practice of literary criticism, and the role of historical and cultural factors in the creation and reception of literary work. Students will work to improve writing skills, research topics, and gain an awareness of the historical perspectives and theoretical approaches that inform the study of literature. We will approach literary works with attention to detail, how authors construct texts, and the role of literature in the wider world. Instead of viewing literary texts as coded puzzles which intimidate, we will focus on analysis of their logic and method.

ENGL-1001-002 | English 1 | C. Rifkind
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course introduces students to university-level literary studies, including the reading of creative texts (short stories, novels, plays, poems, films, graphic novels); the theory and practices of literary and cultural criticism; the role of historical, political, and cultural factors influencing and mediated by literary and cultural texts; and research and writing skills. We will read such canonical works as Shakespeare’s Othello and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to investigate representations of “the other” and these foundational texts will lead us to more recent works that likewise raise important questions about gender, sexuality, race, class, nationalism, colonialism, and language. Classes will combine lectures and small discussion groups, and students will develop a critical vocabulary to analyze texts across genres from a variety of historical periods, geographic regions, and artistic movements. The course also spends significant time on writing and research skills and students should be prepared for in-class writing assignments as well as outside class work. Regular attendance and participation form part of the evaluation.

ENGL-1001-003 | English 1| H. Milne
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course provides a general introduction to literary study at the university level organized around literary genres. We will examine prose fiction, poetry, drama, and creative non-fiction written from a diverse range of geographical locations, historical periods, and sociocultural perspectives. Students will gain an understanding of how to read literature at the university level and will gain some knowledge of literary history and literary theory. This course will also introduce students to the fundamentals of essay writing and research. Classes will combine lectures, small and large group discussions, focused group work, and workshops.

ENGL-1001-001 | English 1 | J. Ball
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

ENGL-1001-770 | English 1: Monsters | S. Asselin
Course Delivery: ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

From Medusa to the Mummy, from Grendel to the Goblin Market to Godzilla, the disruptive presence of literary monsters always provides an educational opportunity for characters and readers alike. This class introduces students to major periods in literary history as we examine manifestations of the monstrous in tandem with changes in cultural contexts and literary aesthetics. The focus on monsters will allow us to deploy a variety of interpretative methods to account for and contextualize the presence of such entities, drawing particularly on theories of Otherness and difference, to discover how monsters manifest anxieties about race, gender, sexuality, religion, imperialism, warfare, gossip, and many other cultural phenomena.

In the fall term, we will concentrate our efforts on an in-depth study of three texts: Frankenstein, Beowulf, and The Tempest. As we do so, students will be introduced to the analytical tools and vocabulary to work with prose, poetry, and drama (respectively), and how to practice close reading in each of these genres. We will also dedicate class time to learning essay-writing skills designed to help you become more adept and confident scholars. We will examine how to conform to the standards of academic integrity, how to design strong thesis statements, how to use textual evidence in papers, and how to fuse all this into a well-structured literature paper. In the winter term, we will tackle a diverse range of texts in more rapid succession—including additional mediums like short stories, film, and graphic novels—that will showcase the variety of forms and uses of monsters. Authors and artists in the second half of the class include Christina Rossetti, H.P. Lovecraft, Ishirō Honda, Angela Carter, and Cherie Dimaline. In addition to refining our mastery of essay-writing, students will also perform a brief in-class presentation on a monster of their choice from outside our course texts.

WINTER 2025

ENGL-1000-006 | English 1A | B. Christopher
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course invites students to read literary works in the context of the forms and genres in which they were written. We will discuss the conventions both of the broad generic categories by which the syllabus is organized and of subgenres of those categories. We will also examine the ways in which authors play with and subvert these conventions. Though genre will be our overarching theme in the course, we will also read the works on the syllabus with attention to the historical and cultural contexts in which they were written. After all, these genres did not develop in a vacuum. Over the course of the term, students will be introduced to a number of schools and techniques of literary criticism, and will be asked to apply some of these techniques in a variety of contexts, including group presentations, essays, workshops, and quizzes.

ENGL-1000-007 | English 1A| B. Pomeroy
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

There is much talk in the media about our society’s commitment to the environment, and not surprisingly, those concerns have been taken up by authors. Although global climate change is one of the most recent concerns, other problems, such as the diminishing ozone layer, toxification of the biosphere, the decline in biodiversity, and the looming crisis in water supply, continue to fascinate authors who have chosen them as a point of departure for their sometimes speculative texts, or grim modern fairy tales whose conclusion is difficult to ignore.

We will examine shorter texts like Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ode to the wasting effect of time, “Ozymandias,” Paolo Bacigalupi’s debate about the responsibility of the media, “The Gambler,” and make an in-depth study of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine and look at academic articles and documentaries as well as Jeanette Winterson’s novel The Stone Gods, in order to see how such writers have figured scarcity of resources or space in their anticipatory works.

ENGL-1000-008 | English 1A | S. Namayanja
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course introduces students to the concept of style in English Language and Literature through the analysis of texts both fictional and non-fictional. The course trains students on how to use close reading as a method to discover the different stylistic devices and figures of speech that the authors use to convey their message. During the course, different texts in the forms of poems and short stories will be tackled to help students understand how different speech patterns that form figures of speech can effectively be used to communicate across varying audiences. In addition, students will also be trained in how to investigate the author’s intentions and how their writings are perceived or the effects they have on the communities where they are composed. By the end of the course, students will be equipped with the knowledge and understanding of how figurative language is used as a communicative tool in literature.

ENGL-1000-09 | English 1A | K. Cameron
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

Course Description TBA

ENGL-1000-010 | English 1A | J. Scoles
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

ENGL-1003-003 | Topics in Literature | A. Brickey
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

Course description TBA

ENGL-1003-004 | Topics in Literature: Women in Black Speculative Literature | I. Adeniyi
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course will introduce students to Black Speculative Literature, focusing specifically on the representations of Black women. While Black people in general have experienced colonialism, racism, and classism, Black women have faced even greater challenges. Throughout the course, we will explore various speculative literary and cultural texts such as short stories, novels, essays, and films, all of which grapple with the cultural portrayals of Black women. We will analyze the implications of these portrayals for Black women socially, politically, and economically. By reading works from African, North American, and Caribbean writers and contexts, we will explore several relevant themes including identity, motherhood, patriarchy, racism, reproduction, community, and posterity. Ultimately, students will gain a comprehensive understanding of Black speculative imagination and the historic and contemporary marginalization of Black women in different contexts of power and control.

ENGL-1003-770 | Topics in Literature | S. Rich
Course Delivery: ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

This course introduces students to the study of literature through the analysis of autobiography. We will read through material dating from antiquity to (post)modernity by writers who both depict and deconstruct ideas of personal identity. We will do this by examining such literary forms as prose, poetry, life narrative, journals, film, and art. Students will be encouraged to reflect upon ideas of the self by examining socially-conditioning constructs, such as the family, memory, gender, history, war, ideology, and psychoanalytic theory. We will also contemplate the role of authenticity in life writing, which is often assumed to be true and yet includes many works of fiction. This class will be highly collaborative and participatory in nature, involving much informal discussion in addition to regular lectures. Throughout the course, we will focus extensively upon improving skills in rhetorical argumentation, close readings, clear scholarly writing, and effective research.

ENGL-1004-003 | Reading Culture: Vampires | S. Asselin
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

Reading Culture is a course organized around a particular motif across time and media in order to develop a wide-ranging set of literary and critical skills. The motif for this class is… the vampire! Instantly recognizable yet astoundingly protean in its representations, the vampire is a long-standing cultural fixation whose permutations—from cadaverous monster, to cultured infiltrator, to sparkling lover, and even a children’s cereal mascot—reveals much about the anxieties and desires of the cultures that deploy this myth. This course examines representations of the vampire (and similar figures) in the folklore of various cultures; the delineation of familiar vampire tropes in the 19th-century fiction of John Polidori, Sheridan Le Fanu, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Bram Stoker; and the classic and contemporary screen adaptations that made the vampire a fixture of popular culture, including films by Murneau, Fisher, and Clement and Waititi. At the same time, students will acquire the vocabulary and skillset to perform literary and cultural analyses of various texts and media, including poetry, prose, film, and graphic novels. This analysis will demystify symbolic readings of the vampire as a vehicle of representations of the Other; of critiques of class, capitalism, and imperialism; and for queer eroticism. Bring your own garlic.

ENGL-1004-004 | Reading Culture: It’s Just for Fun: The Cultural Resonances of Escapist Art | T. Penner
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course challenges the ‘high art’/‘low art’ dichotomy by taking a serious look at works and genres that are often dismissed as escapist as we consider the ways all art engages with the culture around it, despite the genre or qualitative category into which it is placed. To do this we will examine romcoms that question prevailing economic systems, futuristic tales that speak to the present, sitcoms that capture the anxieties of their ages, pop stars that use their music to deconstruct their personae, crime thrillers that take on environmental catastrophe, and super-hero stories that highlight the political unrest of our time. In each work we will consider how escapist trappings can lead to deeper engagement with culture in sometimes surprisingly subversive

ENGL-1005-003 | Reading to Write | J. Wills
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

Course description TBA

ENGL-1005-004 | Reading to Write | J. Scoles
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course introduces students to a variety of creative literature from a writerly perspective. This section of Reading to Write Creatively will examine short fiction and poetry, specifically, as well as the many ways of writing within the two genres. Students read as writers, closely and actively, learning to hear the nuances, cadences, and signatures of working artists. By reading closely, analyzing, and discussing published texts, we will gain an understanding of the strategies and methods writers use to write effectively. This course is recommended for students who plan on taking further creative writing courses at the undergraduate level, as well as those who have an interest in pursuing creative writing as a profession.

ENGL-1005-770 | Reading to Write | S. Pool
Course Delivery: ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

Course Description TBA