3000-Level Course Descriptions
FALL 2024 | FALL WINTER 2024-25 | WINTER 2025
ENGL-3113-001 | Writing Short Fiction | L. Wong
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties — all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion — these are the places where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”- David Foster Wallace
The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself. -Jim Rohn
An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally. - V.S Naipaul
The short story is arguably the most difficult genre to write. Unlike the novel, it requires brevity and flawless execution of craft. You must be detailed enough to draw the reader into the scene and make them care about your character, but you must be brief enough so that the backstory does not overwhelm the narrative arc. This workshop-based course is meant to challenge, provoke, and stretch your skill as a fiction writer; it’s meant to give you a stronger sense of what kind of writer you might aspire to be, and to help strengthen your application of craft through practice and intensive peer feedback.
In this generative workshop, we will focus on crafting original short stories. Student manuscripts will form the primary texts, in addition to some assigned reading and in-class writing exercises. You are welcome to submit both literary and genre fiction.
Questions that we will explore but are not limited to: how do we craft compelling pieces of short fiction? What is the difference between literary, upmarket and commercial fiction? Within a stylistical, literary, and ethical context, what should we be aspiring to, as practitioners of this genre, and how can we be successful in breaking into the industry?
Students will have the opportunity to workshop a draft of their short story during the term and they are responsible for placing as much attention on critique as on their own craft. Learning to write and evaluate short stories will be the focus of the workshop, and we will hone our creative processes to produce engaging works of fiction.
Attendance, thoughtful feedback on peers’ works, and lively discussion are expected. Maintaining a safe, respectful literary community and classroom space is a priority. A final grade will be based on participation, feedback letters, attendance, an outline/synopsis, and an exploratory draft of a short story.
Students are also encouraged to think about submitting work to literary journals such as the University of 丁香园AV’s Juice: /english/juice-journal-submissions.html
As this is an intermediate writing workshop, students should be fairly independent, committed, and motivated to improve their craft. Late workshop submissions without permission will receive a zero if they are submitted a week after the deadline. Similarly, if you are being workshopped and you are unable to attend, we may not be able to accommodate you because of scheduling. It is your responsibility to switch with another student if you know that you will be away that week. If you cannot commit to submission deadlines and/or participate in a respectful peer review environment, the writing workshop may not be the right class for you.
Students are selected for this course based on the strength of their writing sample.
ENGL-3118-001 | Topics in Fiction for YP | H. Snell
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
NOTE that this is a Walls to Bridges course that connects incarcerated and campus-enrolled students to study together within the prison walls. Special teaching methods are deployed to ensure that both groups learn as equals.
The Walls to Bridges course runs Tuesdays 1:00-4:00 pm at Stony Mountain Institution during Fall Term.
Students must fill out an application form and participate in a short interview in order to register for this course.
More information about Walls to Bridges can be found here: /walls-to-bridges/index.html
This course examines varieties of narratives produced for children and adolescents from the end of the 19th century to the present. Students explore narrative structures and strategies, as well as theories of children’s literature. This iteration of the course focuses on animal tales, from the British fables and nonsense poetry of the 19th century to contemporary middle-grade and young-adult novels featuring animal characters.
No prior experience with literature, including children’s literature, is required to take this course, and Permission Waivers will be given to successful applicants who lack the prerequisites. All classes take place in person at Stony Mountain Institution. Transportation is not provided by the university, so students are advised to organize car pools.
Interested students should contact Heather Snell at h.snell@uwinnipeg.ca for the application form.
ENGL-3119-001 | Canadian Children's Literature: A Remix | M. Braith
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Canadian Children’s literature is shaking up the classics. In this course, we analyze how contemporary authors such as Katherena Vermette, David Robertson, Hiromi Goto, and Mariko Tamaki rewrite fairy tales, adventure stories, fantasy stories, and even an iconic text such as Anne of Green Gables. By reading texts relationally, we will analyze how children’s literature reflects constructions of childhood and political concerns within its own temporal and cultural context. We will also reflect on the ways in which children’s literature supports, challenges, and reimagines ideas of Canadian nationhood. When tracing connections and relationships, students will learn about the history of Canadian children’s literature, and they will be introduced to literary theories of intertextuality, postcolonial theories of writing back, and Indigenous theories of braiding texts. This course puts a strong focus on research skills as students are invited to create their own research projects. The course will furthermore strengthen students’ communication skills as well as analytical and critical reading skills.
ENGL-3723-760 | Topics Indigenous Literature and Culture | P. DePasquale
Course Delivery: ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS + ZOOM
This course examines a range of literary and non-literary texts, mostly all available on the Internet, fundamental to a study of the history of colonialism, stereotypes, and racism in North America, with emphasis on the past and present experiences of Canadian Indigenous People. Students will examine, discuss, and research historical and contemporary representations of Indigenous people in various formats, including literature, visual art, film, video, music, and a range of other media. Students will learn about the history and legacies of colonialism, including many of the issues and topics impacting Indigenous People today. The course is informed by the knowledges, worldviews, values, theories, and methodologies of Indigenous Elders, community workers, artists, scholars, and others, including non-Indigenous allies, all those who are actively working today to deconstruct older paradigms and perceptual frameworks. No previous knowledge of Indigenous histories or cultures is required. Engl-3723 fulfills the Indigenous Course Requirement.
This course is taught through the University of 丁香园AV’s online learning platform, Nexus. Students access asynchronous lectures and participate in asynchronous discussions and submit their written assignments online. There are also occasional Zoom meetings which will provide opportunity for further discussion of course content.
ENGL-3725-001 | Topics in Cultural Studies: Photography and Cultural Studies | A. Burke
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
From its very beginnings, Cultural Studies has been concerned with questions of representation, the ways in which the political and the pictorial converge, and the clash and conjunction of ideology and image. From snapshot photography to social media, this course investigates a history of thinking about images and their circulation. We will explore how the image mediates memory and how the photograph is a vehicle that transports the past into the present. How does photography function as a technology of memory, not simply for the individual, but for family, community, culture, nation, and diaspora?
The course begins with the formative work of Walter Benjamin, whose “A Small History of Photography” still sets the contemporary agenda for thinking about photography as a cultural practice and the photograph as an object, whether analogue or digital. From there, we will extend our analysis to questions of art, the archive, activism, and the ordinary. Photography has made its way into the gallery and now counts itself among the fine arts, but there is also the long history of its use for purposes of control and surveillance. Yet, at the same time, photography has frequently been harnessed for positive political ends, allowing queer and racialized groups to make visible experiences and evidence of inequality and injustice. Finally, while photography has long been a mass practice and the primary mode through which everyday life is defined and documented, the ease of image-making in the digital age also makes it somewhat banal, as images are the primary currency in the frenzied circulations of social media.
ENGL-3812-001 | History of English | Z. Izydorcyzk
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
This course offers a concise survey of the evolution of the English language as a medium of communication and literature from Old to Modern English. It introduces students to the concepts and meta-language used to describe linguistic change and emphasizes the connection between such change and cultural/literary expression. Students learn about the language of the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings, Arthurian knights, and Elizabethan gentlemen. They read excerpts from Beowulf, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, among others, to discover the profound shifts that occurred in the structure and use of English over the last millennium and a half. They also explore the consequences of those shifts for communication and literary practices over the centuries. The course will challenge students to enhance their awareness of the time-bound character of both language and literature.
This course will be taught in person though a combination of lecture-discussions, practical exercises and assignments, short quizzes, and a research paper. The textbook will be supplemented by additional readings available online.
FALL/WINTER 2024-25
ENGL-3101-001 | Writing Comprehensive: Prose Poetry/Flash Nonfiction| S. Pool
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
“What is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is prose?” -Gertrude Stein
This course is designed to give students a solid basis on which to build their understanding of Creative Writing practice and themselves as writers. Through a deep focus on the Prose Poetry and Flash Nonfiction students will be introduced to concepts, skills and tools, relevant to many forms of writing, and asked to consider how they might engage these in their own work, through in-class exercises and discussions. Students will be asked to read texts (critical, technical and creative) and engage in discussion around the ideas presented and how these might affect their own practice. Students may be asked to consider and experiment with forms and genres they do not usually write in. Learning to understand ourselves as legitimate writers, with valid, lived experience from which to draw from, is a core tenet of this course. This course will culminate in the production of a portfolio of connected short pieces which students can use to apply for upper-level Creative Writing courses or create submissions to literary journals. Wider discussions will include the responsibility of the writer, writing as craft, and the writer in the world. Students will have at least two opportunities to workshop new creative work.
ENGL-3151-001 | Critical Theory: An Introduction | A. Brickey
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
In her groundbreaking 1991 essay "Theory as Liberatory Practice," bell hooks writes: "I came to theory because I was hurting--the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend--to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing." In this class we will ask: what has theory offered us and how still could it be useful? Students will be introduced to the wide and diverse tradition of critical theory, beginning with its conservative roots in Western Metaphysics and moving historically through major schools of thought including Aestheticism, Marxism, Feminism, New Historicism, Queer Theory, Post-Colonial Theory, Black Studies, and more. We will dedicate ourselves to reading seriously and slowly, analyzing essays that have had significant impact on the history of ideas and taking a particular interest in Literary Studies and its critical attendants. We will read work from Plato, Philip Sidney, Matthew Arnold, Roland Barthes, Gayatri Spivak, Eve Sedgwick, Frantz Fanon, Judith Butler, Fred Moten, and more. Assignments will involve regular in-class writing.
ENGL-3190-001 | Literature and Film | B. Cornellier
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
This course examines some of the intersections and divergences between literature and cinema as narrative modes of expression. Attention is given to the history of the occasionally conflicting relationship between literature and film (as narrative art forms, cultural institutions, and industries), as well as to past efforts by filmmakers and film critics alike to articulate their work to literary institutions and vocabularies in order to claim cultural legitimacy for their emerging medium. As they familiarize themselves with theories of adaptation and intertextuality, as well as with elements of film style and narration, students will be invited to address (and sometimes challenge) diverse critical attempts to demarcate film, literature, comics, and theatre in terms of media specificity.
ENGL-3210-770 | Romantic Literature and Culture| P. Melville
Course Delivery: ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
This course will pursue in-depth analyses of the literature and culture of the English Romantic period (i.e. Late-18th / Early-19th Century). The course will not only consider the Romantic movement as a complex and conflicted response to a shared set of literary and philosophical anxieties but will also pay close attention to the interplay between the socio-political concerns of the Romantic period and the literature the period produced. Students will engage works from various Romantic discourses, including the poetry and prose of Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, William Blake, Samuel T. Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats, and the novels of William Godwin, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley.
ENGL-3211-001 | Victorian Literaure and Culture: Ladies on Bicycles & Stiff Collars | C. Manfredi
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
The word “Victorian” conjures up images that both accurately describe and misrepresent the literature and culture of Britain between 1832 and 1901. Stiff collars and urban squalor have become iconic images of Victorian Britain. Although many Victorians placed a high value on such qualities as honour and duty factory conditions were brutal, the Victorian period also saw the passage of progressive labour laws and the proliferation of discourses around sexuality. In other words, there was never single “Victorian mindset” but rather a range of them, and these shifted throughout the century.
This course introduces students to many canonical (i.e., Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lord Alfred Tennyson, Charles Darwin, Christina Rossetti) as well as lesser-known (i.e., Frances Power Cobbe, Augusta Webster, Henry Salt) authors of the Victorian Era (1832-1901) and covers a range of literary genres from political pamphlets, long form journalism, poetry, scientific writing, and the novel. Our discussions of British literature from this period will be structured around topics such as urbanization and poverty, women in society, theories of evolution, sexuality and sexual transgression, Britain and Empire, and the New Woman.
ENGL-3901-001 | Queer Lit, Cult & Theory | H. Milne
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
How have 2SLGBTQ+ writers used literary forms to explore identity and record personal and collective history? How have queer texts circulated, both within queer communities and beyond them? These are some of the questions that will inform our investigation of queer literature and culture in this course. The first semester will focus mainly on literature written prior to the gay liberation movement of the 1970s and will include readings by Oscar Wilde, Radclyffe Hall, Christopher Isherwood, Ann Bannon, and Audre Lorde. In the second semester, we will consider the complex and diverse 2SLGBTQ+ literary communities that emerged after gay liberation. We will spend several weeks looking at literature that takes as its focus the impact of AIDS on queer communities; we will consider how issues of race and nation have influenced queer writing; and we will examine the place of transgender literature within the broader category of 2SLGBTQ+ literature. We will also examine local queer histories by looking at archival and historical material about 2SLGBTQ+ culture in 丁香园AV. We will supplement our analysis of literary texts and films with historical and theoretical materials. Throughout the course, we will critically analyze current events that pertain to 2SLGBTQ+ culture rights.
ENGL-3980-770 | Topics in Comics/Graphic Novels: Auto/biographical Comics | C. Rifkind
Course Delivery: ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Auto/biographical comics, or graphic life narratives, have been at the forefront of the alternative comics scene since the 1970s. This course traces their development over the past three decades, primarily in the US but with examples of Japanese manga and French bandes-dessinée in translation, to explore how comics can draw non-fictional stories about individuals lives and experiences in broader historical, cultural, and political contexts. In the Fall term, we will study “essential” texts that have laid the foundation for contemporary auto/bio comics studies. In the Winter term, we will study recent works of graphic memoir, graphic journalism, and auto/bio comics for young readers. This will allow us to think about how graphic life narratives can explore the relationships between memory and history, peace and conflict, child and parent, individual and community, self and other, documentary and creativity, fiction and non-fiction.
Students will learn how to study comics as a distinct form and how to draw on literary studies, cultural studies, screen studies, art history, media and communications, and other disciplines to speak and write about visual-verbal texts. Evaluation will include presentations, reading responses, close reading assignments, and a major research project (creative or academic). This live online course requires active participation and engagement: students should expect to attend and contribute regularly to large and small group discussions, and weekly participation will be included in the evaluation.
WINTER 2025
ENGL-3160-001 | Topics in YPC | C. Tosenberger
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
In this course, we will examine multiple narratives of the beings that lurk at the edge of culture and civilization: the "small gods"--fairies, revenants, ghosts, saints, ancestors, angels, demons--and monsters that define and disturb our societal limits. We are especially concerned with how this liminal, marginal category intersects with the equally marginal, liminal category of childhood, and fashions discourses of belonging, of sacrifice and sanctification, and of otherness.
ENGL-3180-752/759 | Making Peace and War: Genocide and Literature | C. Anyaduba
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
This course examines the concept of genocide and its connection to literary and cultural representations. What factors define an atrocity as genocide? Which acts of violence have been officially recognized as genocide by such organizations as the United Nations, and why? How has the concept of genocide been developed, understood, debated, and applied to mass atrocities? How has the understanding and application of this concept been changing, particularly in contemporary discussions? What is the relationship between the concept(s) of genocide and literature, film, visual arts, photography, and other cultural expressions? To address these questions, we will explore various documented cases of genocidal atrocities, both well-known and less recognized, throughout a wide range of historical, geographical, and cultural contexts. The primary objective of this course is to provide a multidisciplinary introduction to genocide and the ways it is represented in literary and artistic forms. We will closely analyze a selection of literary, cultural, and critical texts to understand the stakes for representing genocide, and to determine why and when such representations either succeed or fail. Additionally, we will examine a range of key issues crucial to thinking about genocide in relation to literary and cultural representation, such as: what constitutes genocide literature?; what are the implications of writing about or representing genocide in literature and culture?; how are victim, perpetrator, and bystander groups defined?; what does it mean to survive genocide?; what forms of violence can be considered genocidal (physical, cultural, biological, etc.)?; and what role do literature and the arts play before, during, and after the commission of genocide?
ENGL 3708-001 | Canadian Literaure and Culture | J. Scoles
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
This is a course in Contemporary Canadian Poetry, with a focus on Poetry with Purpose—specifically, poems that advocate, inspire, question, share, unite and give voice to the voiceless. We’ll explore texts and contexts, from small community grassroots to national issues, with lectures and assignments anchored in Canadian culture and history. We’ll explore poetic form and structure, and interrogate the evolving ‘landscapes’ of identity, with a focus on the forces (colonial, political, social, etc.) that shape and re-shape our lives and stories. The first half of this course will explore contemporary Canadian poetry through analysis, close reading, small group and whole-class discussions and presentations. The second half of the course will build upon this exploration and see students write and draft, discuss, expand and refine their poetic craft by exploring a variety of techniques and approaches to writing poetry with purpose, with a focus on essential poetic elements: imagery, voice, theme, structure (form), literary devices, rhythm and sound. Through writing exercises, workshops and peer review sessions, students will also consider the larger context of the Canadian literary community and how, as emerging writers, they might participate in it.
ENGL-3709-245 | Topics in Canadian Literature and Culture: Graphic Novels | C. Rifkind
Course Delivery: ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Since the early 1990s, Canadian cartoonists have been at the forefront of the alternative comics movement (as opposed to superhero or mainstream comics) that continues to gain critical, academic, and popular attention. This course introduces students to Canadian comics and graphic novels that focus primarily on non-fiction stories, from Indigenous history to memoir and autobiography, and in print and digital forms. We will study these graphic narratives in relation to Canadian and Indigenous history, literature, and culture, and we will develop the skills to analyze comics as a specific form of visual-verbal storytelling with its own set of techniques, conventions, and methods. In addition to the graphic narratives, students should be prepared to read critical and theoretical material posted to Nexus. Evaluation will include a short essay, a course workbook, and a take home exam. The list of texts for the course is available through the UW Bookstore.
ENGL-3725-002 | Topics in Cultural Studies: Critical Approaches to Popular Culture | B. Cornellier
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Since its inception in Britain in the 1960s, cultural studies lead important shifts in the academic study of literature and culture, prompting scholars and critics to pay closer critical attention to the contexts of production, reception, and reproduction of different forms of cultural texts and practices. This course focuses on one of these shifts--namely the contestation of the hierarchical binary opposing “highbrow” and “lowbrow” cultural production, institutions, and publics--as well as the deep political implications of such critical and theoretical gestures. In doing so, this course emphasizes the class, gender, and race-based ideologies that saturate the politics of taste in our capitalist, mass-mediated societies, as well as the different (and sometimes conflicting) critical and methodological approaches developed by cultural theorists for the study of popular culture. Students will thus explore and document one of cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s crucial claims: that hegemony is often negotiated, secured, and contested in various – and sometimes conflicting – attempts to articulate culture and ‘the popular.’ This, he insists, is the reason why popular culture should be taken seriously as an object of study. This course includes readings in theory and criticism and the study of pop cultural forms and practices across different media and art practices, intellectual traditions, geopolitical locations, and historical moments.
ENGL-3920-770 | Rep of Disability and Culture | H. Foulger
Course Delivery: ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Disabled people have been the focus of literature and culture for time immemorial, often used as metaphors for the supernatural and evil. “Crip Lit” is an ever-growing subsection of literature which has finally allowed disabled artists to define their experience in humanizing and empowering ways, and use their disability in metaphor and genre to enliven the cultural expectations of disability and to speak to a deeply universal truth about the nature of being human, bodymind differences, and the temporality of being able-bodied.
This course examines past and present narratives by and about sick and disabled people and how narratives by nondisabled people have been damaging to the lives of sick/disabled people.
We will look at the revealing nature of internal narratives, the questions of the rights to live and die, queering disability, fiction vs nonfiction narratives, and issues of disability performance. We will discuss mostly Canadian content but there will be other resources too. We will dig into Amanda Leduc’s work on disability and fairy tales, Adam Pottle’s writing on deafness, neurodiverse creative nonfiction, and 丁香园AV-based theatre creator Debbie Patterson’s writing on the right to die, as well as Margiad Evans, Alice Wong, Annie Liontas, and Sins Invalid. These texts will be largely from Canadian writers, but we will also draw on other sources. This course is held online and will include lectures, in-class discussion and participation, and discussions in Nexus. Assignments will include essays, response papers and online exams.