1000-Level Course Descriptions
FALL 2024 | FALL/WINTER 2024-25 | WINTER 2025
ENGL-1000-001 | English 1A | K. Ready
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course Description TBA
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 | TBA
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course Description TBA
ENGL-1000-004 | English 1A | TBA
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course Description TBA
ENGL-1000-005 | English 1A | TBA
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course Description TBA
ENGL-1000-770| English 1A | TBA
Course Delivery: ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Course Description TBA
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 | TBA
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course Description TBA
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 | S. Pool
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course Description TBA
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 2023-24
ENGL-1001-001 | English 1 | C. Manfredi
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course Description TBA
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-1001-004 | English 1 | TBA
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course Description TBA
ENGL-1001-770 | English 1 | TBA
Course Delivery: ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Course Description TBA
WINTER 2024
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| TBA
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course Description TBA
ENGL-1000-008 | English 1A | TBA
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course Description TBA
ENGL-1000-09 | English 1A | TBA
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course Description TBA
ENGL-1000-010 | English 1A | TBA
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course Description TBA
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 | TBA
Course Delivery: ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Course Description TBA
ENGL-1004-003 | Reading Culture | TBA
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course Description TBA
ENGL-1004-004 | Reading Culture | TBA
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course Description TBA
ENGL-1005-003 | Reading to Write | J. Wills
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course description TBA
ENGL-1005-004 | Reading to Write | TBA
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course Description TBA
ENGL-1005-770 | Reading to Write | S. Pool
Course Delivery: ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Course Description TBA