2000-Level Course Descriptions
FALL 2024 | FALL WINTER 2024-25 | WINTER 2025
ENGL-2102-001 | Intro Creative Writing: Developing a Portfolio (Welcome to the Writers’ Room) | L. Wong
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
“If you’re struggling with what you’re writing—if you’re afraid to be your true self on the page—I dare you to stop listening to the outside voices and try listening only to yourself this one time. Write the book you most want to write…Write the book that is the most unapologetically YOU, no matter how long it takes.”- Nova Ren Suma, author of The Walls Around Us
“Overnight success is almost always a myth. Half of this industry is luck and half is the refusal to quit”--Victoria Schwab, author of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“The first draft isn’t about getting it right, it’s about getting it done.” –Ava Jae, author of Beyond the Red
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
In this workshop-based course, students concentrate on developing a portfolio of creative writing, including literary short fiction, young adult, and genre fiction. The course introduces students to strategies for writing in various prose genres and to the discipline involved in seeing a project through several drafts to its final stages. Through weekly writing exercises/prompts and assigned readings, this class emphasizes skills involved in self-editing and the professional preparation and submission of manuscripts suitable for a portfolio.
Students will be responsible for active participation, thoughtful feedback on peers’ work, and a willingness to generate new writing. This is a safe, supportive and inclusive learning environment. The workshop is also encouraged to think about submitting work to literary journals such as the University of Winnipeg’s Juice: https://www.uwinnipeg.ca/english/juice-journal-submissions.html
As this is a 200-level writing workshop, students should be fairly independent, committed, and motivated to improve their craft. Late assignments without permission will not receive instructor feedback and they will receive a zero if they are submitted a week after the deadline. This may sound harsh but I want us to adhere to the standards that professional writers follow in their daily practice.
Note: This course is recommended for students who plan to enroll in further creative writing courses at the undergraduate level.
ENGL-2102-002 | Intro Creative Writing | TBA
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course description TBA
ENGL-2102-003 | Intro Creative Writing | TBA
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course description TBA
ENGL-2203-001 | Seventeenth Century | K. Sinanan
Course Delivery: IN PERSON AND ONLINE
This course will be delivered both on-line and in person. Monday lectures will be delivered with Panopto (via Nexus) and will include closed captioning. We will meet in person on Wednesdays for discussions and workshops. Friday classes will be a blend of online writing spaces and smaller recorded lectures on critical material to help you understand these pieces. More details will be provided via Nexus.
This course considers seventeenth-century literature in a global context of colonialism, slavery and the making of race. We begin with poems that register both the intimate and the global to examine the presence of tropes of race and colonialism. We then move on to ‘discovery’ narratives that established western narratives of assumed superiority designed to support the settler and extractivist projects of European empire. Other texts allow us to consider the early stages of Indigenous genocide and plantation slavery and the stories that emerge from it. We also consider the ways in which canonical literature, such as Paradise Lost is imbued with imagery and metaphors based on violent global material realities, and we will read a range of genres that articulate the dynamics of slavery, race and colonialism. Throughout the course, primary texts will be read alongside key critical and theoretical works that offer methods for reading the production of race and global space in literature.
ENGL-2230-001 | British Literature and Culture 1600 - 1901 | K. Ready
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course description TBA
ENGL-2603-001 | Short Fiction | C. Russell
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
“We want to know what happens next.” Thus, in Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster described our universal hunger for stories. In “The Philosophy of Composition,” Edgar Allan Poe said one should be able to read stories or poems “at a single sitting,” or one risks losing “unity of impression.” These ideas capture the essence of the form we know as short fiction - the short story. We will discuss elements of fiction, like plot, character, setting, point of view, theme. We will consider different theories about how the form evolved - Outgrowth of the oral tradition of story-telling? Apprenticeship for writing novels? Nineteenth-century magazine editors’ and readers’ demands for stories that would fit in a single issue? We will explore different kinds of stories, such as initiation stories that depict a young person’s passage from childhood to adulthood, and stories of journeys to the unfamiliar. We will explore different modes - realism that tries to reflect our world, and fantasy that depicts different worlds. Hopefully we will come away with a deeper understanding of the history, composition, and possibilities of this genre. Hopefully we will have read some good stories and discovered “what happens next” in each of them.
ENGL-2612-001 | Science Fiction | TBA
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course description TBA
ENGL-2613-001 | Fantasy Fiction | P. Melville
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
This course analyzes literary works within the fantasy genre in light of feminist, postcolonial, Marxist, and other cultural theories. While it considers the history of the fantasy genre and the “fantastic” as a literary mode, the course focuses primarily on the poetics and politics of “world-building,” a term that refers to fantasy’s production of imaginary “secondary” worlds whose historical, geographical, ontological, and cultural realities substantially differ from the world(s) inhabited by fantasy’s various readerships. The course covers a variety of fantasy subgenres, including epic fantasy, urban fantasy, and fantasy for young people. The selection of texts is based on a sample of recent novels that have won awards conferred by institutions such as the World Fantasy Convention, the World Science Fiction Society, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and Locus magazine. Accordingly, the course also considers how historical and cultural pressures influence the administration of such awards and how these awards in turn shape the future of the fantasy genre.
ENGL-2722-001 | Postcolonial Literature | I. Adeniyi
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
This course introduces students to postcolonial literatures and cultures. The focus will be on examining the enduring legacies of colonialism, as well as the ongoing impacts of neocolonialism and imperialism in various contexts. The main objective of the course is to familiarize students with some key themes in postcolonial literature. Through critical analysis of literary and cultural texts, including novels, short stories, poems, and films, therefore, we will explore significant concepts and themes in postcolonial studies such as racism, orientalism, hybridity, alienation, and identity.
ENGL-2740-001 | Migration, Trauma, Memory (with Love): African Literature and Culture | C. Anyaduba
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
This course introduces students to the literatures of the African continent, in English, and the cultures from which they originate. The course also places a particular emphasis on the literature of the African Diasporas. We will explore a range of fictional and non-fictional texts that portray African migrations both to and from the African continent. Through this exploration, we will examine some major themes that emerge in African migration stories from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. Some of the texts we will read focus on topics such as exile, transnational migration, and diasporic communities. These texts portray African mobility as a process that leads to social and psychological displacement and alienation. The selected readings often evoke a sense of loss, whether it be the loss of home, innocence, time, intimacy, or the search for community. With these themes in mind, we will analyze the conditions that give rise to African transnational migrations in the contemporary global world order. We will probe the complex moral, emotional, social, political, and cultural dimensions of African migrations as represented in stories, poems, music, jokes, and visual cultures. In addition, our examination of these texts may be guided by concepts such as exile, alienation, double consciousness, transnationalism, and Afropolitanism.
ENGL-2922-001 | Topics in Women Writers | K. Ready
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course description TBA
ENGL-2981-001 | History of the Book | Z. Izydorczyk
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
This course introduces students to the history of the book, the material basis of literate/literary culture, by exploring the writing and reading technologies from the papyrus scroll to the digital screen. It briefly traces the history of producing, reading, preserving, exploiting, and controlling material texts in Western culture. Students are invited to reflect on writing as handwork, the ideologies of writing and reading, the production of a manuscript / printed codex, the development of mise-en-page and paratexts, the rise of the reading public, the economics of book production and trade, and the digital revolution. The course highlights the importance of writing for the emergence of the modern sense of selfhood and affords a historical and material perspective through which to engage the culture of the past and the present.
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.
FALL/WINTER 2023-24
ENGL-2003-770 | Field of Children’s Literature | TBA
Course Delivery: ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Course description TBA
ENGL-2114-001 | Fairy Tales and Culture | C. Tosenberger
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
In this course we will study fairy tales, focusing not only on collected source material, but on literature written specifically for children based on these borrowed forms. We will trace the history of fairy tales from their origins in oral narrative to their impact on contemporary culture today. Students read and write critically about these tales and engage in comparisons on multiple fronts, exploring major themes and characteristics of these tales as well as the social and psychological aspects of them. The goal is to enrich our appreciation of these tales by strengthening our critical understanding of them as well as to gain insight as to how these tales function in our selves and our society.
ENGL-2142-001 | Field of Lit & Text | B. Christopher
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
This course offers an in-depth introduction to, and practice in the skills of, literary and textual studies. Students explore the histories of literary and textual studies, including literary criticism and critical theories. They practice the skills of close reading and textual analysis, reading through the lenses of critical theories, researching, assembling bibliographies, and analyzing literary and cultural scholarship. Formats include oral presentation, seminar discussion, and formal, written, textual analysis.
ENGL-2146-770 | Screen Studies | A. Burke
Course Delivery: ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
This course provides an overview of history of that most fabled of screens, the cinema. I am in the process of revising this course, but the tentative plan is to break the year into three modules, each of which will take a different approach to thinking about film studies. The course will begin with an extended study of genre, zeroing in on the crime film, specifically the genre known as film noir. This will be followed by a module that considers a wide range of contemporary world cinema, using Girish Shambu’s concept of “the new cinephilia” to think about how we watch and talk about film in the Letterboxd age. The course will conclude with a module on film about childhood, examining the variety of ways in which the experience of being young or growing up has been represented onscreen. Do note that we will not be studying children’s films, but films that depict childhood experience, some of them not really suitable for children at all.
A provisional list of screenings (most of which you will have to do week-by-week before class) will be available later in the summer.
ENGL-2311-001 | Shakespeare | B. Christopher
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
This course offers students the chance to study in depth a selection of the dramatic works of William Shakespeare. In it, we will read a representative sample of his plays, from the range of genres in which he wrote. Students will be invited to think about these works in a variety of ways – aesthetically, theoretically, and historically, for example – both as individual plays and as part of a body of work. In addition to reading and writing about the plays, students will be required, in groups, to edit and to adapt a scene from one of the plays studied this year. Other assignments include quizzes, essays, writing workshops, and brief response papers. NOTE: This class is an optional pass/fail class. Students who want to receive a standard final grade (A, B, C, etc.) should register in ENGL-2311-001. Students who want to take the class as a pass/fail class should register in ENGL-2311-002.
ENGL-2601-001 | The Novel: Sex in the Victorian City | C. Manfredi
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
This course examines the intersection between urbanization and sexuality in Victorian Britain (1832-1901). Largely because of the Industrial Revolution, London experienced an unprecedented population boom: from one million people in 1801 to seven million by 1910. The creation of urban slums became associated with a range of social problems: poverty, prostitution, and “perverse” sexualities. This period played a key role in the history of sexuality since it is the era in which the modern terminologies we use to think and talk about sex were invented. For example, by the end of the 19th century, “homosexuality” had been coined and indelibly attached to the London literary scene thanks to playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde’s trial on charges of “gross indecency” (homosexuality). From marriage to prostitution, from the “Angel in the House” to the “New Woman,” this course focuses on the representation of sexuality and gender across eight novels. For instance, in George Gissing’s The Odd Women, we will see how the author plays on the fashionable topic of the “New Woman” (which enjoyed its heyday in the 1890s) and addresses problems of female independence, female employment, and economic freedom. In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, we will explore the figure of the dandy and the depiction of moral degeneracy and perversion.
WINTER 2024
ENGL-2002-001 | The Creative Process | TBA
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course description TBA
ENGL-2102-004 | Intro Creative Writing | J. Wills
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course description TBA
ENGL-2102-005 | Intro Creative Writing | TBA
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course description TBA
ENGL-2102-006 | Intro Creative Writing | TBA
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course description TBA
ENGL-2102-007 | Intro Creative Writing| TBA
Course Delivery: ONLINE
Course description TBA
ENGL-2202-001 | Literaure of the Sixteenth Century | TBA
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course Description TBA
ENGL-2604-001 | Poetry and Poetic Form | P. Melville
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
This course is designed to introduce students to various features, forms, and figures of poetic discourse. While historical context informs lectures and class discussion, this section of the course proceeds, for the most part, according to the figural elements of poetry (such as rhythm and rhyme, diction and tone, metaphor and allegory). By engaging in thorough discussions and varied writing assignments, students learn to become more appreciative, alert readers of poetry, and in the process expand the possibilities of their own writing. Please note that there will be no textbook to purchase, as all poems will be available through online links to websites such as poetryfoundation.org and poets.org.
ENGL-2613-770 | Fantasy Literature | TBA
Course Delivery: ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Course description TBA
ENGL-2806-001 | Semantics | TBA
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Course Description TBA