While all sections of the same ENGL course teach students the same set of reading and writing skills, the specific texts students read and discuss in each section depend on the instructor’s area of expertise and interests. Often, instructors choose their texts based on a particular theme or topic. Below is a list describing all the themed sections of literature and academic writing that will be offered during the Fall 2025 term. If a section does not appear below, it's because it has not been identified as one with a unifying theme or topic.
For scheduling information about both the themed sections listed below and all other sections of English offered by the department, please refer to the browse classes tool.
For more information about the instructors teaching these sections and others, please see the English Department's faculty profile page.
In this course students will read, discuss and write about at least one major theme in literature and culture, such as crime and punishment, gender roles, immigrant experiences, or paradise lost. Texts studied will be drawn from at least two literary genres.
Topics
Jason Bourget
In this section of ENGL 1102, we will explore how speculative fiction challenges what our culture tells us about ourselves and others. Using texts drawn primarily from science fiction, horror, and fantasy, we will examine how the philosophical and political assumptions of our culture structure our beliefs about gender and sexuality, race and class, aliens and artificial intelligence, language and reality, and the meaning of life and death. While we have this discussion, we will also note how these speculative forms of literature, like science itself, encourage a habit of mind which demands that we always question commonly accepted “truths” about the world around us.
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Nancy Earle
Friendship is “an institutionless institution,” according to the literary critic Gregory Jusdanis. In other words, our friendships are not governed by such things as laws, contracts, vows, or ceremonies. Unlike most other important relationships in our lives, friendship is “a legally, religiously, and economically inconsequential affiliation. There is no fixed beginning or end of friendship, no rite celebrating its appearance, and no covenant sealing its existence” (Jusdanis 4). Perhaps because there are no firm rules, times, or places for having friends, we use the term friendship to refer to many kinds of relationships that we develop in real life and online.
Despite this slippery definition, many would argue that their friendships are significant relationships. Moreover, there is a long history of thinkers who have considered friendship as a model for civil society, or even for nation-to-nation relationships.
In this course we will examine how works of literature have portrayed friendship and explored its meaning in our lives. In our study across three units — poetry, film, and fiction — we will ask the following questions: What is friendship? What makes friendship possible or impossible? What does friendship make possible?
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Liz McCausland
Embodying Gender: In these sections we will explore what it means to live in a gendered body. We will consider both how people use their bodies to express their gender identity and how expectations are imposed on their bodies by others. Our readings will include Caleb Azumah Nelson's novel Open Water and a selection of short fiction, personal essays, and poetry. Students should be aware that reading may include challenging themes such as sexual assault, eating disorders, and gender dysphoria. Please feel free to contact the instructor with questions.
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Eve Preus
Change. Transformation. Evolution. Conversion. These are all words that describe the process of moving from one state of being to another—shifting form, function, perspective, or identity in response to time, experience, or intention. Put another way, they describe the process of becoming rather than a fixed state of being. In this course, we will read a variety of texts — poems, creative essays, short stories, a play, a novel, and a film — that explore what it means to move from one thing to something else entirely. We will analyze how becoming emerges as a philosophical inquiry within the characters who seek to represent human experience, and within their literary genres that seek to reimagine what their forms can become.
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Naava Smolash
Literature and the Political Imagination: Hope in Hard Times begins with the assumption that imaginative acts, creative and literary, are part of how people conceive of a better world in order to bring it into being. We will read Utopian and dystopian fiction, looking at novels, short stories, Socratic dialogue, and film. In addition to learning tools for literary analysis, students in this class will explore the ways speculative literature can renew and revive tradition, clarify the present, warn against authoritarian futures, and generate hopeful ones.
Booklist:
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In this course, students will read, discuss and write about fiction. Texts assigned will emphasize a variety of genres, such as realism, fantasy, mystery and romance, and may reflect significant developments in the history of fiction.
Topics
Noëlle Phillips
This section of Reading Fiction has a vampire theme (cue scary Dracula laughter). Vampire stories have long been popular, but they exploit different kinds of fears depending on the sociocultural context in which they're written. We'll be reading vampire tales from the 19th century up until present day in order to learn more about what people, past and present, both fear and desire. We'll also be watching film versions of this monster. Vampires may not be real, but the stories we create about them can reveal important aspects of the human experience.
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This course emphasizes the close reading of three genres – fiction, poetry, and plays – and examines their defining features.
Topics
Connor Byrne
Considering fiction, poetry, and drama - in works by, among others, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, and the great playwright Sophocles - this course sees writers wrestling with what it means to be human. Students will explore this and related questions across a range of genres but also time periods - including our own, in which technology poses a potentially grave threat to humanity and even human-ness itself.
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Wilhelm Emilsson
In this course, our reading of poetry will range from William Shakespeare to Bob Dylan (ENGL 1109, Coursepack). We will study two major 20th century plays (Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot), one classic detective novel (Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles), and one recent novel about the conflict between conformity and individualism (Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman). We will combine an analysis of literary texts with an appreciation of their cultural significance and aesthetic impact.
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In this course students will learn to closely read, interpret and write about poetry. The poems assigned will be various in nature and will cover a range of poets and poetic forms.
Topics
Kim Trainor
In this class we will learn how to read poems and (hopefully!) fall in love with poetry. Along the way we will study some amazing poems: free verse, constraint-driven poems, spoken word, dis raps, the sonnet, the ode, erotic biblical poetry, ecopoetry, the blues. We'll read a poetry collection by Rita Wong (undercurrent). We'll also watch the Canadian animated film, Window Horses: The Poetic Persian Epiphany of Rosie Ming (2016). We'll study poems from the perspective of working poets: as if we were writing them.
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This course introduces students to the process of writing academic argument papers, and to strategies, assignments and exercises that develop their abilities as researchers, readers and writers of scholarly prose. Students will examine the general principles of composition, and the specific conventions of academic writing as practiced in several disciplines, particularly in the arts and humanities. Students will gain experience in locating, evaluating and using sources within their own writing.
Sections Focused on Specific Topics
Jason Bourget
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Wilhelm Emilsson
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Dorritta Fong
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Noëlle Phillips
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Kim Trainor The Anthropocene
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Admission to second-year English courses is open to all students who have taken any two university-transfer first-year English literature courses, or one university-transfer first-year English literature course and one university-transfer first-year Creative Writing or English writing course.
This course offers an historical survey of representative texts from the beginnings of the English language through to the late seventeenth century. Students will read a variety of works, such as Anglo-Saxon verse, Arthurian romance, medieval comic literature, early religious drama, Shakespearean drama, and both secular and sacred lyric poetry, including sonnets from poets such as Shakespeare, Donne and Milton.
Offerings
Noëlle Phillips
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