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 Summer 2026 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
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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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
Connor Byrne
In this course we will read short stories and novels in order to showcase a range of approaches and goals within the genre of fiction. From Edgar Allan Poe to Toni Morrison, from psychological realism to experimental proto-science fiction to film adaptation - and many spaces in between - this section of English 1106 will enrich your understanding and appreciation for the endlessly-fascinating worlds story and story-telling.
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Ryan Miller
ENGL 1106 aims to recognize and understand a variety of literary devices and textual elements, and in so doing promotes the development of close reading and analysis skills. During the semester, we will draw from the (sub)genres of post-apocalyptic, romantic, and historical fiction. These novels are Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name (2007), and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996), respectively. Our readings include a depiction of life for the survivors of a global pandemic, a sexually charged summer between two young men in Italy, and the tale of a servant girl convicted for her role in a double murder in Ontario in 1843.
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This course emphasizes the close reading of three genres – fiction, poetry, and plays – and examines their defining features.
Topics
Jason Bourget
In this course, which is part of the Ireland Field School, we will explore the contradictory stories that the people of Ireland tell about themselves. Reflecting a nation politically divided in one way or another for much of its history, many of Ireland’s stories are stories of conflict between Protestants and Catholics, between nationalists and unionists, between English and Irish speakers, between religion and secularism, and between tradition and modernity. Our search for these competing narratives will lead us to works set in the Gaelic-speaking Aran Islands, to short stories that show what Dublin looked like in the early twentieth century before, during, and after the Irish War of Independence and subsequent Irish Civil War, and to poems that meditate upon the terror experienced by, and the resilience of, those who lived through the worst years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. As we examine these many conflicting retellings of the “truth” of Ireland, we will also discuss how at least some communities, such as the late 1970s punk scene of “alternative Ulster,” attempted to move beyond these polarizing and all-too-often-destructive narratives of political belonging.
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Taylor Breckles
ENGL 1109 provides an introduction to the study of literature within a wider sociocultural framework. The theme of this course is Comedy as Curtain: Humour as a Rhetorical Tool for Discussing Difficult Topics. This course will explore fictional texts, poems, and a play that all feature humour as a rhetorical strategy for discussing topics like grief, intergenerational trauma, colonialism, sexism, and racism, among others. Students will learn how to apply humour theory to literary texts, identify and analyze literary devices, and recognize genre-specific features. The readings will be predominantly 20th and 21st Century.
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John Rowell
Monsters, Form, and Comedians
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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
Dylan Jackson
Climate and Conservation
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Simon Rolston
Crime and Punishment
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John Rowell
The Ethics of Technology
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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 explores works of literature specifically intended for children and young adults, as well as traditional influences on children's literature, such as folk and fairy tales and moral tales. Students will read works reflecting a variety of literary genres, as well as contextual and/or critical material related to the works being studied.
Offerings
Louise Saldanha
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