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 2021 term.
For scheduling information about both the themed sections listed below and all other sections of English offered by the department, please refer either to the course scheduling tool or to the course catalogue.
Course Catalogue Description
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. Works studied will include at least one of the major genres (fiction, non-fiction, poetry or drama), and at least one other type, drawn from another of the major genres or from less traditional sources, such as graphic novels, film or literary work in other media.
Topics
| Instructor | Section | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Leni Robinson |
090, 091 |
The Paradoxes of Wilderness
The biologist E. O. Wilson has written that wilderness “is the refuge of the spirit, remote, static, richer even than human imagination. But we cannot exist in this paradise without the machine that tears it apart. We are killing the thing we love, our Eden, progenitrix, and sibyl.” In this course we will read poems, novels, short stories, and essays that will allow us to explore the tensions and contradictions that underpin our relationship with the natural world. We will witness an old fisherman battling a giant fish in a contest of strength and endurance, a young Government of Canada worker learning to understand wolves and the wilderness in a new light, and rural labourers and big-city intellectuals who begin to dialogue with one another when they are faced with a shockingly beautiful natural phenomenon in an Appalachian valley. |
Course Catalogue Description
In this course, students will read, discuss and write about fiction. Works 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
| Instructor | Section | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Kurt Klotz |
003, 004 |
False Realities and the Limits of Knowledge
How do we know what we know? Why are some types of knowledge excluded from history, narrative, or representation? These are central questions in a course that examines how our ideas of reality are constructed in relation to memory, history, culture, and ideology. It considers who gains ascendancy in the invisible orders of reality, and how these orders intersect with class, race, and gender. It also considers how we ourselves are subject to systems of knowledge and how characters symbolically journey to the limits of knowledge to gain a different understanding of the world around them. We will also consider who or what represents the borders of knowledge and the practices characters undertake to interrogate the structures that uphold “reality.” |
| Ryan Miller |
005, 006 |
Murder, Mystery, Madness
This course aims to recognize and understand a variety of literary devices and textual elements. In service of the chosen theme, I have drawn upon classic and acclaimed works of literature from the genres of horror, crime/thriller, and historical fiction. With these texts, we will consider the means by which these writers have variously represented criminality and mental instability in their work, as well as what significance these texts might hold for us as critical readers. Discussion topics will include: the horror within, race, psychopathy and/or sociopathy, gender, and the instructive role of evil. |
| Michael Stachura | 090, 091 | The 10th-century Japanese writer Sei Shōnagon wrote in her diary The Pillow Book that sex and literature are two of life’s greatest pleasures. While this course can’t help you with the former, it can certainly help you understand and appreciate the latter. The practical aim of this course is to help you read, analyze, and construct well written academic papers on fiction. But most of all, I hope that this course will help you better appreciate and enjoy the depth and beauty that fiction has to offer you. As the famous literary critic Harold Bloom says in his book How to Read and Why: “Ultimately we read […] to strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests.” |
Course Catalogue Description
In this course students will read, discuss and write about plays as literature, including elements of stagecraft and performance. Plays assigned may emphasize a variety of genres (such as tragedy, comedy, the one-act play, the dramatic monologue) and may reflect significant developments in the history of theatre, from its beginnings to the present.
Topics
| Instructor | Section | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Eve Preus |
001, 002 |
The theatre stages a face-to-face encounter between two groups of strangers — performers and audience. At the level of the medium, then, is an interest in how we come to recognize and let others in. Theatre’s answer to how we do this is always the same: by attending to and empathizing with a polyphony of different voices. Indeed, many scholars have linked the emergence of the theatre to the emergence of democratic citizenship. In this course, we will read and analyze plays from different historical backgrounds, examining dialogue, characterization, and stagecraft. We will look specifically at how these plays represent characters who are strangers in order to speak to broader questions about what the theatre as an art form asks us to consider: how we, for better or for worse, belong to one another. |
Course Catalogue Description
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.
Topics
| Instructor | Section | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Eve Preus |
007, 008 |
Learning and Knowledge |
| Leni Robinson |
090, 091 |
The Natural Environment |