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 Winter 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
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 writer 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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Ryan Miller
ENGL 1102 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. These particular sections of 1102 are themed “Murder and Strangeness” and draw from classic works of fiction, leaning heavily on horror and psychological thriller. Among our readings are two novels, Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. A course pack of shorter works will also be used and includes stories by H.P. Lovecraft, Clive Barker, Flannery O’Connor, and others. With these texts, we will consider the methods by which these writers work to unsettle readers, and how literature can be a useful tool for probing (and occasionally disrupting) our understanding of evil.
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Leni Robinson
A woman attacked by a brown bear in Kamchatka, Russia; a Polynesian island torn by personal, political, and economic conflict; and a girl learning to live alone in a post-apocalyptic landscape — these are a few scenarios explored in the works that we will read this term. The novels, essays, poems, and memoir present competing understandings of the natural world: is it, for example, a wilderness, a raw material, a playground, or a garden? While we consider these questions, we will focus on developing our ability to enjoy, respond to, analyze, and write about literature.
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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 is all about vampires. Vampire stories have long been popular, but they adapt and exploit different sociocultural fears depending on the era in which they are written. We will be reading vampire tales in order to learn more about what people, past and present, both fear and desire. 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 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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Ivana Cikes Climate Change
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Richa Dwor
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Noëlle Phillips
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Leni Robinson Activism and Protest
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Fei Shi
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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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This course is a survey of major representative works of the late 17th through the early 20th centuries, studied in the context of the dramatic shifts in British culture following the Renaissance. A significant portion of the readings will be poetry, from the Restoration, Neo-Classical, Romantic and Victorian Periods, and from the beginnings of the 20th Century Modernist era.
Offerings
Noëlle Phillips
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