Themed Sections of Literature and Academic Writing

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 and weird fiction, but also incorporating examples of horror and fantasy into our discussion, we will examine how the philosophical and political assumptions of our culture structure our beliefs about gender and sexuality, race and class, language and intelligence, 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.

Friendship 

Friendship has been described as “an institutionless institution.” As the literary critic Gregory Jusdanis observes, 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.” At its most basic level, all friendship seems to demand of us is our empathy—our willingness to imagine and engage with the thoughts and feelings of another—and our time. For these reasons, Jusdanis intriguingly suggests, friendship may in fact have a lot on common with the act of reading.
In this course we will explore how specific cultural forms—ranging from the elegy to the novel to the buddy film—have developed traditions centring on the concept of friendship and have, in turn, deepened and troubled our understandings of it. What makes friendship possible or impossible? What does friendship make possible?

The required readings will include the following books, which will be available for purchase through the campus bookstore: Trainor, Ledi; Forster, A Passage to India; Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek; and Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You?

This section of ENGL 1102 can count as a relevant course for the Associate of Arts Specialization in Gender, Sexualities, and Women's Studies. It is open to all students. We will consider the connections among family, gender, and sexuality. How do the families we are born into shape our understandings of gender identity and gender roles? As ideas about gender and sexuality change, how do people adapt family roles and structures in response? We will begin with Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, a classic British courtship novel, and move on to consider more recent texts by and about trans people and the ways they challenge and disrupt conventional ideas about family, including Torrey Peters's novel Detransition, Baby and Taylor Mac's play Hir. These texts may challenge you, whether because of Austen’s early-19th century English or because of the frank depictions of sex, gender and sexuality in Hir and Detransition, Baby. If you are not comfortable reading about these topics, considering the questions they raise with an open mind, and discussing them respectfully, this may not be the right class for you.

Hope and Adaptation amidst the Climate and Biodiversity Emergencies

Much of the creative response to the global climate and biodiversity crises has taken the form of works set in parched or flooded post-apocalyptic and dystopian landscapes. In this course, however, we will focus on novels, short stories, and other creative works that present not only hope for addressing the political and social divisions that are inhibiting change, but also visions of a world where the crises are gradually addressed and humanity flourishes. Our reading will culminate in the study of Kim Stanley Robinson’s immensely hopeful near-future work of science fiction The Ministry for the Future (2020).

ENGL 1106 aims to recognize and understand a variety of literary devices and textual elements, and in so doing promotes the development of critical thinking and analysis. During the semester, we will consider three novels that represent diverse lives and compelling subject matter. These novels are Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), and Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998). Discussion topics will include sociopathy and identity (or “masks”); the importance of art and the humanities in an imagined hyper-corporate and STEM-centric near-future; and Indigenous identity and resistance in the context of Canada’s residential school history. Given what may be at-times discomforting subject matter, students are encouraged to briefly acquaint themselves with these titles before registering.

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, the sonnet, the ode, erotic biblical poetry, the blues. We'll read two poetry collections by Rita Wong and Gary Snyder. 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.

The Ethics of Animal Rights

001

The Douglas College course catalogue says this course covers British literature from the Restoration Era until World War I, which probably sounds vague and meaningless to most students. But let’s think about what was happening during this time. The Restoration refers to the Restoration of the Monarchy – because England had just BEHEADED King Charles I and had a civil war. Then Charles II, the son of the executed Charles I, comes back to England from Europe and everyone’s like, “Well, I guess things are back to normal now.” But they didn’t go back to the good old days. Deeply engrained assumptions about the divine right of kings, about God, about the role of women, about sexuality, and about the superiority of whiteness were to be both reinforced and challenged over the next 300 years. And these assumptions became more complex and more vulnerable to attack as Britain turned itself into an empire, colonizing a quarter of the earth and assimilating millions of non-British folk into its commonwealth. This course will give you a taste of the important literary eras and genres of this time period, and it will also show you how ideas about equality, authority, sexuality, gender, art, and nature developed and shifted in complicated ways. We will be reading some of the established canonical authors (the “dead white guys”) but also looking at some authors – women, people of colour – who have had far less attention paid to them.