Courses in English

This course, along with its complement, Writing Matters: English Literature and Academic Interpretation II, builds students' skills as critical readers and writers through the discipline of English. Students learn to be sophisticated readers of literature, and to examine the assumptions and implications of a wide array of texts as well as culture. The courses develop students' sensitivity to language use and their appreciation of the relationship between form and content. Students will learn a range of global literary genres from various periods including specific terms and devices for reading lyric poems, non-fiction, and one long work (novel or drama). Assignments will introduce stages one and two of a cumulative research paper methodology, with stages three and four completed in the complement course. Through interpretative practices, we are able to examine the literary foundations of our worldviews and look on the world, ourselves, and others anew.

This course, along with its complement, Writing Matters: English Literature and Academic Interpretation I, builds students' skills as critical readers and writers through the discipline of English. Students learn to be sophisticated readers of literature, and to examine the assumptions and implications of a wide array of texts as well as culture. The courses develop students' sensitivity to language use and their appreciation of the relationship between form and content. Students will learn a range of global literary genres from various periods including specific terms and devices for reading narrative poems, short stories, and two long works (novel or drama). Building from the complement course, assignments will complete stages three and four of a cumulative research paper methodology. Through interpretative practices, we are able to examine the literary foundations of our worldviews and look on the world, ourselves, and others anew.

How are we to understand literature which remains distant from us in time, space, and even language? Although we may be able to appreciate the artistry of early writing, only by placing it within its cultural context can we fully value the achievement of the past. This course will therefore consider the literary, political, social and religious climate of the Middle Ages in an investigation of the rich English literary tradition from its beginnings to the 15th century.

This course addresses fundamental issues about the many ways we "read" literature, including questions about its production, interpretation, and reception. Focusing on contemporary theory and research methods, the course will provide students with the necessary literary skills to study literature as a formal discipline at an advanced level. It will also provide students with the ability to understand and integrate literature into their own cultural perspectives and worldviews, especially how the Christian faith both expresses and challenges the important critical debates of the 20th and 21st century.

Anglo-Saxons battling Vikings, miraculous stories of angels and saints, riddles, elegies about the transience of the world, Beowulf's heroic deeds-all these and more can be found in English literature between the 5th and 11th centuries. According to J. R. R. Tolkien, "the unrecapturable magic of ancient English verse" can only be experienced by "those who have ears to hear," or those who can read Old English verse in its original language ("On Translating Beowulf"). This course introduces students to the language and literature of the Anglo-Saxons. It combines language instruction with literary study, readings of modern translations with readings in the original language, so that students may experience firsthand the earliest English literature. No previous linguistic training is required.

The Middle Ages span roughly a thousand years (5th-15th centuries) and boast an exciting array of authors (Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, Margery Kempe) and genres (sagas, romances, mystery plays, allegories). This course explores a specific medieval author, genre, or theme.

This course explores issues of textuality and performance in Shakespeare's canon. It combines a detailed study of the plays themselves with an examination of representative film versions. The course centres on a literary analysis of the text while it also explores the historical context out of which the dramas emerged and contemporary scholarly issues that arise in both text and performance.

This course engages with the emerging field of ecocriticism, examining literary texts with careful attention to their relationship to the environment. Ecocriticism "takes an earth-centered approach to literary studies" (Glotfelty), and as such, questions of sustainability, ethics, stewardship, and environmental justice will be central to this course. One of the central questions of the course will be how, in particular, the Christian faith shapes an investigation of literature and the environment. The course will consider texts from a range of time periods and geographies, drawing from 18th-century British Romantic Poets, 19th-century American nature writers of prose and poetry, as well as more contemporary Canadian and American authors of both fiction and nonfiction. We will move from a broad tradition of nature writing to a more specific consideration of our own particular time and space.

Human being, whether explored through themes of identity, self, or character, is a constantly evolving narrative we construct of ourselves and others. This course examines the intersection of psychological and literary narratives as they construct human being, and emphasizes how storytelling is a vital yet undervalued notion in contemporary society. We will question how human identity is created and communicated, while exploring the fringes of socially accepted behaviour to examine how norms are established, upheld, and challenged both in literature and psychology.

This course will examine the relationship between film and literature by studying films that have been adapted from literary texts. Like literature, films are narratives that can be examined and discussed using similar methodologies. However, film has its own distinct techniques and terminology. This course will augment our understanding of both art forms, as well as their complementary themes such as identity, memory, and violence.

Literary works that offer representations of the artist and his or her work abound, and the presentation of the artist's role in culture has a long and fascinating literary history. This course examines literary representations of art and artists, including the visual arts. How have writers described the lives and the work of writers, painters, and sculptors? What can we learn about creativity, talent, and the lives of artists from these literary works? Texts will be selected from various historical periods, and from multiple countries, in order to demonstrate the rich relationship between the visual and the literary.

In an era on the edge of paradigmatic changes in AI, we explore what literary artists have predicted in science fiction about machine cognition and how it might change human experiences in a series of texts including short stories, essays, films, and novels. We will investigate the interface between the human and the machine while we ponder ethical dilemmas posed by AI. We will consider what our findings and our faith might require of us thoughtful citizens in public policy conversations.

From tea parties to coal mines, this course explores a range of literature and its social contexts across the 19th century. Visit the country estates of the regency period of Jane Austen and the mid-century Victorian London of Charles Dickens. This course includes a variety of the era's prose--both fiction and non-fiction--as well as poetry, sampling many major authors and genres of the period. Explore the Victorian concept of "progress" during a time of scientific advancement, industrialism, colonialism and debates about gender, aesthetics, morality and faith.

Although the field of postcolonial studies is relatively new, it has already produced an impressive body of literature and criticism for examining how British colonialism and imperialism have shaped the modern world. This course is intended to introduce the student to the key English literary texts and theoretical concerns in this ongoing discourse, including questions about race, nation, gender, and cultural identity. We will also address the historical role Christian theology played in colonialism, as well as its place in recuperative strategies of nationhood and equality. We will study novels, films and other media, from sources as varied as Canada, India, the Caribbean, Africa, and Great Britain.

The first decades of the twentieth century were a time of great upheaval: new technologies of speed and mass communication, a horrific first world war, the roaring twenties of jazz and glittering parties, the great depression of the 1930s. In this unsettled world, people presented competing views of the future. Some sought hope and meaning through the creation of new art and literature, experimenting with reflecting the altered world. Modernist literature provoked, frustrated, and unsettled its audiences, but it also spoke to them, mourned with them, and inspired them with its beauty. For people of faith, what is the value of questioning and doubting, of difficulty and perseverance? This course explores these questions alongside the value of hope in the midst of great opposition.

What creative strategies have women used historically to get their writing published? What does gender matter when one is writing or reading a text? This course explores both a history of women and the printed word and a reflection on contemporary issues: genre, authorship, canonicity and tradition, material production of texts, and relations to feminist thought. By reading a wide selection of texts -devotional works, polemical essays, diary entries, poems, "serious" novels and "chick lit" - this course considers women's writing today in the context of the women who came before.

From its rural and colonial past to its increasingly urban and multicultural present, Canada's emerging and evolving sense of national identity has been reflected in its literature. Students will experience this literary history through representative poetry and prose in English, examining critical, cultural, and regional influences prior to 1970.

Tracing our literary landscape reveals that contemporary Canada is constantly changing. Through voices in poetry and prose in English, this course explores our shifting national and regional identities from the contemporary (post-1970) period forward by investigating literary questions of historical and cultural significance.

Arthur of Britain has figured in legend from the 6th Century to the present day. What accounts for this enduring appeal and influence? In our quest for an answer, this course traces the growth of Arthurian legend, or a specific theme within it, from its medieval roots to its contemporary realization.

In 1842, Edgar Allan Poe famously declared the short story to be fiction that conveys a single impression and can be read in a single sitting; since then, critics and authors have debated this definition. Meanwhile, perhaps surprisingly, the genre retains its popularity with the contemporary reading public - an audience whose time-demands dictate the brevity of that "single sitting" and whose culture is an increasingly visual one. In this course, we will examine the development of American and Canadian short stories from the late nineteenth-century to the present, including short story theories, definitions, and the tendentious story cycle. What does the short story reveal to the contemporary reader about past, current and possibly even future North American societies?

This course will provide an introduction to the writing of short stories poetry, creative non-fiction, screenplays, and/or playscripts, depending on instructor expertise. We will read and discuss literary models, but the emphasis will be on students producing their own work. Through a supported workshop environment, students will explore and experience the writer's task, role, and creative process, culminating in a portfolio. No previous creative writing experience is required.

This course will provide instruction in the writing of short stories, poetry, creative non-fiction, screenplays, and/or playscripts, depending on instructor expertise. We will read and discuss literary models, but the emphasis will be on students' own creative work. Through extensive writing and workshop participation, students will explore and experience the writer's task, role, and creative process, culminating in a portfolio.

This course, designed for editors of student publications, provides extensive hands-on experience for up to two students per publication. Working with a faculty advisor, students will edit and produce either a minimum of five issues of the student newspaper, The Chronicle, or the annual creative arts volume, Ballyhoo. Students will be required to create a budget and to manage all aspects of the publications (from promotion to production). Students should expect to spend at least 100 hours per term on the publication. The course includes an honorarium upon completion and is graded pass/fail.

A course on a topic or figure of special interest to a member of the English faculty and offered on a non-recurring basis.

This course deepens the discussion about the many ways we "read" literature. Building from general familiarity with schools of theory, this advanced course will require student engagement with key primary texts that represent major literary interpretive trends and diverse ways of understanding the unique contributions of literary criticism to creating a social imaginary. Throughout, students will be encouraged to interrogate their own assumptions about culture and worldview as they develop an awareness of the many ways that a distinctively Christian reading is both enriched by and challenging to the perspectives offered by the major critical schools.

In this survey of 17th-Century literature, we will explore the ways that writers of this era both register and precipitate the changes that take place during the period. We will also investigate the tensions that exist between the old and the new as early modern thoughts about society, science and the sacred take shape.

From monks in monasteries writing manuscripts to digital books and online discussions, this course will explore the changing technologies of communication and the impact these technologies have on social interaction, cultural products, and human thought. Courses on Book History are offered in history departments, in digital humanities programs, in graduate library programs, and in English departments. This course offers an in-depth study of a number of literary texts (both fiction and non-fiction) coupled with the historical study of books as objects. The analysis of the content of these texts will be enhanced by the study of their form and the larger economic, historical, and cultural context for the texts. We will therefore also pay attention to ink, paper, book covers, and typography.

A course on a topic or figure of special interest to a member of the English faculty and offered on a non-recurring basis.

This course enables students to do a second year of editorship on a student publication.

This course gives an opportunity to do intensive study of a special topic or writer of particular interest to the student who will work closely with a member of the English faculty in tutorial meetings. Students must apply well in advance to a member of the English faculty in order to undertake a Directed Study. ENGL 499 is normally taken by students who are majoring in English.