2000-Level Course Descriptions

FALL 2024 | FALL WINTER 2024-25 | WINTER 2025

ENGL-2102-001 | Intro Creative Writing: Developing a Portfolio (Welcome to the Writers’ Room) | L. Wong
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

“If you’re struggling with what you’re writing—if you’re afraid to be your true self on the page—I dare you to stop listening to the outside voices and try listening only to yourself this one time. Write the book you most want to write…Write the book that is the most unapologetically YOU, no matter how long it takes.”- Nova Ren Suma, author of The Walls Around Us

“Overnight success is almost always a myth. Half of this industry is luck and half is the refusal to quit”--Victoria Schwab, author of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“The first draft isn’t about getting it right, it’s about getting it done.” –Ava Jae, author of Beyond the Red

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself. -Jim Rohn

In this workshop-based course, students concentrate on developing a portfolio of creative writing, including literary short fiction, young adult, and genre fiction. The course introduces students to strategies for writing in various prose genres and to the discipline involved in seeing a project through several drafts to its final stages. Through weekly writing exercises/prompts and assigned readings, this class emphasizes skills involved in self-editing and the professional preparation and submission of manuscripts suitable for a portfolio.

Students will be responsible for active participation, thoughtful feedback on peers’ work, and a willingness to generate new writing. This is a safe, supportive and inclusive learning environment. The workshop is also encouraged to think about submitting work to literary journals such as the University of 麻豆传媒’s Juice: /english/juice-journal-submissions.html

As this is a 200-level writing workshop, students should be fairly independent, committed, and motivated to improve their craft. Late assignments without permission will not receive instructor feedback and they will receive a zero if they are submitted a week after the deadline. This may sound harsh but I want us to adhere to the standards that professional writers follow in their daily practice.

Note: This course is recommended for students who plan to enroll in further creative writing courses at the undergraduate level.

ENGL-2102-002 | Intro Creative Writing | J. Scoles
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

Students will concentrate on developing a significant portfolio of creative writing, including poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction. The course will introduce students to frameworks and strategies for developing creative work through improvisational writing exercises, close reading, and critical analysis. Key writing concepts—Voice, Plot, Setting, and Character, for example—will be explored in depth, and emphasis will be placed on the skills involved in drafting, self-editing, peer-reviewing, and work-shopping creative work, as well as the professional preparation and submission of manuscripts suitable for publication. This course is recommended for students who plan on taking further creative writing courses at the undergraduate level, as well as those who have an interest in pursuing creative writing as a profession.

ENGL-2203-001 | Seventeenth Century | K. Sinanan
Course Delivery: IN PERSON AND ONLINE

This course will be delivered both on-line and in person. Monday lectures will be delivered with Panopto (via Nexus) and will include closed captioning. We will meet in person on Wednesdays for discussions and workshops. Friday classes will be a blend of online writing spaces and smaller recorded lectures on critical material to help you understand these pieces. More details will be provided via Nexus.

This course considers seventeenth-century literature in a global context of colonialism, slavery and the making of race. We begin with poems that register both the intimate and the global to examine the presence of tropes of race and colonialism. We then move on to ‘discovery’ narratives that established western narratives of assumed superiority designed to support the settler and extractivist projects of European empire. Other texts allow us to consider the early stages of Indigenous genocide and plantation slavery and the stories that emerge from it. We also consider the ways in which canonical literature, such as Paradise Lost is imbued with imagery and metaphors based on violent global material realities, and we will read a range of genres that articulate the dynamics of slavery, race and colonialism. Throughout the course, primary texts will be read alongside key critical and theoretical works that offer methods for reading the production of race and global space in literature.

ENGL-2230-001 | British Literature and Culture 1600 - 1901: From Libertines to Aesthetes| K. Ready
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This section of ENGL-2230 (subtitled “From Libertines to Aesthetes”) examines major literary and cultural movements such as Puritanism, Restoration libertinism, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Victorianism, Pre-Raphaelitism, Utilitarianism, Aestheticism, and Decadence. Lectures will introduce students to a selection of canonical, as well as less familiar texts. We will begin discussion of each period with some history to place the texts we are looking at into context. Consideration will be given in the course of the semester to the question of canon formation. We will also be interested in tracing inter-textual dialogues throughout the period.

ENGL-2603-001 | Short Fiction | C. Russell
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

“We want to know what happens next.” Thus, in Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster described our universal hunger for stories. In “The Philosophy of Composition,” Edgar Allan Poe said one should be able to read stories or poems “at a single sitting,” or one risks losing “unity of impression.” These ideas capture the essence of the form we know as short fiction - the short story. We will discuss elements of fiction, like plot, character, setting, point of view, theme. We will consider different theories about how the form evolved - Outgrowth of the oral tradition of story-telling? Apprenticeship for writing novels? Nineteenth-century magazine editors’ and readers’ demands for stories that would fit in a single issue? We will explore different kinds of stories, such as initiation stories that depict a young person’s passage from childhood to adulthood, and stories of journeys to the unfamiliar. We will explore different modes - realism that tries to reflect our world, and fantasy that depicts different worlds. Hopefully we will come away with a deeper understanding of the history, composition, and possibilities of this genre. Hopefully we will have read some good stories and discovered “what happens next” in each of them.

ENGL-2612-001 | Science Fiction: Contact Narratives and Traveller's Tales | C. Fawcett
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

Science Fiction, in exploring potential futures and imagined realities, can situate newness through travel: a protagonist facing a foreign space dislocates us, as we explore alongside these characters. The journey, prevalent throughout literary history, is a process of growth, of change. Exploration and discovery can also bring the protagonist into contact with the Other: the alien or technological construction. These narratives provide speculative spaces that challenge and disrupt our understanding of our world and possible other ones: this dislocation can thus offer a different way of seeing our world, and even ourselves. We will examine an array of texts from the eras of Science Fiction, from the scientific romance to contemporary narratives, looking across literary and media texts.

ENGL-2613-001 | Fantasy Fiction | P. Melville
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course analyzes literary works within the fantasy genre in light of feminist, postcolonial, Marxist, and other cultural theories. While it considers the history of the fantasy genre and the “fantastic” as a literary mode, the course focuses primarily on the poetics and politics of “world-building,” a term that refers to fantasy’s production of imaginary “secondary” worlds whose historical, geographical, ontological, and cultural realities substantially differ from the world(s) inhabited by fantasy’s various readerships. The course covers a variety of fantasy subgenres, including epic fantasy, urban fantasy, and fantasy for young people. The selection of texts is based on a sample of recent novels that have won awards conferred by institutions such as the World Fantasy Convention, the World Science Fiction Society, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and Locus magazine. Accordingly, the course also considers how historical and cultural pressures influence the administration of such awards and how these awards in turn shape the future of the fantasy genre.

ENGL-2722-001 | Postcolonial Literature | I. Adeniyi
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course introduces students to postcolonial literatures and cultures. The focus will be on examining the enduring legacies of colonialism, as well as the ongoing impacts of neocolonialism and imperialism in various contexts. The main objective of the course is to familiarize students with some key themes in postcolonial literature. Through critical analysis of literary and cultural texts, including novels, short stories, poems, and films, therefore, we will explore significant concepts and themes in postcolonial studies such as racism, orientalism, hybridity, alienation, and identity.

ENGL-2740-001 | Migration, Trauma, Memory (with Love): African Literature and Culture | C. Anyaduba
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course introduces students to the literatures of the African continent, in English, and the cultures from which they originate. The course also places a particular emphasis on the literature of the African Diasporas. We will explore a range of fictional and non-fictional texts that portray African migrations both to and from the African continent. Through this exploration, we will examine some major themes that emerge in African migration stories from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. Some of the texts we will read focus on topics such as exile, transnational migration, and diasporic communities. These texts portray African mobility as a process that leads to social and psychological displacement and alienation. The selected readings often evoke a sense of loss, whether it be the loss of home, innocence, time, intimacy, or the search for community. With these themes in mind, we will analyze the conditions that give rise to African transnational migrations in the contemporary global world order. We will probe the complex moral, emotional, social, political, and cultural dimensions of African migrations as represented in stories, poems, music, jokes, and visual cultures. In addition, our examination of these texts may be guided by concepts such as exile, alienation, double consciousness, transnationalism, and Afropolitanism.

ENGL-2922-001 | Topics in Women Writers: From Sublime Vistas to Hideous Progeny: Women, Science, and Literature | K. Ready
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course focuses on a topic in the field of women writers which varies from year to year. The topic area may be defined by genre; historical period; literary and cultural movement; or local, national, or global communities.

The topic for this section (subtitled “From Sublime Vistas to Hideous Progeny: Women, Science, and Literature”) is women, science, and literature. Historically, science has been a field dominated by men, in which context nature sometimes has been imagined as a woman to be dominated and exploited. At the same time, women, as much as men, have been excited by the possibilities opened up by scientific study and the ways in which science and the technological innovations it inspires might make positive changes in the world, and have imagined non-hierarchal and non-exploitative relationships between science and nature. In this course, we will look at how women writers from the Scientific Revolution to the early twentieth-first century have imaginatively responded to developments in science and technology, thinking about questions connected not only to science and gender, but also to the relationship between the humanities and the sciences, now often regarded as separate and even opposed fields of study, although they were not always thought of in this way.

ENGL-2981-001 | History of the Book | Z. Izydorczyk
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course introduces students to the history of the book, the material basis of literate/literary culture, by exploring the writing and reading technologies from the papyrus scroll to the digital screen. It briefly traces the history of producing, reading, preserving, exploiting, and controlling material texts in Western culture. Students are invited to reflect on writing as handwork, the ideologies of writing and reading, the production of a manuscript / printed codex, the development of mise-en-page and paratexts, the rise of the reading public, the economics of book production and trade, and the digital revolution. The course highlights the importance of writing for the emergence of the modern sense of selfhood and affords a historical and material perspective through which to engage the culture of the past and the present.

This course will be taught in person though a combination of lecture-discussions, practical exercises and assignments, quizzes, and a research paper. The textbook will be supplemented by additional readings available online.

FALL/WINTER 2024-25

ENGL-2003-770 | Field of Children’s Literature | C. Fawcett
Course Delivery: ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

This course looks at the varied forms of Children’s Literature as a genre defined by the primary consumers. We will look at the historical conceptions and cultural assumptions about childhood and young readers, the genres and forms, and the ways that we select and promote children’s texts. From Victorian nonsense poetry, novels and picture books, to graphic fiction, films and television series, we will consider how narratives engage young audiences and articulate ideas of childhood. Conceptions of culture and race, gender and sex, nation and place will arise as we look at texts that are didactic and normative, or disruptive and challenging.

ENGL-2114-001 | Fairy Tales and Culture | C. Tosenberger
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

In this course we will study fairy tales, focusing not only on collected source material, but on literature written specifically for children based on these borrowed forms. We will trace the history of fairy tales from their origins in oral narrative to their impact on contemporary culture today. Students read and write critically about these tales and engage in comparisons on multiple fronts, exploring major themes and characteristics of these tales as well as the social and psychological aspects of them. The goal is to enrich our appreciation of these tales by strengthening our critical understanding of them as well as to gain insight as to how these tales function in ourselves and our society.

ENGL-2142-001 | Field of Lit & Text | B. Christopher
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course offers an in-depth introduction to, and practice in the skills of, literary and textual studies. Students explore the histories of literary and textual studies, including literary criticism and critical theories. They practice the skills of close reading and textual analysis, reading through the lenses of critical theories, researching, assembling bibliographies, and analyzing literary and cultural scholarship. Formats include oral presentation, seminar discussion, and formal, written, textual analysis.

ENGL-2146-770 | Screen Studies | A. Burke
Course Delivery: ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

This course provides an overview of history of that most fabled of screens, the cinema. I am in the process of revising this course, but the tentative plan is to break the year into three modules, each of which will take a different approach to thinking about film studies. The course will begin with an extended study of genre, zeroing in on the crime film, specifically the genre known as film noir. This will be followed by a module that considers a wide range of contemporary world cinema, using Girish Shambu’s concept of “the new cinephilia” to think about how we watch and talk about film in the Letterboxd age. The course will conclude with a module on film about childhood, examining the variety of ways in which the experience of being young or growing up has been represented onscreen. Do note that we will not be studying children’s films, but films that depict childhood experience, some of them not really suitable for children at all.

A provisional list of screenings (most of which you will have to do week-by-week before class) will be available later in the summer.

ENGL-2311-001 | Shakespeare | B. Christopher
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course offers students the chance to study in depth a selection of the dramatic works of William Shakespeare. In it, we will read a representative sample of his plays, from the range of genres in which he wrote. Students will be invited to think about these works in a variety of ways – aesthetically, theoretically, and historically, for example – both as individual plays and as part of a body of work. In addition to reading and writing about the plays, students will be required, in groups, to edit and to adapt a scene from one of the plays studied this year. Other assignments include quizzes, essays, writing workshops, and brief response papers. NOTE: This class is an optional pass/fail class. Students who want to receive a standard final grade (A, B, C, etc.) should register in ENGL-2311-001. Students who want to take the class as a pass/fail class should register in ENGL-2311-002.

ENGL-2601-001 | The Novel: Sex in the Victorian City | C. Manfredi
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course examines the intersection between urbanization and sexuality in Victorian Britain (1832-1901). Largely because of the Industrial Revolution, London experienced an unprecedented population boom: from one million people in 1801 to seven million by 1910. The creation of urban slums became associated with a range of social problems: poverty, prostitution, and “perverse” sexualities. This period played a key role in the history of sexuality since it is the era in which the modern terminologies we use to think and talk about sex were invented. For example, by the end of the 19^th century, “homosexuality” had been coined and indelibly attached to the London literary scene thanks to playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde’s trial on charges of “gross indecency” (homosexuality). From marriage to prostitution, from the “Angel in the House” to the “New Woman,” this course focuses on the representation of sexuality and gender across eight novels. For instance, in George Gissing’s The Odd Women, we will see how the author plays on the fashionable topic of the “New Woman” (which enjoyed its heyday in the 1890s) and addresses problems of female independence, female employment, and economic freedom. In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, we will explore the figure of the dandy and the depiction of moral degeneracy and perversion.

WINTER 2025

ENGL-2002-001 | The Creative Process | A. Leventhal
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

Where do ideas come from? How do I cultivate a writing habit? How can I give and receive feedback in a productive way? What factors should I keep in mind when thinking about publication? These are some of the questions we'll consider in this course, which takes creative writing to be a practice rather than a product. We'll look at how a diverse range of contemporary writers have approached these questions, and students will identify and practice skills that are key to a healthy writing habit, with a particular focus on revision and peer review. Alongside essays, interviews, and craft books, we'll read an assortment of contemporary short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry, in order to develop an ear for a variety of voices and techniques. In addition to analytic work, this class will require you to write creatively, think critically about your work, and submit it for peer review. This course is recommended for students with an interest in creative writing, who plan to take further creative writing courses.

ENGL-2102-004 | Intro Creative Writing | J. Wills
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course offers an introduction to creative writing, drawing on four modes/genres: short and long form fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. Students will practice a variety of techniques, including reading, writing, workshopping, editing, and evaluating their own work as well as the work of their peers. Texts studied will be: Yellowface (R.F. Kuang), Zom-Fam (Kama La Mackerel), One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Omar El Akkad), and How to Pronounce Knife (Souvankham Thammavongsa).

ENGL-2102-005 | Intro Creative Writing | J. Scoles
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

ENGL-2102-006 | Intro Creative Writing | J. Ball
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

The focus of this course is on introducing students to the fundamentals of creative writing in preparation for a professional career. The basic contention of this course is that creative writing is a form of work, which requires the development of analytical and compositional skills, alongside the cultivation of strong professional habits.

Students will learn to divest themselves of the “inspiration model” and manufacture inspiration. Students will analyze model texts to determine how they work and how to recognize and reproduce particular literary tactics. Students will learn and practice various compositional tactics, including traditional methods and experimental new methods.

Emphasis will be placed on revision, both structural and stylistic, and refining work through successive drafts. The basics of preparing and submitting creative work for publication will be discussed. The fundamentals of a creative career will be addressed. This course assumes that students have professional ambitions as creative writers.

ENGL-2102-007 | Intro Creative Writing| J. Scoles
Course Delivery: ONLINE

ENGL-2185-250 | Literary Communities | T. Penner
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

Paris in the 1920s was an artistic hotbed with few rivals for its position of cultural importance. Over the past century it has become nearly mythological, thanks to the artists that created works about their times there. This course will specifically consider the literature produced by several authors and poets that became denizens of the city of lights in the decade following World War I. By looking at works from Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Anaïs Nin, Djuna Barnes, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, we’ll reflect on what these poets, diarists, and authors have to say about exile, trauma, hedonism, and nostalgia while we consider how their creations reverberate beyond their era and continue to shape our perceptions of Paris in the early 20^th Century.

ENGL-2202-001 | Literature of the Sixteenth Century | S. Goodhand
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

Often when we think of 16^th-century England, we imagine the dramatic Tudor reigns of Henry VIII and his daughter, Elizabeth I. It is a century of fascinating change. Henry VIII breaks from Rome to form the Church of England, which starts the Reformation and makes England an independent nation-state divorced from the medieval European empire of Roman Catholicism. There are mass migrations from rural to urban areas, which sees the population of London quadruple over the century. The “Age of Exploration” morphs into England’s imperialist expansion when Elizabeth I competes with Spain’s colonies in the Caribbean by supporting Raleigh’s expedition to North America. In intellectual history, it is the age of expanding humanism, with state projects of translating biblical texts into vernaculars, and a focus on the importance of education and free scientific study. All of this sets the stage for our world.

This survey course studies Sixteenth-Century English literature, covering poetry, drama, philosophical and scientific works, and travel narratives. It emphasizes the relationship between literature and its historical contexts, engaging with authors such as Thomas More, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Amelia Lanyer, and Katherine Philips. Students will come away with a better sense of the literary, religious, scientific, and political movements in early modern Europe that were at play during the start of the era we have inherited. Our studies will revolve around two themes. First: that the past is a “different country,” a world with its own set of motivations, anxieties, conflicts, and concerns. Second: despite that alterity or strangeness, the past nevertheless gave birth to the present. Our goal will be to understand our own place and received patterns of thought by looking at what came before.

ENGL-2604-001 | Poetry and Poetic Form | P. Melville
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course is designed to introduce students to various features, forms, and figures of poetic discourse. While historical context informs lectures and class discussion, this section of the course proceeds, for the most part, according to the figural elements of poetry (such as rhythm and rhyme, diction and tone, metaphor and allegory). By engaging in thorough discussions and varied writing assignments, students learn to become more appreciative, alert readers of poetry, and in the process expand the possibilities of their own writing. Please note that there will be no textbook to purchase, as all poems will be available through online links to websites such as poetryfoundation.org and poets.org.

ENGL-2613-770 | Fantasy Literature | S. Asselin
Course Delivery: ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

This online course provides an exploration of the genre of fantasy literature by looking at several notable examples of the genre. Because fantasy is such a large genre, the subtheme for the course this year is "building worlds". One version of fantasy literature involves the readers (and sometimes characters) encountering strange worlds different from the reality of their lived experiences. This class will take the process of worldbuilding as practiced by authors of varying periods, cultural influences, and philosophical concerns, and how these influences form the fictional world in question. Readers encounter these worlds in turn, and to varying degrees suspend disbelief, learn about aspects of the world both relevant to and beyond the immediate plot, and possibly even start filling in details themselves. In addition to the usual key concepts and techniques for studying fantasy, we will engage with questions of narrative devices, verisimilitude, cognitive estrangement, and the impact of complex fantasy worlds on readers and on the performance of texts in the marketplace and in adaptation. Authors we will examine this term include William Morris, J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, Anne McCaffrey, Marjorie Liu, and N.K. Jemisin. Assessment in the class will be largely essay-based, but students will also be able to pursue a world-building project of their own.

ENGL-2806-001 | Semantics | H. Tran
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

Semantics is the branch of linguistics concerned with how we construct meaning using language. It is arguably the most diverse branch of linguistics, situated between the highly-structured and formalizable "inner layers" of language (phonology, morphology and syntax) and the deeply-contextual and fuzzier "outer layer" of pragmatics. The course introduces students to the concepts of sense and reference, the difference between sense and reference, the application of basic rules in formal logic, prototype theory, componential analysis, and cognitive semantics. The course examines word meaning, lexical relations, linguistic systems relating to time, how to identify thematic roles in sentences, the functions of noun classifiers, deictics, and adpositions. This course also analyses sentence meaning in context and explores the nature of polysemy, metaphors, metonyms and image schemas from the perspective of cognitive semantics.