Courses and room assignments are listed in the 2025 Summer Session Timetable (search: “English”).
100 Level
The courses in our 100 series introduce students to the study of English literature at the university level through broad courses that introduce the major literary forms via examples drawn from different times and places. These courses aim to develop writing, reading, and critical skills, and frequently require some oral participation in tutorial groups. Essays at the 100 level typically do not require research or secondary sources.
200 Level
Courses in the 200 series provide historically, geographically, generically, or theoretically grounded introductions to the study of English literature. These include the four "gateway" courses required of Specialists and Majors--introductions to the major national-historical fields (British, Canadian, and American) that comprise literatures in English--as well as a wide range of courses that will prepared students for further study. Coursework at the 200 level may require some research and the beginnings of familiarity with scholarship on the subject. Students will often be expected to participate orally in class or in tutorial groups. English 200-level courses are open to students who have obtained standing in 1.0 ENG FCE, or ANY 4.0 University-level FCE, or who are concurrently taking one of ENG110Y1, ENG140Y1, ENG150Y1.
300 Level
At the 300 level, courses advance into a particular period or subject within a literature or literary genre: contemporary American fiction, for instance, or a particular topic in Shakespeare studies. Courses at this level introduce students to research skills and typically require essays that incorporate some secondary sources. The smaller size of many of these courses frequently demands a greater degree of oral participation. Most English 300-level courses are open to students who have obtained standing in at least 4.0 FCE, including 2.0 ENG FCE.
400 Level
Courses in the 400 series are both advanced and focused, unique courses created by Department faculty that often relate to their own research. Active student participation, including oral presentations, is an important part of these courses. Courses at the 400 level require a substantial research essay for which the student has significant input into framing the research question. Please note, beginning with the 2019-20 FAS Calendar, for NEW 2018 program students, English 400-series courses are open to students who have obtained standing in at least 9.0 FCE, including 4.0 ENG FCE, and who have completed ENG202H1, ENG203H1, ENG250H1, and ENG252H1.
Notes on the Timetable, Enrollment Regulations and Procedures
1. For updated information on room assignments and course changes, consult ACORN. When enroling in courses, important to pay attention to the session ( F, S, or Y) and LEC section numbers.
Changes to Reading Lists and Instructors - Students should note that changes to scheduling, staffing, reading lists, and methods of evaluation may occur anytime thereafter. When possible, changes to the course schedule will appear on ACORN. Students should avoid purchasing texts until the reading list is confirmed by the instructor during the first week of classes. Students wishing to read listed texts in advance are advised to use copies available at both the University and public libraries.
3. Enrollment in all English courses is limited by Department policy. First-year students may enroll in any 200-series course if they are concurrently enrolled in ENG110Y1, ENG140Y1 or ENG150Y1. In some 200-series courses and all 300-series courses, priority is given to students enrolled in an English program. In 400-series courses, priority during the first round of enrollment is given to fourth-year students who require a 400-series course to satisfy program requirements. To ensure maximum availability of 400-series courses, fourth-year Specialists are allowed to enroll in only 1.0 400-series ENG FCE and fourth-year Majors are allowed to register in only 0.5 400-level ENG FCE. During the second round of enrollment the priority is lifted and the course is open to all students who meet the prerequisites.
ENG100H1F - Effective Writing
Section Number: LEC0101
Time(s): Monday & Wednesday 10 am - 1 pm IN-PERSON
Instructor(s): TBD
Brief Description of Course: TBD
Required Reading: TBD
First Three Authors and Texts: TBD
Method of Evaluation: TBD
ENG100H1F - Effective Writing
Section Number: LEC0201
Time(s): Tuesday & Thursday 10 am - 1 pm IN-PERSON
Instructor(s): TBD
Brief Description of Course: TBD
Required Reading: TBD
First Three Authors and Texts: TBD
Method of Evaluation: TBD
ENG100H1F - Effective Writing
Section Number: LEC5101
Time(s): Tuesday & Thursday 6-9 pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Instructor(s): TBD
Brief Description of Course: TBD
Required Reading: TBD
First Three Authors and Texts: TBD
Method of Evaluation: TBD
ENG100H1S - Effective Writing
Section Number: LEC0101
Time(s): Tuesday & Thursday 1-4 pm IN-PERSON
Instructor(s): TBD
Brief Description of Course: TBD
Required Reading: TBD
First Three Authors and Texts: TBD
Method of Evaluation: TBD
ENG100H1S - Effective Writing
Section Number: LEC0201
Time(s): Monday & Wednesday 10 am - 1 pm IN-PERSON
Instructor(s): TBD
Brief Description of Course: TBD
Required Reading: TBD
First Three Authors and Texts: TBD
Method of Evaluation: TBD
ENG100H1S - Effective Writing
Section Number: LEC5101
Time(s): Monday & Wednesday 6-9 pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Instructor(s): TBD
Brief Description of Course: TBD
Required Reading: TBD
First Three Authors and Texts: TBD
Method of Evaluation: TBD
ENG102H1S - Literature and the Sciences
Section Number: LEC0101
Time(s): Monday & Wednesday 1-4 pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Instructor(s): Daniel Bergman
Brief Description of Course: Literature has always provided a place for the imaginative exploration of science, technology, and the physical universe. For students interested in literary treatments of science and scientific problems, concerns, and methods. Topics that may be explored include: the role and status of the scientist within literary history; artificial intelligence as a literary subject; and fiction’s relationship to factuality and objectivity.
Assumes no background in the methods and techniques of literary scholarship. This course may not be counted toward any English program.
Required Reading: TBD
First Three Authors and Texts: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; H.G. Wells, The Time Machine; N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season
Method of Evaluation: In-class quizzes; reading reflections; short essay; final exam
ENG140Y1 - Literature for our Time
Section Number: LEC5101
Time(s): Tuesday & Thursday 6-9 pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Instructor(s): TBD
Brief Description of Course: TBD
Required Reading: TBD
First Three Authors and Texts: TBD
Method of Evaluation: TBD
ENG202H1F - Introduction to British Literature I
Section Number: LEC0101
Time(s): Tuesday & Thursday 10 am - 1 pm IN-PERSON
Instructor(s): Carroll Balot
Brief Description of Course: A survey of English literature, from its beginnings in the Anglo-Saxon period through the late seventeenth century, emphasizing major authors, movements and periods, and formal analysis. Central themes will include the relationship between heroism and Gospel values; the movement from a providential to a modern scientific cosmology; the many forms of love, sacred and secular; community, individualism, and alienation in the transition to modernity; and sin, shame, and forgiveness. We will employ a variety of approaches to literary analysis, including historicism, psychoanalysis, New Criticism, and modes of political and affective reading.
Required Reading: The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Concise Edition, Volume A – Fourth Edition The Medieval Period - The Renaissance and the Early Seventeenth Century - The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century. Edited by Joseph Black; Leonard Conolly; Kate Flint; Isobel Grundy; Wendy Lee; Don LePan; Roy Liuzza; Jerome J. McGann; Anne Lake Prescott; Jason Rudy; Barry V. Qualls; Claire Waters.
First Three Authors and Texts: Bede, selections from Ecclesiastical History of England; Dream of the Rood; Beowulf.
Method of Evaluation: Participation; term test; short essay; final examination.
ENG203H1S - Introduction to British Literature II
Section Number: LEC0101
Time(s): Monday & Wednesday 10 am - 1 pm IN-PERSON
Instructor(s): Michael Johnstone
Brief Description of Course: TBD
Required Reading: TBD
First Three Authors and Texts: TBD
Method of Evaluation: TBD
ENG215H1F - The Canadian Short Story
Section Number: LEC0101
Time(s): Monday & Wednesday 10 am - 1 pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Instructor(s): Sarah Caskey
Brief Description of Course: The short story is a demanding and exhilarating art form. As the Canadian literary critic W. H. New observes, it “calls upon its readers to perceive the breadth of vision that is condensed into a small compass.” Canadian writers have made outstanding contributions to the genre and this course examines Canadian short fiction written in English since the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. The short stories selected for analysis reflect a variety of authors, as well as diverse periods, regions, literary styles, thematic interests, and experimentation within the genre. Together, the stories attest to the vitality of the genre in this country and the important role Canadians writers have played in shaping the form.
We will focus on reading individual stories closely, with attention to form and structure, and to relating seemingly disparate stories to one another, synthesizing ideas that connect them into a larger short-story literary tradition. Teaching the stories close to chronological order means we can grasp much of the history of literary influence and the growth and development of the genre in Canada within the boundaries of the syllabus. Throughout the term, we will explore the place of the short story in Canadian literary culture and its exciting intersection with issues including identity, storytelling, and art. Through our reading we will discover the relevance and dynamism of this genre in Canadian writing.
Required Reading: Course readings will be available on the Library Reading List through Quercus.
First Three Authors and Texts: Michael Crummey, Harry Robinson, Thomas King.
Method of Evaluation: Passage Analysis (25%); Essay (40%); Final Assignment (25%); Participation 10%).
ENG237H1S - Science Fiction
Section Number: LEC0101
Time(s): Tuesday & Thursday 10 am - 1 pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Instructor(s): Michael Johnstone
Brief Description of Course: TBD
Required Reading: TBD
First Three Authors and Texts: TBD
Method of Evaluation: TBD
ENG250H1F - Introduction to American Literature
Section Number: LEC0101
Time(s): Monday & Wednesdasy 2-5 pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Instructor(s): Scott Rayter
Brief Description of Course: This course will introduce students to American literature in a variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, and slave narratives, by a number of writers seen as key figures in the American canon, but also some who are less well-known, and we will examine how their works reflect national and individual concerns with freedom and identity, particularly in relation to race, gender and sexuality.
Required Reading: We will be using the shorter 10th edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature (2 vols, published July 2022), with works by writers such as Irving, Hawthorne, Jacobs, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Crane, Jewett, Bierce, Gilman, James, Frost, Hemingway, Faulkner, O’Hara, Olds, Morrison, and Lahiri.
First Three Authors and Texts: Irving, Hawthorne, Jacobs, Melville
Method of Evaluation: Take-home Mid-term Test (20%); Essay (35%); Participation (15%); Take-home Exam (30%)
ENG252H1F - Introduction to Canadian Literature
Section Number: LEC0101
Time(s): Tuesday & Thursday 1-4 pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Instructor(s): Vikki Visvis
Brief Description of Course: This course offers an introductory study of English-Canadian prose and poetry from the eighteenth century to the present day by identifying landmarks in the Canadian literary tradition and by examining the historical, cultural, and political forces that have both shaped and challenged these CanLit milestones. The course will begin by analyzing the writings of Canada’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pioneers and settlers, and will, then, revisit Canada’s settler-colonial history from Indigenous literary perspectives. We will continue by discussing the confluence of Romantic and nationalist influences in Confederation poetry during the late nineteenth century; the evolution of realist fiction during the twentieth century; the formal experimentation that modernized Canadian poetry in the mid-twentieth century; and diversity in women’s writing during the late twentieth century. The course will close by exploring contemporary multicultural narratives—within contexts such as postmodernism, Black writing, and Asian-Canadian fiction—and queer literature in Canada.
Required Reading:
1. Course Reader
2. Thomas King: Green Grass, Running Water (Harper-Collins)
3. Michael Ondaatje: In the Skin of a Lion (Vintage)
Excerpts by Samuel Hearne, David Thompson, Frances Brooke, Catharine Parr Traill, Susanna Moodie. Poetry by Charles Sangster, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott, A. J. M. Smith, P. K. Page, Irving Layton. Short stories by Sinclair Ross, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Eden Robinson, Austin Clarke, Dionne Brand, Madeleine Thien, Shyam Selvadurai, Beth Brant in Course Reader
Course Reader will be posted on Quercus. Novels by King and Ondaatje can be purchased from the University of Toronto Bookstore.
First Three Authors and Texts: Hearne, Thompson, Brooke
Method of Evaluation: Short essay: 4–5 pages (25%); Long essay: 8–10 pages (40%); Final examination: 2 hours (25%); Online participation (10%).
ENG270H1S - Introduction to Colonial and Postcolonial Writing
Section Number: LEC5101
Time(s): Tuesday & Thursday 6-9 pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Instructor(s): Geoffrey Macdonald
Brief Description of Course: In this course, we analyze the aesthetic and political modes of resisting colonial power around the world. We study anglophone African, Caribbean, and South Asian literature in relation to race, gender, sexuality, and capital accumulation. Because these literatures comprise an immense and diverse expanse of cultures, voices, styles, geographical locations, and kinds of writing, no single course can possibly represent the fullness of their literary expression. Together, we work on a representative selection of poems, novels, and a play by examining key ideas and modes of expression that have been crucial to the development of rich literary cultures. Literary texts are placed in conversation with key concepts such as resistance literature, decolonization, feminism, economic justice, sexual diversity, identity, globalization, nationalism, diaspora, and intersectionality.
Required Reading:
Moniza Alvi, At the Time of Partition
Merle Collins, The Colour of Forgetting
Merle Hodge, Crick Crack Monkey
Ngugi wa Thion’go and Ngugi wa Mirii, I Will Marry When I Want
Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable
Chinelo Okperanta, Under the Udala Trees
First Three Authors and Texts: Ngugi and Ngugi, Okperanta, Hodge
Method of Evaluation: Critical Review (10%), Discussion Question (5%), Proposal (10%) + Essay (20%), Reading Responses (10%), Participation (10%), Final Exam (35%)
ENG289H1F - Introduction to Creative Writing
Section Number: LEC5101
Time(s): Monday & Wednesday 6-9 pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Instructor(s): TBD
Brief Description of Course: TBD
Required Reading: TBD
First Three Authors and Texts: TBD
Method of Evaluation: TBD
ENG323H1F - Austen & Her Contemporaries
Section Number: LEC0101
Time(s): Tuesday & Thursday 10 am - 1 pm IN-PERSON
Instructor(s): Michael Johnstone
Brief Description of Course: TBD
Required Reading: TBD
First Three Authors and Texts: TBD
Method of Evaluation: TBD
ENG331H1S - Drama 1485-1603
Section Number: LEC0101
Time(s): Monday & Wednesday 10 am - 1 pm IN-PERSON
Instructor(s): Philippa Sheppard
Brief Description of Course: TBD
Required Reading: TBD
First Three Authors and Texts: TBD
Method of Evaluation: TBD
ENG365H1S - Contemporary American Literature
Section Number: LEC0101
Time(s): Monday & Wednesday 2-5 pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Instructor(s): Scott Rayter
Brief Description of Course: How do contemporary American fiction writers explore the politics of representation in their works, particularly in relation to identity—be it national, sexual, gender, ethnic, or racial—and within a larger postmodern context of questioning subjectivity itself?
Required Reading: Works will include only recent 21st-century novels and short stories by writers such as George Saunders, Lorrie Moore, Carmen Maria Machado, Alison Bechdel, Colson Whitehead, Ha Jin, Nathan Englander, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Tommy Orange.
First Three Authors and Texts: Machado, Saunders, Moore.
Method of Evaluation: Take-home Passage Analysis (20%); Essay (35%); Take-home Exam (30%); Participation (15%).
ENG371H1F - Topics in Indigenous, Postcolonial, Transnational Literatures: TBD
Section Number: LEC0101
Time(s): Monday & Wednesday 12-3 pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Instructor(s): TBD
Brief Description of Course: TBD
Required Reading: TBD
First Three Authors and Texts: TBD
Method of Evaluation: TBD
ENG376H1F - Topics in Theory, Language Critical Methods: Narrative Theory
Section Number: LEC0101
Time(s): Monday & Wednesday 11 am - 2 pm IN-PERSON
Instructor(s): Daniel Newman
Brief Description of Course: What is narrative? How does it work? How do the elements of a narrative combine to affect readers aesthetically, emotionally, ideologically? These are some of the questions asked by narrative theory (or narratology). More specifically, it asks questions like, “How and why are the events in this story arranged in this particular order?” and “How do narrators control the flow of knowledge and information?” Narratology is therefore a useful framework for any student interested in reading, analyzing or even writing narrative literature (including fiction, narrative nonfiction, film, comics, drama and even some poetry and music). It also complements other critical or theoretical approaches to literature: some of the great works of feminist and Marxist literary theory, for example, simultaneously use and contribute to narratology.
This course covers the building blocks of narrative and examines the effects of techniques like free indirect discourse, non-chronology, and dissonance and unreliability irony. Our primary focus will be on modes of narration (including unreliable and weird narrators) and narrative time (including impossible temporalities). We will also pay significant attention to relations between individual narratives and genre. The theory we discuss will always be grounded in real texts, all of them short: short stories and nonfiction narratives, journalism, film, comics, music videos, and many other media. You're encouraged to suggest additional short narratives that strike them as interesting from a technical/formal perspective.
Required Reading: The reading (and viewing) list will be composed of several short texts, most of them short stories (but also journalism, nonfiction, film, comics, music videos and other media). All readings and videos on the syllabus are available free online, either through the University of Toronto libraries (UTL) or elsewhere.
The exact texts will be announced before the course begins, but they will include mainly modern and contemporary works by authors and directors including Margaret Atwood, Ted Chiang, Teju Cole, Roald Dahl, Hergé, Shirley Jackson, Jamaica Kincaid, Thomas King, David Lynch, Sasha Bissonnette, Sarah Polley, Bill Watterson and many more.
First Three Authors and Texts: Lucy Corin, “Miracles”; Raymond Carver, “So Much Water So Close to Home”; Namwali Serpell, “Account”
Method of Evaluation: Three Short Textual Analyses + One Creative-Analytical Assignment (60%, based on top three of four grades), Take-Home Test (25%), Participation (15%)
ENG378H1F - Special Topics: TBD
Section Number: LEC0101
Time(s): Tuesday & Thursday 1-4 pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Instructor(s): TBD
Brief Description of Course: TBD
Required Reading: TBD
First Three Authors and Texts: TBD
Method of Evaluation: TBD
ENG480H1F - Advanced Studies Seminar: TBD
Section Number: LEC5101
Time(s): Monday & Wednesday 6-9 pm IN-PERSON
Instructor(s): TBD
Brief Description of Course: TBD
Required Reading: TBD
First Three Authors and Texts: TBD
Method of Evaluation: TBD
ENG481HF - Advanced Studies Seminar: Writing Medieval Women
Section Number: LEC0101
Time(s): Tuesday & Thursday 2-4 pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Instructor(s): Carroll Balot
Brief Description of Course: A fourth-year seminar for advanced undergraduates on some medieval women writers: what they wrote, the novels they inspired, and what they mean to use today. The course is organized around Lauren Groff’s Matrix, which imagines a 13th century abbess, visionary and poet loosely based on Marie de France and Hildegard of Bingen; Victoria MacKenzie’s For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain, which imagines the encounter between two fifteenth-century English writers, Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich; and Katherine Chen’s Joan, which imagines the early life of Joan of Arc. In the first part of the course we will read Matrix along with some of the writing by and literary criticism about Hildegard and Marie de France. In the second part of the course, we will read The Book of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Love with MacKenzie’s novel. Finally, we will read Chen’s Joan in tandem with some of the documentary materials related to the life and trial of Joan of Arc. With this multidimensional approach I am hoping we will both respect the distinctiveness of these women’s voices, recognize important continuities between them and us, and explore the significance of feminist neo-medievalism.
Required Reading: Hildegard of Bingen, Selected Writings. Penguin, 2001; Marie de France, Poetry, translated and edited by Dorothy Gilbert. Norton, 2015; Lauren Groff, Matrix. Riverhead/Penguin, 2022; Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, ed. and trans. Barry Windeatt. Oxford, 2015; Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. and trans. Anthony Bale. Oxford, 2015; Victoria MacKenzie, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain. Bloomsbury, 2024; Katherine Chen, Joan. Hachette, 2023.
First Three Authors and Texts: Hildegard of Bingen, selections; Marie de France, lais and fables.
Method of Evaluation: Class participation; presentations; weekly short essays; term paper.
ENG482H1S - Advanced Studies Seminar: Canadian Speculative Fiction
Section Number: LEC0101
Time(s): Tuesday & Thursday 2-4 pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Instructor(s): Vikki Visvis
Brief Description of Course: If speculation beyond the directly observable natural world is the hallmark of speculative fiction, then, the emphasis on realism in historical surveys of Canadian fiction means the elision of genres such as science fiction, fantasy, and horror. However, Canadian literature betrays a marked commitment to speculative fiction, from Margaret Atwood’s now archetypal feminist dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale to the inception of cyberpunk with William Gibson’s Neuromancer. This course will specifically examine how works of Canadian speculative fiction respond to three timely issues: American socio-politics, Canadian settler-colonialism, and experiential displacement. We will begin by appraising how Canadian futuristic dystopian narratives offer critiques of and convey anxieties about the socio-political dynamics of their US neighbours, whether in terms of misogyny, reproductive rights, religious extremism, totalitarianism, terrorism, biological warfare, a second American Civil War, and climate change. We will continue by evaluating how Indigenous “wonderworks,” Indigiqueer speculative fiction, and Afrofuturism not only uncover Canada’s own problematic history of residential schooling, two-spirit discrimination, anti-Black racism, and ghettoization but also celebrate the power of cultural resurgence to combat settler-colonial legacies. The course will close by considering how post-apocalyptic pandemic settings and the genre of cyberpunk display the dynamics of displacement and alienation, be it as a stateless refugee or as post-human. Ultimately, by investigating the ways Canadian speculative fiction responds to American socio-politics, marginalized cultures, and conditions of displacement, this course exposes how fantastic worlds are far from escapist avoidance; they are, in fact, vehicles for new forms of critical engagement that educate us about our immediate reality and enable us to navigate our future.
Required Reading: Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale; Omar El Akkad, American War; Cherie Dimaline The Marrow Thieves; Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring; Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven; William Gibson, Neuromancer; short stories by Adam Garnet Jones, Kai Minosh Pyle, Mari Kurisato, and Nazbah Tom from Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction, Ed. Joshua Whitehead.
First Three Authors and Texts: Margaret Atwood, Omar El Akkad, Cherie Dimaline
Method of Evaluation: Five short response assignments (1-2 pages each) 15%; Participation 10%; Seminar presentation (15 minutes) 20%; Essay proposal and annotated bibliography 20%; Final long essay (15-18 pages) 35%.