Summer 2025 Timetable

ENG100H1F - Effective Writing

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday & Wednesday 10 am - 1 pm  IN-PERSON

Instructor(s): Austin Long

Brief Description of Course: The goal of this course is to facilitate the transition from the high school level of writing about English to the university level. Priorities include developing key aspects of style such as sentence structure; the flow of information across sentences, paragraphs, and entire pieces; and how to move away from “hamburger”/court room essays (essays that provide a number of pieces of evidence to prove an observation) to logically structured essays, in which each subsequent paragraph strives to develop a nuanced argument. At the end of the course, students should feel more confident in their writing for any subject but especially for English literary studies. We will also discuss what it means to write effectively in the age of AI, and what we can do as writers to make use of our humanness.

Required Reading: 
Selections from E. B. White and William Strunk Jr., The Elements of Style
Selections from Eric Hayot, The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities
George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”
Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (the paper that posits the “Turing test”)
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

First Three Authors and Texts:
E. B. White and William Strunk Jr., The Elements of Style
Eric Hayot, The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

Method of Evaluation:
An initial evaluative personal essay, 500 words (10%)
500-word close reading (20%)
1000-word argumentative essay (30%)
Participation and attendance (20%)
Editorial assignment (either with a partner or AI generated essay) (10%)
Final personal essay, 500 words (10%)

ENG100H1F - Effective Writing

Section Number: LEC0201

Time(s): Tuesday & Thursday 10 am - 1 pm  IN-PERSON

Instructor(s): Ivan Sapp

Brief Description of Course: No matter which program you find yourself in, effective writing is the backbone of academic life. Today, moreover, its importance increasingly transcends the classroom. This course is devoted to the foundations of effective writing: from reading closely and constructing a strong thesis to organizing a compelling argument firmly rooted in textual evidence, it is intended to give students a surer grasp of the true essentials. Emphasis will be placed on examining concrete examples of what effective writing looks like.

Required Reading: Readings for this course will combine brevity with multiplicity. Each “text” (in the broad sense) will serve as a springboard for exercises in effective writing, while many of them will also serve to exemplify it.

• Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read A Book?”
• Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One
• Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “A Letter”
• G.K. Chesterton, “The Meaning of Dreams”
• Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster”
• Miscellaneous short texts, podcasts, etc.

Method of Evaluation:
Effort and Participation — 15%
Attendance and active participation will be essential to success in this course.

Abstract Assignment — 25%
Students will be asked to read a given essay and to present a 1 page abstract that elegantly charts the course of its argument. This assignment will serve to sharpen a number of skills simultaneously: close reading and comprehension, the logical/ organized presentation of ideas, the construction of clear sentences and paragraphs, etc.

Thesis Building Assignment — 25%
Students will be asked to read a short story or watch a film and to build a compelling thesis around a theme of their choice (a selection of possible themes being provided). The point here will be to really grasp what an ideal thesis consists of and how one might go about generating one.

Final Paper — 35%
This final assignment (5-10 pages) will aim to bring together each of the core facets worked upon in the course. Students will write a brief, argumentative essay on a text of their choice.

ENG100H1F - Effective Writing

Section Number: LEC5101

Time(s): Tuesday & Thursday 6-9 pm  ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

Instructor(s): Erin Baldwin

Brief Description of Course: Effective writing might seem elusive, but it doesn’t have to be. This course will break down the fundamentals of persuasive and compelling writing across genres, examining the conventions and strategies that are used in everything from the academic essay to newspaper articles, fiction, and even online content creation. Along the way we will attend to the basics of argument development, paragraph construction, syntax and grammar, and revising that will allow you to strengthen the organization of your ideas both within and beyond the academy. Over the semester, we will follow a scaffolding approach to guide you through the writing process, using each method of evaluation as a building block to assemble the argumentative short essay and the public humanities assignment where you will transpose academic prose into an alternative format. We will begin with in-class exercises focused on defining terms, close reading, and grammar and syntax, all of which will be employed in the paragraph construction assignment. Then, we will turn to developing an argument, essay outlining, the appropriate use of citations, and completing a first draft. Finally, we will attend to the revising and editing process in order to both enhance our preexisting work and consider how it might be reconceptualized. Collectively, then, the lessons of this course will take the guesswork out of the often-intimidating writing process, providing you with the toolkit you need to consistently produce effective writing.

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

• Employ close reading skills and process work to develop a persuasive argument.
• Recognize and employ the components of a well-crafted paragraph including topic sentences, supporting evidence, analysis, and concluding sentences.
• Recognize and employ the conventions of an academic essay including thesis statements, introductory paragraphs, concluding paragraphs, and a Works Cited page.
• Construct clear and concise sentences using proper grammar and syntax.
• Assemble both a cohesive and argumentative short essay and public-facing assignment.
• Appropriately cite using MLA Style. 
• Revise work using proven editing strategies.

Required Reading: Selections from The Elements of Style, Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, The Broadview Pocket Guide to Writing, and On Revision (readings to be posted on Quercus under files).

First Three Authors and Texts: The Elements of Style, Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, and The Broadview Pocket Guide to Writing.

Method of Evaluation: 
Active Participation: 20%
In-Class Quizzes/Writing Exercises: 20%
In-Class Paragraph Construction Assignment: 10%
Short Essay Thesis and Outline: 10%
Short Essay First Draft: 10%
Short Essay Final Draft: 15%
Public Humanities Assignment: 15%

ENG100H1S - Effective Writing

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday & Thursday 1-4 pm  IN-PERSON

Instructor(s): Sara Ameri Mahabadi

Brief Description of Course: What does academic writing mean? How is it different from other types of writing? How does one go about doing it? These are the major questions practically explored in this course. The aim of this course is to provide students with applicable skills for writing expository, persuasive, and critical prose in academic and professional settings. This will involve learning to organize ideas, communicate them with precision, develop personal strategies for writing, and edit and revise independently.

This course may not be counted toward any English program.

Required Reading: 
Roe, Steven C., and Pamela H. Den Ouden. Academic Writing: The Complete Guide. Third edition., Canadian Scholars Press, 2015.
Northey, Margot. Making Sense: A Student’s Guide to Research and Writing. Ninth edition., Oxford University Press, 2019.

Method of Evaluation:
In-class writing and editing exercises (15%)
Oral Participation (10%)
Essay 1 (20%)
Essay 1 Revision (25%)
Writing Process self-reflection (10%)
Essay 2 (20%)

ENG100H1S - Effective Writing

Section Number: LEC0201

Time(s): Monday & Wednesday 10 am - 1 pm  IN-PERSON

Instructor(s): Carson Hammond

Brief Description of Course: Practical tools for writing in university and beyond. Students will gain experience in generating ideas, clarifying insights, structuring arguments, composing paragraphs and sentences, critiquing and revising their writing, and communicating effectively to diverse audiences. This course may not be counted toward any English program.

Required Reading: William Strunk Jr. & E.B. White, The Elements of Style (illustrated fourth edition); Wayne C. Booth et al., The Craft of Research (selections); Catherine Savini, “Looking for Trouble: Finding Your Way into a Writing Assignment”; Janet Boyd, “Murder! (Rhetorically Speaking)”; Gerald Graff, “Hidden Intellectualism”; Anne Lamott, “Shitty First Drafts”; Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal”; James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son”; George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”; Bertolt Brecht, “Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties”; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, "We Should All Be Feminists"; Rebecca Jones, “Finding the Good Argument OR Why Bother with Logic?”

First Three Authors and Texts: Strunk & White; Lamott; Savini

Method of Evaluation: Weekly writing prompts (30%); participation (20%); provisional thesis and essay outline (10%); essay—first draft (20%); essay—final draft and reflection (20%)

ENG100H1S - Effective Writing

Section Number: LEC5101

Time(s): Monday & Wednesday 6-9 pm  ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

Instructor(s): Sarah Howden

Brief Description of Course: Learning to write effectively is a key step toward success in one’s university career and beyond. We all have writing implements, and we all have topics we like to think about critically and deeply. This course is about sharpening our writing tools in order to share and communicate our questions, ideas, analyses, criticisms, arguments and passions effectively. In conceptualizing writing as a muscle that we can strengthen through repetitive use, this course approaches writing as a process and practice, rather than a forced, one-time execution of putting our thoughts onto the page. This course is designed to allow for experimentation and imperfection in order to render the feat of facing the blank page less daunting. In this way, this course is meant to provide students with compositional tools that will instill confidence in their capabilities to succeed as effective writers and communicators.

The learning goals and outcomes of this course are to give space for students to engage in the practice of generating ideas and topics to write about, to illustrate how to clarify the insights they gain as they continue to think more deeply about these ideas, and finally to teach them how to organize these ideas into effective arguments, which are made up of a series of smaller components on the sentence, paragraph and structural levels. While the primary focus of this course is literary analysis, the assignments of the course are designed to allow for students to also pursue topics they are passionate about.

Required Reading: The reading list is made up of short pieces of fiction and poetry that lend well to close reading, as well as essays and articles about effective writing, but the major culminating assignment asks students to analyze one of these primary pieces in relation to any text of their choosing.

First Three Authors and Texts: “Text” here is used broadly to capture any prose, poetry, film, song, album, art piece or perhaps even TikTok trend.

Method of Evaluation: Over the semester, students will approach the final essay (50%) in a series of steps. Firstly, they will submit their thesis statement and paper outline (10%) for feedback from myself; then, they will submit their first draft (20%) for feedback from myself and one of their peers; and finally, they will submit their polished final draft (10%) and reflection (10%) on the writing process. The other methods of assessment come from participation (20%) and weekly writing exercises that will be completed in class (30%).

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.

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): Danyse Golick

Brief Description of Course: This course explores how recent literature in English responds to our world in poetry, prose, and drama. In the first half of the summer, we will explore some of the modernist and post-modernist roots of contemporary literature. We will read both well-known texts (from authors like T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf) and lesser known but equally impactful works (such as soldier’s poetry from WWI and independent magazines from the Harlem renaissance). In the second half of the summer, we will explore contemporary works published in the last decade, from graphic novels to Instagram poetry. We will see how literature shapes and is shaped by the vast media ecosystem we find ourselves in. Throughout the summer, we will discuss how the formal qualities of these texts shift, how historical contexts impact these works, and how they relate to other media, in other words, how literature responds to its time. 

Upon completing this course, students will have a clear understanding of the major literary movements of the last century and how English literature responds to our world. Students will also hone their ability to close read texts and come up with compelling arguments through essay writing. Through the structure of the course and the weekly writing reflections, students will refine their critical voices and, by the end of the course, produce polished, persuasive pieces of writing.  

Required Reading:
T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway  
Nella Larsen, Passing  
Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley 
Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown  
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home  
Sheena Patel, I’m a Fan 
Billy-Ray Belcourt, This Wound is a World  

Method of Evaluation:
Weekly Writing Prompts 30%
Participation - 15%  
Essay # 1 – 15% 
Essay # 2 – 20%  
Essay # 3 – 20% 

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: This course will highlight key authors, texts, and forms/genres of British literature from the late 1600s to the early 1900s. Covering poetry, drama, fiction, and critical prose, we will look at the work of writers such as John Dryden, Aphra Behn, Alexander Pope, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Johnson, William Wordsworth, Byron, Robert Browning, George Eliot, George Bernard Shaw, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. We will focus on evolving conceptions of identity (individual, social/cultural, political, sexual/gendered) as expressed through genre.

Required Reading: Custom anthology; George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (Oxford UP, 2015)

First Three Authors and Texts: Dryden, Pope, Haywood

Method of Evaluation: Essay #1 (20%), Essay #2 (35%), Reading Quizzes (5%), Participation (10%), Final Exam (30%)

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: This course will treat science fiction (SF) as a significant literature and tradition that has reflected and responded to our rapidly changing modern world in distinct ways since the late 19th century. During the term, we will attempt to develop a working definition of SF not just by identifying its tropes and conventions, but also by understanding what it does that sets it apart from other genres and from mainstream literature. To do so, we will explore themes of the encounter with the alien, how technoscience affects the possibilities and forms of identity in the future, and dystopia/utopia. Overall, we will approach SF as a literature of sociocultural critique that explores challenging and profound questions about the human condition through the lens of technoscience.

Required Reading: TBD

First Three Authors and Texts: TBD

Method of Evaluation: Essay #1 (20%), Essay #2 (40%), Reading Quizzes (10%), Final Exam (30%)

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): Zak Jones

Brief Description of Course: This course introduces students to a plethora of new writing from authors working in both local and global writing communities, representing work published at all stages of the writer’s career. Each week students will read a poem or two as well as a piece of short fiction, a personal essay, short memoir or experimental prose. The purpose of this exposure is to portray the broad array of styles, tones, tastes, genres and forms achieving publication in our moment and to suggest some “jumping-off points” for the students to begin their own creative writing journey.

ENG289 is conducted as a series of cumulative steps that result in a publishable piece of writing. From breaking through artificial “writer’s block” with a tried-and-true exercise in “deep noticing,” to the first draft, then to an assignment where we will research and amalgamate publications accepting submissions, to editing, through to submitting work to a literary journal, students will perform all the steps of literary production, rather than simply concluding their experience at the point of instructor feedback. The purpose of this is twofold: to allow students to experience the payoff for their hard work (submission with the chance of publication) and to increase the “stakes,” so to speak, of their work. In essence, the final assignment simply must be their own work, rather than the work of an LLM or Artificial Intelligence program.

Each lecture will engage with the craft elements of that week’s particular text (i.e. characterization, “hook,” form, dialogue, etc.), pulling from our discussions both holistic and fundamental instruction in the discipline of creative writing and all that this craft demands and entails. Students can look forward to broadening their reading horizons and familiarity with contemporary writing while honing their own artistic and academic practice that will carry them through the term, their studies at UofT and into the world.

First Three Authors and Texts: 

• Selection of exemplary short stories, poems and essays TBD.
• Tentative authors: Souvankham Thammavongsa, Jia Tolentino, David Means, Joy Williams, Kevin Barry, Kathleen Alcott, Joy Harjo, Ben Lerner, Sanna Wani, Canisia Lubrin, Cody Caetano, Anuja Varghese, Sheila Heti, Kaveh Akbar, Sandra Cisneros, John Ashbery, Han Kang, Joshua Cohen, Liz Howard, Dianne Williams

Method of Evaluation:

• “Deep Noticing” Assignments/Reading Responses: 15%
• First Draft of Creative Work: 20%
• Annotated Would-be/Could-be Bibliography Assignment: 15%
• Final Draft of Creative Work: 30%
• Magazine/Journal Submission Receipt 10%
• Active Participation and Attendance: 10%

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: This course will explore the fiction of Jane Austen in relation to its literary and sociopolitical context, particularly in view of the aesthetic and cultural issues prevalent at the time of the French Revolution and Regency in England (1789–1820). Austen’s novels reflect, confront, and challenge these issues (i.e., social and economic class, war, gender roles, rights, imperialism/colonialism, slavery, the status of the novel, genre, reading and readerships, and more), particularly as they affected women. We will read Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) alongside Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House (1794) to consider the representation –– and critique –– of women’s socioeconomic status in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, especially as related to property; and, Austen’s Persuasion (1818) alongside Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778) to consider the gender(ed) politics of courtship and marriage in the early 19th century. We will examine the ways in which genre for Austen and her contemporary novelists served as an important means by which to reinforce or challenge various sociocultural norms.

Required Reading: Austen, Pride and Prejudice (2nd ed.; Broadview Press, 2020); Austen, Persuasion (Broadview Press, 1998); Burney, Evelina (Broadview Press, 2007); Smith, The Old Manor House (Broadview Press, 2002).

First Three Authors and Texts: Smith; Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Burney

Method of Evaluation: Essay #1 (15%), Essay #2 (35%), Participation (15%), Final Exam (35%)

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: Together, we will journey back to the birth of English theatre. Performances began in the church in the mid-900s when the Bishop of Winchester added a short play to the Easter mass. This was in Latin, of course, but it was to ignite centuries of sacred drama based on the narrative of the human race’s relationship with God as described in the Bible. This summer, we have a tremendously exciting opportunity to watch the pageant wagon plays of the whole York cycle, some scripts of which we will study, performed right at the University of Toronto. Then, we will explore the Tudor interludes, performed in the great halls of aristocratic houses, featuring comic and serious satire of the social and political mores of the time. In the latter half of the course, we will arrive at the Early Modern plays (including works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson) focusing on those dramas that especially draw on their predecessors for inspiration. We will trace elements of staging, of fairy tale and folklore, of Classical and Biblical learning. We will evaluate the categories into which the Academy has typically slotted these plays: medieval or modern, sacred or profane, revenge tragedy or history play. Through the whole course, we will examine clips from filmed performances, as well as availing ourselves of some live theatre. Students will also have the chance to do some primary research at the Records of Early English Drama, examining written materials from the period.

Required Reading: The Second Shepherds’ Pageant (Towneley Cycle), The Crucifixion (York Cycle), The Harrowing of Hell (York Cycle), Everyman, Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres, Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister, Lyly’s Endymion, Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare’s Richard III and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour.

First Three Authors and Texts: The Second Shepherds’ Pageant, The Crucifixion, The Harrowing of Hell

Method of Evaluation: One in-class essay 25%; one research essay 30%; one three-hour exam 30%; participation (including performance in class or recitation in my office) 15%.

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: “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power”: Afro-Asian Crossings

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday & Wednesday 12-3 pm  ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

Instructor(s): Lilika loki Kukiela

Brief Description of Course: “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power.” This slogan first appeared on a poster held by Richard Aoki, a prominent Asian American member of the Black Panther Party protesting the 1969 arrest of fellow Panther, Huey Newton. The slogan again appeared during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 on posters held by Asian American activists who saw the rise in anti-Asian racism from the COVID- 19 pandemic as tethered to anti-Black violence. How do Asian American writers reckon with and take back the term “Yellow Peril” from its originally racist origins? How do they see their identity, history, and work in relation to Blackness? What is Black Power? And how do Black writers, thinkers, and artists imagine Asian Americans in forging Black Power? This course surveys Asian American and African American literary and cultural texts and scholarship that imagine interracial and transnational solidarities, tensions, and intimacies. We will begin with Asian American texts that engage with the term “Yellow Peril” and African American texts that work through notions of “Black Power.” We will then examine Afro-Asian crossings in a variety of texts to determine points of comparison and points of contention across these communities of color. This course explores notions of Blackness, “yellowness,” and Orientalism across an array of texts to make sense of how “Yellow Peril” is in solidarity and in tension with “Black Power.”

Required Reading:
John Okada’s No-No Boy
Malcolm X/Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring
W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess
Jennifer Hasegawa’s poem “Villanelle on Los Angeles 1992”
Audre Lorde’s poem “Power”
Cathy Park Hong’s essay “Stand Up”
Ben Wang and Mike Cheng’s Aoki: A Documentary Film
Ice Cube’s track “Black Korea”
Claudia Rankine's Citizen

*Students will also be required to read essays and selections from academic works in Asian American studies and Black studies.

First Three Authors and Texts: Ben Wang and Mike Cheng’s film, Aoki: A Documentary Film; Nitasha Sharma’s essay, “The Racial Studies Project: Asian American Studies and the Black Lives Matter Campus”; John Okada’s novel, No-No Boy; Citizen by Claudia Rankine.

Method of Evaluation: 15% participation; 25% group presentation on a theoretical or critical text; 25% protest slogan analysis; 35% final paper

What students will find unique about this course is how a protest slogan can hold aesthetic and political value for Asian American and African American literary and cultural studies.

Students will find the assigned readings especially interesting because we are working through Asian American and African American texts and cultural objects that are in conversation with each other.

What excites me about teaching this course is engaging with the theories and methods of Asian American studies and Black studies to understand the possibilities and tensions of Afro-Asian relations.

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: Making It New: Experiments in American Modernism

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday & Thursday 1-4 pm  ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

Instructor(s): James Dunnigan

Brief Description of Course: Whatever modernism was (a period? a movement? a bit of both?) it definitely shattered—still shatters, still transforms—our received notions of what “writing” is and what “genre” means. With the aim of appreciating the full range of these transformations, we will be studying modernist American poetry, fiction, essays, literary journals and various hybrid media. By the end of this course, students will have developed an appreciation of the variety of literary forms and major topics or motifs in American modernist writing. These motifs include, but are not limited to, the reappropriation of classical mythology, the pursuit of a new vernacular, and DIY print culture.

In order to preserve the sense of modernism and modernist studies as an ongoing experiment, this class will lean as heavily on student participation as it does on standard lectures. Each student is to treat the class as a laboratory: a space to experiment with approaches to modernism and to treat the period as a mirror for our own early twenty-first century experience. For that purpose, our final assignment will allow students to write their own texts in response to one of the assigned. In order to show how the forms of modernist writing remain relevant to literature in our own time, our final text will be by a famous living writer who in many ways is the chief heir of modernism in North America: Anne Carson.

Required Reading: 
T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Gertrude Stein, “Poetry and Grammar”
H.D. “Choruses from the Iphigeneia in Aulis”
Ezra Pound, Cantos 1 and 2
William Carlos Williams, Spring and All
Wyndham Lewis et al., (eds), BLAST vol. 1
Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston et al., (eds), FIRE!!
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

Method of Evaluation: 
Attendance and class participation (15%)
Eight weekly reading journal entries, due Mondays (15%)
One short paper (6pp, 30%)
One longer paper (9-10pp) or creative project + rationale (40%)

ENG480H1F - Advanced Studies Seminar: Contemporary Repetitions of Lolita

Section Number: LEC5101

Time(s): Monday & Wednesday 6-9 pm  IN-PERSON

Instructor(s): Rachel Windsor

Brief Description of Course: Seventy years after its original publication, references to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita remain plentiful in contemporary literature and culture. Retellings and reimaginings continue to circulate, ranging in form from novels, to short stories, to memoirs, to albums, and beyond. In digital spheres, allusions to the novel are equally abundant: critical engagement with the novel regularly goes viral on BookTok and BookTube, while purveyors of the “nymphet aesthetic” rack up thousands of views on Tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Even slang has shifted to accommodate Nabokov’s—or rather, Humbert’s—creation, as the “Lolita” remains, unfortunately, a recognizable figure. This course asks why Lolita is so fascinating to the American cultural imagination, examining whether controversy and taboo alone account for its enduring presence. It begins by encouraging students to analyze Lolita as a literary object, identifying the novel’s own repetitions as well as the key complexities that will animate its later literary and cultural echos. It then turns to those texts that reiterate Lolita, asking students to consider what the similarities and differences illuminate about the current moment—that is, what aspects of Lolita remain timely or urgent and why this might be the case—as well as what contemporary revisions reveal about the prescience (or lack thereof) of Nabokov’s work. Finally, it attends to reverberations of Lolita in contemporary American culture, encouraging students to interrogate the “Lolita” as an archetype and as what M. Gigi Durham calls an “effect,” as well as the novel’s place in the post-#MeToo era. All discussions are animated by the central question: what accounts for America’s seventy-year long obsession with Lolita?

Required Reading: Primary readings will consist of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) alongside several works that consciously repeat one or more of its elements, which may include Jeffery Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides (1993); Pia Pera’s Lo’s Diary (1995); Emily Prager’s Roger Fishbite (1999); Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003); and Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa (2021). These texts will be paired with cultural reiterations of Lolita as it echos in mass media and culture (for instance, Lana Del Rey’s album Born to Die (2011); the “coquette”/“nymphet” aesthetic in fashion magazines and digital spaces; BookTok and BookTube videos; and several pertinent advertisements) as well as short works of literary and cultural theory (which will consist of selections from childhood studies; girlhood studies; American studies; critical race theory; and feminist trauma theory).

First Three Authors and Texts: Vladimir Nabokov, “Good Readers and Good Writers” (1948); Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955); Jeffery Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides (1993).

Method of Evaluation: Active and informed participation (15%); weekly discussion posts (10%); Lolita retelling assignment (20%); Lolita in culture assignment (25%); final essay or creative project (30%).

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 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 Heloise, Hildegard of Bingen, and Marie de France. In the second part of the course, we will read Chen’s Joan along with some late medieval lives of virgin martyrs, Cristine de Pizan’s poem about Joan of Arc, and some of the records from Joan of Arc’s trial. 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: The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, translated and edited by Betty Radice. Penguin: 2004; Marie de France, Poetry, translated and edited by Dorothy Gilbert. Norton, 2015; Lauren Groff, Matrix. Riverhead/Penguin, 2022; Katherine Chen, Joan. Hachette, 2023.

First Three Authors and Texts: Letters of Abelard and Heloise; 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%.