A study of plays by such dramatists as Beckett, Miller, Williams, Pinter, Soyinka, Churchill, with background readings from other dramatic literatures.

This is a critical introduction to major genres of Victorian literature. It offers an opportunity to explore how novelists, poets, and non-fiction prose writers such as the Brontës, Dickens, Tennyson, Darwin, Robert Browning, J.S. Mill, Thomas Hardy, and Oscar Wilde respond to crisis and transition: the Industrial Revolution, the Idea of Progress, and the Woman Question. Other topics may include the Romantic inheritance, liberty and equality, theology and natural selection, empire and nation, Art for Art’s Sake, the Fin de siècle, and Decadence. The multi-genre setup of the course allows students to see how novels, poems, and non-fiction prose develop as individual genres and converse with each other in responding to the same issues. Authors and topics vary with the instructor.

This course explores poems by the representative poets of the modern(ist) period, such as Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, H.D., W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, e.e. cummings, Langston Hughes, and others. What is unique about this period is the co-presence of and tension between elements of the chronologically modern and the radically modern (i.e. “modernist”), embodied in perspectives and issues that continue to impact our contemporary era. Students will be intrigued by the depth of anxieties and the variety of opportunities inherent in modern and modernist poetry.

Works by at least six contemporary poets, such as Ammons, Ashbery, Heaney, Hughes, Lowell, Muldoon, Plath.

Writing in English Canada before 1914, from a variety of genres such as the novel, poetry, short stories, exploration and settler accounts, nature writing, criticism, First Nations cultural production.

A study of major Canadian playwrights and developments since 1940, with some attention to the history of the theatre in Canada.

This course introduces advanced study of Canadian fiction through provocative examples from the ethnically, geographically, and aesthetically diverse range of fiction produced in Canada. It considers key Canadian novels and short stories in their literary, historical, and critical contexts. Discussion may include topics such as Indigenous fiction, settler constructions of Canada, the Canadian versions of modernism and postmodernism, and multicultural and diasporic narratives.

Beginning with movements and debates that shaped the modernist period, this course will introduce students to genres, forms, and themes that have inspired twentieth and twenty- first century poetry in English Canada. From imagist experimentation and lyric elegies to long poems, from concrete poetry to spoken word poems and, more recently, digital poetry, we will examine the role of poetry today in diverse social, cultural, and aesthetic contexts.

A study of works by Indigenous writers from North America and beyond, with significant attention to Indigenous writers in Canada. Texts engage with issues of de/colonization, representation, gender, and sexuality, and span multiple genres, such as fiction, life writing, poetry, drama, film, music, and creative non-fiction.

Close encounters with recent writing in Canada: new voices, new forms, and new responses to old forms. Texts may include or focus on poetry, fiction, drama, non-fiction, or new media.

Black Canadian Literature (poetry, drama, fiction, non-fiction) from its origin in the African Slave Trade in the 18th century to its current flowering as the expression of immigrants, exiles, refugees and ex-slave-descended and colonial-settler-established communities. This half-course will focus on significant authors of the latter 20th century, such as Austin Clarke, Dionne Brand, Lorena Gale, Dany Laferriere, Djanet Sears, etc., while lectures will address the history and politics that inspire Canada's most dynamic and relevant, diverse and radical, insightful and outspoken assembly of scribes.

Black Canadian Literature (poetry, drama, fiction, non-fiction) from its origin in the African Slave Trade in the 18th century to its current flowering as the expression of immigrants, exiles, refugees and ex-slave-descended and colonial-settler-established communities. This half-course will focus on established authors and significant anthologies of the early 21st century, such as Frankson's Africanthology, Mason-John & Cameron's The Great Black North, and works by Andre Alexis, Wayde Compton, Michael Fraser, Suzette Mayr, Zalika Reid-Benta, etc., while lectures will address the history and politics that inspire Canada's most dynamic and relevant, diverse and radical, insightful and outspoken assembly of scribes.

This course explores writing in a variety of genres produced in the American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as narratives, poetry, autobiography, journals, essays, sermons, court transcripts.

This course explores American writing in a variety of genres from the end of the Revolution to the beginning of the twentieth century.

This course explores twentieth-century American writing in a variety of genres.

This course explores six or more works by at least four contemporary American writers of fiction.

What, if anything, is distinctively "African" in African texts; what might it mean to produce "African" readings of African literature? We address these, as well as other questions, through close readings of oral performances and literary and other cultural texts.

Literature and cultures of Asian Canadians and Asian Americans, including fiction, poetry, theory, drama, film, and other media.

Major authors and literary traditions of South Asia, with specific attention to literatures in English from India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the diaspora. The focus will be on fiction and poetry with some reference to drama.

This course focuses on recent theorizations of postcoloniality and transnationality through readings of fictional and non-fictional texts, along with analyses of contemporary films and media representations.

Sustained study in a topic pertaining to Indigenous, postcolonial, or transnational literatures. Content varies with instructors. See Department website for current offerings. Course may not be repeated under the same subtitle.

Sustained study in a topic pertaining to Indigenous, postcolonial, or transnational literatures. Content varies with instructors. See Department website for current offerings. Course may not be repeated under the same subtitle.

Sustained study in a topic pertaining to British literature before 1800. Content varies with instructors. See Department website for current offerings. Course may not be repeated under the same subtitle.

Sustained study in a topic pertaining to British literature before 1800. Content varies with instructors. See Department website for current offerings. Course may not be repeated under the same subtitle.

Sustained study in a topic pertaining to literary theory, critical methods, or linguistics. Content varies with instructors. See Department website for current offerings. Course may not be repeated under the same subtitle.

Sustained study in a topic pertaining to literary theory, critical methods, or linguistics. Content varies with instructors. See Department website for current offerings. Course may not be repeated under the same subtitle.

Sustained study in a variety of topics, including: Canadian literature, American literature, Post-1800 British literature, and genres or themes that span across nations and periods. Content varies with instructors. See Department website for current offerings. Course may not be repeated under the same subtitle.

Note: An additional fee of $123 will apply to the "Cook the Books" subtitle offering.

Sustained study in a variety of topics, including: Canadian literature, American literature, Post-1800 British literature, and genres or themes that span across nations and periods. Content varies with instructors. See Department website for current offerings. Course may not be repeated under the same subtitle.

This course explores contemporary literary theory, but may include related readings from earlier periods. Schools or movements studied may include structuralism, formalism, phenomenology, Marxism, post-structuralism, reader-response theory, feminism, queer theory, new historicism, psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, critical race studies, and ecocriticism.

An introduction to psychoanalysis for students of literature, this course considers major psychoanalytic ideas through close readings of selected texts by Freud. The course also explores critiques and applications of Freud's work and examines a selection of literary texts that engage psychoanalytic theory.