Click HERE for our Winter 2025 Course Offerings.
Explore our different course requirements and discover specific routes through each program by clicking on the Programs & Courses menu. For specific advice regarding course selection and program requirements, please contact our Undergraduate Coordinator: eng-ugc.utsc@utoronto.ca. Please email the course instructor if you have any questions about specific courses.
FALL 2024 COURSES
FALL 2024 A-LEVEL COURSES
A-level courses are meant to offer a wide-ranging introduction to the fundamentals of studying English. They are good starting places because they are intended to prepare you for any of the major or minor programs we offer, but you can also begin with B-level courses that fit your interests or schedule.
Note that you do not have to take our A levels in numerical order -- for instance, you can take ENGA02H3 before, after, or at the same time as ENGA01H3.
Instructor: TBD
Click here for a brief video introduction to this course!
This course introduces the fundamentals of studying English at the university level, and builds the skills needed to successfully navigate English degree programs as well as a liberal arts education more broadly. Students will learn how to read texts closely and think critically; they will practice presenting their ideas in a clear, supported way; they will be exposed to a variety of texts in different forms and genres; and they will gain a working familiarity with in-discipline terminology and methodologies. Moreover, the course is an opportunity to explore the power exercised by literature on all levels of society, from the individual and personal to the political and global.
ENGA01H3 covers a wide range of texts, from Charles Dickens's Bleak House to Lin Manuel Miranda's Hamilton, from canonical sonnets to Indigenous and racialized challenges to the form. We will look at nontraditional forms like webcomics, podcasts, and a text adventure video game, all while asking "What IS literature?" and "Who is it FOR?" and "What place is there for ME in literature?"
This course will be delivered online, with lectures having synchronous ("in person") and asynchronous (at your own speed) components. You will have some synchronous tutorial meetings, which give you the opportunity to discuss your ideas in a smaller group (led by a PhD student in English) and become comfortable asking questions and trying out new ways of thinking.
ENGA01H3 is a required course for our English Specialist, English Major, and English Minor. You can explore our degree requirements and routes through the program HERE.
Instructors: TBA
Click here for a brief video introduction to this course!
Intensive training in critical writing about literature. Students learn essay-writing skills (explication; organization and argumentation; research techniques; bibliographies and MLA-style citation) necessary for the study of English at the university level through group workshops, multiple short papers, and a major research-based paper. This is not a grammar course; students are expected to enter with solid English literacy skills.
Conducted in sections of 25 students.
ENGA02H3 is a required course for our English Specialist, English Major, and English Minor. You can explore our degree requirements and routes through the program HERE.
Instructor: Daniel Tysdal
An introduction to the fundamentals of creative writing, both as practice and as a profession. Students will engage in reading, analyzing, and creating writing in multiple genres, including fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and drama. This course will will include tutorial meetings, led by a graduate student in English, which give you the opportunity to discuss craft, analyze published work, do freewrites, and workshop your work with a smaller group.
Priority will be given to students who have declared, or are considering, a Major or Minor program in Creative Writing
ENGA03H3 is a required course for our Creative Writing Major and Creative Writing Minor. You can explore our degree requirements and routes through the program HERE.
Instructor: Garry Leonard
Click here for a brief video introduction to this course!
An exploration of how literature and film reflect the artistic and cultural concerns that shaped the twentieth century.
Either ENGA10H3 (or , which will be offered in Winter 2024) is required for our Literature and Film Minor. You can explore our degree requirements and routes through the program HERE.
FALL 2024 B-LEVEL COURSES
B-level courses are intended to offer an introduction to particular areas of study in English, typically based on region, time period, genre, or theme. None of the B-level offerings have pre-requisites, and all are pitched at an introductory level. You should feel free to take B-level classes at any stage of your degree.
Instructor: Randy Lundy
This course introduces students to a diverse selection of recent writing by Indigenous authors in Canada/Turtle Island, including novels, poetry, drama, essays, oratory and autobiography. Discussion of literature is grounded in Indigenous literary criticism, which addresses such issues as appropriation of voice, language, land, spirituality, orality, colonialism, gender, hybridity, authenticity, resistance, sovereignty, and anti-racism.
Instructor: Niyosha Keyzad
This course will provide science students with practical strategies, detailed instructions, and cumulative assignments to help them hone their ability to write clear, coherent, well-reasoned prose for academic and professional purposes. Topics will include scientific journal article formats and standards, peer-review, and rhetorical analysis (of both scientific and lay-science documents).
Instructor: TBA
A study of fiction, drama, and poetry from the West Indies. The course will examine the relation of standard English to the spoken language; the problem of narrating a history of slavery and colonialism; the issues of race, gender, and nation; and the task of making West Indian literary forms.
Instructor: Kara Gaston
A study of Dante鈥檚 Inferno and its influence on later art and literature. Inferno describes a journey through the nine circles of hell, where figures from history, myth, and literature undergo elaborate punishments. Dante鈥檚 poem has inspired writers and artists since its composition, from Jorge Luis Borges to Gloria Naylor to Neil Gaiman. In this course, we will read Inferno together with a selection of 19th, 20th, and 21st century works based on Dante. Throughout, we will explore how Dante鈥檚 poem informs and inspires poetic creativity, social commentary, and political critique. No prior knowledge of Dante or Inferno is necessary; we will encounter the text together.
Pre-1900 course
Instructor: Urvashi Chakravarty
An introduction to the historical and cultural developments that have shaped the study of literature in English before 1700. Focusing on the medieval, early modern, and Restoration periods, this course will examine the notions of literary history and the literary 鈥渃anon鈥 and explore how contemporary critical approaches impact our readings of literature in English in specific historical and cultural settings.
Pre-1900 course
ENGB27H3 is a required course for our English Specialist, English Major. You can explore our degree requirements and routes through the program HERE.
Instructor: Laura Jane Wey
The goal of this course is to familiarize students with Greek and Latin mythology. Readings will include classical materials as well as important literary texts in English that retell classical myths.
Pre-1900 Course.
Instructor: Heidi Craig
An introduction to the poetry and plays of William Shakespeare, this course situates his works in the literary, social and political contexts of early modern England. The main emphasis will be on close readings of Shakespeare's sonnets and plays, to be supplemented by classical, medieval, and renaissance prose and poetry upon which Shakespeare drew.
Pre-1900 course.
Instructor: TBA
An introduction to children's literature. This course will locate children's literature within the history of social attitudes to children and in terms of such topics as authorial creativity, race, class, gender, and nationhood.
Pre-1900 course.
Instructor: Daniel Tysdal
An introduction to the writing of poetry. This course will provide an introduction to the writing of poetry through workshop sessions. Admission by portfolio.
Prerequisite: You need to have completed and successfully applied to the Major or Minor program in Creative Writing (click for program details). If you are a non-first year student and would like to apply for B-level Creative Writing courses, please submit a portfolio in the following manner: Email 5-10 pages of poetry to creative-writing@utsc.utoronto.ca. Please include your student number, and note if you are applying for the F or S term.
Instructor: Erica Cardwell
A focused introduction to the writing of fiction. This course will enable students to explore the writing of short fiction through reading, discussion, and workshop sessions.
Prerequisite: You need to have completed and successfully applied to the Major or Minor program in Creative Writing (click for program details). If you are a non-first year student and would like to apply for B-level Creative Writing courses, please submit a portfolio in the following manner: Email 5-10 pages of fiction or other prose writing to creative-writing@utsc.utoronto.ca.. Please include your student number.
Instructor: Andrew Westoll
A focused introduction to the writing of creative non-fiction. This course will enable students to explore the writing of creative non-fiction through reading, discussion, and workshop sessions.
Prerequisite: You need to have completed and successfully applied to the Major or Minor program in Creative Writing (click for program details). If you are a non-first year student and would like to apply for B-level Creative Writing courses, please submit a portfolio in the following manner: Email 5-10 pages of fiction or other prose writing to creative-writing@utsc.utoronto.ca. Please include your student number.
Instructor: Deirdre Flynn
In this course, students will learn to write critically about movies. We will watch movies and read film criticism, learning to write about film for various audiences and purposes. Forms of writing covered will include movie reviews, blogs, analytical essays, and research-based essays. This is a writing-intensive course that will include revision and peer review. Students will learn how to write academic essays about movies, while also learning about the goals and tools for writing about film for other audiences and venues.
Instructor: Garry Leonard
An investigation of film genres such as melodrama, film noir, and the western from 1895 to the present alongside examples of twentieth-century prose and poetry. We will look at the creation of an ideological space and of new mythologies that helped organize the experience of modern life.
Instructor: Heidi Craig
This course explores the creative, interpretive, social, and political effects of our interactions and experiments with digital forms of literature: novels, short stories, plays, and poems, but also video games, online fan fiction, social media posts, and other texts typically excluded from the category of the "literary." The course attends both to texts written before the digital turn and later digitized, as well as to "born-digital" texts. It surveys the history of shifts within the media landscape - from oral to written, from manuscript to print, from print to digital. Over the course of the semesters, we will explore a variety of questions about digital literary culture, including: How does a text's medium - oral, manuscript, print and/or digital - affect its production, transmission, and reception? How do writers harness, narrate, and depict the use of digital technologies? How does digital textuality challenge earlier conceptions of "literature"? How does digitization shape our work as readers and critics? By reading "traditional" literary forms alongside newer ones, we will investigate how the digital age impacts literature, and how literature helps us grapple with the implications of our digitized world.
FALL 2024 C-LEVEL COURSES
Note that the pre-requisite for most C-level courses is any 6.0 university credits. Most of our C-level courses strongly recommend the completion of and/or . Some classes will have additional restrictions 鈥 make sure you check the for specific details, and remember to check our Programs & Courses section to track your route through your chosen program.
Instructor: Daniel Tysdal
An introduction to the craft of screenwriting undertaken through discussions, readings, and workshop sessions.
Instructor: Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm
This course is a creative investigation into how, through experimentation, we can change poetry, and how, through poetry, we can change the world. Our explorations are undertaken through writing assignments, discussions, readings, and workshop sessions.
Instructor:
An in-depth study of selected plays from Shakespeare's dramatic corpus combined with an introduction to the critical debates within Shakespeare studies. Students will gain a richer understanding of Shakespeare's texts and their critical reception.
Pre-1900 course.
Instructor: TBA
The world is increasingly interrelated - economically, digitally, and culturally. Migrants and capitalists move across borders. So do criminals and terrorists. Writers, too, travel between countries; novels and films are set in various locales. How have writers had to re-invent generic conventions to imagine the world beyond the nation and the new links among distant places?
Prerequisite: Any 6.0 credits
Instructor: Christine Bolus-Reichert
An introduction to the poetry and nonfiction prose of the Victorian period, 1837-1901. Representative authors are studied in the context of a culture in transition, in which questions about democracy, social inequality, the rights of women, national identity, imperialism, and science and religion are prominent.
Pre-1900 course
Prerequisite: Any 6.0 credits
Instructor: Maria Assif
A study of Arab women writers from the late nineteenth century to the present. Their novels, short stories, essays, poems, and memoirs invite us to rethink western perceptions of Arab women. Issues of gender, religion, class, nationalism, and colonialism will be examined from the perspective of Arab women from both the Arab world and North America.
Prerequisite: Any 6.0 credits
Instructor: TBA
This course will explore the literary history and evolution of the superhero, from its roots in the works of thinkers such as Thomas Carlyle and Friedrich Nietzsche to the wartime birth of the modern comic book superhero to the contemporary pop culture dominance of transmedia experiments like the 鈥渦niverses鈥 created by Marvel and DC. We will explore the superhero in various media, from prose to comics to film and television, and we will track the superhero alongside societal and cultural changes from the late 19th century to the present.
Prerequisite: Any 6.0 credits
Instructor: Rakesh Sengupta
This course introduces students to cinema by, and about, immigrants, refugees, migrants, and exiles. Using a comparative world cinema approach, the course explores how the aesthetics and politics of the cinema of migration challenge theories of regional, transnational, diasporic, and global cinemas.
Instructor: Randy Lundy
An intensive study of the writing of poetry through a selected theme, topic, or author. The course will undertake its study through discussions, readings, and workshop sessions.
Instructor: Andrew Westoll
An advanced study of the craft of creative non-fiction. Through in-depth discussion, close reading of exceptional texts and constructive workshop sessions, students will explore special topics in the genre such as: fact versus fiction, writing real people, the moral role of the author, the interview process, and how to get published. Students will also produce, workshop and rewrite an original piece of long-form creative non-fiction and prepare it for potential publication.
Instructor: Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm
This course connects writers of poetry and fiction, through discussion and workshop sessions, with artists from other disciplines in an interdisciplinary creative process, with the aim of having students perform their work.
Prerequisite: Any B-level course in Creative Writing; students in performance-based disciplines such as Theatre and Performance (THR) and Music and Culture (VPM) may be admitted with the permission of the instructor.
Instructor: Rakesh Sengupta
This course will introduce students to various film cultures in India, with a focus on Bollywood, the world's largest producer of films. The readings will provide an overview of a diverse range of film production and consumption practices in South Asia, from popular Hindi films to 'regional' films in other languages. This is an introductory course where certain key readings and films will be selected with the aim of helping students develop their critical writing skills. These course materials will help students explore issues of aesthetics, politics and reception across diverse mainstream, regional and art cinema in the Indian subcontinent.
FALL 2024 D-LEVEL COURSES
D-level courses are smaller, more intensive explorations of a specific topic or theme. The seminar-style format means that emphasis is placed on discussion, and there is a greater expectation of independent and self-driven work. Our D-levels typically require at least 2 C-Level courses in English. Make sure to check the for any other requirements or recommended preparation information.
Instructor: Erica Cardwell
Feminist scholar, Gloria Anzaldua writes in Borderlands/La Frontera, 鈥淚 cannot separate my writing from any part of my life. It is all one.鈥 In this class, students will engage with a genre-expansive survey of non-linear and experimental forms of life writing in which lived experience inspires and cultivates form. Some of these genres include flash fiction, auto-theory, auto-fiction, book length essays, ekphrasis, anti-memoir, performance texts, and many others. This course is rooted in intersectional feminist philosophy as a foundational tool for interdisciplinary practice. Throughout the semester, we will explore theoretical frameworks that center decolonial literary analysis. We will pair these readings with literature that exemplifies these approaches. Students will be asked to work with various prompts and prose experiments, all culminating in a long form hybrid project in which students are expected to 鈥渂reak form.鈥 In this class, 鈥渢he personal is political鈥 is the fertile center for our rigorous process of writing and craft excavation. Writers and artists to be read and discussed: Gabrielle Civil, Kyo Maclear, Brad Modlin, Leslie Marmon Silko, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Theresa Hak Kyong Cha, and many others.
Prerequisite: [0.5 credit at the B-level in Creative Writing] and [0.5 credit at the C-level in Creative Writing]
Instructor: Christine Bolus-Reichert
Climate change is our reality, but what will we do with it? Climate scientists warn us about the potentially catastrophic impacts of climate change while also telling us there is still time to change course, to move towards a just low-carbon world. Making the choices to head off the worst of climate change won't be easy. We have a relatively short amount of time to undertake major transformation. It's often hard to imagine how we get from where we are to where we need to be. That's where this course comes in. Jointly with a class from the Political Science department, POLD82, we will explore the way things could be as society grapples with the climate emergency. Through both political science analysis of the dynamics of climate politics and explorations of speculative climate fiction, we will explore how grounded imagination about the future can unlock potential for political change today and how it can help us navigate the changes that are underway.
Prerequisite: 2 C-level courses in English
Instructor: Marlene Goldman
One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness-- Gustave Flaubert
In this course, we will focus on Canadian writers and filmmakers who are globally celebrated for their style. Students will engage with select works by Margaret Atwood, Dionne Brand, Miriam Toews, Sarah Polley, Michael Ondaatje, Denis Villeneuve and David Cronenberg. Our goal in analyzing these works lies in enjoying the artists鈥 imaginative worlds and exploring the signature elements that contribute to their unique style. Equally critical, this course will also invite students to share work that inspires them and use that inspiration to find their voice and hone their unique essay writing style. To help students explore different styles, we will be hosting weekly in-class writing cafes where students experiment with adopting different writing styles.
Prerequisite: 2 C-level courses in English
Instructor: Neal Dolan
In this course we will read through all nine of Robert Frost鈥檚 books of poetry in chronological order -- from A Boy鈥檚 Will (1913) to In the Clearing (1962), attending to pertinent aspects of his biography as we proceed. (Each book contains roughly 30 to 50 pages of poetry). We will start with close responsiveness to the poems themselves, focusing on just a few each week, and we will circle out from these to consideration of larger contexts 鈥 literary-historical, social-historical, and political-cultural. In seminar discussions we will seek together to articulate aesthetic appreciation of one of modern poetry鈥檚 finest formal craftsmen, and we will follow the poems鈥 promptings towards larger reflections on self and society in an era of accelerating modernization and uprooting. Additional themes and topics will include pastoral; realism; vernacular; country versus city; individualism and community; family; gender; the Cold War; social class; technology; localism and precarious life-worlds; indigeneity and cultural erasure; American nationality. There will also be opportunities to consider Frost in relation to other poets of his own modernist era as well as important precursors.
Instructor: TBA
Advanced study of theories and critical questions that inform current directions in cinema studies.
Prerequisite: 2 C-level courses in English
WINTER 2025 COURSES
WINTER 2025 A-LEVEL COURSES
A-level courses are meant to offer a wide-ranging introduction to the fundamentals of studying English. They are good starting places because they are intended to prepare you for any of the major or minor programs we offer, but you can also begin with B-level courses that fit your interests or schedule.
Note that you do not have to take our A levels in numerical order -- for instance, you can take ENGA02 before, after, or at the same time as ENGA01.
Instructors: TBA
Intensive training in critical writing about literature. Students learn essay-writing skills (explication; organization and argumentation; research techniques; bibliographies and MLA-style citation) necessary for the study of English at the university level through group workshops, multiple short papers, and a major research-based paper. This is not a grammar course; students are expected to enter with solid English literacy skills.
Note: Conducted in sections of 25 students
ENGA02H3 is a required course for our English Specialist, English Major, and English Minor. You can explore our degree requirements and routes through the programs here.
Instructor: Andrew Westoll
An introduction to the fundamentals of creative writing, both as practice and as a profession. Students will engage in reading, analyzing, and creating writing in multiple genres, including fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and drama. This course will will include tutorial meetings, led by a graduate student in English, which give you the opportunity to discuss craft, analyze published work, do freewrites, and workshop your work with a smaller group.
Priority will be given to students who have declared, or are considering, a Major or Minor program in Creative Writing
ENGA03H3 is a required course for our Creative Writing Major and Creative Writing Minor. You can explore our degree requirements and routes through the program HERE.
Instructor: Garry Leonard
Building on , this course considers how literature and film responds to the artistic, cultural, and technological changes of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Either ENGA11H3 (or ENGA10H3) is required for our Literature and Film Minor. You can explore our degree requirements and routes through the program HERE.
Instructor: TBA
An introduction to the critical study of cinema, including films from a broad range of genres, countries, and eras, as well as readings representing the major critical approaches to cinema that have developed over the past century.
WINTER 2025 B-LEVEL COURSES
B-level courses are intended to offer an introduction to particular areas of study in English, typically based on region, time period, genre, or theme. None of the B-level offerings have pre-requisites, and all are pitched at an introductory level. You should feel free to take B-level classes at any stage of your degree.
Instructor: Neal Dolan
An introduction to the understanding of poetry in English. By close reading of a wide range of poems from a variety of traditions, students will learn how poets use the resources of patterned language to communicate with readers in uniquely rich and powerful ways.
Instructor: Sarah King
Life-writing, whether formal biography, chatty memoir, postmodern biotext, or published personal journal, is popular with writers and readers alike. This course introduces students to life-writing as a literary genre and explores major issues such as life-writing and fiction, life-writing and history, the contract between writer and reader, and gender and life-writing.
Instructor: TBA
A study of the Canadian short story. This course traces the development of the Canadian short story, examining narrative techniques, the\matic concerns, and innovations that captivate writers and readers alike.
Instructor: Yulia Ryzhik
An introduction to the historical and cultural developments that have impacted the study of literature in English from 1700 to our contemporary moment. This course will familiarize students with the eighteenth century, Romanticism, the Victorian period, Modernism, and Postmodernism, and will attend to the significance of postcolonial and world literatures in shaping the notions of literary history and the literary 鈥渃anon.鈥
Pre-1900 course.
ENGB28H3 is a required course for our English Specialist, English Major. You can explore our degree requirements and routes through the program HERE.
Instructor: TBA
An introduction to the writing of poetry. This course will provide an introduction to the writing of poetry through workshop sessions. Admission by portfolio.
Prerequisite: You need to have completed and successfully applied to the Major or Minor program in Creative Writing (click for program details). If you are a non-first year student and would like to apply for B-level Creative Writing courses, please submit a portfolio in the following manner: Email 5-10 pages of poetry to creative-writing@utsc.utoronto.ca. Please include your student number, and note if you are applying for the F or S term.
Instructor: Andrew Westoll
A focused introduction to the writing of fiction. This course will enable students to explore the writing of short fiction through reading, discussion, and workshop sessions.
Prerequisite: You need to have completed and successfully applied to the Major or Minor program in Creative Writing (click for program details). If you are a non-first year student and would like to apply for B-level Creative Writing courses, please submit a portfolio in the following manner: Email 5-10 pages of fiction or other prose writing to creative-writing@utsc.utoronto.ca.. Please include your student number.
Instructor: Erica Cardwell
A focused introduction to the writing of creative non-fiction. This course will enable students to explore the writing of creative non-fiction through reading, discussion, and workshop sessions.
Prerequisite: You need to have completed and successfully applied to the Major or Minor program in Creative Writing (click for program details). If you are a non-first year student and would like to apply for B-level Creative Writing courses, please submit a portfolio in the following manner: Email 5-10 pages of fiction or other prose writing to creative-writing@utsc.utoronto.ca. Please include your student number.
Instructor: TBA
In this course, students will learn to write critically about movies. We will watch movies and read film criticism, learning to write about film for various audiences and purposes. Forms of writing covered will include movie reviews, blogs, analytical essays, and research-based essays. This is a writing-intensive course that will include revision and peer review. Students will learn how to write academic essays about movies, while also learning about the goals and tools for writing about film for other audiences and venues.
Instructor: Rakesh Sengupta
An introduction to cinema鈥檚 relationship to colonialism, decolonization, and postcolonialism. How has film constructed, perpetuated, and challenged colonial logic? We will explore this question by examining colonial cinema, ethnography, Hollywood genres, anti-colonial film, and postcolonial film practices.
WINTER 2025 C-LEVEL COURSES
Note that the pre-requisite for most C-level courses is any 6.0 university credits. Most of our C-level courses strongly recommend the completion of and/or . Some classes will have additional restrictions 鈥 make sure you check the for specific details. Additionally, our Programs & Courses section can help you track your route through your chosen program.
Instructor: TBA
This multi-genre creative writing course, designed around a specific theme or topic, will encourage interdisciplinary practice, experiential adventuring, and rigorous theoretical reflection through readings, exercises, field trips, projects, etc.
Instructor: TBA
A study of contemporary Canadian poetry in English, with a changing emphasis on the poetry of particular time-periods, regions, and communities. Discussion will focus on the ways poetic form achieves meaning and opens up new strategies for thinking critically about the important social and political issues of our world.
Instructor: TBA
A study of selected topics in literary criticism. Schools of criticism and critical methodologies such as New Criticism, structuralism, poststructuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, gender and sexuality studies, New Historicism, and postcolonialism will be covered, both to give students a roughly century-wide survey of the field and to provide them with a range of models applicable to their own critical work as writers and thinkers. Recommended for students planning to pursue graduate study in English literature.
Instructor: Christine Bolus-Reichert
A study of fairy tales in English since the eighteenth century. Fairy tales have been a staple of children鈥檚 literature for three centuries, though they were originally created for adults. In this course, we will look at some of the best-known tales that exist in multiple versions, and represent shifting views of gender, race, class, and nationality over time. The course will emphasize the environmental vision of fairy tales, in particular, the uses of natural magic, wilderness adventures, animal transformations, and encounters with other-than-human characters.
Instructor: Deirdre Flynn
A study of the relation between self and other in narrative fiction. This course will examine three approaches to the self-other relation: the moral relation, the epistemological relation, and the functional relation. Examples will be chosen to reflect engagements with gendered others, with historical others, with generational others, and with cultural and national others.
Instructor: Erica Cardwell
This course focuses on queer studies in a transhistorical context. It serves as an introduction to queer theory and culture, putting queer theory into conversation with a range of literary texts as well as other forms of media and culture. This course might explore contemporary LGBTQ2+ literature, media and popular culture; the history of queer theory; and literary work from early periods to recover queer literary histories.
Instructor: Maria Assif
This course is an introduction to the theory and practice of rhetoric, the art of persuasive writing and speech. Students will study several concepts at the core of rhetorical studies and sample thought-provoking work currently being done on disability rhetorics, feminist rhetorics, ethnic rhetorics, and visual rhetorics. A guiding principle of this course is that studying rhetoric helps one to develop or refine one's effectiveness in speaking and writing. Toward those ends and through a 20-hour community-engaged learning opportunity in an organization of their choice students will reflect on how this community-based writing project shapes or was shaped by their understanding of some key rhetorical concept. Students should leave the course, then with a "rhetorical toolbox" from which they can draw key theories and concepts as they pursue future work in academic, civic, or professional contexts.
Instructor: TBA
This course will look at the depiction of childhood and youth in contemporary film and television, especially focusing on films that feature exceptional, difficult, or magical children. The course will explore how popular culture represents children and teens, and how these films reflect cultural anxieties about parenting, childhood, technology, reproduction, disability and generational change. Films and television shows may include: Mommy, The Babadook, Boyhood, Girlhood, A Quiet Place, We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Shining, Looper, Elephant, Ready Player One, Stranger Things, Chappie, Take Shelter, and Moonlight.
Instructor: TBA
An intensive study of the writing of fiction through a selected theme, topic, or author. The course will undertake its study through discussions, readings, and workshop sessions. Admission by portfolio.
Pre-requisite: , and admission to the Creative Writing Major or Minor. Click here for details on our Creative Writing programs. If you have been taking courses in the Creative Writing program prior to 2020, please contact creative-writing@utsc.utoronto.ca to check on your enrollment options.
Instructor: Alice Maurice
An introduction to the major theorists and schools of thought in the history of film theory, from the early 20th century to our contemporary moment. What is our relationship to the screen? How do movies affect our self-image? How can we think about the power and politics of the moving image? We will think about these questions and others by watching movies in conjunction with theoretical texts touching on the major approaches to film theory over the last century.
WINTER 2024 D-LEVEL COURSES
D-level courses are smaller, more intensive explorations of a specific topic or theme. The seminar-style format means that emphasis is placed on discussion, and there is a greater expectation of independent and self-driven work. Our D-levels typically require at least 2 C-Level courses in English. Make sure to check the for any other requirements or recommended preparation information.
Instructor: TBA
Topics in the literature and culture of the Romantic movement. Topics vary from year to year and may include Romantic nationalism, the Romantic novel, the British 1790s, or American or Canadian Romanticism.
Pre-1900 course
Instructor: Christine Bolus-Reichert
This course will be a study of four writers who are generally left out of the Victorian canon (only one, William Morris, is included in anthologies of the period), but who were major contributors to the development of modern fantasy. George MacDonald, who wrote one of the first portal fantasies along with a series of mythopoeic modern fairy tales, was a major influence on C.S. Lewis, author of the Chronicles of Narnia. William Morris wrote the first immersive, secondary world fantasies in English, and made possible the innovations of J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin, and countless other fantasy world-builders. Edith Nesbit wrote more than sixty novels, many of them fantasies for children, as well as one of the first time-travel fantasies. Lord Dunsany was a prolific writer of short stories, originating cosmogonic fantasy, weird tales, and sword and sorcery. All four writers were social outsiders, in spite of their class privilege, with commitments (in the case of Morris and Nesbit especially) to radical politics. We will consider what Victorian fantasy contributes to the development of the genre, as well as its important role in subverting the social status quo.
Pre-1900 course
Instructor: Neal Dolan
This seminar course will usually provide advanced intensive study of a selected American prose-writer each term, following the development of the author's work over the course of his or her entire career. It may also focus on a small group of thematically or historically related prose-writers.
Instructor: Andrew Westoll
A practical introduction to the tools, skills and knowledge-base required to publish in the digital ages and to sustain a professional creative-writing career. Topics include: the publishing landscape, pitching creative work, and employment avenues for creative writers. Will also include a workshop component (open to all genres).
YEARLONG 2023-2024 COURSES
The three creative writing independent study courses are taught by creative writing faculty 鈥 please see the for enrollment requirements and procedures.
Instructor: Yulia Ryzhik
An intensive year-long seminar that supports students in the development of a major independent scholarly project. Drawing on workshops and peer review, bi-monthly seminar meetings will introduce students to advanced research methodologies in English and will provide an important framework for students as they develop their individual senior essays. This course is strongly recommended if you're thinking about pursuing graduate studies in English.
In addition to workshops and peer review, students will have the opportunity to work individually with the instructor and with a faculty supervisor in their chosen research area.
Depending on the subject area of the senior essay, this course can be counted towards the Pre-1900 requirement. Also, please see the ENGD98 page for more details.