Undergraduate English Courses 2018/19

This course will examine works in a variety of literary genres (such as novels, plays, poetry, graphic novels and others) on the topics of crime and criminality, with the intent of introducing students to literature addressing themes of surveillance, law-breaking, human and non-human justice, suspense, villainy, violence, civil disobedience, and/or imprisonment. Note that this is not a detective fiction course (see EN249: Mystery and Crime Fiction).

In addition to the lecture, students are required to attend a tutorial. All tutorials begin in Week 2.

A detailed exploration of genres, techniques, and critical terminologies in prose fiction from different historical periods. While introducing central themes and analytical strategies required for the formal study of prose narratives, we will also be concerned with such over-arching issues as cultural contexts, reception, and the evolution of genres. The course provides representation of four popular genres: gothic, fantasy, historical romance, and science fiction.  We will address such fundamental questions as, What is a genre? What are some identifying features of specific genres? What role does genre fiction play, in cultural, economic, and literary terms? How do writers adapt more general literary techniques for use with specific genres? Authors to be studied may include J.R.R. Tolkien, Bram Stoker, Jane Austen, William Gibson, Diana Gabaldon, Ursula K. LeGuin, H.P. Lovecraft.

In addition to the lecture, students are required to attend a tutorial. All tutorials begin in Week 2.

This course introduces students to the conventions and expectations of writing at the university level. Through a variety of writing assignments, including the argumentative essay, the journal article review, and the reflective journal, students will practice skills central to achieving sound academic writing, including planning, drafting, revising, and editing. Students will learn and apply the grammatical conventions fundamental to achieving fluency and clarity in written English, as well as be familiarized with practices of academic citation. Through continuous instructor and peer assessment, this course aims to equip students with the skills they need to achieve strong, polished texts.

A study of different sports as portrayed in contemporary literature, with attention to both competitive and leisure pursuits. The course will consider poems, stories, songs, novels, and essays, looking at how authors use different aesthetic approaches to write about team and individual sports. Themes to be examined will include: the body as a site of exhilaration, effort, and pain; the highs and lows of spectacle and spectatorship; heroes and anti-heroes; amateurism versus professionalism; sport’s relationship to fantasy, ritual and myth; the role of gender, race, and performance in sports; and connections between sport, nationalism, and other forms of group identity.

Category 3

Culture is a confusing word with divergent meanings that cover beliefs, ideas, art, and traditions. Each sense of culture is quite different and competes with the others: when we use the word “culture” we lean toward one or another of these facets. Despite the entanglements of “culture”, it is a concept we aren’t yet able to do without. In fact, the number of contexts in which the vocabulary of culture appears has proliferated to such an extent that knowing how to “read” culture has become an indispensable life skill. ”Reading culture” involves both knowing stuff – facts about the world – and knowing how to interpret that stuff. Just to complicate matters, when we interpret culture we also interpret other people’s interpretations. Reading culture is meta!

In this course, we will focus on the role of narrative – the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves – in making our world meaningful and, simultaneously, in helping us deny what is deeply at risk in it. We will read three works of literary non-fiction that thoughtfully explore the cultural intricacies of living: the paradox of defending the free market while suffering the effects of industrial pollution; the dilemma of eating meat despite knowing animals are sentient beings; and the risks and hopes found in an intercultural dialogue that responds to the global climate threat. The goal of the course is not to take sides or a stand, but rather to learn the skills of reading culture beyond the surface of media appearances.

Category 4

This course explores a selection of Shakespeare’s tragedies and history plays, with an emphasis on their literary, theatrical and cultural contexts. We will consider Shakespeare’s contribution to the genres of the “tragedy” and the “history play” by analyzing his narrative and theatrical strategies in the context of the early modern period. Along with close readings of the texts, we will focus on the production histories of these plays, drawing on audio and visual resources, to demonstrate how they have been adapted and why they remain so relevant to audiences around the world–in theatre, film, and television.

Exclusions: EN232, EN351

Category 1

Through the study of a range of literary works across genres, this course introduces students to British literature from 1660 to the early 20^th century. Particular emphasis will be placed on helping students learn to situate literary works within their historical and social contexts and to recognize patterns of influence that connect literary works across periods. Authors studied may include Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Dickens, Woolf, Eliot, and Joyce.

Exclusion: EN122*, EN244*

Category 2

This course introduces students to American literature of the nineteenth century through an exploration of the fiction, poetry, and essays of some of the period’s leading authors—Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allen Poe. Through an investigation of a variety of literary genres and aesthetic forms, we will explore representations of some of the major political, social, and economic forces that shaped nineteenth-century American society: slavery, abolition, puritanism, democracy, subjectivity, and the constitution of national identity.

Exclusion: EN215

Category 3

This course offers a consideration of Canadian literature from the end of the Second World War to the present, with an emphasis on the emergence of a national literature. Students will read a variety of texts (poetry, nonfiction, drama, and fiction) in order to examine changing definitions of Canadian culture and identity through two phases of contemporary Canada: the cultural nationalist period of the 1950s through the 1970s, and the 1980s onward, when nation-based definitions became increasingly problematic in the face of global culture, transnationalism, resurgence in Indigenous flourishment and debates about multiculturalism and citizenship. Authors studied may include: Lawrence Hill, Wayde Compton, Marilyn Dumont, Dionne Brand, Thomas King, Laurie Graham.

Exclusion: EN217

Category 3

This course will introduce students to the practice of creative writing and literary analysis by reading short fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction as models for students’ creative writing. The course will include an ongoing discussion of how to read like a writer, and will explore literary genres and creative methods with opportunities for writing practice in short assignments designed to broaden students’ skills and abilities. The dual guiding principles of the course will be examination of how language works in written forms and compositional experimentation with a variety of writing styles.

NOTE: This is a required course in the new Creative Writing Minor (for non-English majors) and the Creative Writing Concentration (for English majors).

Category 4

In this course, we explore a diverse range of literature produced for young adults, with emphasis on texts since the 1960s. Students will attend to a range of cultural and literary topics, including genre, history, representations of adolescence and adulthood, central themes, social issues, and approaches to reading and interpretation. We will encounter scholarly and popular conversations about what counts as adolescent literature, and what ideological or aesthetic qualities determine whether or not a text is bestowed with a YA label. By exploring the shifting techniques, characteristics and concerns of literature for, about, and by  adolescents, we will come to understand the role youth has played, and continues to play, in the social imaginary. Thematic concerns include, but are not limited to: adolescent 'risk-taking,' resistance, hedonism, displacement, activism and agency.

Category 4

The Romantic Age is generally understood as spanning the years 1780-1840, and this course will consider the diverse poetry and prose produced in the first half of this period by writers such as Charlotte Smith, William Blake, William Godwin, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Bage, John Thelwall and others. Set against the backdrop of the American and French Revolutions and the Napoleonic Wars, the writings of the early Romantics explore such issues as natural rights and gender roles, humanitarianism and idealism, the individual and exotic otherness, industrial reform and the return to nature. Central to each of these debates is a concern with the writer's dual role as a mediator of socio-cultural events and a social being, one who acts (or strives to act) in the world through words. Wordsworth's conception of the poet as the "rock of defense for human nature" will be scrutinized throughout the course both for what it suggests about the Romantic faith in poetic imagination and what it implies about the writer's ineluctable distance from the human and the natural.

Exclusion: EN294

Category 2

This course involves the study of poetry, fiction, drama, essays and little magazines published in Britain in the twenties and thirties (the ‘interwar’ period). There will be a focus on modernism as well as other major tendencies rooted in the social, intellectual and political life of these decades. Some attention will be given to the development of modern criticism. Key authors include Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Stevie Smith, and Aldous Huxley.

Exclusion: EN258

Category 2

This course offers a wide-ranging historical survey of the most enduring, influential and controversial critical approaches to literary studies. We will explore such contested territories as classical theory, formalism, historicism, structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalytic theory, gender studies, postcolonialism, cultural studies, post-structuralism and deconstruction.

Exclusion: EN291

Category 4; required for Honours English majors.

An examination of literary representations of physical, economic, social and political instabilities and upheavals. The course will consider ways in which transgressive acts against authority of the law serve to interrogate the boundaries between self and other, between a culture's desires and fears.

Category 4

Come explore the rich literatures and cultures of West Africa and its immigrant communities! In this course, you will discover ancient empires, desert universities and coastal slave-forts; you’ll join in valiant struggles for independence, just as you’ll stroll on the haunting streets of London or zoom around in bustling Lagos (a megalopolis with the population of Canada). In a variety of texts – from oral sagas to rollicking Nollywood films, and from mysteries to parodies – we will examine such topics as cultural traditions, religious beliefs, gender, ethnicity, slavery or neocolonialism. Special emphasis will be placed on recent Nigerian cultural production and issues related to globalization and human rights. Books to check out include Evaristo’s Blonde Roots; Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives or Kwei Quartey’s Children of the Street: An Inspector Darko Dawson Mystery.

Exclusion: EN309c

Category 3

Recent prose, poetry, drama and fiction-theory contributions to literature in Canada by women from various communities and perspectives. Questions of gender and sexuality, ethnicity, race and class considered alongside contemporary developments in literary theory and practice.

NOTE: The Barbara Parker Memorial Scholarship in English will be awarded each year to a continuing Laurier student with the highest GPA in this course.

Exclusion: EN309r

Category 3

This course brings together the scholarly study and practical application necessary to write literary short fiction. Students will learn about the craft by reading and analyzing a selection of short stories as well as authors’ reflections on their artistic practice, while also engaging in creative writing exercises, peer assessment, and the building blocks of the writing process, from brainstorming to revision. Students will be expected to produce a critical exegesis accompanying a sustained and coherent work of short fiction developed from shorter oral and written exercises throughout the term.

NOTE: Entrance to this course is by application only.  Students must submit a portfolio of 6-8 pages of original fiction (i.e., written by the applicant) to Prof. Mariam Pirbhai (mpirbhai@wlu.ca). Portfolios may be submitted by September 1, 2018, and will be evaluated in order of receipt. These portfolios will form the basis of admission to the course.  Upon approval of the portfolio, successful applicants will be given overrides in order to register.  For any further information or queries, please contact Prof. Pirbhai directly.

Exclusion: EN331

Category 4

This course concentrates on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, one of the most justifiably famous works in all of literary history. Vast controversy surrounds even the most basic assumptions concerning this composition: how serious is the author concerning its content? How biting is the satire? How do the many characters relate to historical figures, ideas, and political movements of the era (if they do)? We shall wrestle with such questions and, ideally, students should arrive at an understanding that in The Canterbury Tales, genres, identities, and literary conventions are (just as they are in present-day life) in constant dialogue, interrogation, and conflict. The Canterbury Tales include examples of fables, heroic poetry, hilarious farce, cynical romance, satire of the church, and provocative and profound religious writings, to name just a few genres. No previous knowledge of Middle English is necessary in order to take this course.

Exclusion: EN352*

Category 1

The course focuses on a variety of 17th-century literary texts considering the interrelations of love, sex, and desire; class and gender relations; colonization; political power; and the place of religion in society. Students will read texts by writers including, but not restricted to, John Donne, Ben Jonson, John Milton, Katherine Philips, John Webster, and Mary Wroth.

Exclusion: EN309x, EN354*

Category 1

With the proliferation of personal computers and digital record keeping from the 1980s onwards the Information Age began and revolutionized our world. Electronic devices, including computers, smartphones, digital cameras, and the internet have radically changed our way of storing and retrieving information, of communication, and our perception and relationship to others in the globe. In this course, we examine the use and relationship of digital media (digital images, videos, social media, web pages, databases, digital audio, and e books), improved communication (email, social media, web 2.0), and increased mobility (tourism, migration) to life writing. We explore the ways identities are fashioned, mediated, remediated, and performed in various forms of late 20^th and 21^st century life writing, including the memoir, graphic narrative, film, autobiographical novel, video and on-line blogs.

Texts to be studied include: Piper Kerman’s Orange is the New Black; Eddie Huang’s Fresh Off the Boat; Alison Wearing’s Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter; Marie Calloway’s What Purpose Did I Serve in Your Life as well as some shorter pieces and sites online. Please read one or two of these books over the summer.

Content Warning: Some of the materials in this course contain explicit scenes and language that students may find disturbing.

Category 4

This course will focus on poems, novels, plays, and nonfiction that deal with the end of the world. Topics studied may include the collapse of western culture, ecological cataclysm, political dystopias, nuclear holocaust, and global pandemics. We will consider what portrayals of “The End” say about the cultures that produce them, and look at the forms of resilience they inspire. Students will be expected, by end of term, to have facility with these different genres, to analyze literary works, and to produce cogent written arguments on selected topics regarding these works.

In addition to the lecture, students are required to attend a tutorial. All tutorials begin in Week 2.

In this course, we will focus on the genre of fiction, considering the way writers are influenced by different cultural traditions, literary movements and historical periods. We will also keep a number of questions in mind as we read this genre: What are the major conventions of short fiction? How does fiction “rebel” against these conventions? When does a story lose sight of “reality” and enter the realm of the fantastic or allegorical? What are the building blocks of literary analysis? Readings will include short stories and novels.

In addition to the lecture, students are required to attend a tutorial. All tutorials begin in Week 2.

This course introduces students to the conventions and expectations of writing at the university level. Through a variety of writing assignments, including the argumentative essay, the journal article review, and the reflective journal, students will practice skills central to achieving sound academic writing, including planning, drafting, revising, and editing. Students will learn and apply the grammatical conventions fundamental to achieving fluency and clarity in written English, as well as becoming familiar with practices of academic citation. Through continuous instructor and peer assessment, this course aims to equip students with the skills they need to achieve strong, polished texts.

This course introduces students to poetry and poetics from a wide range of styles and periods, and includes an ongoing discussion about poetry's influence on culture. Ideally, students learn to read formal, stylistic, and rhetorical features in the poems, and to consider the ways that poetry challenges our perspectives on language and delves into enduring questions about how meaning is made. Forms and genres may include the sonnet, lyric, villanelle, elegy, ode, spoken word, ballad, dramatic monologue, prose poem, or free verse. This course encourages students to come to a greater appreciation of the pleasures and rewards of reading poetry.

Category 4

This course focuses on strategies for clear and effective communication, with an emphasis on genres of writing related to employment and business contexts. Writing for the workplace entails complex situations for communication: it must be is sensitive to ethical, interpersonal, economic, and professional considerations, while also aiming for clarity and concision. This course hones students’ abilities to act and communicate professionally, positioning them to perform, adapt, and excel in the workplace. We will practice communicating dense and detailed information simply, implementing best practices in digital communication, working effectively in teams, and giving and receiving feedback, all while learning to write grammatically sound prose that is readily understood by diverse audiences. Students will write and revise memos and emails and collaborate on a major consultation project in order to hone their abilities as professional communicators. Throughout, attention will be paid to the links between effective writing and oral presentation. To this end, the course features a series of guest speakers, drawn from the Laurier community and beyond, who will address a variety of topics in professional communication, including writing to fundraise and writing in the tech industry. As part of the course assessment, students will be invited to act as respondents to these guest speakers and reflect on their own competencies as writers and public speakers. More broadly, students will be invited throughout the course to reflect on their values, strengths, and aspirations as emergent professional communicators.

Non-designated Writing Course

A study of the ways in which literature of various periods and nationalities functions to criticize its milieu. Emphasis will be placed on the specific socio-historic contexts and ideologies of the period in which the works were written.

Category 4

Do you like learning about other cultures? Do you enjoy stories of struggles and resistance? Do you want to discover new literatures in English – for instance from Africa, Southeast Asia, Oceania or the West Indies? If so, then course is for you! This introductory course surveys texts from former British Commonwealth nations, as well as other countries grappling with neocolonialism, and introduces key concepts in postcolonial studies (eg. imperialism, cultural reclamation, popular resistance). In addition to revelling in the storytelling, imagination and humour in these texts, we will pay special attention to topics that shape our multicultural world (eg. class, gender, ethnicity) and broach such complex global issues as immigration, economic development, social injustice, violence or war.

Category 3

This course examines selected Arthurian narratives, myths, and traditions within a variety of contexts: textual, generic, national, cultural and technological. Students will examine the medieval origins and modern adaptations of Arthurian legends as well as the key figures of these stories, such as King Arthur, Sir Lancelot, Guinevere, Sir Gawain and Morgan La Fee. Though this course concentrates mainly on texts, it may also include examinations of Arthurian material within films and multi-media environments such as internet websites and video games. (No prior knowledge of medieval literature or computer technologies is necessary)

Exclusion: EN209w

Category 4

A study of the interconnections between gender and genre in selected plays drawn from all stages of Shakespeare's development as a dramatist.

Exclusions: EN232*, EN351

Category 1

Fairy tales are so short, yet their spell seems everlasting. Do fairy tales still enchant you? Do you still enjoy Disney films or fairy tale adaptations (e.g. the musical Into the Woods, the Shrek films or TV series Once Upon a Time)? Do you want to learn something about how fairy tales evolved historically? Finally – are you ready to take fairy tales seriously – via literary criticism? If so, then this is the course for you!  Studying a variety of fairy tales (e.g., Perrault, Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen), we will explore how fairy tales evolved historically  and continue to impact our lives today, and we will also investigate some of the critical lenses that can be applied to fairy tales (e.g. psychoanalysis, feminism, postmodernism).

Summer Reading: Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber and the original fairy tales that Disney films are based on. (Please feel free to email the instructor, Dr. Madelaine Hron, for selections!) 

Exclusion: EN209r

Category 4

This course introduces students to some of the significant literary works and the principal historical periods of British Literature, dating from the eighth century to 1660. Students learn to situate literary works within their historical contexts and to trace patterns of influence and ideas that link certain literary works across the various periods. The course also introduces students to some of the important forms of literature, e.g., epic, lyric, tragedy. Possible authors for study include Chaucer, Spenser Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton.

Exclusions: EN122, EN244

Category 1

A study of contemporary Canadian and American literature about migration and diaspora, focusing primarily on Arab, Caribbean, Latin American and South Asian perspectives. The course will explore a range of topics and issues pertaining to immigration and citizenship, including multiculturalism and diversity; “ethnicity” and identity; the “invisible” or “model” minority; employment and labour; first versus second-generation perspectives; memory. Students can expect to encounter short stories, the novel, drama, essays, and film.

Category 3

Offers a survey of the contexts and development of Canadian literature starting from early texts of encounter between Indigenous peoples and Europeans, to works produced through the end of the Second World War. Texts may include exploration writing, Indigenous oral culture, poetry, performance works, journalism, and fiction. Students explore how and where Canadian literature emerged, the challenges of defining Canadian Literature in the period before Confederation, and the development of modernism in Canada.

Category 3

The Romantic Age is generally understood as spanning the years 1780-1840, and this course will consider the diverse poetry and prose produced in the second half of this period by writers such as Lord Byron, Jane Austen, Percy and Mary Shelley, John Keats, Thomas De Quincey, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon and John Clare.  Often in dialogue and occasionally in dispute with earlier writers like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Godwin and Wollstonecraft, the work of second-generation Romantics is characterized by a deep engagement with the supernatural and transcendent, with nature as a source of terror and upheaval as well as consolation, with the role of writing as a tool of social reform, and, perhaps above all, with the life of the mind—the layers and labyrinths of consciousness, the weight of memory and the psychology of isolation.

Exclusion: EN294

Category 2

This writing-intensive course develops students’ abilities to communicate effectively and professionally in several genres of academic writing and presentation. Students will hone diverse competencies in advanced writing and communication, learning to communicate with academic and broader audiences alike. Topics may include reviewing the principles of effective academic writing across genres (e.g., the summary, the annotated bibliography, the critical review, the essay, the major research paper), practicing skills in self-evaluation, revision, and peer review, becoming proficient in English grammar, and constructing effective oral presentations. Students will also have the opportunity to develop their strengths as professional communicators by crafting such genres as the personal statement, the conference paper proposal, and the elevator pitch, and by communicating about academic topics in digital and social media.

Category 4

The course involves the study of influential playwrights who transformed drama and theatre from the end of the 19th century into the 20th century. Plays will be studied in their literary, theatrical, and cultural contexts to understand the role of the theatre in modern society. The emphasis of the course will be on how theatre artists experimented with dramatic form (e.g. realism, expressionism, epic theatre, and theatre of the absurd) to explore a wide range of issues and themes. Authors include figures such as Henrik Ibsen, Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Samuel Beckett.

Category 3

A critical and cultural survey of the flourishing of the novel as a literary form during the Romantic and Victorian periods. Six representative works are usually selected for study, with emphasis on form, narrative technique and social context (including class and gender). Authors often chosen include Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Wilkie Collins, W.M. Thackeray, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde.

Category 2

This course is designed to teach the fundamentals of writing poetry to students who demonstrate an active interest in the genre. The core texts will introduce students to the practice of writing poetry, including various traditions and techniques as they have been developed or adapted in contemporary Canadian poetry. Students should arrive in the class prepared to write often, submit original poetry for feedback frequently (from both peers and the instructor,) and demonstrate an appetite for revision. A wide variety of poetic styles and methodologies will be discussed and assigned as research work, and students will be encouraged to develop their poetic abilities through a series of assignments and exercises.

Entrance to this course is by application only.  Students must submit a portfolio of 6-8 pages of original poetry (i.e., written by the applicant) to Prof. Tanis MacDonald (tmacdonald@wlu.ca). Portfolios may be submitted between July 1 and November 15, 2018, and will be evaluated in order of receipt. Upon approval of the portfolio, successful applicants will be given overrides in order to register. For any further information or queries, please contact Prof. MacDonald directly.

Exclusion: EN331*

Category 4

This course will explore the recent history and current popularity of dystopic narratives in a variety of genres, including young adult fiction, graphic narratives, poetry, and prose fiction, with the aim of discussing the cultural and social politics of disaster, annihilation, and reconstruction or cultural renewal as they appear in dystopic texts. The course will place special emphasis on the shifting representations and ideological positions of age, gender, race, heroism, individualism, and nationalism in these texts. Course texts may include books by Larissa Lai, Emily St. John Mandel, Nalo Hopkinson, Jeff Lemire, and others.

Category 3

The course involves the study of major tendencies and achievements in the drama and theatre of the late 20th century, drawing from an international context. Areas to be covered will include: issues and themes related to race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and nationality as they have been explored by modern playwrights; experiments in dramatic form and language; and the role of the theatre in contemporary society. The course will include plays by Caryl Churchill, Tony Kushner, Anna Deavere Smith, Brian Friel, and Tomson Highway.

Category 4