Undergraduate English Courses 2020/21

An introduction to the skills of analyzing literature through an examination of the endlessly fascinating topic of love. Love in its many guises will be encountered by students throughout the entire span of literary history, from knights in shining armour and powerful princesses right to the present, and through a variety of genres: fiction, poetry and drama. Themes of this course may include the origins of erotic and romantic traditions, fantasies and realities, and contemporary relationships.

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.

An intensive reading course that introduces students to the elements of literature and literary analysis through a variety of approaches and texts (fiction, poetry, drama, and prose) from different historical periods and cultural contexts.  Students will read three novels (19th century to the present), a selection of poetry derived from various genres and periods, and one play.

This course introduces students to the conventions and expectations of writing at the university level. Through a variety of writing assignments, such as an article summary, an argumentative essay, a reflective journal, or a research paper, 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.

This course, which aims to introduce students to African literature and culture, explores the representation of the African child in literature and media, and is particularly useful if you are considering applying to Teacher’s College. The first part of the course surveys Western representations of the African child, from slavery and 19th century race discourses to the present-day depictions of African children in popular culture and media (eg. charity campaigns or Disney films such as Queen of Katwe). Then we delve into African texts that feature children, so as to explore their creativity, cultural richness or playful humour (eg., an African “Harry Potter” or a parody of slavery) and to investigate more serious issues such as neo/colonialism, immigration, education, gender rights, child soldiers, AIDS or modern slavery etc. Reading Suggestions: Okorafor’s Akata Witch, Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, Evaristo’s Blonde Roots.

Exclusion: EN209j

Category 3

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

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 the classic readings in science fiction from the 19^th and 20^th century. A survey of iconic novels and short stories, from some of the earliest works in the genre through to the “golden age” of science fiction in the 1960s. Students will explore the history of science fiction as a genre and its defining literary characteristics and narrative devices, as well as consider recent challenges to the traditions of science fiction, particularly challenges presented from the perspective of gender studies, race studies, and ecocriticism. Required readings will include novels, short stories, and critical essays.

Category 4

The course introduces students to some of the significant literary works and the principal historical periods of British Literature from the Romantic Period (circa 1800) to the mid 20th century. Ideally, 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. Authors studied may include Blake, Wordsworth, Eliot, Tennyson, Browning, Yeats, Dickens, Woolf, and Joyce.

Exclusions: EN122, EN244

Category 2

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.

Exclusion: EN209t

Category 3

This course will introduce students to the practice of creative writing and literary analysis in the genres of short fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. The course will include discussion of how to read like a writer, and will explore literary genres and creative methods with opportunities for writing practice in shorter and longer 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 Creative Writing Minor (for non-English majors) and the Creative Writing Concentration (for English majors).

Category 4

This course will examine literature by Indigenous writers (mainly from what is now Canada), with a particular focus on key concepts and historical events that have shaped the field of Indigenous Literature. We will consider how Indigenous people represent themselves, their cultures, and their physical environments, as well as how they respond to non-Native representations via expressions that range from creation stories and other orature, to speeches, letters, short stories, poems, plays, and novels. We will also explore stories of resilience and humour that counter the assumption that Indigenous stories are only ever tragic ones. Students will develop skills in commenting critically on these works while also gaining knowledge of the historical, political, and cultural contexts out of which they emerge.

Exclusion: ID280

Category 3

This course involves the study of British and Irish poetry, drama, fiction, and essays from the turn of the 20^th century to just after the First World War. The texts will be related to social, intellectual, and political life in these decades, including events/developments/artistic movements such as Modernism, the Irish Question, the Women’s Movement, and the First World War. Authors include James Joyce, G.B. Shaw, W.B. Yeats, Charlotte Mew, Cicely Hamilton, and D.H. Lawrence.

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.

Britain in the 21^st century experienced what Zygmunt Bauman has called “liquid modernity,” where change occurs more and more rapidly due to globalization, migration, and technological advancement. Bauman notes that modern life is now characterized by “fragility, temporariness, vulnerability and inclination to change.”  This course examines representative narratives (novel, memoir, thriller) by British authors such as Ian McEwan, Ali Smith, and Kate Atkinson who represent their observations, fantasies, and anxieties about contemporary life in Britain. Issues to be discussed include precarity, violence, race, realism, trauma, and gender.

Category 2

This course will cover prose, poetry, drama, nonfiction essays, and/or theory by Canadian women writers from various communities and perspectives. Gender, sexuality, class, race and racialization will be considered alongside contemporary developments in feminist literary theory and practice. We will look at some historical discussions of women’s writing in Canada as groundwork for more recent texts and critical conversations, including a close look at the structural challenges women have faced in getting their writing into print.

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

Exclusion: EN309r

Category 3

A critical and cultural survey of the novel as a literary form in 20th-century Britain and Ireland, with emphasis on form, narrative technique, and social context. Authors studied may include James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Category 3

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.

Students who have passed EN272: Introduction to Creative Writing are allowed into the course without portfolio; contact Joanne Buchan to confirm your credit in that course, and for assistance in registering.

For students who have not taken and passed EN272, entrance to EN370 is by application only. Students must submit a portfolio to Prof. Tanis MacDonald. The portfolio is a sample of creative writing (in this case, poetry) written by the applicant, and must consist of one sample of 6-8 pages. 

Portfolios can be submitted from April 1 to August 31, 2020, and will be evaluated in order of receipt until the course fills. 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. MacDonald directly.

Exclusion: EN331

Category 4

Critical study of significant literary interventions in the cultural formation of Victorian England (1830-1860). In particular we examine the responses of novelists, poets and other writers to emerging issues of social power and conformity, individual liberty, "progress," industrialism, imperialism, gender and class. The literary treatment of these concerns is explored in relation to developments in genre and narrative form, to emerging mass readerships, and to theories of literature as "a criticism of life." Authors often selected for study include Arnold, Alfred Tennyson, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Elizabeth and Robert Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, John Ruskin and Charles Dickens.

Category 2

This course will examine four key medieval texts, ranging in date from the Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Century: Beroul’s Old French The Romance of Tristan (in Modern English translation), Letters of Heloise and Abelard, Sir Thomas Malory s Morte Darthure (excerpts), and Geoffrey Chaucer s Troilus and Criseyde. These texts depict eight of the most famous love-figures in all literature: Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guenivere, Abelard and Heloise, and Troylus and Cressida. We shall consider these love-figures and their requisite texts not only as artifacts within the traditions of courtly love and of the medieval period more generally but also as representations and texts that are in dialogue with innovative, contemporary approaches to literature such as psychoanalysis, feminism, and theories of the body. The first major text, Chaucer s romance, is unquestionably the most important composition that he completed and a profoundly influential work with regard to its treatment of sexuality against the background of military exploits and conquests. The second major text, Sir Thomas Malory s Morte Darthur, depicts the often fascinatingly conflicted love-lives of Arthur s knights and other major characters. This work remains the most intelligent, comprehensive, and exciting discussion of knighthood, chivalry, and other defining values of the late Middle Ages. No previous knowledge of Middle English is necessary in order to take this course. Note: this course counts as an ML course.

Category 1

A study of the representations of terrorism in selected works of literature (fiction, drama, poetry), scholarship and theory. This course will examine the intellectual, historical and cultural contexts governing works in (primarily in English) engaged with the notions of "terrorism" and the "terrorist" in a variety of periods, and may include novels such as Joseph Conrad's, The Secret Agent, Don DeLillo's, Mao II, ; plays such as Eugene O'Neil's The Hairy Ape, Kia Kothron's, 7/11; poems such as Amiri Baraka's "Somebody Blew Up America," Solmaz Sharif's Look; memoirs such as Alexander Berkman's Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist; and theoretical texts such as Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception, Jean Baudrillard's The Spirit of Terrorism.

Category 3

This course will focus on poems, novels, plays, and nonfiction that deal with catastrophe in various forms. Topics studied may include societal collapse, 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. By the end of term, students will be expected to have facility with different literary genres, to be able to critically 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 study poetry and prose that addresses human conceptions of and engagements with the natural environment. Beginning with foundational questions about what constitutes nature, environment, and ecology—especially as they intersect with human being and dwelling—we will consider the various ways in which writers have framed the natural world, whether as divine bequest, aesthetic object, resource for exploitation, moral teacher, interrelational space, etc.  A survey of the history of environmental literature will be combined with a consideration of how contemporary writers are confronting some of the most pressing ecological issues of our time.

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, such as an article summary, an argumentative essay, a reflective journal, or a research paper, 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.

This course explores global and postcolonial literature from Africa, Asia and the Americas, in light of questions of migration (roots), identity (race) and power (resistance) in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Category 3

Focuses on literature produced in the United States in the latter part of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Through a study of poems, plays, and fiction, the course will examine literary figures such as Toni Morrison, David Foster Wallace, Louise Erdrich, Lydia Davis, and Jhumpa Lahiri, and discusses recent trends in movements such as Postmodernism, Multiculturalism, the literature of 9/11, the graphic novel, and digital literature.

Category 3

Introduces students to some of the significant literary works and the principal historical periods of British Literature, dating from the eighth century up to the Romantic Period (circa 1800). Students learn to situate literary works within their historical contexts and to trace patterns of influence and ideas across various periods. The course also introduces students to some of the important forms of literature, e.g., epic, lyric, tragedy, satire. Possible authors for study include Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Swift, Pope, Defoe, and Austen.

Exclusions: EN122, EN244

Category 1

A study of contemporary Canadian and American literature about immigration to North America, focusing primarily on Arab, Caribbean, Latin American and South Asian perspectives. The course will explore a range of topics and issues pertaining to immigration, including settlement and citizenship, multiculturalism and the melting pot; ethnicity and othering; the visible minority and minorityhood; employment and labour; first versus second-generation or inter-generational identities; the “American” dream; diaspora and diasporic identities; memory, history and migration. Students can expect to encounter short stories, the novel, drama, essays, and film.

Category 3

The course offers a consideration of issues in 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 examine changing definitions of Canadian culture and identity through the study of poetry, nonfiction, drama, and fiction 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, and debates about multiculturalism and citizenship.

Exclusion: EN217

Category 3

This course will introduce students to the vibrant and still emerging cyberpunk movement in literature and film, as well as to more recent trends post-2000. Students will explore central literary and cinematic texts of the cyberpunk movement, including foundational works by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Philip K. Dick, and Ridley Scott. Students will also have the opportunity to consider the current direction of science fiction in more recent texts, including the spate of original science fiction series produced by streaming services. The course is loosely organized around the central figure of the cyborg. Additionally, students will investigate a number of theoretical concepts central to cybercultures, including Baudrillard on the simulacrum, Benjamin and the panopticon, and Benedikt on the architecture of lightness.

Exclusion: EN209d

Category 4

According to Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid Walsh, the tween is commonly understood to be a "construction of the present day"—one that is largely market-driven, defined by commodity culture, and "exclusively or almost exclusively female"(Seven Going on Seventeen 6). In this course, we will consider these claims. What is it about our current cultural moment that has brought this new category into being? How does this category affect literary activity? Why is it gendered?  And if the tween is a market driven category based on the disposable income of 8-12 year girls, then how do we ethically engage with representations of children who lie beyond its purview? We will consider these questions as we explore a diverse range of literature produced for children in intermediate school. Emphasis will be on texts published since the 1960s.

Category 4

A survey of the literature of the later Romantic Period (c.1810-1840) that foregrounds the influence of, and resistance to, dystopian visions of the world. The course explores works by writers in a variety of genres and styles, including sonnets, odes, verse dramas, lyric poetry, manifestos, novels, confessional non-fiction, literary criticism and theory, letters, and journals.

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.

Category 2

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

The 18th century is the first era in which the novel becomes both a popular and professional practice. Many authors capitalized on commercially viable topics, such as sex, scandal, crime, and shopping. Many also wrestled with philosophical and political themes, and an apparent war of extremes – sense and sensibility, science and religion, order and revolution. This course explores the many forms the novel adopted in this period, including “true history,” memoir, travel fiction, adventure and survival, comic romance, and the gothic. Our focus will be both on understanding the cultural contexts of the literature, as experienced by readers in the eighteenth century, and on discovering the relevance of this literature to current issues.

Category 1

Creative nonfiction takes the real world as its subject, and like all writing, the composition of creative nonfiction in its various subgenres is a dedicated literary practice. Creative nonfiction is as old as writing itself but subgenres like memoir, narrative journalism and the personal essay have recently become more popular than ever. This course will instruct students in the reading and writing of creative nonfiction by addressing form, voice, language, style, and structure, along with a study of the debates surrounding the challenges of working with nonfiction material. Assignments will offer students a variety of opportunities to develop their creative nonfiction styles via examples and exercises, and will consider the cultural uses of writing creative non-fiction.

Students who have passed EN272 are allowed into the course without portfolio; contact Joanne Buchan to confirm your credit in that course, and for assistance in registering.

For students who have not taken and passed EN272: Introduction to Creative Writing, entrance to EN369 is by application only. Students must submit a portfolio of 7-9 pages of original creative non-fiction (i.e., personal essays, memoirs, literary journalism) written by the applicant to Prof. Mariam Pirbhai. Please do not send scholarly essays.

Portfolios may be submitted until December 15, 2020, and will be evaluated in order of receipt until the course fills. 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.

Category 1

A study of a selection of 16th-century poetry, drama and prose, together with other art forms and cultural discourses that contributed to early modern ideologies and constructions of gender, the body and the state. The texts to be studied include Thomas More's Utopia; Elizabeth Joscelin's The Mother's Legacy to her Unborn Child; poetry by Shakespeare and by English and continental women writers; selections from Spenser's Faerie Queene; Marlowe's Doctor Faustus; and Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam.

Exclusion: EN353

Category 1

Critical study of change and resistance in later 19th-century English literature (1860-1900), with some emphasis on writings involved in symptomatic critical and public controversies, from the so-called "fleshly school of poetry" (the PreRaphaelites) to the notorious Decadent Nineties and the trial of Oscar Wilde. The exploration of other literary cultures or communities might include the Aesthetic Movement, the pseudonymous "Michael Field" (a collaboration of two women poets), the cult of sensation fiction, and the increasingly sharp tensions between writers and the "Victorianism" of their public readership and reviewers. Authors often selected for study include Christina and Dante Rossetti, George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans), Wilkie Collins, Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Michael Field" (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Lionel Johnson, Oscar Wilde and Thomas Hardy.

Exclusions: En230, EN357

Category 2

Building on Leslie Stephen’s striking claim that “[t]he literary movement at the end of the eighteenth century was obviously due in great part, if not mainly, to the renewed practice of walking,” this course will offer a pedestrian’s view of the Romantic period (c.1770-1850).  Exploring both the physical act and the written transcription of Romantic pedestrianism, we will consider the ways in which the socio-cultural and ideological meanings of walking were contested and refined in this period, to the extent that a new “age of pedestrianism” was inaugurated.  From the great diversity of texts and contexts in which Romantic pedestrianism unfolds, we will focus in particular on walking as an aesthetic practice in both rural and urban settings, on walking as a political and potentially transgressive act of self-authorization and, finally, on walking as a mode of nostalgic recollection and consolation.  Insofar as the discourse of pedestrianism is inextricably bound up with such creative activities as philosophic contemplation, painting, writing and reading, we will also consider its role as a (perhaps vital) catalyst and conduit for the human imagination—a study that necessarily takes us beyond the Romantic period and into our own and compels us to practice pedestrianism even as we read about it.

Category 2

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 David Hare, Tony Kushner, Anna Deavere Smith, and Griselda Gambaro.

Category 4