Undergraduate English Courses 2025-26

For the most up-to-date information about courses, including classroom locations, check LORIS Browse Classes.

Online Learning Resources

Ask your instructors for recommended specialized web resources related to their courses.

Laurier Library

You have access to a large collection of research materials (books, articles, films, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and more) through the Laurier Library. Many of these materials are online. 

For quick access, check out the English Guide. 

Contact the English Librarian for more information: Meredith Fischer (mefischer@wlu.ca).

Sample Online Resources

• Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism
• British Library

Fall 2025

100-Level Courses

EN111: Literature and Crime

EN112 Literature and Love

200- and 300-Level Courses

These courses are all available to students in Years 2, 3, and 4.

EN201A: Children's Literature

EN209z: Asian North American Literature:

Asian American and Asian Canadian are terms used to describe people of Asian descent living in Canada and the US. Yet, as Nguyen points out, these bounded categories are both necessary and insufficient. This course explores this paradox by tracing the diverse histories of Asian diasporic communities in North America, such as the Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Laos, Pakistan, Korea and China to examining how narratives of the past shape literary and cultural production in the Asian North American diaspora.

By examining dominant narratives that have shaped the lives of Asian North Americans, such as multiculturalism, the American Dream, the model minority myth, and the figure of the grateful refugee, we can consider how these stories influence our understandings of cultural identity.

This exploration will include studying the historical and social contexts in which these narratives emerged, as well as the ways they may be questioned, resisted or reimagined. We will read works from a broad range of literary forms and authors of diverse backgrounds to reflect on what Lisa Lowe calls the “heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity” of Asian North American experiences.

EN237: The Fairy Tale

EN238: Tolkien and Fantasy

EN239: Classic Science Fiction

EN240A: Critical Approaches to Literature

EN249: Mystery and Crime

EN261: Sport Literature

EN266: American Dreams and Nightmares

EN271: The Creative Process

EN272A: Introduction to Creative Writing

EN301A: Literary Theory

EN309y: Shakespeare in Performance

EN309z: TBA

EN345: 19th-Century British Novel

EN350: Romantic Radicals

EN388: 18th-Century Literature - Strange Wonders

EN394: Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama

400-Level Seminars

These courses are available to Year 4 majors in Honours and Combined Honours English.

EN420a: Life-Writing and Digital Media

Life writing is writing that takes a life, one’s own or another’s, as its subject.  Forms of life writing include autobiography, biography, life narrative, memoirs, diaries, blogs, and other online social networking sites. This course looks at a sampling of self-life writing in the 21^st century. We examine the use and influence of other media, particularly digital and visual media, on the writing, construction, and representation of one’s life. We explore ways that improved media and technology, including email, social media, databases, video, and photos, YouTube, mediate and remediate our identities.

EN450q: Terrorism in Literature

This seminar involves the study of the representations of terrorism in selected works of literature (fiction, drama, poetry), scholarship and theory. At issue will be terrorism not only as protest, violence, and spectacle, but how it is mediated in political, popular, media and literary discourse. The course will examine the intellectual, historical and cultural contexts surrounding the literature engaged with the notions of "terrorism" and the "terrorist" emerging from a variety of nations and periods. Included among these will be the varying definitions and applications under which the term "terrorist" has historically operated, the strategic binary of speakability/unspeakability that governs much of the political interpretation of and response to terrorism, the complex "topographies" of discourse in which literary works situate the terrorist activities, and the ways in which literature can produce and perform "terror" itself. Along with the primary works of literature, students will be expected to read and perform analyses on secondary and theoretical works connected to the literary works and topic, both orally in the form of class presentations and in the form of various written responses. Students will also be expected to undertake research beyond the materials included on this syllabus and discussed in class as part of the research paper that forms the capstone assignment in the course.

Winter 2026

100-Level Courses

EN113: Literature for Our Time

EN165: Enriched Literary Studies

200- and 300-Level Courses

These courses are all available to students in Years 2, 3, and 4.

EN201B: Children's Literature

EN201: Law and Order

EN222: Literary Adaptation

EN231: Arthurian Traditions

EN233: Shakespeare's Comedies and Romances

EN240B: Critical Approaches to Literature

EN245: British Literary Tradition 1

EN252: Multiculturalism and Literature

EN263: Canada Then - Exploring Canadian Literature

EN265: Inventing America

EN272B: Introduction to Creative Writing

EN281: Contemporary Science Fiction

EN301B: Literary Theory

EN322: Modern Drama - Experiments in Form

EN346: The British Novel in the 20th Century

EN369: Creative Writing - Nonfiction

EN390: Chaucer and the Middle Ages

400-Level Seminars

These courses are available to Year 4 majors in Honours and Combined Honours English.

EN409n: Black Canadian Literature

This course introduces you to the primary writers and concerns of Black Canadian Literature. Tracing the literature’s development over the almost 200 years of its existence, we will examine a range of genres, from slave narratives to prose fiction, theatre, poetry, and dub and spoken word. Rooted in the historical and social contexts of Black people’s histories and experiences in Canada, the course explores how the works of Black Canadian writers by bringing together multiple Black diasporas, confront the tensions between home and homelessness, citizenship and exile, being and belonging. In other words, we will consider the ways in which Black Canadian Literature as a uniquely diasporic form disrupts national narratives, such as multiculturalism, while imagining different possibilities for worldmaking and community. How does the literature, for example, when read as an archive of Black lives, help us demarcate Black histories and geographies across Canada, from the Maritimes to the prairies? What is the literature’s relationship to other regions, such as the Caribbean, continental Africa, and the United States? And finally, what can Black Canadian Literature teach us and the world? 

EN460r: Recent Indigenous Writing

This course will examine a selection of works from the voluminous recent production of novels, memoirs, poetry, plays, songs, and films by Indigenous artists in North America. It will introduce students to some of the leading edges of literary output and scholarly work in the field of Indigenous cultural production, focusing especially on works that have emerged within the last decade as part of the Indigenous Literary Renaissance’s second wave. We will consider how Indigenous writers are adopting and making different genres their own, including the novel and short story, experimental poetry, drama, comics, and genre fiction. The course will include Indigenous cultural creators from both Canada and the United States to give students a broader understanding of contemporary Indigenous literary and cultural production within and across Turtle Island. It will also provide an opportunity for comparative study of the development of Indigenous Literary Studies in two distinct but overlapping settler-colonial contexts. 

EN460s: Literature, Gender, and Wellness

Though ideas about happiness and the good life have been at the heart of philosophical and political debates for years, in the past few decades there has been a boom in what Sara Ahmed calls “the happiness industry” (2012, p. 3). This industry is comprised of an abundance of popular and professional initiatives -- self-help books and podcasts, curriculum documents, popular literature and wellness retreats – meant to support traits integral to the good life. In this course, we will turn to a range of literary cultural texts as we examine shifting representations of the good life, and we will answer the following questions: How have ‘happiness scripts’ evolved over the 20th and 21st century? How are they currently shaped by neoliberalism and elaborated along gender lines? How do literary works reify happiness scripts, challenge them and/or reorient our understanding of wellness? Affect theory will be particularly instrumental to our theoretical understanding of not only happiness, but the spectrum of emotions and behaviours discussed under the umbrella of the wellness industry: resilience, hope, optimization, languishing, dread, and anxiety.