Undergraduate English Courses 2022/23

This course will examine works in a variety of literary genres (such as novels, plays, poems, graphic novels and short stories) on the topics of crime and transgression. Students will be introduced to basic literary terms, explore issues of justice and social justice, representation, violence, guilt, power and gender. The readings cover a range of historical periods, from the 17^th century to the 21^st century. 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 thematic concepts and analytical strategies required for the formal study of prose narratives, we will also be concerned with over-arching issues such as context, reception, genre evolution, and adaptation. The course is organized both historically, from Bram Stoker to William Gibson, and by genre, providing representation of four popular forms: fantasy, the gothic, historical romance, and science fiction. 

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 will introduce poetry as a genre, parsing historical development and contemporary practices. We will study poetry and poetic theory from a variety of traditions, emphasizing the practice of close reading, attention to literary devices, and discussion of poetry as a cultural force.

Category 4

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

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). Then we delve into African texts that feature children, so as to explore their creativity, cultural richness or playful humor (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

A study of selected comedies and dramatic romances by William Shakespeare. These extremely popular works will be examined in terms of their generic structures and Early Modern theatrical traditions and practices. Textual analysis will be supplemented by cutting-edge theoretical approaches, including psychoanalytical approaches, the connections of the plays to fairy-tales, and a variety of exciting cultural representations of gender as a category of identity and performance.

Exclusions: EN232, EN351

Category 1

This course will provide a close reading of J. R. R. Tolkien’s novel The Lord of the Rings through various critical approaches, as well as through the author’s use of his scholarly background in Anglo-Saxon and Medieval literature.  Tolkien’s “theory” of fantasy will be explored through a discussion of his lecture/essay “On Fairy-Stories” early in the term, which will help the class understand the purposes, structure, themes, and characterizations in LoTR.  There will also be some discussion of, and showing scenes from, Peter Jackson’s three-film version (2001-2003) of the text.  The course will include discussions of why The Lord of the Rings has generated such sustained cultural impact, and why it remains relevant today.

Exclusion: EN309t

Category 4

This course introduces students to American literature of the twentieth century through an exploration of the fiction, poetry, and essays of some of the period’s leading authors – William Faulkner, Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes. Through an investigation of a variety of literary genres and aesthetic forms, we will explore some of the major political and economic forces that shaped twentieth-century American society: capitalism, feminism, race, civil rights.

Exclusion: EN216

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

In this course, students examine the compact history of YA literature alongside a cultural history of youth itself. We will explore the shifting characteristics and concerns of literature for adolescents alongside discourses that shape adolescence as a distinct social category. Thematic concerns include, but are not limited to: adolescent 'risk-taking,' resistance, hedonism, displacement, activism and agency. 

Category 4

A survey of the literature of the early Romantic Period (c. 1780-1810) that foregrounds the influence of revolution and counter-revolution. The course explores works by writers in a variety of genres and styles: sonnets, odes, ballads, lyric poetry, epics, novels, polemic non-fiction, literary criticism and theory, letters, and journals, etc.

Exclusion: EN294

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, deconstruction, and ecocriticism.

Exclusion: EN291

Category 4; required for Honours English Majors

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 2

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, personal essay, and documentary poetry 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: 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 EN369 is by application only. These students must submit a portfolio to Prof. Tanis MacDonald. The portfolio is a 6-8 page sample of the applicant’s nonfiction prose on any subject and in any style OTHER THAN a scholarly essay.   

Portfolios can be submitted from May 1 to August 31, 2022 and will be evaluated in order of receipt until the course fills. 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.

This course brings together the study and writing of literary short fiction. Students will be expected to read, analyze and discuss individual examples of short fiction, as well as writings by selected authors on aspects of artistic practice and craft. Students will also study and apply, in weekly workshops and take-home exercises, the elements of short fiction, which may include perspective, characterization, place, atmosphere, structure and dialogue. A student's mark will be determined through written and oral assignments, culminating in the production of a final assignment in the form of a critical exegesis accompanying an original work of short fiction. The course will provide students with a sense of the basic craft necessary to begin writing fiction, including critical evaluation of the genre.

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 EN371 is by application only. These students must submit a portfolio to Prof. Tamas Dobozy. The portfolio is a 6-8 page sample of fiction on any subject in any style, written by the applicant.  

Portfolios can be submitted from April 1 to August 31, 2022 and will be evaluated in order of receipt until the course fills. Upon approval of the portfolio, successful applicants will be given overrides in order to register. For any further information or queries, please contact Prof. Dobozy directly.

Exclusion: EN331

Category 4

A study of prose, poetry, and drama written between 1660 and 1800, a period of social and economic revolution brought about by scientific inventions, British colonial expansion, and the rise of the middle class. The literature depicts strange and wondrous worlds in order to examine the nature of humanity, urban life, criminal behaviour, love, sexuality, and women's changing roles in the period.

Required textbook:  Vol. 3 of The Broadview Anthology of British Literature:  The Restoration and the Eighteenth-Century.  2^nd ed. Ed. Joseph Black et al., 2012.

Exclusion: EN355

Category 1

This course examines key non-Chaucerian literary compositions of the Middle Ages. We shall examine influential works such as the spectacular medieval mystery plays, the often absurdly comic medieval lyrics, the profoundly moving romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the powerful religious writings of Langland and Margery Kempe, and the deeply provocative romances of Sir Thomas Malory and other writers, both male and female.  (Also counts as a ML course.)

Exclusion: EN352

Category 1

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.

Exclusions: EN230, EN357

Category 2

The course will examine selected poetry by Hardy and three of his novels: Far From the Madding Crowd, The Woodlanders, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles.  Poem’s to be discussed will include “Hap,” “The Darkling Thrush, “The Oxen,” “Nature’s Questioning,“ “The Respectable Burgher on ‘The Higher Criticism,’” “Neutral Tones,” “At Castel Boterel,” “During Wind and Rain,” “The Convergence of the Twain,” “Channel Firing,” and “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations.’” Themes to be explored will include the Victorian crisis of faith, the transition to modernism, nineteenth-century ecology, gender roles, Victorian realism and sensationalism, and tragedy and the novel.

Category 2

Can reading lead to healing? How to express pain in words? How to represent and understand the suffering of others? How might studying fictional texts inform us about health issues in the future – from the ethics of cloning, to pandemics of the future? These are some of the questions we will probe in this interdisciplinary course which explores the intersections of literature and medicine. Examining the pathography genre, we will confront such issues as illness, grief, depression, disability, eating disorders, dementia, gender rights and human rights related to health. Summer Reading suggestions: Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Bayley's An Elegy for Iris, Ma’s Severance.

Category 4

An introduction to the skills of analyzing literature through an examination of the endlessly fascinating topic of love. We will draw a variety of genres throughout literary history to examine the representation of love, its common themes and its diverse qualities. We will consider love in relation to desire, friendship, ethics and well-being.

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 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 some of the significant literary works and the principal historical eras of British literature, covering from the Anglo-Saxon Period (circa 800) into the Age of Reason (18^th Century).  The major works studied will be the Old English poem Beowulf (in translation), “The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale” from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  Students learn to situate literary works within their historical contexts and to trace patterns of influence and ideas across time.  The course also introduces students to some of the important forms of literature such as epic, lyric, elegy, tragedy, and satire.  Other authors for study include John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, John Milton, Aphra Behn, and Jonathan Swift.

Exclusions: EN122, EN244

Category 1

An introduction to a selection of significant literary works and principal events of British literature, from the Romantic and Victorian periods of the nineteenth century into the mid-twentieth-century Modernist period.  Authors to be studied will be William Wordsworth, John Keats, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles Dickens, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.  The course will introduce students to significant modes of literature such as the ode, the sonnet, the dramatic monologue, the gothic, the short story, the occasional poem, and stream of consciousness.   The novel to be studied will be Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

Exclusions: EN122, EN244

Category 2

A study of the development of the crime genre in fiction from 19th-century mystery stories to contemporary police narratives. In this course, crime stories are read and analyzed in relation to questions of gender, class, race, and law and order in the different social, historical, economic, and national contexts that define and shape the various subgenres of the detective story. 

Category 4

Contemporary literature from Canada and the United States about immigration to North America, focusing primarily on Arab, Caribbean, Latin American and South Asian perspectives. The course will explore a range of topics central to the immigrant and diasporic experience, including first versus second-generation experience; national models and myths, such as multiculturalism, the melting pot and “the American dream”; employment and labour; refugeehood, exile and double diaspora; ethnicity, race, religion and othering; memory, history and identity. Students can expect to encounter short stories, the novel, drama, essays and, time permitting, film.

Category 3

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-Indigenous 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

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

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 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

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.

Exclusion: EN309s

Category 2

A critical study of change and resistance in later nineteenth-century English literature (1860-1900).  This will include the exploration of literary cultures and genres such as the Aesthetic Movement, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the gothic, ekphrastic poetry, and the Decadent Nineties, along with the at times sharp tensions between writers and the "Victorianism" of their public readership and reviewers. Authors selected for study will include Walter Pater, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, and Rudyard Kipling.  The novel to be studied will be Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

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 Caribbean evokes images of eternal sunshine, white sand beaches and holiday dreamscapes. But take a different kind of voyage, through the writers’ pen rather than the tourists’ lens, and you will find, in the cross-cultural encounter between peoples of African, European, Indigenous and Asian origin, a vibrant literary tradition that is at once energized by an "island" sensibility; shadowed by the history of slavery, indenture and colonization; and driven by a poetics and politics of anticolonial resistance. In this course, students will learn about the various contexts (e.g., Jamaica, Trinidad, Haiti), formal innovations (e.g., calypso, dub, nation language) and major figures of the Caribbean and its diasporas, including Shani Mootoo, Caryl Phillips and Sam Selvon.

Category 3

This seminar will offer an in-depth study of creative nonfiction via studying innovative texts, and corresponding work to move the student writer towards the generation and production of a short manuscript. Class discussions will deal with the practical and theoretical aspects of writing and literature, along with a study of the issues and debates surrounding the challenges of creative nonfiction as a genre, including redefining its limits. Readings and assignments will offer students ways to consider audience and milieu, and to speak to process in the form of critical exegesis.

Students who have passed EN272: Introduction to Creative Writing or EN369: Creative Writing: Nonfiction 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 or EN369, entrance to EN480a is by application only. These students must submit a portfolio to Prof. Tanis MacDonald. The portfolio is a 10-12 page sample of the applicant’s nonfiction prose on any subject and in any style OTHER THAN a scholarly essay.

Portfolios can be submitted from May 1 to December 31, 2022 and will be evaluated in order of receipt until the course fills. 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.

Category 4