Themed Sections of Literature and Academic Writing
While all sections of the same ENGL course teach students the same set of reading and writing skills, the specific texts students read and discuss in each section depend on the instructor’s area of expertise and interests. Often, instructors choose their texts based on a particular theme or topic. Below is a list describing all the themed sections of literature and academic writing that will be offered during the Winter 2025 term. If a section does not appear below, it's because it has not been identified as one with a unifying theme or topic.
For scheduling information about both the themed sections listed below and all other sections of English offered by the department, please refer to the browse classes tool.
For more information about the instructors teaching these sections and others, please see the English Department's faculty profile page.
In this course students will read, discuss and write about at least one major theme in literature and culture, such as crime and punishment, gender roles, immigrant experiences, or paradise lost. Texts studied will be drawn from at least two literary genres.
Topics
Jason Bourget
In this section of ENGL 1102, we will explore how speculative fiction challenges what our culture tells us about ourselves and others. Using texts drawn primarily from science fiction, horror, and fantasy, we will examine how the philosophical and political assumptions of our culture structure our beliefs about gender and sexuality, race and class, aliens and artificial intelligence, language and reality, and the meaning of life and death. While we have this discussion, we will also note how these speculative forms of literature, like science itself, encourage a habit of mind which demands that we always question commonly accepted “truths” about the world around us.
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Nancy Earle
Friendship is “an institutionless institution,” according to the literary critic Gregory Jusdanis in his book A Tremendous Thing: Friendship from the Iliad to the Internet. In other words, our friendships are not governed by such things as laws, contracts, vows, or ceremonies. Unlike most other important relationships in our lives, friendship is “a legally, religiously, and economically inconsequential affiliation. There is no fixed beginning or end of friendship, no rite celebrating its appearance, and no covenant sealing its existence” (4). Perhaps because there are no firm rules, times, or places for having friends, we use the term to refer to many kinds of relationships that we develop in real life and online. Despite the term’s slippery definition, many people would argue that friendships can be significant relationships. Moreover, there is a long history of thinkers who have considered friendship as a model for civil society, or even for nation-to-nation relationships. In this course we will examine how works of literature have portrayed friendship and explored its meaning in our lives. In our study across three units – poetry, film, and fiction – we will ask the following questions: What is friendship? What makes friendship possible or impossible? What does friendship make possible?
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Elizabeth McCausland
This section of ENGL 1102 can count as a relevant course for the Associate of Arts Specialization in Gender, Sexualities, and Women's Studies. It is open to all students.
This semester, we will consider the connections among family, gender, and sexuality. How do the families we are born into shape our understandings of gender identity and gender roles? As ideas about gender and sexuality change, how do people adapt family roles and structures in response? We will begin with Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, a classic British courtship novel, and move on to consider more recent texts by and about trans people and the ways they challenge and disrupt conventional ideas about family. These texts may challenge you, whether because of Austen’s early-19th century English or because of the frank depictions of sex and sexuality in Hir and Detransition, Baby. If you are not comfortable reading about these topics, considering the questions they raise with an open mind, and discussing them respectfully, this is not the right class for you.
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Ryan Miller
The (Post-)Apocalyptic Imagination
ENGL 1102 aims to recognize and understand a variety of literary devices and textual elements, and in so doing promotes the development of close reading and analysis skills. This section of 1102 will explore the (post-)apocalyptic imagination in fiction. Using three novels – Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake – we will consider some of the strategies and approaches writers use when depicting societal collapse, including – importantly – where meaning is to be found for those left behind.
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In this course, students will read, discuss and write about fiction. Texts assigned will emphasize a variety of genres, such as realism, fantasy, mystery and romance, and may reflect significant developments in the history of fiction.
Topics
Dorritta Fong
“One is not born, but becomes, a woman,” Simone de Beauvoir, the French feminist writer argued. While it is generally accepted that women are formed more by society than by biology, men are not so universally thought to be made by social expectations. In this section of Reading Fiction, we will consider the gender roles taught to both men and women by our culture. We will read short stories and novels to analyse the ways in which women are shaped by being taught to wait for knights in shining armour, and men by trying to fit themselves into those inflexible suits. We will consider if and how women and men are “Stiffed” (to use Susan Faludi’s term), or stifled by the very limited roles society allows.
Please be aware that we will be exploring viewpoints and ideas which may be difficult and sensitive. Remember that education and critical thinking require your dealing with potentially disquieting matters; keep an open mind, but also realise that if you are unwilling or unable to accept exploring these issues, this may not be a suitable class for you.
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Noëlle Phillips
In this section of Reading Fiction, we will be exploring vampire tales. Vampire stories have long been popular, but they are shaped by the particular sociocultural fears and anxieties of the era and culture that produces them. We will be reading novels, short stories, and folkloric histories in order to learn more about what people, past and present, both fear and desire. Vampires may not be real, but the stories we create about them can show us important aspects of the human experience.
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This course emphasizes the close reading of three genres – fiction, poetry, and plays – and examines their defining features.
Topics
Wilhelm Emilsson
In this course, our reading of poetry will range from William Shakespeare to music lyrics (ENGL 1109, Coursepack). We will study two major 20th century plays (Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot), one classic detective novel (Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles), and one recent novel about the conflict between conformity and individualism (Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman). We will combine an analysis of literary texts with an appreciation of their cultural significance and aesthetic impact.
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This course introduces students to the process of writing academic argument papers, and to strategies, assignments and exercises that develop their abilities as researchers, readers and writers of scholarly prose. Students will examine the general principles of composition, and the specific conventions of academic writing as practiced in several disciplines, particularly in the arts and humanities. Students will gain experience in locating, evaluating and using sources within their own writing.
Sections Focused on Specific Topics
Jason Bourget
The Ethics of Animal Rights
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Richa Dwor
Critical Thinking
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Nancy Earle
The Future of Work
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Dorritta Fong
Who Are You? Your Identity
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Wilhelm Emilsson
Education, the Internet, Identity, Consumerism
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Elizabeth McCausland
Education
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Leni Robinson
Activism, Protest, and Political Polarization
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Fei Shi
Gender, Sexuality, Queer Discourse
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Admission to second-year English courses is open to all students who have taken any two university-transfer first-year English literature courses, or one university-transfer first-year English literature course and one university-transfer first-year Creative Writing or English writing course.
This course is a survey of major representative works of the late 17th through the early 20th centuries, studied in the context of the dramatic shifts in British culture following the Renaissance. A significant portion of the readings will be poetry, from the Restoration, Neo-Classical, Romantic and Victorian Periods, and from the beginnings of the 20th Century Modernist era.
Offerings
| Noëlle Phillips Section 001 In Person |