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 Summer 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
Lise Davidson
Through an exploration of fiction, poetry, and drama, this literature course takes up the theme of the Mean Girl, as she has persisted throughout the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. While we will be reading and discussing stereotypical depictions of feminized unkindness - the catty, the cliquey, the sly - we will also broaden this trope as a way to explore the social and cultural forces that position women in these roles and pit them against each other. How is the Mean Girl both perpetrator and victim of misogyny, internalized shame, and the economic, colonial, and racial inequalities that inform the literature we read and the cultures we inhabit? In the face of these challenges, what can the Mean Girl, in her multiple incarnations, teach us about survival, community, and resistance?
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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
Ryan Miller
ENGL 1106 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. During the semester, we will draw from the (sub)genres of post-apocalyptic, romantic, and historical fiction. These novels are Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name (2007), and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996), respectively. Our readings include a depiction of life for the survivors of a global pandemic, a sexually charged summer between two young men in Italy, and the tale of a servant girl convicted for her role in a double murder in Ontario in 1843.
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This course emphasizes the close reading of three genres – fiction, poetry, and plays – and examines their defining features.
Topics
Connor Byrne
Considering fiction, poetry, and drama - in works by, among others, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, and the great playright Sophocles - this course sees writers wrestling with what it means to be human. Students will explore this and related questions across a range of genres but also time periods - including our own, in which technology poses a potentially grave threat to humanity and even human-ness itself.
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In this course students will learn to closely read, interpret and write about poetry. The poems assigned will be various in nature and will cover a range of poets and poetic forms.
Topics
Eve Preus
Literary critic Helen Vendler observed, “We read imaginative works - whether epic, fiction, drama, or poetry - in order to gain a wider sense of the real.” In this course, we will gain a wider sense of the real by studying a variety of poems and poets, with an emphasis on the lyric. The lyric is the genre of private life, and as such, it is meant to be read as if the reader is the one thinking and feeling what the poet is articulating. Consequently, it is a ripe place to explore the paradox of our own lived realities: what it means to be both ourselves and yet part of other people. Throughout the course we will practice in-depth close-readings of lyric poems and put these critical skills into practice through essays and other writing exercises.
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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
Eve Preus
Knowledge, Language, and Technology
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John Rowell
Effects of Technology and Virtual Reality
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