All available Fourth Year Peterborough Campus Course Descriptions for the 2025-26 Academic Year can be found below.
If any of the course descriptions you are looking for are not available, please consult the 2025-26 Academic Timetable to determine if the course is being offered.
If any of the course descriptions you are looking for are present in the timetable with no description below, please consult the Academic Calendar for all information presently available.
PETERBOROUGH
FALL TERM
ENGL 4153H: Studies in Renaissance Literature
Staging the Supernatural
Professor Andrew Loeb
This course explores the representation of ghosts, demons, devils, magicians, witches, and other supernatural figures on the early modern English stage. What does their popularity tell us about the learned philosophies and folk traditions circulating in this period? How do their representations on the stage intersect with ideas about class, politics, religion, gender, sex, and race current in the early modern world? And, maybe most importantly: what made them so damned (literally) entertaining?
ENGL 4501H: Studies in Canadian Literature
Black Canadian Literature
Professor Jan Anderson
This seminar examines Black Canadian literature as a body of works that confront the tendency toward the absented presence of Black people in Canada. The seminar will engage Black literary genres including letters, plays, narratives of liberation, novels, manifestos and poetry. These literatures will stage an encounter with the lived experiences of Black Canadians from enslavement to the present. As a liberatory project the course explores the literary contributions of Black Canadians to the Black radical tradition and highlights Canada’s longstanding participation in Black liberation struggles. The course interrogates the ways in which Black Canadian authors stake claims on being, knowledge and power while grappling for subject status, belonging and acknowledged citizenship.
ENGL 4801H: Studies in Genre
Paint Me a Picture, Tell Me Your Tale: Film, Theatre and Organic Storytelling
Professor Stephen Brown
Children like to draw and act out. That’s essentially human. From cave paintings to the Sistine Chapel and from Shamen to Shakespeare, performance with a brush or a gesture is the most authentic mode of culture. We’ll delve into two films and two plays watching and listening for the emotional truths in the performances, perhaps to be baffled by one recurring paradox: is it only in our failures to love that we find love? The films? Lynne Ramsay’s Gasman and Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The plays? Two Pulitzer Prize winners: Margaret Edson’s W;t [sic] and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, both of which were reconceived as Emmy and Academy Award winning films by Mike Nichols. We’ll compare those adaptations from stage to screen, as we contrast watching with listening. (2-hour weekly seminar)
ENGL 4807H: Studies in Fiction
Professor Lewis MacLeod
Henry James called 19th century novels “loose, baggy monsters,” overstuffed, understructured horrors. Compared to a sonnet, say, or a play, the novel has no overarching set of rules, no necessary structural components (scenes, acts, etc.) and no standard dimensions. This course deals with seminal short texts. The overall reading load isn’t lighter than normal, but we’ll focus (almost!) exclusively on novels of 200 pages or fewer, the extreme short edge of what "counts" as a novel. The intention is to think about a) what the root features of the novel might be and b) the interpretive implications of writing (and reading!) novels that barely qualify as such.
WINTER TERM
ENGL 4209H: Materiality and the Text
Professor Emily Bruusgaard
While we might think that we simply read a book, book historians argue that the material form a text takes – cover, errata, dedications, paper, marginalia, etc. – affects how we read and interpret it. What happens to the study of the materiality of texts when a screen replaces the paper or parchment, and the stability of the written or printed signs is no longer guaranteed? This course will examine how a text progresses from the creator to the consumer in a digital environment. Topics for discussion will include paratexts and metadata, archival theory, fan fiction, copyright and intellectual ownership, and the constantly shifting landscape of born-digital texts.
ENGL 4301H: Studies in American Literature
Professor and Description T.B.D.
ENGL 4809H: Setting the Scene
Professors Hugh Hodges and Andrew Loeb
This course is designed to develop leadership, analytical and directorial skills for students with a background in reading dramatic texts. The course is especially well-suited to students who intend to teach theatre or to use drama in social service professions. It begins with the proposition that these texts are designed for the stage and not the library and comprises an advanced-level exploration of the basic concepts underlying the first-year English Department course in reading drama, including character study, the relationships among silence, noise, sounds and voice in drama/theatre, the difference between dialogue and monologue and the uniqueness of soliloquy, the binary of emptiness and presence, the usefulness and inappropriateness of stage directions, and the limitations and ephemerality of settings and props. Students will be expected to participate, in a leadership role, in workshops with students in ENGL 1809H, with a focus on analysing and presenting key scenes from plays on the syllabus.
ENGL 4851H: Advanced Seminar in Creative Writing
Professor Aaron Kreuter
Description T.B.D.
DURHAM-GTA CAMPUS
FALL TERM
ENGL 4501H: Studies in Canadian Literature
GTA Lit: Where Is Near Here? GTA Lit
Professor Joel Baetz
One of literature’s most powerful functions is that it can change how you think about, even experience, a place you thought you knew. Read Colson Whitehead’s description of Central Park – and you’ll look for its jutting rocks. Read Virginia Woolf’s version of London and you’ll pay close attention to the booming of Big Ben.
So, too, with literature about places and spaces just outside our door.
In this course, we’ll read literature about vast region that stretches west along the 401 and ends in the largest city in Canada. We’ll start by reading a novel about Oshawa, some stories about neighbourhoods in Scarborough and Markham, and then some poems, plays, and fiction about Toronto itself. How does literature give shape to places we think we know? How does it define life in the suburbs and city that are so close to us?
ENGL 4801H: Studies in Genre
Literature and War
Professor Ihor Junyk
The focus of this course will be literature and war. Focusing on the First and Second World Wars, we will explore the ways that writers have used genres as diverse as the novel, poetry and comics to grapple with one of the most harrowing human experiences. Topics will include the experience of battle; war and gender; genocide; memory, mourning, and trauma. We will supplement the literary works with both historical and theoretical texts and explore connections to media such as visual art and film.
WINTER TERM
ENGL 4401H: Studies in Victorian Literature
Decadence and Aestheticism
Professor Amanda Paxton
At the end of the nineteenth century, in response to urban monotony, the decline of traditional religion, and new understandings about sex and gender, there arose a literary, artistic, and social movement known—disparagingly—as Decadence. Building on Aestheticism’s belief in art-for-art’s-sake, Decadence was characterized by excess, sensuality, and explorations of pain and pleasure. This course explores the seductions and subversions of Decadence and Aestheticism, examining turn-of-the-century British and Continental literature, visual art, and theatre. In today’s world of wealth disparity, unbridled consumption, and unstable leadership, what might fin-de-siècle Decadence tell us about ourselves?
Full-Year Course
ENGL 4850Y: Advanced Seminar in Creative Writing
Professor and Description T.B.D.