ENGL-5121H Medieval Manuscripts: Texts, Scribes, Audiences
Dr. Joanne Findon
Fall 2022
This course explores medieval texts produced from the 12th century to the 15th century, particularly the 14th-century manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The course considers basic issues in medieval manuscript studies, including an introduction to scripts and abbreviations and the practice of glossing, and some hands-on work with quill pens and parchment.
ENGL-5204H: From Private to Public: Letters, Tweets, and Other Epistles
Dr. Rita Bode
Winter 2023
This course considers the many ways in which written correspondence plays a significant role in other literary genres, most notably, the novel, and also occupies an enduring position as a genre on its own contributing substantially, in its adaptability and flexibility, to human communication.
ENGL-5902H: Musical Thinking in the Early Modern English Theatre
Dr. Andrew Loeb
Fall 2022
This course examines representations of English music theory and practice on the early modern stage. Drawing on literary analysis, musicology, and cognitive theory, students will explore music’s role in the “cognitive ecology” of the theatre where it enabled complex, collaborative thinking about cosmology, religion, politics, class, sex, gender, and bodies.
ENGL-5311H: Black Lives Matter
Dr. Charmaine Eddy
Fall 2022
This course examines the Black Lives Matter movement as the most recent form of collective social protest against state-sanctioned racial violence. The course looks at the influence of earlier civil rights movements on contemporary forms of protest, the theoretical parameters behind the movement, the “racial formations” (the prison complex, racial justice activism, the Obama presidency) from which the movement emerged, as well as recent literary accounts of the movement.
ENGL-5312H: Reading Toronto
Dr. Joel Baetz
Winter 2023
A city - and Toronto is no different - isn't just built; it's imagined into existence. In this course, we will discover the many Torontos that are mapped by the imaginations of authors and readers who are eager to build, amplify, and revise the meanings of Canada's largest urban region
ENGL-5315H: Arts of Conflict
Dr. Michael Epp
Winter 2023
This course will explore practical and theoretical conflicts between public violence and its cultural artifacts, including literature, film, murals, sculpture and parades. Our focus will be on twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts, images and public displays from Ireland, usually relating to the Irish Republican Army. We will question why modern cultural formations and political structures condemn violence even as they rely on it; and we will ask what place public violence has in a modern culture defined by its faith in the possibility of reasoning and debating all conflicts away.
ENGL-5902H: Society, Morality, and the American Novel in the 50s
Dr. Dan Dufournaud
Winter 2023
In this course, we will attend to the immediate postwar period in America through a number of novels published in the 50s and early 60s. A shared fear of conformity among writers and intellectuals will preoccupy our discussions, but other issues we will investigate include anticommunism and redbaiting, the rise of postindustrial capitalism and the unprecedented growth of the professional-managerial class, racial strife and the shifting borders of whiteness, and class inequality and suburban expansion.
Reading Course
An individual course designed to provide opportunities for intensive study in a particular field of the program. Please see the Academic Administrative Assistant for more information.
Electives Offered by Other Departments
The following courses are available to students without the need for prior approval from the Program.
ENGL-5305H: Subjects of Desire
Dr. James Penney
Fall 2022
This course examines theories of subjectivity that have informed work in cultural studies, media studies, and related disciplines. What is the relation between the desiring function of subjectivity and the forces of construction and production variously attributed to power, discourse, or society? How do we conceive of the limits of determination and of the possibility of freedom and agency?
ENGL-5306H: Culture, Heritage & the Arts
Dr. Suzanne Bailey
Winter 2023
This course will critically explore selected theoretical, empirical, and creative constructions, contestations and celebrations of Canadian culture(s). Course content ranges from the national to the local, examining cultural communities and identities, intellectual traditions, cultural policies, museums and galleries, and cultural expression in film, theatre and literature.
ENGL-5501H: Identities & Social Movements
Professor to be determined
Fall 2022
The course directly addresses a wave of identity politics and its controversial place even within seemingly identity-based movements. Readings on gender, queer theory and politics, disability, aging, and race will come from sociology and political science as well as cultural, literary and film studies.