2000-level courses

A "Random Act of Poetry" on a Seton window by ENGL/WRIT 2221 students

You may take a 2000-level course once you have completed one unit of literature at the 1000 level or five units of any university study. Completion of at least one unit at the 2000 level is recommended for English courses at the 3000 and 4000 level.

ENGL 2201:   Shakespeare Fall/Winter; one unit

Section 01: Tuesday and Thursday 1:30-2:45

Instructor: Reina Green

In this class we will study Shakespeare's drama and consider how the plays reveal his development as a writer and dramatist, and how they engage with the theatrical milieu of the time and the conventions of various dramatic genres: namely comedy, history, tragedy, and romance.  We will explore the plays not just as two-dimensional texts, but as four-dimensional theatrical experiences as we closely examine the issues of staging Shakespeare's plays both at the turn of the seventeenth century and now, in the early twenty-first century.

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Fall/Winter; one unit

Section 01: Friday 11:05-1:35

Instructor: Rhoda Zuk

Section 18: Contact Distance Learning
Instructor: Sandra Orser

This course is a critical study of the forms and content commonly found in children's literature. The origins of children's literature in folk forms such as myth, fable, and fairy tale are explored, and selected classic, modern, and contemporary works are studied.

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Winter term; half unit

TTh 3:05-4:20

Instructor: Graham Fraser

This course in an introduction to the study of drama including works from ancient Greece to the twenty-first century. Special attention will be paid to the evolution of theories of tragedy and the place of tragedy in changing historical and cultural contexts. Other issues we will explore include the relation of tragedy and comedy, the ritual origins of theatre, social and political issues in drama, ideas of realism(s) and modern movements in theatre such as the theatre of cruelty, the theatre of the absurd, and the epic theatre. This course stresses the relation between text and performance and the nature of dramatic production as interpretation. Students will therefore be required to attend at least one theatrical performance.

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Fall term; half unit

Section 01: Tuesday and Thursday 10:30-11:45
Instructor:  David Wilson

Winter term; half unit

Section 02:  Monday and Wednesday 11:05-12:20

Instructor:   David Wilson

Pre-requisite: WRIT 1120 or five units of university study. If you are taking this course in the Writing Minor, you are recommended to complete WRIT 1120 first.  Students are not permitted to take both ENGL/WRIT 2220 and PBRL 3012 for credit.

Building on WRIT 1120, this course explores the rhetoric of persuasion in various genres and situations.  The foundation of the course is classical rhetoric, as reinterpreted for modern times.  We explore logic and style as part of effective persuasion, as well as ethical issues that arise.  By the end of the course, students will be familiar with a variety of rhetorical and literary terms -- impress your friends by referring casually to paronomasia or paraprosdokian. Some research in the field is required.  Limited enrolment.
 

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Fall term; half unit

Section 01: Monday and Wednesday 3:05-4:20

Instructor: Clare Goulet 

Pre-requisite:  ENGL 1170/1171 or ENGL 1155 or permission of the instructor. If you are taking this course in the Writing Minor, you are recommended to complete WRIT 1120 first.

This is a study of lyric and narrative thinking via specific writing assignments in poetry, fiction, and/or nonfiction, in a workshop environment.  Reading and written discussion of (and visits by) contemporary writers are central to the course, with peer-reviewed literary journals drawn on as texts and to establish standards.  Limited enrolment.

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Winter term; half unit

Section 01: Monday and Wednesday 3:05-4:20

Instructor: Clare Goulet 

Pre-requisite: WRIT 1120 and ENGL/WRIT 2220 or permission of the instructor.

An introduction through workshops and case studies to the history and practice of text editing, from manuscript analysis, structural and stylistic issues to copy editing and proofing galleys, in a range of genres: literary, scholarly, scientific, and popular.  Students will have access to manuscripts and editing professionals.  Based on the Professional Editorial Standards of the Editors' Association of Canada. Limited enrolment.

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ENGL 2240:  Women's Literary Tradition I

Fall term; half unit

Section 01: Wednesday 4:30-7:00

Instructor: Anna Smol 

This course is a study of women’s writing from the Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century, with a focus on women writers living in England or known to the English.  The course covers a variety of genres, including letters, poetry, prose non-fiction, and the novel.  We will look at how writers in different periods such as Christine de Pisan and Mary Wollstonecraft write about women's education and about their lives generally, and we will read the works of writers like Mary Wroth and Aphra Behn, who take up genres and topics usually reserved for male writers. Throughout the course, we will investigate the material conditions that enabled women to become writers as we examine how women represented their experiences and how they presented their arguments in the long-standing debate about women.

Further information about the course, as it becomes available, can be found on the ENGL 2240 webpage.

This course is also listed as a women-emphasis course in the Women's Studies Department.

This course will also offer a service learning option for those who are interested. Service learning allows you to integrate meaningful volunteer work with academic credit. I will discuss details of this option in the first class.

If you complete this course successfully, you will gain some knowledge of women's history and literary tradition in Europe (primarily in England) from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, and you will gain experience examining this material through feminist and gender studies approaches. Although everyone in the class will be able to apply this knowledge to contemporary gender issues, those who take up the service learning option will learn more specifically about twentieth-century protest movements and about historical and archival work. Everyone in the class will get practice in developing writing, research, and oral presentation skills as you improve your ability to analyze various literary genres.

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Winter term; half unit

Section 01: Tuesday and Thursday 12:05-1:20

Instructor:  Travis V. Mason

A study of the literatures in English of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa with a focus on debates and issues involved in creating national literatures as a response to colonial rule. This course is also listed under Canadian Studies.

Postcolonial writing emerges from the experience of colonization and deals creatively and critically

with tensions between present-day society and the imperial centre. This course will examine

contemporary literature about the ways in which settler/invader colonies—places where descendents of

earlier colonists remain—respond to the past and attempt to move forward. Some questions we might

consider include: How do colonized subjects resist assimilation? In what ways do education,

displacement, and racial separation affect native language, ideas of home, and cross-cultural

relationships? What role does storytelling play in preserving indigenous cultures? When, and in what

ways, is violence an acceptable response to colonialism? To what extent have land and native

inhabitants been considered equally exploitable? Other topics might include:

language and naming
mapping

violence

race

gender

poverty/class

representation of the Other

human-animal relations

Truth and Reconciliation

migration

citizenship

borders

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 ENGL 2260: Poetry

Fall term; half unit

Section 01: Monday, Wednesday and Friday 11:05 - 11:55

Instructor:  Clare Goulet

A study of poetic techniques and genres, with an opportunity to become acquainted with contemporary experimentations and to examine the development of one poet's work.

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Fall term; half unit

Section 01: Monday and Wednesday 12:30-1:45
Instructor: John Morgenstern

This course is a study of detective fiction as it has developed from its genteel English and hard-boiled American origins into a form able to embrace serious analysis, feminist perspectives, and post-modernist poetics. This course can also satisfy requirements for a  Cultural Studies degree.

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