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Le Département d'English opère en anglais seulement. L'information sur cette page est donc en anglais seulement.

Here is the Department of English full list of 4000-level seminars for Spring 2026, Fall 2026, and Winter 2027.

SPRING 2026 (Session B: May 4-June 12)

ENG 4152 Three Long Poems of the Romantic Period (SEMINAR)

Professor Ian Dennis

Few undergraduate courses can devote the time necessary to read some of the most significant literary works of the Romantic period.This course will divide its attention between three such works: Wordsworth’s The Prelude, P. B. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, and Byron’s Don Juan.   We will examine the complete texts (including the three stages of The Prelude), look at some of the critical literature on these poems and on their reception history, and attempt to place their achievement in context.This will be an intensive course for students with a genuine interest in poetry.

Method: Seminar

Grading:

  • Seminar Presentations 50%
  • Final Essay 50%

Texts:

  • William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850 (Norton)*
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works (Oxford)
  • Lord Byron, The Major Works (Oxford) 

* This text is indispensable, but any good scholarly edition of the other two poems will do.

FALL 2026

ENG 4185  Beyond the Pale: Diverse Experimental Literature (SEMINAR)

Professor Kimberly Quiogue Andrews

When we think about “experimental” literature, we often think of work by white authors: the modernism of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, perhaps the Beats’ Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, or the deliberately nonsensical qualities of the “Language” movement’s Charles Bernstein and Lyn Henjinan. This class aims to reconfigure our sense of the “experimental” to include a wide-ranging body of work by writers with marginalized identities. Minoritized writers are often subject to the notion, deeply embedded in the history of literary criticism on the subject(s), that writing about “identity” and formal/linguistic innovation do not mix. In contrast, the writers whose work we will read in this course continually try and subvert or expand our notions of what it means to write into, around, or from marginalized standpoints. Embedded into this conversation are important debates that touch on the most fundamental qualities of “the literary”: form vs. content, narrative vs. lyric, “high” vs. “low” culture, the question of genre and audience. Through a rich reading list of primary texts that only continues to grow in breadth in the 21st century, students in this class will gain a deep appreciation for the ways in which generic forms can come to be defined by race and gender, and what breaking out of those forms can make possible for a truly varied expression of lived experience.

The primary reading list for this class will include a selection from amongst the following texts:

  • Chase Berggrun, R E D
  • Dionne Brand, The Blue Clerk
  • Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee
  • Jos Charles, feeld
  • Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings
  • John Keene, Counternarratives
  • Layli Long Soldier, WHEREAS
  • Canisia Lubrin, The Dyzgraphxst
  • NorubeSe Philip, Zong!
  • Tommy Pico, Nature Poem
  • Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
  • Marjane Saratrapi, Persepolis
  • Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies
  • Melvin B. Tolson, Harlem Gallery
  • Jackie Wang, The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us From the Void
  • Monica Youn, Blackacre

Secondary texts will include a selection from amongst the following works of criticism:

  • Timothy Yu, Race and the Avant-Garde
  • Natalia Cecire, Experimental
  • Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Integral Music
  • Fred Moten, In the Break
  • Journal articles on Philip, Keene, James, Tolson, and Rankine

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ENG 4151  18th Century Sex & Gender on Screen (SEMINAR)

Professor Sara Landreth

This seminar explores how 18th-century debates about gender and sexuality are adapted for the 21st-century screen. What does it mean to be a “coquette” or a “prude”, a “rake” or “a man of feeling”, and how are these literary types translated from page to film? Each unit on our syllabus pairs one or two films set in the long 18th century with primary and secondary readings that engage with 18th- and early 19th-century texts. We will discuss the economics of the traditional marriage market as well as new approaches to 18th-century Queer cultures. Filmic works will include Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), The Favourite (2017), Belle (2013), Northanger Abbey (2007), and Dangerous Liaisons (1988). We will read “scandalous” prose narratives by Eliza Haywood and James Boswell, and novels—such as Pamela (by Samuel Richardson), Northanger Abbey (by Jane Austen),and The Woman of Colour (Anonymous)—that resist traditional marriage plots. 

Required Texts: Available on amazon and through the library

Marking

  • Seminar presentation = 30% (15% quality of written essay/script; 15% presentation & discussion leadership.
  • Midterm=10%
  • Participation = 20% 
  • Final Exam (in-person during exam period) = 40% 

Course Objectives To engage deeply and critically with a wide range of texts; to foster a generous intellectual environment where discussion and debate can thrive; and to hone our skills in oral presentation, in-person real-time conversation, and written communication.

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ENG 4115  The Canterbury Tales and Their Modern Rewritings (SEMINAR)

Professor Andrew Taylor

“Chaucer’s Tales were an unfinished business.”

Patience Agbabi, Telling Tales

The idea of the storytelling competition that Chaucer uses to frame his Canterbury Tales continues to inspire writers and generate rewritings. The telling of stories can be “an act of profound hospitality” and a “welcoming-in,” the principle Ali Smith offers for the Refugee Tales initiative in Britain, which has now generated four volumes of short stories. But storytelling can also be oppositional, a veiled expression of hostility or an assertion of one’s own identity by challenging or appropriating the voices of others.

The course will exploring the different possibilities of the tale-telling framework, considering both Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and a number of rewritings, from those of Chaucer’s immediate successors to Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales (2014), the BBC’s reworking of the Wife of Bath’s Tale in 2003, Ufuoma Overo-Tarimo’s reworking of the Miller’s Tale, The Miller’s Tale: Wahala Dey O!, which premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2012, or Zadie Smith’s reworking of the Wife of Bath’s Tale, The Wife of Willesden.

Texts:

  • Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, 2nd ed. ed. Robert Boenig and Andrew Taylor (Broadview, 2012).
  • Ufuoma Overo-Tarimo, The Miller’s Tale: Wahala Dey O! , ed. Jessica Lockhart et. al. Columbia, SC: CreateSpace, 2018. I will distribute a pdf.

Mark Scheme:

  • Position papers, class presentation, and short class assignments 30%
  • Final essay 40%
  • Final exam30%

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ENG 4182  Fugitivity and the (Post) Slavery North: Contemporary Canadian Fiction and Film on Nineteenth-Century Black Life (SEMINAR)

Professor Jennifer Blair

This course looks at contemporary representations of enslavement, emancipation, mobilization, and emigration with a focus on stories of Black life in nineteenth-century Canada. Canadian authors and filmmakers have developed new approaches to telling these stories, approaches that critique the narrative of Canadian benevolence towards Black freedom-seekers; the reliance on realist narrative modes; the reluctance to analyze connections between slavery, colonialism, and capitalism; the treatment of slavery logics as entirely of the past; and the focus on the United States when many of these stories are in fact global in nature. We will study the “neo-slave narrative,” the role of the speculative in representational strategies, connections between slavery logics and climate, including the notion of the “plantationoscene,” the tensions between post-emancipation Black labour in Canada and settler colonialism, and re-examinations of the “underground railroad.” The selected novels and films highlight the complexities of nineteenth-century Black Life in Canadian and transnational contexts, including the numerous challenges Black freedom-seekers faced after crossing the Canada/US border. They also foreground the political and community-based initiatives undertaken by Black leaders—both individuals and collectives—to address the racism they faced in their new Canadian home.

Course Texts:

Novels:

  • Esi Eduygen, Washington Black (2018) $16.99
  • Omar El-Akkad, American War (2018) $23.00
  • Kai Thomas, In The Upper Country (2024) $23.00
  • Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (2018) $28.99

Films:

  • Steal Away (2025), dir. Clement Virgo
  • Harriet (2019), dir. Kasi Lemmons

Coursepack:

Includes excerpt from Karolyn Smardz Frosts’s Steal Away Home (narrative non-fiction, 2018) and scholarship by Andrea Davis, Barrington Walker, Teresa Goddu, Laura Langer Cohen, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, and Ronald Cummings.

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ENG 4131  Touching Grass: New Material Ecopoetics in Canada (SPECIAL TOPIC)

Professor Jennifer Baker

This course explores the creation and interpretation of texts in material ecopoetics, a multimodal and interdisciplinary genre of poetry. What wild experiments are possible when poets engage, not with the abstract world of metaphor, but the material world around them? What kinds of genres are produced, and how are we meant to read such texts? In this course we will be exploring poetry and poetic genres that engage with the material world and ecological crisis beyond the purely literary. 

Our texts may include such works as: 

  • Christian Bok, Xenotext, Book I (2011)
  • Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott, Decomp (2013)
  • Jennifer Still, Comma (2014)
  • Adam Dickinson, Anatomic (2018)
  • Rita Wong and Fred Wah, Beholden (2018)
  • Madhur Anand, Parasitic Oscillations (2022)
  • Kate Siklosi, Selvage (2023)
  • Sophie Anne Edwards, Conversations with the Kagawong River (2024)
  • and selected works by angela rawlings.

Secondary Texts:

  • Don MacKay, “Baler Twine,” from Vis a Vis (Gaspereau Press, 2001)
  • Wendy Wheeler, “Perfused with Signs: biosemiotics and human sociality,” from The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics, and the Evolution of Culture, Lawrence & Wishart, 2006. 
  • Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things,” from Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Duke UP, 2010. 1-19.
  • Lynn Keller, “In More than Words: Ecopoetic Hybrids with Visual and Musical Arts,” Humanities, Vol. 15 (7), pp145.

Assessment Breakdown:

  • Seminar = 30% (15% quality of the written script, 15% oral presentation and discussion leadership)
  • Participation = 40% (online posts and in-person discussion contributions
  • Final Essay = 30%

     

WINTER 2027

ENG 4175  British Literature and The Cinematic (SEMINAR)

Professor James Brooke-Smith

In a famous interview with Alfred Hitchcock in 1962, Francois Truffaut asked, “isn’t there a certain incompatibility between the term ‘cinema’ and ‘Britain’,” and suggested that British culture was too rural, traditional and literary to produce a truly great film culture. Less well known, but more salient for our purposes in this class, was the belated response of Stephen Frears, director of My Beautiful Launderette, The Queen, and several other seminal works of British cinema, to Truffaut’s provocation: “The great French film-maker, Francois Truffaut, once famously said that there was a certain incompatibility between the words British and Cinema. Well, bollocks to Truffaut!”

This class will explore the relationship between literature and cinema in Britain. It is not principally a course about film adaptations of novels (although we will watch several), but an opportunity to explore the overlaps, tensions, and exchanges between two closely related artforms as they have developed in a medium sized post-colonial nation perched in the mid-Atlantic between Europe and North America. Some of the topics we will consider include: the avant-garde documentary tradition; social (sur)realism and kitchen sink aesthetics; regional accents and identities; post-colonial migration and cultural hybridity; the pastoral; youth culture in text and image; surveillance, espionage, and CCTV; waste lands and eco-apocalypses; travel to the continent; American imports; haunted landscapes.

Texts:

  • Rudyard Kipling, Mrs. Bathurst
  • Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
  • E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops
  • Graham Greene, The Destructors
  • Christopher Isherwood, Prater Violet
  • Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca
  • Muriel Spark, The Public Image
  • J.G. Ballard, High Rise
  • P.D. James, Children of Men

Films:

  • Alfred Hitchcock, Sabotage
  • Alfred Hitchcock, Rebecca
  • Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times
  • E.A. Dupont, Picadilly
  • Pablo Larain, Spencer
  • Michael Powell and Emerich Pressburger, A Matter of Life and Death
  • Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange
  • Derek Jarman, Jubilee
  • Stephen Frears, My Beautiful Launderette
  • Joanna Hogg, Unrelated
  • Rose Glass, St Maud
  • Andrew Kotting, Gallivant
  • Emerald Fennell, Saltburn

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ENG 4148  Thomas Middleton, Jacobean Dramatist (SEMINAR)

Professor Jennifer Panek

“The Tudor Tarantino” was what the BBC recently called Shakespeare’s younger contemporary Thomas Middleton (c. 1580-1627)—an epithet that speaks to the violence, outrageous sexuality, black humour, and biting social commentary that characterize much of Middleton’s work. Beginning with his early satire of urbanization and consumerism, Michaelmas Term (c. 1604), this course examines seven of his finest plays, written alone or in collaboration. Among them will be his scandalous theatrical depiction of a real-life London woman who dressed as a man (The Roaring Girl, 1611); one of the best exemplars of the popular “city comedy” genre, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613), in which a prosperous Londoner enjoys being cuckolded for financial gain; and the bloody, sexually disturbing worlds of Middleton’s two tragic masterpieces, The Changeling (1621) and Women Beware Women (c. 1621). If Shakespeare was, in Ben Jonson’s famous words, “Not for an age, but for all time,” Middleton was very much a playwright producing entertainment for his own time and place: London circa 1603 to 1625. For that reason, the study of his plays offers even more insight into the fantasies and anxieties of ordinary early modern Londoners than those of his famous contemporary. 

Method:

Seminar and discussion

Assignments and grading: 

  • Class participation: 10%
  • Summary assignment: 5%
  • Midterm in-class assignment: 30%
  • Conference proposal and paper: 25% (10% for the proposal and 15% for the paper itself)
  • Final exam: 30%

Texts: 

  • Thomas Middleton: Four Plays (ed. William Carroll, Bloomsbury). We will study all of the plays in this anthology: Women Beware Women, The Changeling, The Roaring Girl, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.
  • Course reader, containing three Middleton plays—Michaelmas Term; A Mad World, My Masters; and The Maiden’s Tragedy—and required contextual readings. 

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ENG 4120  What’s New in Critical Race Theory? (SEMINAR)

Professor Jennifer Blair

This course considers recent works in the area of Critical Race Theory published since 2020. It aims to focus on critical concepts that are pressing in our moment, in some cases extending from those studied in courses on race and decolonization in the second- and third-year levels of our English program. These concepts include Black-Indigenous relations, environmental racism, futurity, fugitivity, racial capital, self-voicing and sovereignty, settler colonialism, and abolitionism. Much of our class discussion will focus on specific representational forms (analogy, metaphor, metonymy, life-writing, documentary poetics, and rhythm) and the role these formal aspects play now in thinking about race and, in some cases, political mobilization. As such, while this is a theory course, our point of entry will be from a literary studies perspective. We will also study creative works (poetry and prose writings from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries) that are discussed in the theoretical works, or to which the theoretical works can be readily applied. All course readings have some relation to Canadian political, geographic, and/or cultural contexts.

Theory:

  • *Phanuel Antwi, On Cuddling: Loved to Death in the Racial Embrace (2023) (2 weeks)
  • Shona N. Jackson, Beyond Constraint: Middle/Passages of Blackness and Indigeneity in the Radical Tradition (2024) (one chapter from the Rights and Representations section, titled “Work as Metaphor, Labour as Metonymy”) (1 week)
  • Iyko Day, editor, “Palestine After Analogy” (Critical Ethnic Studies Special Issue) (2024) (2 weeks)
  • Tiffany Lethabo King, Red and Black Alchemies of Flesh: ConjuringA Decolonial and Abolitionist Now (a video lecture) (1 week)
  • *Leanne Simpson, Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Time Ahead (2025) (2 weeks)
  • Anthony Reed, Soundworks (one chapter only: “Amiri Baraka’s Poetics for a Post- Revolutionary Age”)(2021) (1 week)
  • *Dele Adeyemo, Natalie Diaz, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Rinaldo Walcott, Borders, Human Itineraries, and All Our Relation (2024) (2 weeks)
  • Deanna Reder, Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition (excerpt)(2022) (1 week)

Creative works to which we will apply the theory (some of these are already discussed in the theoretical texts):

  • *Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem
  • Mahmoud Darwish (“Eleven Planets”), Amiri Baraka (poetry/sound works discussed by Reed), and Rita Wong and Fred Wah (from Beholden); prose writing/multi-media work by Jordan Abel (from Nishga), Leanne Simpson (from As We Have Always Done), and Katherine McKittrick (from Dear Science)

*Indicates books to purchase (4) plus there will be a course pack (all creative works are short selections that will be available in the course pack)

Evaluation:

  • Seminar Presentation: 20%
  • Participation (in-class discussion and two short presentations)
  • 20%; Essay Proposal: 10%
  • Mid-Term: 25%
  • Final Essay: 25%

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ENG 4186  Literary Animal Studies (SEMINAR)

Professor Emelia Quinn

Literature is a traditionally human affair: reliant on language use for its production and reception, literary narratives tend to centre around human agents and human concerns. However, the nonhuman animals with whom we share our world also have a significant, if overlooked, place in literary history. Despite a vast bestiary of animal presences in literature, literary criticism has tended to either ignore animals, focusing solely on the human actors in narrative, or has failed to think beyond the symbolic or metaphorical value of animal figures. This has changed in recent years, with the rise of animal studies in the humanities demonstrating the importance of paying close attention to animals in literary texts and to the ways in which animals can assert their textual agency in unexpected and powerful ways. This seminar engages with a range of contemporary texts that explore key ideas and debates in the field of animal studies. We will also encounter some of the major theoretical works in animal studies, from Carol J. Adams’s feminist-vegetarian theory of the “absent referent,” to Jacques Derrida’s concept of the “l’animot,” and consider the intersections of animal studies with postcolonial studies, critical race studies, queer theory, ecocriticism, posthumanism, and vegan studies. Texts considered might include J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals (1999), Marian Engel's Bear (1979), Yann Martel's Life of Pi (2001), and Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats (1998).

*Please note that this course has a significant reading load, with many novels and complex theoretical texts. Students who sign up to this course should be prepared to invest significant time each week into preparing for seminar classes*

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ENG 4139  Exploring Haunted Structures (SPECIAL TOPIC)

Professor Sean Moreland

English 4139 focuses on (North) American literature. This version of the course examines narratives of haunting and possession, from the 19th century through to the contemporary period, by writers resident in the regions now defined nationally as the United States and Canada. Each of the required readings for the course (which include novels, short stories, and graphic novels) presents a conception of haunting and/or possession linked to a particular structure and conveyed through the use of different formal and stylistic techniques. These “haunted structures” are at once architectural/geographical (these narratives frequently focus on haunted homes, public edifices, landscapes or territories) and conceptual; in exploring such simultaneously physical and theoretical spaces, we will rely on a variety of conceptual frameworks, including psychoanalytic, post-colonial, Marxist, eco-critical, feminist and queer-theoretical perspectives.

REQUIRED TEXTS (subject to change):

  • Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
  • Stephen King, The Shining (1977)
  • Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
  • Eden Robinson, Monkey Beach (2000)
  • Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom (2016)
  • Emily Carroll, A Guest In the House (2023)
  • Marcus Kliewer, We Used To Live Here (2024)

EVALUATION:

  • Participation 10%
  • Peer Responses (2 x 5%) 10%
  • Short Presentation 10%
  • Short Report 15%
  • Major Presentation 20%
  • Research Abstract 10%
  • Final Research Project 25%