Also offered through the Division of Continuing Studies.

This course aims to introduce students to the various ways literature reflects, constructs, reinforces, and challenges gender roles. The course will explore masculinity and femininity, suggesting that they are always socially constructed and historically specific by examining literature from the Middle Ages to the present. In order to do so, students will explore several different feminist approaches to literature and culture. Ultimately, the course will show that understanding gender as socially constructed rather than biologically given is empowering for society as a whole.

Note: Distance Learning computer requirements.

This course examines the various ways in which literature reflects, constructs, reinforces, and challenges gender roles. The course will explore "masculinity" and "femininity," suggesting that they are always socially constructed and historically specific. Students will examine the degree to which gender is an organizing principle in the daily life of Western civilization, looking first at how the gendered body is politicized in specific literary works (prose, poetry, drama) and films. They will then investigate how class and race have the potential to disrupt gender as a primary category of analysis. And, finally, they will discuss the challenges to gender analysis raised by the figure of the transgendered person.

This course offers an advanced introduction to the key concepts and questions of postcolonial theory and related theories of race and ethnicity. This course will survey some of the major texts of these theories, as well as their historical, social, political, and philosophical backgrounds, in order to assess their value for understanding our own relation to and perception of those who are “other” to us.  Central to this investigation will be an examination of how categories of racial, ethnic, and cultural difference are constructed, maintained, and contested in literature and culture.

This course offers an advanced introduction to contemporary theories of gender, sex, and sexuality.  This course will survey some of the major texts of these theories, as well as their historical, social, political, and philosophical backgrounds, in order to explore the different ways in which categories of gender, sex, and sexuality have been defined and disrupted, problematized and pluralized by competing thinkers and writers.  Offered in alternate years.

Also offered through the Division of Continuing Studies.

This course is offered under special circumstances and at the discretion of the Department Head where a student with high standing in earlier English courses wishes to pursue a specific topic in some depth. The course is normally conducted on a tutorial basis and usually includes a considerable amount of written work.

Note: Distance Learning computer requirements.

This course will focus entirely on the dramas of William Shakespeare. The course will centre on the plays from Shakespeare's early career to mid career. Students will study plays from the genres of tragedy, comedy, history, and Roman plays, within the context of a variety of critical approaches. A study of these plays will reveal the remarkable artistry of this great Elizabethan who is still recognized after 400 years as the world's finest dramatist.

This course continues the study of the dramas of William Shakespeare. The course will centre on the plays from Shakespeare's mid career to late career. Students will study plays from the genres of comedy, tragedy, and romance within the context of a variety of critical approaches. The course will also draw attention to Shakespeare in performance and the Shakespearean theatrical conventions within which these plays were performed.

In this study of dramatic literature from medieval to modern times, students will examine a rich diversity of dramatic forms. The course will begin with an introduction to classical drama and its sustained influence on English literature and then proceed to a study of medieval religious allegorical drama, Renaissance tragedy, Renaissance satiric comedy, Restoration and eighteenth-century comedies of manners, nineteenth-century comedy, modern discussion drama, tragicomedy, and musical drama.

In this course, which focuses on dramatic literature of the twentieth century, students will be introduced to a wide variety of modern dramas by pre-eminent playwrights from North America, Britain, Europe, and Africa. These writers have challenged traditional approaches to drama to invent new dramatic styles such as realism, naturalism, poetic drama, symbolism, expressionism, the epic theatre, the theatre of the absurd, and surrealism. The modern theatre has its great definitive scenes which sum up man as he has come to sense himself in the modern world: his most fundamental hopes and fears, his understanding of the shape and currents of the world, and his intuition of his stance in relation to that world.

The course examines the relationship between the news media and the military within the broader context of the pervasive presence of mass media of communication in the political and cultural realms. A critical personal inventory of the students' habits as mass media consumers forms the basis for the course and for each class. The course studies the rhetoric of mass media communication from Plato to today before shifting focus to an investigation of the newsroom, the business and marketing pressures affecting its operation, and the constitutional and legal rights and responsibilities related to freedom of the press. Students will survey and examine in detail examples and case studies of the evolving relationship between the news media and the military in Canada and elsewhere. The aim of this course is to enable students to critically analyze various print and electronic news products, including their modes and styles of presentation, and to evaluate their relationship to the military.

This course surveys and examines war literature from its origins in the Greek classical period to the First World War. The Iliad, Beowulf and Shakespeare's Henry V will be studied as foundational texts that establish the concepts of the hero and the comitatus, the roles of religion and fate, and the characteristics of the war story. The works of the First World war trench poets, the memoirs of Graves and Britain, and Hemingway's fiction will focus analysis on how the unforgettable experience of war becomes realized in various literary forms.

This course surveys and examines war literature from the Second World War to the present. The course begins by studying how the unforgettable experience of Second World War combatants is represented in fiction, memoir and poetry. The Canadian novel Execution is used as the focal point of this critical analysis. The stories of non-combatants and civilians, including a survivor of the holocaust, extend the range of wartime experience beyond the combat veteran. Study of post-war texts focuses on the Cold War and Vietnam. The course concludes with an examination of the writings of Canadians about UN missions and the war in Afghanistan.

This course is designed so that professors in the Department of English will be able to share with the students the results of their research in a particular area of literary studies that does not form part of the regular honours stream. Topics will vary with the interests and research of the faculty.

Through an examination of novels, short stories, and poetry from Africa, South America, and the Caribbean, complemented by recent films, this course will introduce students to some of the major writers of the "new literatures in English." Such artists invite us to consider how we encounter, explore and engage other countries and cultures, how we respond to foreign values and perspectives, how we meet new and unexpected challenges and unusual circumstances. Attention will be given to historical, social and cultural contexts as well as to appreciating the works within their own emerging traditions and within the parent tradition of English literature.

Through a survey of novels, short stories and poetry from Afghanistan, Iran, Australia, New Zealand, India and the Himalayas, complemented by recent films, students will familiarize themselves with outstanding writers of the "new literatures in English." Class discussion will focus on such themes as human relationships in the rapidly changing contemporary world, heroism, leadership, terrorism, fundamentalism, spirituality, "the good life," racial and gender issues, environmental stewardship, and the link between a nation's character and its landscape.

In this course, students will have an opportunity to examine selected modern literary works from Africa, South Asia and the West Indies, as well as to assess how writers in those societies have depicted the throes of revolution, the pain of exile, the struggle for freedom, the waning of colonialism, the anguish of alienation, and the quest for identity. Students will be encouraged to approach the writers and their works historically and critically.

This course will focus on the ideal of a perfect society that has dominated the human imagination ever since the days of Plato. Students will study the utopian and dystopian ideas in the works of Plato, More, Shakespeare, Swift, Shelley, Stevenson, Wells, Huxley, Burgess and Atwood. They will be encouraged to explore the following themes among others: Plato's Myth of the Cave, the philosopher king, imperfect societies, the idea of utopia, utopia perverted into dystopia, tyranny and dictatorship, hubris and nemesis, religion vs. science, the abuse of science, individuality and freedom, power and the state.

This course offers a critical and analytical approach to one of the most popular forms of literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Students will encounter many variations of what Poe called the tale of ratiocination, as well as the tale of mystery and imagination. They will study the works of well-known writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, G.K.Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler, John le Carré and Simon Winchester. Students will be expected not only to read extensively but also to analyse and critically evaluate what they read. They will be encouraged to engage in creative writing.