This course gives students skills for analyzing the stories that shape our world: traditional literary narratives such as ballads, romances, and novels, and also the kinds of stories we encounter in non-literary contexts such as journalism, movies, myths, jokes, legal judgments, travel writing, histories, songs, diaries, and biographies.

An introductory survey of the forms and history of world drama in its performance context from the classical period to the nineteenth century. May include later works influenced by historical forms and one or more plays in the Theatre Erindale schedule of production. May include a research performance component. This course is also listed as DRE121H5.

An introductory survey of the forms and history of world drama from the late nineteenth century to the present in its performance context. May include film adaptations and one or more plays in the Theatre Erindale schedule of productions. May include a research performance component. This course is also listed as DRE122H5.

An exploration of how late twentieth and twenty-first century literature in English responds to our world. Includes poetry, prose, and drama by major writers, such as Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, J.M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, and emerging writers.

An introduction to poetry, through a close reading of texts, focusing on its traditional forms, themes, techniques, and uses of language; its historical and geographical range; and its twentieth-century diversity.

This course serves as an introduction to influential texts that have shaped British literary history from Beowulf and Geoffrey Chaucer to William Shakespeare, from John Milton and Aphra Behn to Frances Burney. Students will focus on questions such as the range and evolution of poetic forms, the development of the theatre and the novel, and the emergence of women writers. The course will encourage students to think about the study of English literatures in relationship to history, including the history of world literatures.

An introduction to influential texts that have shaped British literary history from the Romantic period to the present, covering developments in poetry, drama, and prose, from William Wordsworth to Zadie Smith and beyond. The course will address topics such as revolution and war; the increasing diversity of poetic forms; the cultural dominance of the novel; romanticism, Victorianism, modernism, and postmodernism; feminism; colonialism and decolonization; the ethnic and cultural diversity of Anglophone literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; literature and sexual identity; the AIDS epidemic; and technology and the digital age. The course will encourage students to think about the study of English literatures in relationship to history, including the history of world literatures.

This course gives students the tools they need to appreciate and understand poetry's traditional and experimental forms, specialized techniques, and diverse ways of using language. The course asks a fundamental question for literary studies: why is poetry is such an important mode of expression in so many different time periods, locations, and cultures?

An introduction to the rhetorical tradition from classical times to the present with a focus on prose as strategic persuasion. Besides rhetorical terminology, topics may include the discovery and arrangement of arguments, validity in argumentation, elements of style, and rhetorical criticism and theory.

This course will use the tools and perspectives of rhetoric, from the Sophists to the postmodern, to analyze and critique the texts and other cultural artifacts that surround us. Much of what we encounter in the cultural realm is an argument; the task in this course will be to understand and engage with those arguments. Students will analyze the rhetoric of poetry, fiction, and drama, as well as of news stories, speeches, video, images, and more.

An introduction to the novel through a reading of ten to twelve texts, representing a range of periods, techniques, regions, and themes.

This course gives students a foundational understanding of the novel in English. It introduces them to the history of the novel, from medieval sagas and adventure stories to modern experiments with fragmentary narratives. The course covers novels from a range of geographical places; students will be asked to consider why the novel has been so successful in the past, and what its futures might be. Students will read at least one complete novel during the course and extracts from others.

This course explores shorter works of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty first-century writers. Special attention will be paid to formal and rhetorical concepts for the study of fiction as well as to issues such as narrative voice, allegory, irony, and the representation of temporality.

This course explores collections of short stories. It examines individual stories, the relationships among and between stories, the dynamics of the collection as a whole, and the literary history of this genre, along with its narrative techniques and thematic concerns.

An introduction to the Canadian short story, this course emphasizes its rich variety of settings, subjects, and styles.

This course introduces students to various literary traditions of writing about the visual arts, from the close analysis of images in novels, poems, and essays to verbal forms (such as ekphrasis and calligrammes) that make poetry and fiction out of paintings, photographs, and sculptures. While the puzzle of translating between space-based and time-based arts will be at the centre of our inquiry, the course will also consider texts and books as visual objects; how writers create visual experiences and mental images; and how literary writing is inspired by museums and exhibitions. Students will have opportunities to practice writing about the arts in collaboration with the Blackwood Gallery at UTM and its featured artists, and, when possible, with other Peel Region and Greater Toronto Area artists and galleries.

This course examines the deep history and extraordinary diversity of interactive storytelling, with a focus on narrative art in digital games, transmedia/cross-platform projects, alternate reality and pervasive games, theme parks, and immersive performances, as well as literary texts and films. We will consider forms (e.g., riddles, parables, metafiction, branching narratives) that require participatory agency, choice-based and emergent storytelling, as well as genres (e.g., creation myths, planetary romances, travelogues, adventure fiction, Expressionist cinema) that discover or assemble a narrative by traversing a world. We will also explore the contexts and theoretical grounds of reader- and player-centric approaches.

This course introduces students to Shakespeare. Lectures equip them with historical knowledge about literature, politics, and the theatre in Shakespeare's time. Tutorials help them to grapple with Shakespeare's language, versification, and stagecraft. By the end of the course students will have a new framework within which to understand - and interrogate - the enduring power of Shakespeare's work.

A critical and historical introduction to works written and created for or appropriated by children, from early didactic forms through the “Golden Era” to 20th-century fiction and contemporary works that centre non-white identities and experiences. The course may include fiction, poetry, drama, non-fiction, and visual media, and may cover works by authors such as John Bunyan, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Lucy Maud Montgomery, A.A. Milne, Louise Fitzhugh, Salman Rushdie, Cherie Dimaline, Aviaq Johnston, Katherina Vermette, Audrey Thomas, Jason Reynolds, Hanna Alkaf, Namina Forna.

An introduction to the writing and sequential art of comics and graphic novels, this course includes fictional and nonfictional comics by artists such as Will Eisner, Art Spiegelman, Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Julie Doucet, Marjane Satrapi, Chester Brown and Seth.

At least 12 works by such authors as Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, S.S. Van Dine, Dashiell Hammett, Rayond Chandler, William Faulkner, P.D. James, Ruth Rendell. 

This course explores speculative fiction that invents or extrapolates an inner or outer cosmology from the physical, life, social, and human sciences. Typical subjects include AI, alternative histories, cyberpunk, evolution, future and dying worlds, genetics, space/time travel, strange species, theories of everything, utopias, and dystopias.

This course focuses on fantasy literature, film, and television, and draws on a wide range of critical, cultural, and theoretical approaches. As it explores the magical and supernatural, it may consider such genres as alternative histories, animal fantasy, epic, fairy tales, magic realism, and swords and sorcery. Authors and texts covered will survey the history of fantasy across American, British, and Canadian literature, and may include Beowulf, Octavia Butler, Lewis Carroll, Neil Gaiman, Ursela K. Le Guin, C.S. Lewis, George R. R. Martin, Ovid, J.K. Rowling, Shakespeare, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Jonathan Swift, and J. R. R. Tolkien. 

A critical and historical critical introduction to gothic literature, film, and television covering such authors as Angela Carter, Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson, Edgar Allen Poe, Anne Rice, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram Stoker. The course draws on diverse critical and theoretical approaches as it examines a wide range of national and cultural contexts. It focuses on the gothic in broad terms and such concepts and issues as fear, horror, terror, the monstrous, the mythological, and the supernatural.

An introductory survey of major works in American literature, this course explores works in a variety of genres, including poetry, fiction, essays, and slave narratives.

This course introduces students to major works in American literature in a variety of genres, from poetry and fiction to essays and slave narratives.

An introductory survey of major Canadian works in poetry, prose, and drama from early to recent times.

This course introduces students to Canadian literatures, from the oral narratives of Canada's early Indigenous communities to new writing in a digital age.

This course examines the relationship between writing and the environment. Students will examine the role of the written word in defining, thinking about, and acting in the interest of the planet and its climate, while considering literary genres, theoretical frameworks, and contemporary and multidisciplinary debates. Readings will vary but may include William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Rachel Carson, Edouard Glissant, Octavia Butler, Jamaica Kincaid, and Amitav Ghosh.

This course introduces students to the intersection of music and literature. We will study how melody, rhythm and texture interact with language, story and performance using examples from folk ballads and blues, art-songs, popular songs, musical theatre, jazz and hiphop, as well as poems inspired by musical styles and performers. Works to be covered may include folksongs collected by Francis Child and Alan Lomax, Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies, popular songs by Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, theatrical works by Bertolt Brecht, Stephen Sondheim and Lin-Manuel Miranda, performances by The Last Poets, hiphop lyrics by Public Enemy, and poems by William Blake, William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Don McKay.