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.

An introduction to a contemporary trend or concern in literary culture. May focus on a popular theme, genre, or author. Area of focus will vary from year to year.

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.

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.

Why do we play? Game designers, philosophers, sociologists, and performance theorists have long argued that play can tell us about our development as children and adults, our search for freedom, our relationship to animals, and the values and problems of our societies. This course introduces students to Play Studies and Game Studies in the humanities by considering the reasons we play in relationship to the objects we play with, including things that are more normally thought of as games—card and board games, sports, toys, video games—as well as other sites of playful thought and action, like paintings, films, and short stories. Students in this course will encounter major scholars of play and games and key terms and concepts in the analysis of play and games. We will play and design story-rich games and we will discuss effective narrative design primarily in digital games. Students will also consider problems in play and games like cheating, addiction, and gamification.

Introducing a lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer tradition in literature and theory, this course may explore texts from a variety of historical periods, from the classical to the contemporary. It will focus on a variety of genres, potentially including poetry, drama, fiction, criticism, and popular culture.

Toronto is one of the world's most diverse and multicultural cities. This course is a study of literature by writers with strong connections to Toronto who explore issues such as diasporas, identity, nationality, place, origin, and the multicultural experience. Writers may include: Judy Fong Bates, Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, Rohinton Mistry, Michael Ondaatje, M. Nourbese Philip, Shyam Selvadurai, M. G. Vassanji.

In this course we will study literary and non-literary texts in English from the nineteenth century to the present day that come from colonial and postcolonial contexts and that speak to the experience of those affected by colonization, immigration, exile, war, and globalization. Students will be introduced to postcolonial theory and questions about race, ethnicity, religious difference, and diasporas in Anglophone literary studies. They may study texts by Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Jean Rhys, Ezra Pound, Eugene Ionesco, Vladimir Nabokov, Arthur Koestler, Joseph Brodsky, V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Milan Kundera, Josef Skvorecky, Salman Rushdie, Mavis Gallant, W.G. Sebald, Michael Ondaatje, Edwich Danticat, and Azar Nafisi.

An introduction to Indigenous literature and storytelling with emphasis on First Nations, Métis, and Inuit authors in Canada and Native American authors in the United States of America. In this course, students will review academic citation practices, apply Indigenous theory to storytelling, and engage with audio recordings, poetry, drama, novels, short stories, and non-fiction by writers such as Jeannette Armstrong, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Natalie Diaz, Michael Dorris, Tomson Highway, Basil Johnston, Daniel Heath Justice, Lee Maracle, Eden Robinson, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Tommy Orange.

This course will consider the implications, for literary studies and for literary writing, of modern traditions of feminist and gender theory. Students will encounter the work of major feminist thinkers - e.g., Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Alice Walker, Julie Kristeva, and Judith Butler - and texts by major women writers. The course will explore feminist approaches to literature, including those that borrow from post-structural, psychoanalytic, and contemporary gender, race, and queer theories.

This course investigates fanfiction from a variety of theoretical standpoints, including gender and sexuality studies, critical race studies, and affect theory. It considers the literary history of fanfiction- amateur, unauthorized stories about characters invented by canonical writers (e.g., Jane Austen and Arthur Conan Doyle); a wide selection of fanfiction stories; and the commercialization of the products of the modern fanfiction industry.

This course covers romances of the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, ranging from the amatory (stories about love, longing, and desire) to the fantastic (the supernatural and fantasy). Students will consider issues of canonization, popularity, the text-author-reader relationship, definitions of high and low art, ideas about good and bad writing, and eroticism and desire. Texts may include Harlequin romances, paranormal romance, and works by Jane Austen, the Brontes, Daphne du Maurier, Stephenie Meyer, Nicholas Sparks, Sarah Waters, and E. L. James.

This course introduces students to the history of video games from early arcade cabinets and personal computers to home video game consoles and mobile devices in everyday life. It considers the role of culture, technology, and marketing in the formation of interactive texts, genres, and play experiences. Students will be exposed to unique primary sources in the Syd Bolton Collection of video games and the Electric Playground Media Archive of historical game industry footage through course content, lectures, and assignments.

An introduction to literary theory and its central questions, such as the notion of literature itself, the relation between literature and reality, the nature of literary language, the making of literary canons, and the roles of the author and the reader.

Students will engage in a variety of creative exercises, conducted across a range of different genres of literary writing.

This course will help students to see connections between their reading and their work as creative writers. They will read texts in a variety of literary and non-literary genres and consider the way that writers learn their craft from other writers. Practical assignments will encourage students to find creative ways to critique, imitate, speak to, and borrow responsibly from the work they read.

This course provides a richly rewarding opportunity for students in their second year to work on the research project of a professor. Students enrolled have an opportunity to become involved in original research, learn research methods, and share in the excitement and discovery of creating new knowledge. Professors' project descriptions for the following fall-winter session are posted on the ROP website in mid-February and students are invited to apply at that time. See Experiential and International Opportunities for more details.