This course considers the relationship between poetry written by Black women (particularly June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Lucille Clifton) and Black feminist theory (bell hooks, Angela Davis, the Combahee River Collective). In addition to a grounding in this 20th-century moment, the course will also consider nineteenth-century example (including Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells) and the contemporary moment, consider a wide arc of how Black feminism produces and arises from Black poetics.

This course takes as its focus the intersection of race and gender as explored and expressed in diasporic Black women’s writing. With a focus on North America, we will ask about the relationships amongst self-expression and genre under conditions of disempowerment. This course introduces contemporary thinking about race and colonial encounters alongside fiction and life-writing by African American, Canadian, and Caribbean women from a range of historical periods. Authors may include: Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs, Audre Lorde, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwige Danticat, Dionne Brand.

This course involves in-depth study, within the framework of postcolonial and transnational studies, of literatures in English from around the world. It includes fictional and non-fictional texts and contemporary films and media representations.

A concentrated study of one aspect of postcolonial literature or literary culture, such as a particular genre, author, period, regional or national context, or theme, or the application of a particular critical approach. Topics may vary from year to year.

A concentrated study of one aspect of literary or critical theory, such as a particular school of theory, an important author, or a contemporary theoretical debate. Topics may vary from year to year.

This course will involve a wide variety of experiments with poetic expression and poetic forms.

Students will experiment with fiction and non-fiction prose writing, including autobiography, biography, and narrative for new visual, digital, and interactive media.

Students will learn the basics of literary editing for different readerships: the course will cover such topics as the selection of a base text; treatment of variants; creation of paratext; design and layout; proofs and proofchecking; and the differences between print and digital media.

Students will experiment in a workshop environment with a variety of short, non-fictional forms, e.g. memoir, auto/biography, true crime.

A concentrated study of one aspect of creative writing practice, such as a particular genre or theme, or the application of a particular formal technique. Topics may vary from year to year.

A concentrated study of one aspect of writing for performance such as a particular medium (e.g. digital), genre, or theme. Topics may vary from year to year.

We often categorize literature by its nation of origin when we study and teach, though we also recognize the limitations involved in doing so. Over the past several decades, the study of U.S. literature, in particular, has been shaped by transnational and global approaches that emphasize the porous nature of any “national” literature. In this course, students will study approaches to American Literature in global contexts. These may include hemispheric approaches to U.S. literatures that emphasize U.S. interactions with Central America and the Caribbean, engagements with Africa in U.S. literatures, or U.S. literatures and the Pacific from the eighteenth century through the present.

Literary theory from classical times to the nineteenth century. Topics include theories of the imagination, genre analysis, aesthetics, the relations between literature and reality and literature and society, and the evaluation and interpretation of literature.

This course considers the ways in which digital technologies are transforming texts, reading, readerships, and the idea of the literary. Students will study a wide variety of digital texts, e.g., fanfiction, webcomics, viral Tumblr posts and tweets, and video games. They will also learn about the use of digital tools to read, study, and preserve texts. The course may include a practical project, e.g., the design of a narrative game using Twine; the curation of a digital exhibit using Omeka; or an argument about some text/s using visualization software.

This course explores literary theory from the early twentieth century to the present. Schools or movements studied may include structuralism, formalism, phenomenology, Marxism, post-structuralism, reader-response theory, feminism, queer theory, new historicism, psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, and cultural and race studies.

This course gives students a new perspective on the cultural contexts for British Romanticism: students will learn about literature's relationship to philosophy, politics, religion, science, and colonialism in the Romantic period, as they examine works by some major authors such as William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, and Mary Shelley.

An introduction to psychoanalysis for students of literature, this course considers major psycholanalytic ideas through close readings of selected texts by Freud and related psychoanalytic thinkers. The course also explores critiques and applications of Freud's work and examines a selection of literary texts that engage psychoanalytic theory.

This course covers the early Romantic period in British Literature. Students may read novels such as Frances Burney's Evelina; plays such as Richard Brinsley Sheridan's School for Scandal; writing on the French and American Revolutions; William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience; and ballads by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hannah More, and Mary Robinson.

This course covers the later Romantic period in British Literature. Authors studied may include Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, and John Keats.

This course offers students a chance to read some early novels in English - from the scandalous to the sentimental to the Gothic. They will consider what made novels best-sellers in eighteenth-century Britain and why the popularization of novel reading was such a source of controversy at the time. Authors may include: Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Frances Burney, and Ann Radcliffe.

Real or imagined geographical locations, landscapes, rooms and houses play an important role in literature. In addition to providing a narrative setting, fictional space might guide our interpretation of plot, serve as a metaphor for broader historical, sociological or psychological issues, or become a character in its own right. Ranging across a variety of literary periods and genres, this course will explore how works of fiction describe space and how these descriptions shape our responses. Authors and texts may range from the early English period to the present day, including Beowulf, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, Jane Austen, Edgar Alan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson, Gloria Naylor, Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, V.S. Naipaul, and so on.

A scholarly project chosen by the student and supervised by a faculty member. The form of the project and the manner of its execution will be determined in consultation with the supervisor. All project proposals must be submitted to the Undergraduate Advisor, who can provide proposal forms.

A project in creative writing chosen by the student and supervised by a faculty member. The form of the project and the manner of its execution will be determined in consultation with the supervisor. All project proposals must be submitted to the Undergraduate Advisor who can provide proposal forms.

Students will read novels and/or short stories of importance for Canadian literary history: these may include, for example, L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes, Lawrence Hill's Book of Negroes, and Alice Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.

This course gives students a chance to think about the social, historical, and personal circumstances that have produced the work of some major Canadian authors, from the poets of Canadian Confederation to contemporary Black and Indigenous writers such as M. NourbeSe Philip and Rita Joe.

Students will read a selection of American writings from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; these may include the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe's novels, and slave narratives such as those of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs.

Students will read a selection of works by American authors as diverse as Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Harper Lee, Thomas Pynchon, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

This course will explore some of the most recent, provocative, and significant developments in literary theory, including work in such areas as eco-criticism, literary activism, critical race studies, Indigenous studies, queer and trans studies, and cognitive literary studies.

A scholarly project chosen by the student and supervised by a faculty member. The form of the project and the manner of its execution will be determined in consultation with the supervisor. All project proposals must be submitted to the Undergraduate Advisor by May 15 who can provide the proposal form.

This course provides a richly rewarding opportunity for upper-level students 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.