200 Level English

Courses at the 200 level introduce students to a diverse range of theories and methods relevant to literary and cultural study. These courses typically combine literary and theoretical readings, with an emphasis on key concepts, paradigms, and debates. You do not need to take 200 level courses in your second year - but because the theories and methods you encounter in these courses will likely inform perspectives and approaches at the 300 and 400 levels, you may want to consider taking at least one 200 level course early in your program.

Please consult the University Calendar for a full listing of our ENGL courses, not all of which are offered in a given year. Our department also offers Film Studies and Creative Writing courses.

English students: are you interested in theories of linguistics and the use of language? You can take LING 299 in Winter 2025 and have it count towards your English BA. Course information: LING 299 Special Topics in Linguistics: Metaphor in Language and Mind MWF 9:00-9:50 Instructor: Herb Coulston. Contact Craig Soars at efsadvsr@ualberta if you are interested.

fall 2024

ENGL 206 LEC A1: How Poems Work: Introduction To Poetry
R. Brazeau

An introduction to a range of poetic forms, techniques and theories.

ENGL 207 LEC A1: How Stories Work: Introduction To Narrative
L. Robertson

An introduction to narrative and narrative theory through a range of fictional and non-fictional writing.

ENGL 215 LEC A1: Reading Literature Across Time
C. Sale

Inequality

We will range from one of William Shakespeare’s earliest plays, Henry VI Part 2 (c. 1592), to Canadian author Rawi Hage’s 2009 novella Cockroach, reading along the way three of the greatest novels written in English: Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939). These are five of the most devastating literary texts for our course theme, inequality. Despite the liberal-democratic dreams of the twentieth century, economic inequality is drastically on the rise even in so-called ‘first world’ countries. Our goal is to read these five texts closely and well, in order to appreciate their great imaginative force at representing the plight of those struggling with ‘unequal’ circumstances that sometimes imperil their very existence even as others around them, who enjoy more privileged circumstances, thrive. As we will discover as we read, this selection of texts permits us to range back further in time than 1592, and across cultures both historical and contemporary, as we grapple with literature’s immense power to represent humanity in dire circumstances with the hope of producing social change.

ENGL 217 LEC A1: Intro Literary & Critical Theory
M. Litwack

We are, after all, talking about words, as we realize that by their efficacy we are damned or saved. –Hortense Spillers, "Interstices: A Small Drama of Words"

You can never be too sure what a word will do. –George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin

This course introduces participants to the theoretical foundations of contemporary literary and cultural criticism. We will consider a breadth of critical concepts and arguments from the nineteenth century to the present that have shaped practices of reading in the humanities and that you will likely encounter throughout your studies in English. Reading closely and situating texts in their intellectual contexts, participants will become fluent in a variety of frameworks for thinking rigorously and creatively about language, writing, rhetoric, interpretation, subjectivity, desire, difference, culture, historicity, and politics.

Throughout our collective inquiry into histories of modern and contemporary theory, a question posed by Louis Althusser—“what is it to read?”—will oversee our work. This question will bear directly on one of the objectives of this course: to learn to appreciate the pleasures and frustrations, the insights and surprises that accompany the pursuit of reading and rereading complex theoretical texts.

This course consists of three units: (I) Language, Signification, Writing; (II) Subjects, Ideologies, Antagonisms; (III) History, Representation, Fabulation.

ENGL 220 LEC A1: Reading Gender And Sexuality
D. Woodman

Using contemporary literary and cultural texts, this course section explores gender and sexuality in their relationships to other social and political identities such as race, class, and ability.  Course texts will cover a variety of genres and formats, ranging from academic articles to novels, from poetry to graphic literature. We will engage with gender and sexuality in a variety of forms and expressions. Authors and poets will include, but not be limited to, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Daniel Justice Heath, Carmen Machado, Anna-Marie McLemore, Elliot Page, Vivek Shraya, Bishak Som, Kai Cheng Thom, and Joshua Whitehead. Theorists will include leading figures in the fields of gender and sexuality such as Michelle Bae-Dimitriadis and Olga Ivashkevich, Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Ramzi Fawaz, Michel Foucault, Greta Gaard, Tanja Kubes, Jay Lalonde, Thomas Laqueur, Anna Nygren and Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, Paul Preciado, Legacy Russell, and Nikki Sullivan.

ENGL 221 LEC A1: Reading Class And Ideology
M. Simpson

This course offers an introduction to dynamics of class and ideology in literary and other cultural texts, and to the critical concepts and methods key to their study. We will focus on the ways in which these terms animate critical debate in particular strains of political, social, and cultural theory, while also considering the relevance and resonance of such critical debate for the interpretation of selected aesthetic case studies. At stake is a question about ways of knowing the world: less, that is, an ‘application’ of theory to cultural texts and more an engagement with the theoretical potential in different discursive modes – the diverse capacities offered by distinct critical and creative practices to ‘do’ theory so as to illuminate contradictions and tensions yet also possibilities and opportunities in social experience.

ENGL 222 LEC A1: Reading Race and Ethnicity
O. Okome

Race and African Literature

Race will remain important to those who were formally colonized, and this is for good reasons. It will remain that way for the foreseeable future because the legacies of colonialism, the eloquent manifestation of race theory, are still present in societies of previously colonized people. Initially framed around the curio perceived as human difference during the age of European Exploration, notions of human difference soon became more than what was apparent in the field of visual cognition. By the second half of the 18th century, firm and calcified ideas of nonvisual properties have been erected around what was observable physical differences. Soon enough a system of racial hierarchy was formulated, creating a racial episteme that assigned intrinsic values to physical properties such as hair texture, skin color and cranium size. By the end of the 18th century and with the help of anthropology, this popular knowledge became the scientific truth about race. And by the end of the century, a large body of literary works emerged in Europe that reiterated this racial discourse ad infinitum, creating a literary tradition that was to affect the social and cultural worth of this racial other to this day. Often discussed as homogenous and needing help from the Europe, this racial other became the subject for subjugation. In Africa, blackness was assigned to the entire population and became the only way of knowing and dealing with them. This course will study the making of race, that is literary race and racism, in selected European texts of the period mentioned as well the deconstruction of the formation of this architecture of race and racism in selected texts from Africa writers.

Texts:
Edgar Wallace, Sanders of the River
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horsemen
Mariama Ba, So Long A Letter
JM Coetzee, Disgrace

Critical Texts:
Simon Gikandi, Reading the African Novel
Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (2nd edition)
Sandra L. Gilman Introduction: “Ethnicity-Ethnicities-Literature-Literatures,”PMLA.1998:113/1, pp19-27.
Linda Hutcheon, Homi Bhabha, Daniel Boyarin and Sabine I. Gotz, “Four Views On Ethnicity,” PMLA. 1998:113/1, pp28-51.
Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”
http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/pursuits/achebehod.html

ENGL 223 LEC A1: Reading Empire and Postcolonial
T. Tomsky

This course introduces students to the field of postcolonial literary studies and its critical concepts, including by its most prominent anticolonial theoreticians, Aimé Césaire, Franz Fanon, Edward W. Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Achille Mbembe. Noting that postcolonial studies is not a unified field, we will explore the ways postcolonial theories respond critically to the political phenomenon of imperialism. This course asks: How and in what ways do literary texts reproduce and sustain imperial ideas? What does postcolonial theory offer today’s readers, in terms of its disparate reflections and critique of imperialism? And, what is the relationship between literary representations and the real world? Guided by these questions, this course invites students to consider the relevance of postcolonial theory, the relationship between culture and imperialism, as well as the role of literary texts in deepening our understanding of imperialism and its violences. We will focus on key concepts developed by anticolonial critics seeking to explain the ways in which texts help manufacture political consent. Next we will turn to postcolonial reflections upon empire, across disparate regions, to explore, analyze, and compare the way postcolonial writers and anticolonial intellectuals consider strategies of resistance as well as ways to approach and account for empire’s unresolved legacies.

ENGL 250 LEC A1: Intro Canadian Literatures
D. Fuller

What are “Canadian Literatures”? How can we read them critically and responsibly? This course will introduce students to the study of Canadian literatures via a series of texts, problems and issues.  It will do this by engaging critically with the nation, specifically Canada, as a framework for literary study by considering the relationship between Canadian Literature and colonization and by examining how postcolonial, diasporic and indigenous ways of thinking about literature can help us to interpret and analyse what we read.  

You will read a selection of texts emerging from a range of communities. Texts written in different genres, and at various periods of time, ranging from the eighteenth century to the present. You will discuss, research and write about ideas that emerge from these texts and learn how to situate both ideas and texts in their cultural, social, linguistic, historical and political contexts.

Primary texts will consist of: a twenty-first-century novel - Jael Richardson Gutter Child (2021); a coursepack containing an anthology of short stories, poems and essays, and some online texts that are public domain/out of copyright.

Secondary material will include a selection of literary criticism, contextual essays, and new media genres and/or sound recordings.

Delivery:

Classes will include various ways of learning such as lectures, seminar-style discussion, in-class small group work and independent research. 

Assessments include a mix of graded and ungraded assignments, for example, short critical commentaries (ungraded); a close reading assignment, a research essay and a final unseen in person exam (all graded elements). 

winter 2025

ENGL 206 LEC B1: How Poems Work: Introduction To Poetry
C. Bracken

An introduction to a range of poetic forms, techniques and theories.

ENGL 215 LEC B1: Reading Literature Across Time
Women Behaving Boldly
L. Schechter

This course hopscotches from the early medieval period to our current moment, covering key texts from roughly 1000 CE to the 2020s. These works share an interest in cultural and social change: they reflect recent shifts, they evaluate current conditions, they agitate for new thinking, or they offer ways for modern readers to imagine anew what earlier moments were like. The texts may reflect our changing sense of history as much as they reflect historical change itself, in other words. These works also share an interest in women behaving boldly: we will read texts authored by women along with texts that focus on women as characters. Some of these women will be writing and/or living at the margins of society, while others will be at the very centre of power, and still others will be somewhere in the middle. While all materials will be read or watched in modern English, some pieces will be translated from earlier Englishes or other languages. 

ENGL 216 LEC B1: Introduction to Indigenous Literary Methods
B. Kerfoot

This course introduces students to key theoretical concepts in Indigenous literary studies pertaining especially to questions of land, sovereignty, kinship, and temporarily. We will contextualize Indigenous literary methods within the emergence of Native Studies as an academic discipline in the twentieth century to explore their theoretical entanglements with existing fields like postcolonialism, postmodernism, and semiology and to consider how they extend the limits of what academic fields have historically called research.

Part of our inquiry will be to question the usefulness of distinctions like theory, praxis, and form as we read academic texts, poetry, and fiction. The goal of the course is to develop fluency in Indigenous literary theory and to posit a method for respectful analysis of Indigenous literatures.

ENGL 217 LEC B1: Introduction to Literary and Critical Theory
K. Ball

To study theory is to generate new frameworks for reading our objects of inquiry and thereby both expand and refine the questions we pose about the phenomena we investigate. This course introduces key approaches, methods, and concepts that will help you navigate literary and cultural theory. Toward this aim, you will have occasions to practice identifying the operations of theory in literary and cultural criticism as well as other knowledge traditions, everyday practices, and interactions while testing its explanatory value for the interpretation of difficult texts. As we compare theoretically informed discussions about literature and culture, you will be provided with opportunities to take positions on debates and, in the process, learn how to contribute to these conversations at an academic level. Ultimately, then, you will be encouraged to discover your potential to think conceptually to become a theorist in your own right.

Required Texts:
Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Dictee. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001.
Rivkin, Julia and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Second Edition. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1998 and 2004.

ENGL 220 LEC B1: Reading Gender And Sexuality
D. Woodman

Using contemporary literary and cultural texts, this course section explores gender and sexuality in their relationships to other social and political identities such as race, class, and ability.  Course texts will cover a variety of genres and formats, ranging from academic articles to novels, from poetry to graphic literature. We will engage with gender and sexuality in a variety of forms and expressions. Authors and poets will include, but not be limited to, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Daniel Justice Heath, Carmen Machado, Anna-Marie McLemore, Elliot Page, Vivek Shraya, Bishak Som, Kai Cheng Thom, and Joshua Whitehead. Theorists will include leading figures in the fields of gender and sexuality such as Michelle Bae-Dimitriadis and Olga Ivashkevich, Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Ramzi Fawaz, Michel Foucault, Greta Gaard, Tanja Kubes, Jay Lalonde, Thomas Laqueur, Anna Nygren and Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, Paul Preciado, Legacy Russell, and Nikki Sullivan.

ENGL 221 LEC B1: Reading Class And Ideology
N. Barnholden

Using examples of so-called “lowbrow” fiction written ostensibly for working class readers, this class will introduce students to critical theories of cultural production, consumption, and circulation. We will focus on key methods of interpretation to understand the different ways we can, and already do, understand class and ideology in literature.

ENGL 222 LEC B1: Reading Race And Ethnicity

An introduction to dynamics of race and ethnicity in literary and other cultural texts, and to the critical concepts and methods key to their study.

ENGL 223 LEC B1: Reading Empire & Postcolonial
L. Harrington

This course will introduce theories, literatures and histories of imperialism and postcolonialism. We will ask how colonial discourse was constructed and consider the links between cultural production and political narratives of power. In so doing we will examine key terms such as coloniality, Empire, postcolonialism and decoloniality through our readings and discussions of a range of literary and cultural texts. These will mainly come from the region of South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. Our focus will begin in the late 19th century taking into account key essays and political writings as well as poetry and short stories before moving to 20th and 21st century texts.

Previous Offerings

2023-24 Fall and Winter Term Courses
2022-23 Fall and Winter Term Courses

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