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.

Spring 2025

ENGL 250 LEC A1: Introduction to Canadian Literatures
K. Smitka

What are Canadian Literatures? How can we read them critically and responsibly? This course will introduce students to the study of Canadian literatures through a chronological survey. The course will engage 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.

This course will introduce you to both a range of genres (non-fiction, poetry, and short story), as well as a range of time periods (eighteenth century to the present). Students can expect to 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.

fall 2025

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
C. Bracken

This course will focus on a genre of narrative that has been remarkably prominent in Western-European culture in recent years: romance.  Hegel says that romance is a secular religion that aims to reconcile the “inner life” with the outer realities of labor and law, politics and police.  Romance trains us to accept our current situation by holding out the promise of better things to come.   We will learn to recognize conventional narrative patterns not only canonical and popular texts, from the courtly romance to the Hollywood blockbuster, but also in everyday life, for example in romantic redemptive projects.

Readings:

• Auerbach, Mimesis (Princeton)
• Barthes, Image,Music,Text (FSG)
• Chretien de Troyes, Yvain in Arthurian Romances (Penguin)
• Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton)
• Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (Texas)
• Turner, Drama, Fields, and Metaphors (Cornell)
• Welch, Winter in the Blood

ENGL 212 LEC A1: Critical Approaches to the English Language
D. Bargen

We will consider language and how it works and specifically how the English language works. While this is not a linguistics course, we will consider questions about the English language that might be explored more generally in the study of linguistics. Thus, we will consider the sounds, words, and syntax of English, and various other aspects of language such as differences among various uses of the English language in Canada and elsewhere. For example, we will assess the use of non-standard English in light of the concerns of those who take a rule-based approach to language and in light of the responsibility teachers of English feel to teach Standard English. We will raise concerns about inclusivity in view of the emphasis on Standard English in schools. We may also consider language acquisition, both by children and by those for whom English is not their first language. A further topic of discussion will be the differences between oral and written language. Potentially, we will discuss how language changes, considering how English has changed and is changing; the role of slang and jargon; meaning and language; technology and the digital world and language.

The course will be of interest to a wide variety of students, such as prospective teachers, writers, and science students interested in systematic and objective analysis of the English language. A further aim of the course is to heighten awareness of the use of language and to invite direct involvement in deliberately observing the language that we use or that is used around us. This is not a course in remedial English nor is it specifically intended to help students improve their English writing, composition, or speaking.

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

We will range from one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, Henry VI Part 2 (c. 1592), to 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 all devastating 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, busy exacerbating other forms of inequality including gender inequality and racial inequality. Our goal is to read these 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. These texts will deeply challenge us—they are all dark, and all tragic, even where there is humour in them—but whether we are discussing labourers engaged in a revolt, a stone mason who longs to receive a university education, a New York socialite who experiences a financial disaster, farm workers dispossessed from their land, or an impoverished Middle Eastern immigrant’s troubles in contemporary Canada, our texts will show us literature’s immense power to represent humanity in dire circumstances with the hope of producing social change.

ENGL 216 LEC A1: 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 A1: Introduction to Literary and Critical Theory
M. Litwack

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 mid-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: 

1. Language, Signification, Writing(Nietzsche, Saussure, Benveniste, Barthes, Derrida, Glissant)
2. Subjects, Ideologies, Antagonisms (Freud, Lacan, Irigaray, Spillers, Butler, Hegel, Marx & Engels, Kanafani, Althusser, Fanon, Coulthard)
3. History, Representation, Fabulation (Foucault, Spivak, W. Benjamin, Hartman)

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

As this course demonstrates, discussions of gender and sexuality engage with individual identity and relationships, community, culture, environment, language and reading practices. Our explorations of gender and sexuality deploy intersectional queer and feminist theories through a variety of lenses. Course texts range from academic articles to novels, from poetry to graphic literature. The following provides a representative survey of works we will explore collectively:

• Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (excerpts)
• Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (excerpts)
• Nikki Sullivan’s “Queer: A Question of Being or Doing?”
• Jack Halberstam’s “Becoming Trans”
• Christopher Griffin’s “Relationalities of Refusal: Neuroqueer Disidentification and Post-Normative Approaches to Narrative Recognition”
• Ramzi Fawaz’s “A Queer Sequence”
• Paul Preciado’s Countersexual Manifesto (excerpts)
• Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism (excerpts) 
• Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed
• Elliot Page’s Pageboy: A Memoir
• Bishakh Som’s Apsara Engine
• Hannah Emerson’s The Kissing of Kissing (excerpts)
• Anna-Marie McLemore’s Wild Beauty

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.

Potential readings may include theoretical texts by Raymond Williams, Karl Marx, Georg Lukács, Louis Althusser, Lauren Berlant, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Pierre Bourdieu, Joshua Clover, Sivia Federici, Charmaine Chua, Andreas Malm, Winona LaDuke and Deborah Cowen, along with narrative, filmic, and photographic aesthetic materials.

ENGL 223 LEC A1: Reading Empire and the 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.

ENGL 250 LEC A1: Introduction to Canadian Literatures
J. Rak

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.

Texts

• Jael Richardson, Gutter Child (2021)
• Laura Moss and Cynthia Sugars, Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts, vol. 2
• Selected online versions of texts that are out of print

winter 2026

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

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 medieval period to our current moment, covering key texts from the mid-1100s 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 studies within the emergence of Native Studies as an academic discipline to explore their entanglement with fields like postcolonialism, poststructuralism, feminism, and queer theory and to consider how these methods invite us to rethink literary analysis.

Possible texts include works by Lee Maracle, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Glen S. Coulthard, Daniel Heath Justice, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Vine Deloria, Jr., Jack D. Forbes, Gerald Vizenor, Jodi Byrd, Mark Rifkin, and others.

ENGL 217 LEC B1: Introduction to Literary and Critical Theory
A. Carlson

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 gain 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 and thus become a theorist in your own right.

ENGL 220 LEC B1: Reading Gender And Sexuality
T. Tomsky

This course introduces students to the theory, history, and critique of gender and sexuality, as well as the way these categories intersect with constructions of race and class. Of particular interest in this course is the way that literature, film, and popular culture respond to the complex notions of gender and sexuality. The theories, literature and visual media examined in this course explore representations and the constructions of gender and sexuality; they expose and critique the values, ideologies, and normative ideals, including the ‘naturalness’ and ‘fixity,’ inherent in notions of femininity, masculinity, heterosexuality, marriage, and the (nuclear) family; in relation to these categories, they suggest alternative vocabularies, politics, and possibilities in the context of contemporary capitalism, class and work divisions, globalization, injustices, and oppression.

Texts

• Virginia Woolf, excerpts from A Room of One’s Own (1929)
• Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979)
• Justin Torres, We the Animals (2011)
• Shyam Selvadurai, Funny Boy (1994)
• Dorothy Allison, Bastard out of Carolina (1992)
• Kent Monkman, select artworks available in e-class
• Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (2015)
• Jennie Livingston, dir. Paris is Burning (1990)

We will be reading select theoretical scholarship by Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Raewyn Connell, James W. Messerschmidt, Kate Millett, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and others.

ENGL 221 LEC B1: Reading Class And Ideology
D. Fuller

This course introduces you to the theory, history, critique and politics of class and ideology, and connects those ideas to the study of literature. This is a theory class, and so there isn’t a lot of literature in it. But it does have a LOT of ideas, and it’s a course that will make your other classes “work” (pun intended). “Class” and “ideology” are among the most loaded terms in use within academic critical discourse, but what do they really mean, and how are they connected to how we read and think about literature? In this course, we are going to read excerpts and shorter pieces by some of the people who have thought hard about these questions, and then we will figure this out for ourselves.

Texts will include excerpts from work by Marx, Walter Benjamin, bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, Gloria Anzaldúa, and others. All the readings will be available via Canvas

Delivery: Classes will combine a range of teaching and learning activities including mini-lectures and lectures, in-class small group work, and plenary discussions; independent research tasks.

Assessment: Assignments will include graded and ungraded critical written commentaries; a research essay, and a final in-person exam (this will be a “seen” exam where you get the questions in advance of sitting the exam in person).

ENGL 222 LEC B1: Reading Race And Ethnicity
O. Okome

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.

Previous Offerings

2024-25 Fall and Winter Term Courses
2023-24 Fall and Winter Term Courses
2022-23 Fall and Winter Term Courses

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