300 Level English

Courses at the 300 level focus predominantly on historical periods and national literatures, with some foregrounding genre or cultural categories. These courses tend to survey their topics, engaging them by means of broad coverage.

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.

 

Spring 2025

ENGL 367 LEC 800: Topics in Contemporary Literature
The Literary Event
K. Ball

In "The Modernist Event," Hayden White contends that certain kinds of situations are, at once, inherently "modernist" yet "sublime" in their impact insofar as their magnitude and pathos overpowers a witness's ability to do justice to them from a single unified perspective.  Taking White's essay as a departure point, this course will provide an opportunity to reflect critically on how literature and film illustrate the challenge of representing histories and memories that are ineluctably mediated by disparate and partial standpoints over time.

Possible course texts

• Roland Barthes' "The Reality Effect"
• Walter Benjamin's "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" and "The Storyteller"
• Raymond Carver's "Cathedral"
• Michaela Coel's "I May Destroy You"
• Mahmoud Darwish's Memory for Forgetfulness:  August, Beirut, 1982
• Jacques Derrida's "Différance" and "Signature Event Context"
• John Fletcher's Freud and the Scene of Trauma
• Aril Folman’s Waltz with Bashir
• Crystal Gail Fraser's By Strength, We Are Still Here:  Indigenous Peoples and Residential Schooling in Inuvik, Northwest Territories
• Sigmund Freud, Cathy Caruth, Laura S. Brown, and Kai T. Erikson on trauma and catastrophe
• Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Michael Haneke's Caché
• Alain Resnais' Last Summer at Marienbad and Hiroshima, mon amour
• Christina Sharpe's In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
• W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz
• Adania Shibli's Minor Detail
• Hayden White's "The Modernist Event"
  
  

ENGL 385 LEC 700: Topics in Popular Culture
Catastrophe and Memory Politics
M. Litwack

How does the past live on in the present and how, in turn, does the present shape our imagination of the past? This experiential learning course addresses this question through an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of memory studies. Taking Berlin — Germany's capital and the largest city in the European Union — as our classroom, we will investigate how local, national, and international institutions have narrated Germany's history through official representations of the past like public monuments, memorials, and museums, as well as through street art, oral history, and social movements. We will focus our attention on the status of historical memory in three related cases of catastrophe and mass violence: (i) the German Empire's genocide of the Ovaherero and Nama peoples in present-day Namibia between 1904 and 1908; (ii) the Nazi Holocaust; and (iii) Germany's ongoing military, financial, and ideological support for the State of Israel in historic Palestine. Through field trips, readings, film and art, and dialogues with German cultural workers and community activists, we'll consider what aspects of the past are promoted, commemorated, and erased — and why. By the end of this course, participants will possess a robust understanding of why representations of the past matter; the political work performed by representations of the past in the present; and how historical memory mediates the formation of (trans)national identifications, political attachments, imaginations of justice and redress, and the very ideas of “Germany” and “Europe” as such. Restricted to students in the e3 Berlin Program. Contact Global Education for registration assistance.

 

Summer 2025

ENGL 308 LEC B1: Topics in Indigenous Literature
City as Indigenous Story
C. Kerr

In this course we will be exploring how Indigenous writers are using cities to centre contemporary Indigenous identity. This course will focus on how Indigenous writers are pushing back against Western stereotyping, and colonial discourse around Indigeneity in urban centres and how in doing so Indigenous communities are building cultural institutions, history, language, and creating new opportunities for future Indigenous narratives. Readings will include work from Kyle Edwards, Conor Kerr, katherena vermette, Billy-Ray Belcourt and others.

 

Fall 2025

ENGL 308 LEC A1: Topics in Indigenous Literature
Indigenous Horror
C. Bracken

This course was originally inspired by an interview that Sherman Alexie gave to the New York Times in November, 2013. Asked if he would recommend any new books by Indigenous authors, Alexie says that what catches his interest today is Indigenous genre fiction: “sci-fi, horror, crime and experimental fiction.” Alexie himself has written horror and crime. Alexie’s remark recalls something Eden Robinson says in the notes to Blood Sports: “I prefer the older, bloodier versions of fairy tales.” In August, 2020, the Times published another article, ‘We’ve Already Survived an Apocalypse,’ on the enduring popularity of genre fiction among Indigenous authors (and, presumably, their readers). Horror remains a trend in Indigenous fiction. Why? Ned Blackhawk points out that “the narrative of American History” has failed to gauge “the violence that remade much of the continent before U.S. expansion.” Indigenous horror might be a literary response to this forgotten history of violence.

ENGL 308 LEC A2: Topics in Indigenous Literature
Indigenous Speculative Fiction
B. Kerfoot

This course explores the surge of Indigenous authors writing speculative fiction, a catch-all term for literary modes that depart from realism and turn to more imaginative worlds like fantasy, horror, science fiction, dystopia, post-apocalypse, and Indigenous futurisms. Why are Indigenous writers drawn to these modes? Why do they depart from realism? How do they build the worlds they imagine? How do they use, adapt, or challenge the literary conventions in which they write? Course readings will be primarily novels and short stories paired with literary theory.

ENGL 308 LEC A3: Topics in Indigenous Literature
nêhiyawêwin in Indigenous Literary Genres
A. Van Essen

This course focuses on three genres in Indigenous literatures: poetry, children’s literature, and the novel. Most of the texts we will read include words or phrases in nêhiyawêwin (Plains Cree). Through a careful reading of these words, texts, and genres we will explore issues such as Indigenous languages & language revitalization, identity, culture, and how these texts might be used by teachers in K-12 classrooms.

ENGL 314 LEC A1: Irish Writing in English
R. Brazeau

Selected works from the Irish context.

ENGL 327 LEC A1: Topics in Medieval Literature 
Erotic and Divine Love in Medieval Literature
M. Cárdenas

This course whets the razor’s edge separating erotic and divine love in medieval literature, with a special focus on love’s role in intellectual and moral development. We will examine key European stories and texts in modern translation alongside medieval English texts, drawing on readings from Dante, Chrétien de Troyes, Marie de France, and Francesco Petrarch before turning to several works by Geoffrey Chaucer and The Book of Margery Kempe. These texts—spanning a range of genres, place, and time—will be united also by related conceptions of courtly love, masculinity and femininity, authorship, religion, and the emerging sense of the individual within society. Students thus can expect to walk away with a strong knowledge of medieval European culture and a historical appreciation for the development of literature in medieval England. 

ENGL 336 LEC B1: Sixteenth-Century Literature
The Invention of English Literature
M. Cárdenas

“I’ll melt my brain into invention, / Coin new conceits, and hang my richest words / As polished jewels in their bounteous ears.” (Ben Jonson, Every Man Out of His Humour) 

This promise, delivered in the year 1599 to a rowdy audience of London playgoers, comically but defiantly envisions an English public of “attentive auditors” who have “come to feed their understanding parts.” Jonson’s intellectual bravado here is hardly imaginable without the developments of the sixteenth century, when an island nation whose fortunes turned on sheep seemed to experience their renaissance at last—albeit nearly two hundred years after the Italians. In this section of ENGL 336 we will explore the self-conscious invention of English literature according to the opposing definitions this word held at the turn of the century: to find and collect what already exists (OED 1), and to contrive or create something new altogether (OED 3). The course examines how English writers drew upon and developed existing poetic forms and genres like pastoral, love sonnets, and epic, and how they convinced themselves that what they wrote was itself worthy of memory and imitation. In this survey, we will consider chiefly poetry, with selections of prose and drama. Our thematic questions will be guided by the central literary preoccupations of the late sixteenth century: how can we perform our genuine selves? What does love do to people? Is it more important to know what is right, or to do what is right? We will encounter influential attempted answers to these questions by writers like Thomas More, Philip Sidney, Francis Bacon, and especially Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare. Through a mix of lecture, class discussion, and written assignments, students will become familiar with a defining moment of self-discovery in English literary history.

ENGL 341 LEC A1: Eighteenth-Century Literature 
L. Robertson

This course will provide an introduction to a fascinating and often neglected period, the eighteenth century. We will study a range of texts, trying to understand the period on its own terms. What forms and genres dominated the period? How do these forms and genres change, and what is at stake in those changes? How do writers of the period deal with their inheritance from the past, and how do they look forward to the future? How do writers engage with the complex politics of the period, including the developing British Empire and the loss of most of Britain’s American colonies to revolution? This was a period of great prosperity and economic growth in the British Isles and its colonies, but that wealth was, of course, unevenly distributed and depended heavily on some ethically horrifying activities, such as the exploitation of the poor and the labouring classes, the violent theft of land and resources from Indigenous peoples, and the sale and labour of enslaved people; English-speaking writers and readers had to grapple with these issues as they represented and thought about their world. This is also a period in which women came to play an increasingly important role in public literary and political discourse (they were central, for example, to the development of the novel as a major literary form), and we will read some important texts by (and about) women.

ENGL 352 LEC A1: Nineteenth-Century British Literature
P. Sinnema

Through a selective reading of literary texts, this course attempts to gain some understanding of major cultural, social, and aesthetic movements of the Victorian era (1837-1901). Our investigations open with the double question, “Who were the Victorians and how did they conceive of themselves”? and move on to query some of the assumptions that motivate that question. We will concern ourselves with central issues of the period as represented in a few novels and poems. Perhaps more than any other tension or aspiration generated by the development of industrialization—concerns about “women’s place,” apprehensions about a decline in Christian faith in the wake of Darwinian evolution, fears about racial contamination in the rapacious expansion of empire—the ongoing antagonism between an emerging proletariat and an increasingly entitled bourgeoisie has come to have especially profound resonance in our understanding of who the Victorians were. 

ENGL 357 LEC A1: Topics in American Studies
Politics of Mobility
M. Simpson

“Travel made the United States. As both a country and a concept, America was founded on movement—of people, of ideas, of goods.”
- John Cox Traveling South: Travel Narratives and the Construction of American 
Identity (Georgia, 2005)

In just two sentences, the literary critic John Cox succinctly captures mobility’s dialectic in the American instance: at once a potent myth in the national imaginary and an abiding material dynamic in US cultural life. So understood, these entangled issues exemplify what some scholars call the politics of mobility, a perspective that will frame and guide our study in this course. As a concept, the politics of mobility challenges us to reject the ordinary understanding of mobility as a common condition, freely available to everyone, and to see instead the ways in which and ends to which mobility constitutes a social and cultural resource, differentially distributed, invested, directed, and determined, and as such always and necessarily subject to contest and struggle. We will use this perspective to explore a diverse range of cultural materials—fictional and non-fictional narrative, poetry, film, artwork, print ephemera—produced in the United States over the last two centuries. Topics include: struggles over slavery; Native American removal and resistance; social mobility; immigration and national fantasy; automobility; production, circulation, and labor; mediation and the circuits of culture; energy and mobility.

Potential materials may include: prose by Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Jacobs, and Meridel Le Sueur; poetry by John Rollin Ridge, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Esther Belin, and Fady Joudah; films such as Finally Got the News and The Forgotten Space; theoretical perspectives from Joshua Clover, Stephano Harney and Fred Moten, and Winona LaDuke and Deborath Cowen.

ENGL 372 LEC A1: Publishing Canadian Literatures
D. Fuller

How is Canadian literature printed, marketed and sold? How is the digital revolution affecting what we read? How has the world of publishing shaping what we read? Study Canadian publishing, and learn about censorship, scandals, corporate mergers, radical presses, book design, running a bookstore, the world of editing…and more! In this course, students will read four Canadian books: a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, and literary and popular texts. There will also be required readings that are variously historical, cultural and theoretical in style.  Each of the four Canadian books will also be a case study text that we will contextualise and examine as an illustration of an aspect of Canadian publishing, namely: Unit 1: Publishing, Unit 2: Selling, Unit 3: Reception and Unit 4: Circulation.  

Primary Texts/4 Case Study Texts

• L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (1908) (find your own edition)
• Louise Penny, Bury Your Dead (2010)
• TBA: a Canada Reads book
• Mini Aodla Freeman, Life Among the Qallunaat (2015)

Secondary materials will include: scholarly articles about Canadian publishing and book history; BookNet Canada and other industry research materials (including podcasts); expert visits (in person and virtual) from industry professionals and scholars. 

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

Assessment will include short, written assignments based on research tasks, a team presentation and a research essay. 

ENGL 388 LEC A1: Children’s Literature
Studies in Fantasy Literature for Children
R. Prusko

Our course will explore several works of fantasy for children, beginning in the “Golden Age” of children's literature with Carroll's Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Barrie's Peter and Wendy (1911). We'll go on to discuss novels by C.S. Lewis, A.A. Milne, and Mary Norton as we work our way towards E.B. White’s 1952 novel Charlotte’s Web. Our study of the novels will emphasize careful literary analysis; we'll also consider their historical contexts and their cultural significance in their authors’ time and our own. While our main focus will be novels in the fantasy genre, we’ll open our course with a sampling of picture books by Maurice Sendak and Mem Fox.

ENGL 391 LEC A1: Topics in Women’s Writing
Sickness and/in Health: Reading Womxn’s Writing Through the Lens of Medical Humanities
D. Woodman

This course will survey a variety of womxn’s writing, reading their works through the lens of medical humanities. The title is inspired by an online seminar series (‘Contemporary Womxn’s Writing and the Medical Humanities’). Our course will take up weekly topics in diverse genres by womxn across cultures, races, genders and sexualities.

What is medical humanities? It is a cross-disciplinary field of inquiry that brings together medical health sciences and the humanities to explore how the latter can be deployed to explore, critique, and re-vision the former.  Thus, medical humanities looks to literary works on health, illness, and medical experiences as interventions in how western science represents these human experiences. Our course will use a medical humanities approach to queer, and, to reference Legacy Russell, will demonstrate how glitched bodies, cut and sutured, enable a form of Paul Preciado’s potentia gaudendi, a voluptuous possibility emerging through the destabilized and volatile body.

In addition to selections from Russell’s Glitch Feminism (2020) and Paul Preciado’s Countersexual Manifesto (2018), we will read Susan Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor” (1978), Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill” (1926), Edith Snook “’The Women Know’: Children’s Diseases, Recipes and Women’s Knowledge in Early Modern Medical Publications” (2016),  Jennifer Evans and Sara Read “Introduction Women’s Writings About Illness and Disease” (2022), Dalton and Ledin “Queer Medical Humanities” (2024), Rebecca Rosenberg and Benjamin Dalton “Medical Humanities as a Place for Feminist and Queer Resistance, Emancipation and Joy” (The Polyphony 2020) to begin our focus on contemporary works. Then we will turn to works such as Kathy Acker’s “Eurydice in the Underworld,” (1997),  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love (2000), Audre Lorde Cancer Journals (1980), Kimiko Tobimatsu Kimiko Does Cancer (2020), Sarah Manguso Two Kinds of Decay (2009), Linda Hogan Solar Storms (1997), and Margaret Edson’s Wit (2001 film adaptation of the play).

ENGL 398 LEC A1: Histories of Reading
D. Fuller

What is the history of reading?  What is the difference between an ‘ideal’ reader and an actual reader? How is the history of print reading part of the history of colonization?  What does it mean to be a reader in the twenty-first century? This course is an introduction to the history of reading in North America and Western Europe.  It is not a traditional literary text-based course since it engages with scholarship and methods from reading studies, cultural studies and book history, but no prior knowledge of these fields is required.  We will use a variety of historical and contemporary case studies, artefacts, online resources and secondary texts (historical and theoretical) to explore the different ways that readers have acted in different geographical places and at different times in history.  The aim of the course is to provide students not only with some knowledge of the history of readers and reading, but also with a vocabulary and with conceptual frameworks that they can use to think and write critically about different cultures and practices of reading. 

The course consists of four sections: Unit 1:  What is the history of reading?; Unit 2: Theories of Readers and Reading: From ‘Ideal’ readers to Fans; Unit 3: Exploring the Reading Experience and Evidence of Reading: Communities of readers and Individual readers; Unit 4: Making Readers in the 21st century.

Classes will combine a range of teaching and learning activities including mini-lectures and lectures, “labs”; small group work, and plenary discussions.  Students will prepare by reading a selection of secondary material some of which will be historical, at other times, theoretical.  There will also be some hands-on ‘field work’ tasks often during the “labs” (e.g. experimenting with the Reading Experience Database; recording your own reading history).

Readings will include:
Selections from: Shafquat Towheed, Rosalind Crone, Katherine Halsey (eds.) The History of Reading: A Reader (2010)

Online Resources to be consulted include:
The Reading Experience Database (Open U, UK)
WHAT MIDDLETOWN READ project (www.bsu.edu/libraries/wmr) (USA)
Memories of Fiction Project (UK)

 

winter 2026

ENGL 300 LEC B1:Social and Cultural History of the English Language

D. Bargen

English has a long history, which begins in the British Isles soon after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and still continues across the world. It also has a long prehistory: its earliest reconstructable ancestor was spoken in an area somewhere in the region of the Black and Caspian seas about five thousand years ago. This course will introduce the story of the English language. We will consider the development of the English language from its prehistoric roots to modern times. We will learn to use the Oxford English Dictionary to explore the history of English and consider the influence of women on the history of English. Students will also be exposed to samples of historical varieties of English.

Specific topics covered may include how the prehistory of English was discovered and reconstructed; how language develops historically; the ancient and persistent influence of the Roman Empire and its Latin on English; why the Celts on the British Isles influenced English only minimally; how the Viking invasion and the resulting Danelaw changed English; the impact of the Norman knights on English after their invasion in 1066 and why this branch of Vikings spoke French; political power and language change; how the printing press changed English; sound changes in language such as the Great Vowel Shift; Samuel Johnson, Noah Webster, and the influence of their dictionaries on English; grammarians and prescriptivism; approaches to the politics of language; and Canadian English.

ENGL 305 LEC B1: Topics in Religion and Literature
Blasphemy
L. Harrington

This course explores the intersection of literature and religious belief in the twentieth century through two frames: blasphemy and religious sectarianism. Our focus will be on Catholicism and Protestantism in the Northern Irish context and Islam in the Indian/English/British Indian context.  We will analyse a selection of poetry, a short story and one (long) novel. Throughout the course we will question how faith and religious conflict shape writers and readers, discuss the representation of fundamentalism, and study the tension between freedom of speech and the sacred.

ENGL 310 LEC B1: Postcolonial Literature
O. Okome

An examination of the range of literature produced under and in the aftermath of colonialism and imperialism.

ENGL 339 LEC B1: Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s Class Politics
C. Sale

This course will focus on the class politics of Shakespeare’s drama. Shakespeare’s England was a highly stratified society which ranged from the sovereign down to the lowliest agricultural labourers. Elite political commentators attempted to justify this culture of ‘degree’ by claiming that some persons were the greater beneficiaries of ‘nature’s light’ and therefore more ‘excellent’ than others. By this logic, some were entitled to rule over others. The class structure also derived from the Roman past and more immediately feudal culture, which allowed some persons to treat others as their property. The culture thus bestowed on some persons rights and privileges withheld from others (with these rights ranging from what one might wear to the authority one might wield in local offices). Even writing for the stage was regarded as an activity for some, not for all. This is why Shakespeare was notoriously denounced (as a man without a university degree) as an ‘upstart crow’ who dared to write for the stage. In our investigation of the Shakespearean drama’s strong interest in issues of class, we will study four plays that take us across the full range of Shakespeare’s career in writing for the stage, starting with the very early Comedy of Errors and ending with Shakespeare’s very last tragedy, Coriolanus. As we will see, the question of ‘class’ is very hard to disentangle from the question of how women were treated in early modern English culture. We will investigate how Shakespeare’s plays represent resistance, sometimes subtle and sometimes explicit, to the multi-faceted power dynamics of class and class prerogatives, and how they envision a more just and equitable society.

ENGL 343 LEC B1: Topics in Eighteenth-Century Literature
Gender and Sexuality in 18th-Century British Literature
K. Binhammer

This course explores the historical representation of gender and sexuality in Britain through a range of literary genres from Restoration drama to domestic fiction. We will pay particular attention to the intersection between the emerging essentialist definitions of bourgeois white femininity and the rise of heteronormativity. The course will ask questions such as: How do literary texts re-imagine the difference between male and female in the period? How does the representation of sexuality shift from libertine poetry to the gothic novel? In what ways does the rise of capitalism and imperialism shape representations of gender and sexuality? Does the rise of the professional woman writer change the discourse of gender? We will be interested in de-naturalizing our contemporary assumptions about femininity and masculinity, and hetero- and homo-sexuality, by confronting the historical otherness of early LGBTQ2+ and feminist writers. Writers to be studied include Aphra Behn, Lord Rochester, Eliza Haywood, Horace Walpole, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Topics include pornography, cross-dressing, effeminacy, social class, domesticity, marriage, same-sex desire, and sentimentalism.

ENGL 363 LEC B1: Modernist Literature
R. Brazeau

Studies in high, low and late modernism, and the avant-garde from 1900 to 1950.

ENGL 367 LEC B1: Topics in Contemporary Literature
The Surveillance Society
T. Tomsky

In 2013, National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden leaked the startling revelation that the US government was secretly surveiling its own citizens as well as international embassies and foreign leaders. The NSA’s widescale surveillance operation on ordinary American citizens was extraordinary: it epitomized the system’s unlimited reach and its lack of accountability. That mass surveillance was facilitated by a range of anti-terror legislation, brought in after the attacks on September 11, 2001, to apprehend and preventatively arrest terrorists without charge—including the Patriot Act in the US and the Canadian Anti-Terrorism Act in Canada. 

Today, people are not so much shocked as habituated to modes of surveillance. Nowadays, people willingly give up their personal information via their apps, smartphones, devices, and cameras, enabling the further extraction and exploitation of their data by companies like Google (Alphabet) and Facebook (Meta). In short, surveillance continues to be the defining feature of our information-obsessed society. From increasingly ubiquitous close-circuit-television (CCTV) and biometric verification, to Google Earth searches and data retention on our digital devices, the many experiences of our private and public lives are mediated, monitored, mined, and managed through technology. The extent of both governmental and individual access to information raises important questions about the attenuated divide between public and private lives, as well as the power and violence—such as tracking and cyberstalking—implicit at the heart of surveillance systems. 

This course explores representations of the so-called “surveillance society” in literature, popular culture, film, and critical theory. We will explore the themes of privacy, control, in/security, and citizenship as they intersect with subjectivity, gender, race, and sexuality. Our guiding questions are these: what can literature and visual culture tell us about the surveillance state? How do literary mediations of surveillance culture represent public anxiety about technology? What kind of resistance or agency is made possible for the individual subject of surveillance? Why is the literary corpus on surveillance overwhelmingly dystopic and in what ways might dystopic representations of surveillance societies be considered productive and strategic?  

Texts 

• Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale 
• Dave Eggers, The Circle 
• Alan Moore and David Lloyd, V for Vendetta 
• George Orwell, 1984 
• Claudia Rankine, Citizen 
• Select poems from Andrew Ridker, ed., Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics
• Short films by Tim Maughan and TV shows by Charlie Brooker. 
• Theoretical readings by Michel Foucault and Guy Debord, as well as scholars working on 
  surveillance cultures (Kirstie Ball, Simone Browne, Kevin D. Haggerty, David Lyon, Torin 
  Monahan, Daniel Trottier, Shoshana Zuboff, and others). 
  
  

ENGL 378 LEC B1: Contemporary Canadian Literatures
J. Rak

In this course, you will read nonfictional literary works made in Canada to answer the following questions: what does “truth” mean in a post-truth era? What does nonfiction in Canada have to say about Canada’s colonial history and neocolonial reality, ongoing struggles for justice, the impact of social media and even oil and gas? In this course, we’ll ask and try to answer these questions and more in our readings of memoirs, biographies, diaries and autobiographical comics by some of the best writers in Canada who are writing right now. If you are a writer or an editor, if you dream about becoming a teacher or if you just want to learn more about contemporary writing made where you live, this is the course for you. 

Texts

• Sonja Boon, Laurie McNeill, Julie Rak, Candida Rifkind, The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada. (we’ll use lots of material from this book)
• Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes on Belonging
• Kate Beaton, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands
• Fred Wah, Diamond Grill
• Maria Campbell, Halfbreed (the revised edition)
  
  

ENGL 391 LEC B1: Topics in Women’s Writing
Women Writers and Detective Fiction
C. Devereux

In this course we will consider how women writers have worked within and have shaped the genres of detective fiction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on works in which women detectives solve the crimes. We will read texts from a range of categories of detective fiction, including the classic whodunit, cozy crime, hard-boiled or noir, police procedural, Nordic noir and Indigenous crime fiction. We will also look at some adaptations of novels and stories for film or television. With gender ideology and representation as a central concern, we will consider what characterizes the crimes, the detectives, the processes and the social and cultural structures within which women detectives are represented as working. Students will have the opportunity to read beyond the course texts for assignments that may include presentations, reports, and book and film reviews, as well as essays. 

 

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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