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.

Fall 2024

ENGL 300 LEC A1: 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.

Topics may include how the prehistory of English was discovered and linguistically 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; using the Oxford English Dictionary to explore the history of English; grammarians and prescriptivism; approaches to the politics of language; the influence of women on the history of English; and Canadian English.

ENGL 301 LEC A1: Topics in Genre
Sun, Sea & Sex: Caribbean Poetry and Erotic Politics
M. Bucknor

As a travel destination, the Caribbean islands have traditionally been conceived as a sexualized landscape. Indeed, from as early as the colonial period, the Caribbean has been both feminized and eroticized as part of the progressive narrative of conquest (Anne McClintock 1995; Greg Thomas 2007). The hetero-patriarchal and imperialist agenda of racial capitalism framed the resources of these lands as available for penetration, extraction and control. As Mimi Sheller has reminded us, “the Caribbean has been repeatedly imagined and narrated as a tropical paradise in which the land, plants, resources, bodies, and cultures of its inhabitants are open to be invaded, occupied, bought, moved, used, viewed, and consumed in various ways” (Consuming the Caribbean 1). At the same time, “the sexual imperative of the imperial exercise, as Robert Aldrich has shown, made empire’s outposts a “homosexual playground” (Colonialism and Homosexuality 2-5). This course will consider the political significance of the erotic in Caribbean poetry. Exploring the issues of colonialism, gender, race, class, sexuality, the environment, history, religion and capitalism, we will give extended attention to the motif of the erotic as an index of decolonial politics. An anthology of selected poems from the Anglophone Caribbean, in addition to at least 4 small poetry collections by writers such as Andre Bagoo, Dionne Brand, Kei Miller and Tanya Shirley, and selected poems from Olive Senior's oeuvre, especially Gardening in the Tropics, will provide the texts for the course.

ENGL 301 LEC A2: Topics in Genre
Reconciliation Fictions
C. Bracken

ENGL 302 LEC A1: Topics in Literary and Critical Theory
Violence in Theory and Literature
K. Ball

This course will provide an opportunity to explore theoretical and literary figurations of violence and their interdisciplinary intellectual histories in order to practice methods of critical analysis while reflecting on the interrelations between power, consciousness, culture, and society. This term, we will begin with the canonical master-slave dialectic from G.W.F. Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit before tracing its intellectual history as represented in excerpts by Karl Marx and Simone de Beauvoir. In probing this legacy, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and Glen Coulthard will facilitate our critical appraisal of the “politics of recognition” and the case for violent revolt against colonial and racist domination. Comparing Walter Benjamin’s, Judith Butler’s, and Hannah Arendt’s perspectives on state authorized violence will serve as background for our consideration of Michel Foucault’s model of disciplinary power as an attempt to counteract an over-emphasis on the sovereign state in sociopolitical theory. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric will illuminate racialization and its attendant humiliations in everyday life and the public sphere while Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees will shed light on the traumatic aftereffects of a war that precipitated partition. The course will conclude with Adania Shibli’s A Minor Detail in order to reflect on representations of perpetrators and victims in the context of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

Required Texts:
Coulthard, Glen. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. Introduction by Kwame Anthony Appiah. Grove Press, 2008.
Lawrence, Bruce and Aisha Karim, Eds. On Violence: A Reader. Duke University Press, 2007.
Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press, 2014. Shafak, Elif. The Island of Missing Trees. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023.
Shibli, Adania. A Minor Detail. W.W. Norton, 2020.

ENGL 308 LEC A1: Topics in Indigenous Literature
Storying Indigenous Governance
R. Jackson

This course examines the relationship between Indigenous governance and stories. Prominent scholars of Indigenous law like Val Napolean (Saulteau) and John Borrows (Anishinaabe) make the clear case that a diverse array of Indigenous legal and political orders mobilize stories to communicate central tenets and principles of collective life. Similarly, Thomas King’s (Cherokee) maxim that “stories are all we are” has been a guiding principle of Indigenous literary criticism in the past 15 years. Bringing together approaches from Indigenous political science, legal studies, and literary analysis, this course poses the central question: (how) can literary study help refine our understanding of Indigenous political thought? What can the particular methods and critical vocabularies of literary analysis offer to stories of governance? How can the perspectival shifts offered in literary works open the horizon of what counts as political? What are the limits to storying governance?

ENGL 308 LEC A2: Topics in Indigenous Literature
nehiyawewin 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 nehiyawewin (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 311 LEC A1: Topics in Postcolonial Literature
O.Okome

On the Idea of Blackness

What is blackness and how is the history transmitted through literature over time? Is blackness the opposite of whiteness? Ideas of blackness and its assigned physical and intrinsic human values and characteristics have been around since the meeting between Europeans and peoples of the global south. Controversial as the word has assumed in our contemporary world, discourses of blackness often lurk behind our actions and utterances even when they are not intended. Although the keynote of discourses of blackness is difference, that is human difference, there is hardly any uniformity in the articulation of blackness from one place to the other. But what remains unchanged in the many permutations of blackness across the globe are the characteristics attached to what is described as black humanity. Even when attempts were made in the past to sanitize this historical notion of blackness, all they do is to reinforce notions of difference, which inevitably reifies ideas of whiteness. Since the American Civil Rights Movements, renaming and recalibrating this historical meaning of blackness seem not to have changed the basic idea of being black, ideas firmly rooted in the history of colonialism and slavery. This class will engage with literary descriptions of blackness and will attempt to frame the role that European literature about Africa of the 18 and 19th centuries bequeathed to contemporary discourses of race. This class will also grapple with a selection of African literary texts that refute the historical idea of blackness in this category of Europe literature about Africa.

Tentative Texts:
Edgar Wallace, Sanders of the River
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Joyce Cary, Mister Johnson
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Ambiguous Adventure
Mongo Beti, Mission to Kala
Margaret Hayes, African Novels in the Classroom
Toni Morrison, The Origins of Others
Simon Gikandi, Reading the African Novel
Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (2nd edition)

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

Selected works from the Irish context written in English.

ENGL 315 LEC A1: South Asian Writing in English
L. Harrington

On this course we will cover a broad range of literature from South Asia, both geographically and historically. We will begin by tracing some key issues around language and indigenous traditions before examining the Progressive Writers' Movement and Partition literature. Our focus will then move to thematic issues informed by the methodologies of postcolonial literary practice, including gender and the nation, representing the subaltern, migration and diaspora, and the concept of New India. 

ENGL 337 LEC A1: Topics in Early Modern Literature
The Common and Commons
C. Sale

In this course we will engage one of the most important literary themes of early modern English culture, the question of whether or how the culture could hold things in common.We will begin our investigations with the two humanist texts from the early sixteenth century that most famously articulate the political propositions of the ‘common’, Erasmus’s first two ‘adages’ and Thomas More’s Utopia, and will then range across select literary texts up to the mid-seventeenth century as we pursue various permutations of our theme. Our texts will include Christopher St. German’s ‘Tale of the Master, the Servant, and the Sick Man’ (early 1530s), selections from Isabella Whitney’s verse miscellany A Sweet Nosegay (1573), the anonymous play The Life and Death of Jack Straw (early 1590s), excerpts from the banned 1594 book Conference about the Next Succession, Shakespeare’s last tragedy, Coriolanus (c. 1609), the dramatist John Ford’s masterpiece The Broken Heart (c. 1628), and John Milton’s radical political treatise The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649).

As we will see, the question of whether or how a culture may hold things in common was caught up for the English in the early modern period with the question of whether or how ‘sovereignty’ could be conceived of as ‘popular’ or ‘republican’, and what kind of authority the ‘people’ and any given literary writer could wield in shaping England’s constitutional imagination. These remain pressingly important questions for the shaping of democratic cultures in the twenty-first century. Assignments will be designed in such a way that there is no need for students to do any research beyond the assigned readings. Our imperative, instead, is to study and understand what the course texts may contribute to our understanding of the ‘common’ and ‘commons’ now.

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

Selected eighteenth-century works written in English.

ENGL 397 LEC A1: History of the Book
A. Daignault

This course will provide a broad introduction to the field of Book History, which focuses on the material creation, existence, and circulation of texts, or in other words, their lives. We will begin with a consideration of the ‘nodes’ of conventional and historical publishing as described by Robert Darnton’s Communications Circuit and a thorough exploration of what a book actually is (or might be), and then develop and complicate Darnton's circuit by considering contemporary pathways to publishing, exploring digital media and publishing, and thinking about how book history and genre intersect. Through theoretical readings, analytic and reflective writing, hands-on activities, and creative engagements with the content of the course, students will learn about how books – and texts of all kinds – are and were made.

Course Objectives

By the end of this course, students should be able to:

• Confidently employ critical and theoretical terminology in their discussions of Book History
• Describe how networks of people and processes collaborate to create material texts, both historically and in the present
• Conduct, report on, and share research about defined case studies of books
• Apply their understanding of the material composition and design of a book in practical ways

winter 2025

ENGL 307 LEC B1: Métis Literature
M. Dumont

This course is a short survey of Métis Literature beginning with the origins of Métis writing in song and oral storytelling. Upon establishing the identity of the Métis as post-contact Aboriginal Peoples, the course corrects erroneous notions of hybridity and racialization which marginalize the Métis. Themes such as language hierarchy, erasure, sovereignty, and resilience will be examined through the seminal works of prose and poetry written by contemporary Métis writers.

ENGL 308 LEC B1: 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 310 LEC B1: Postcolonial Literature
Postcolonial Intimacies and the Politics of Decolonization
T. Tomsky

This course takes up a selection of postcolonial texts from places like the Caribbean, South Africa, Nigeria, India, Pakistan, and others to explore the impact of colonialism on postcolonial societies. Modern colonialism, beginning in the fifteenth century was a European enterprise, focused fundamentally on exploiting the natural resources and people of the colonies. Imperial expansion infamously brought with it guns, disease, and steel, but also European fauna, flora, epistemologies, practices, and institutions that reshaped colonized territories and societies in enduring ways. Alongside their physical incursion, European colonizers turned to cultural forms to narrate and dominate their colonies: through literary representations, the colonial territory was feminized, and colonial relationships to the land and the peoples were relayed through patriarchal and heterosexual forms of colonial desire. The land, and all the people who inhabited those environments were constructed as passive objects to be explored, possessed, made known, or exploited by colonial men. Postcolonial narratives seek to reconfigure those colonial relationships, whether in relation to the land, to community, to ideas of the nation, to sexuality, and to gender. Such literary reconfigurations are part of the anticolonial struggle and postcolonial empowerment. This course examines such works by a myriad of postcolonial writers. We will explore the representation of relationships, communities, and intimacies that defy (neo)colonialism, including how essentialist definitions of race and gender can be resisted, and how one’s relationship to the environment can be rethought.

ENGL 325 LEC B1: Medieval Literature
D. Bargen

Medieval English literature is much more diverse than simply Chaucer and Beowulf. In this course, for instance, we will study texts written by women in Middle English or in other European languages and translated into Middle English.  We may also discuss texts commissioned or translated by English women as well as Middle English texts written for women. These particular texts are important in part because of the role they play in the growth and establishment of vernacular writing in English as opposed to Latin or French. Other texts could include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, selections from William Langland's Piers Plowman; from Thomas Malory's stories of King Arthur and his knights; from medieval English drama, the poems of Thomas Hoccleve, Middle English lyrics, a beast fable, probably Chaucer, and so forth.  Though we will read some of these in modernized or translated editions, the course could also expose students to manageable glossed or short selections in Middle English to give students a taste of the English language in this period (prior knowledge of Middle English is not required).

ENGL 352 LEC B1: 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 B1: 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. Likely 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.

ENGL 363 LEC B1: Modernist Literature
R. Brazeau

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

ENGL 372 LEC B1: Publishing Canadian Literature
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 2025 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 380 LEC B1: Writing from here
S. Krotz

What does it mean to write and read from here, a place defined by various names, including amiskowacîyowaskahikan (ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ – Beaver Hills House) and Edmonton, within the parkland biome, Treaty 6 territory, and the Métis Nation of Alberta Region 4, in proximity to the North Saskatchewan River / kisiskâciwanisîpiy? Although reading can be a powerful means of escape, in this course, we will consider reading as a way of attending to where we are. We inhabit language as well as physical spaces: each informs the other as we find our place in the world. Exploring a diverse array of literary engagements with the Edmonton area, we will consider how the words and names we use, and the stories we tell and encounter, influence our perceptions of the spaces we move through each day. At the same time, we will think about how this place – including its political and social as well as physical characteristics – influences how we interpret the local writing we encounter. What tools does literary studies give us to articulate these relationships? How do writers turn and focus our attention to the textures of this place? How do their stories and poetics map and navigate its landscapes, communities, histories, and ways of being? How do they challenge or transform our understanding of what it means to live here? 

ENGL 388 LEC B1: Children’s Literature
A. Daignault

Studies in print and oral texts, including picture books, historical, critical and theoretical approaches to literature for young people.

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. 

ENGL 398 LEC B1: 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)

Previous Offerings

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

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