400 Level English

Courses at the 400 level afford intensive engagement with advanced topics in English Studies. Offered as seminars, these courses enable students to engage in intimate and sustained conversations about literary and other cultural materials, and to pursue compelling and original avenues of research.

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 409 LEC A1: Studies in Literary Periods and Cultural Movements
"Between World and Toy": Sociopolitical Analyses of Literary Representations of Toys
E. Harris

Yet were, when playing by ourselves, enchanted with what
alone endures; and we would stand therein the infinite,
blissful space between world and toy, at a point which, from 
the earliest beginning, had been established for a pure event.
– Rainer Maria Rilke, “Duino Elegies,” The Fourth Elegy (Trans. Stephen Mitchell)

In “The Philosophy of Toys (1853)” poet Charles Baudelaire observes that: “The toy is the child’s earliest initiation into art, or rather it is the first concrete example of art.” Moreover, in studies of the phenomenon of “play,” Performance Studies Scholar Victor Turner reports that playfulness is “double-edged, ambiguous… a volatile, sometimes dangerously explosive essence which cultural institutions seek to bottle or contain.” Turner also insists that “play” is a potent force through which we can redefine “what our culture states to be reality.” 

In this “Laboratory-style” class, we will immerse ourselves in wondrous works of literature, all of which meaningfully engage the theme of toys, particularly: puppets, dolls, marionettes, and soldiers. We will also watch one film (with subtitles), and encounter the work of visual artists, including contemporary Indigenous artists’ re-takes on the Haudenosaunee corn husk doll, and the “Doll with No Face” legend.

We explore these texts/media through critical Looking-Glasses such as: Performance Studies, Queer Theory/Gender Studies, Disability Theory, Postcolonial Theory, feminist theory, psychoanalysis (Freud’s “Uncanny,” “abjection” via Julia Kristeva), Subjectivity Studies, and the Haudenosaunee Imagination via Joe Sheridan and Roronhiakewen Dan Longboat. This course is designed to furnish students with the opportunity to incorporate your own inquiries and skill-building goals, giving you the chance to engage with critical theory (regardless of your level of experience). We will intensively refine skills relating to: seminar presentations, close reading, and scholarly elucidation/writing. 

You will get the chance to try out some graduate school “moves,” at a reduced workload. Students are welcome to incorporate research materials from your own disciplines and interests into the development of the final project (proposal to be discussed with the Instructor).

Texts 

• Novel: The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
• Poetry: Deaf Republic, Ilya Kaminsky (You won’t believe how beautiful this is.)
• Queer Children’s Lit: William’s Doll, Charlotte Zolotow
• Short stories: The Paper Menagerie, Ken Liu; The Youngest Doll, Rosario Ferré 
• Children’s Lit: Winnie-the-Pooh, A. A. Milne
• Films: (supplied by Instructor) undecided; the short-list includes work by The Brothers Quay (The Street of Crocodiles), Jan Švankmajer (Alice), and Krzysztof Kieślowski (The Double Life of Veronique). Viewings will depend on the class presentation schedule.

(And more… additional texts – short stories, essays, toys, dolls, etc. will be furnished by the Instructor).

fall 2025

ENGL 402 LEC A1: Studies in Genre
The Short Story
L. Harrington

Countering the hegemony of the novel, particularly in postcolonial contexts, this course will explore the tradition of the short story in South Asia and in Ireland. The short story was a staple form in literary culture for centuries before the partitions of India and Ireland. Since then, the ‘modern’ short story has been an important fictional mode, particularly amongst women. Reading a wide selection of short stories, we will interrogate the form, its heritage in oral cultures, its production and ‘episodic’ circulation, and its association with liminal subjects.

ENGL 407 LEC A1: Studies in Texts and Cultures
Sex in Public, or American Pornocracy
K. Ball 

ENGL 430 LEC A1: Studies in Theory
After Humanism
M. Litwack

...after Humanism, what? 
            – Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Found”

What is a human? Who is a human? What does it mean to fight for humanity, to take up “the human” as your defining political constituency? How have formations of race, gender, sexuality, and capitalist empire variously defined and troubled our conceptions of humanity? Are humans really so different from other animals? What do the humanities—including the kind of aesthetic education you undertake in a major like English—have to do with humanity? In our age of permanent war and socio-ecological catastrophe, is humanism still a useful project for keeping open the horizon of justice? 

In this advanced seminar, we will track some competing responses to these queries to consider why the meaning of “the human” has figured a persistent site of intellectual and political contestation. We will begin with an inquiry into the emergence of modern western humanism, exploring the entangled relations among slavery, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, personhood, and (un)freedom through which the category of “the human” has been developed and disrupted. In our second unit, we will examine how a range of theorists have answered, reworked, or challenged the question “what does it mean to be human?” by engaging issues of racial and sexual difference, dignity and enjoyment, sense and nonsense, enfleshment and collective life. To do so, we will draw on multiple traditions all concerned—albeit often in quite distinct ways—with the ethics, aesthetics, politics, and limits of the human. These include Black feminist theory, deconstruction, queer theory, anticolonial thought, animal studies, and (the critique of) political theology. We will not attempt a comprehensive survey of these fields but rather examine and assess how, across a diverse set of critical projects, energies have been directed toward excavating what the human has historically meant; tracking what or who it has been defined against; and re-imagining what it still yet might mean, as well as what alternative modes of existence and social life may be possible outside, beyond, or even after humanism.

Because, as we’ll see, the question of the human also necessarily bears on how we approach questions of the subject, power, race, sex, property, violence, value, voice, community, meaning, being, no-thingness, freedom, and the universal—that is, many of the central critical preoccupations across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—this seminar will additionally serve to familiarize seminar participants with some of the most pressing issues and debates in contemporary theory.

Texts

• Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal 
• Mohammed El-Kurd, Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal 
• Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection 
• Course packet with readings in Alain Badiou, Aimé Césaire, Lucille Clifton, Claire Colebrook, Lee Edelman, Immanuel Kant, Ranjana Khanna, Jacques Lacan, Saba Mahmood, David Marriott, Jean-Luc Nancy, Elizabeth Povinelli, Friedrich Schiller, Hortense Spillers, Neferti Tadiar.

ENGL 467 LEC A1: Studies in Race and Ethnicity
On Being Black: Theories of Presence 
O. Okome 

ENGL 483 LEC A1: Studies in Popular Culture
Real Dancers in Fictional Narratives
C. Devereaux 

Novels with real-life dancers at their centre are not exactly a narrative genre, but they do offer a compelling opportunity to consider how creative writers engage with the work, the lives and the performances of dancers. In this course we will read a handful of novels from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries in which real-life dancers are fictionalized. We will also read some contextual, biographical and critical material, and will consider how fictionalized real-life dancers come to index the social and cultural conditions of gender, race, class and mobility in their own time and at the moment of their representation in fiction.

Winter 2026

ENGL 402 LEC B1: Studies in Genre
Diaries and Journals
J. Rak

This course delves into the fascinating world of the “secret genre” of diary and journal keeping, from archival examples, to famous published diaries like those of Virginia Woolf and Anne Frank, to activist diaries, to contemporary practices of journaling in the “post-digital” media ecosystem in which we find ourselves today. We will use work from diary theorists critics, material from the study of life writing, and work from book history on the post-digital turn to learn how to read, interpret and even write diaries and journals from the past, and in the present. 

Texts

• Elizabeth Penashue, I Keep the Land Alive
• War diaries, Canadian Great War Project
• University of Guelph Rural Farm Diary Archive
• Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank 
• Samuel Pepys, Diary (online resource)
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
• Abby Sy, videos on making travel journals
• Fang Fang, Wuhan Diary
• Marta Hilliers, A Woman in Berlin
• Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf

ENGL 409 LEC B1: Studies in Literary Periods and Movements
Victorian Conceptions of the Self 
P. Sinnema

This course takes up a few central “statements” about the individual as a construct—of narrative fiction (i.e. the first-person voice/perspective typical of the bildungsroman), of scientific debate (evolutionary, legal, and psychological investigation), of the emergent self-help industry—in order to investigate how the self was conceptualized (written, positioned, dissected) and subjected (to juridical, state, satirical, etc. apparatuses and practices, but also made into a semi-autonomous being, an agential subject) in Victorian Britain. The idea of the self serves only as a potential touchstone for our approach to these disparate texts; students are encouraged to develop and refine their own interpretive interests, and to have Villette read for the start of class. 

ENGL 425 LEC B1: Studies in the History of Reading
Readers, Reading, and Mass Media
D. Fuller

When contemporary readers turn to books, fan fiction or audiobooks in their leisure time they are participating in popular culture. They are also choosing an activity – reading – that is often viewed as more socially and cultural valuable than others, such as watching television or playing online games.  In this course we examine why reading books gives kudos to readers; how mass media and the publishing industry inform what and how we read and our ideas about it; and how and why readers share their reading, and connect with others both on- and off-line.

This is not a traditional literary text-based course since it engages with scholarship and methods from reading studies and book history, but no prior knowledge of these fields is required.  The four themed units are: Reading As A Social Practice; Reading and Mass Media; Producing Readers; Reading and Digital Media. Within each unit we will examine a selection of theories, artefacts and practices that will allow us to investigate the meanings and formations that contemporary book and reading cultures assume. Our texts and case studies will range across media, genres and nation-states. Hands-on activities (e.g. an in-class reading group) and mini-research tasks (e.g. observing readers in libraries and bookshops) will also inform our learning and thinking.

ENGL 426 LEC B2: Studies in Literary and Cultural Histories
The Many Faces of Hamlet
C. Sale

In this fourth-year seminar, students will have the opportunity to study the canonical literary text of “Western” literature from a variety of historical, critical, and theoretical perspectives. The course will include study of at least two film adaptations of Shakespeare’s play. 

ENGL 465 LEC B1: Studies in Gender and Sexuality
Debating Gender: Feminist Poetry before 1800
K. Binhammer

Wife and servant are the same
But only differ in the name
     – “To the Ladies,” Lady Mary Chudleigh 

Poetry by women and non-binary writers before the advent of the modern feminist movement, such as Lady Chudleigh’s “To the Ladies,” often contains surprisingly spirited articulations of sentiments we now identify as feminist. This course focusses on this rich and diverse archive of early English poetry, from Old English laments to 17th-century “querelles des femmes” dialogues to 18th-century Enlightenment heroic couplets to 1790s equal rights epistles. We will focus on gender and genre, considering what poetry offers writers who are searching for a language to express the unsayable within dominant culture. What can we learn about the history of gender, patriarchy and feminism (and how it is both similar and different from our current moment) by reading poetry? We will encounter a diversity of writers, from aristocratic to laboring class, from religious to secular, from married to single, including “Anon”, Gwerful Mechain, Geoffrey Chaucer, Aemilia Lanyer, Rachel Speght, Alexander Pope, Mary Leapor, Jonathan Swift, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Mary Collier. We will cover a range of topics, including heteronormativity, sexual assault, colonialism, slavery, and sex work. 

Previous Offerings

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

Home | About Us | People | Research | Programs | Courses | Student Groups | Meet Our Alumni