Courses

Course: CRWR 314: Topics in Writing Fiction | Funny Story: Writing the RomCom Novel
Term: Winter 2026
Section: AS01
Instructor: Jackie Baker

In this advanced fiction writing course, students will learn the expectations of the romantic comedy novel genre and will conceptualize, plot and outline their own original romcom novels, writing and submitting for workshop their first chapters. Substantive peer editing and workshopping will be weighted equally with creative content in this course.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in CRWR 295.

Permission Required: No

Course: CRWR 317: Topics in Creative Writing | A Genre-Bending Free-for-All
Term: Winter 2026
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Chris Hutchinson

This creative writing course is designed for writers of all kinds seeking to refine their craft, push artistic boundaries and engage in rigorous critical discussion. Radically open to all genres—including fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction and hybrid forms—the course emphasizes both technical mastery and creative risk-taking and provides a unique opportunity to work with a diverse group of writers in an open and fluid creative space. Through intensive workshops and close reading of contemporary and foundational texts, students will develop a deeper understanding of their own aesthetic sensibilities. Special attention will be given to revision as a dynamic, generative process. By the end of the semester, students will produce a portfolio of polished work, accompanied by a critical reflection on their creative practice.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in CRWR 295.

Permission Required: No

Course: CRWR 404: Advanced Seminar in Creative Writing | Writing Poems in Series
Term: Winter 2026
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Lisa Martin

This intensive seminar in creative writing will focus on writing poems in series. For student writers, beginning to think beyond writing individual poems to writing a number of poems that are connected to one another thematically, narratively and/or formally can be an important step in the development of poetic practice. In this advanced seminar, we will explore a range of ways to approach writing poetry in series or sequence, and each student will draft, workshop, revise and polish a portfolio of original work. This seminar will be run as a writing workshop. Students will be required to carefully read and constructively edit the work of their peers, drawing on their growing understanding of poetic craft.

Prerequisites: Minimum grade of C- in 9 credits of 300-level CRWR and consent of the department. Interested students must write to the instructor (lisa.martin@macewan.ca) by October 30, 2025, seeking permission to take the course and including a list of CRWR courses they have already taken. Eligible students will be notified and issued a permission number. Please note that after October 30, 2025, applications will be considered on a first-come, first-served basis.

Permission Required: Yes

Course: ENGL 342: Topics in the Literature of the Long 18th Century | Augustan Women’s Writing
Term: Winter 2026
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Dave Buchanan

This course looks at writing by women in Great Britain during the Augustan Age from the late 17th to the late 18th centuries, across a range of genres (poetry, novel, short fiction, non-fiction) and styles (satire, pastoral, romance, comedy, polemic). Featured authors include Aphra Behn, Mary Astell, Eliza Haywood, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Jane Collier, Frances Burney, Phyllis Wheatley and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in three credits of 200- or 300-level ENGL, not including ENGL 205, ENGL 207, ENGL 211 or ENGL 297.

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 350: Topics in Romantic Literature | British Romantic Poetry
Term: Winter 2026
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Mark Smith

Conventionally book-ended by the French Revolution in 1789 and the beginnings of modern democratic reform in 1832, the Romantic period in Britain was a time of intense social and political upheaval. This course acquaints students with the diverse poetry of the period in relation to its complex and volatile literary, intellectual and historical contexts.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in three credits of 200- or 300-level ENGL, not including ENGL 205, ENGL 207, ENGL 211 or ENGL 297.

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 364: Topics in 20th and 21st Century Literature | Carceral Lyric
Term: Winter 2026
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Sara Grewal

In his 1832 essay “What is Poetry?”—now widely considered the most influential text for lyric studies—John Stuart Mill famously described the lyric poem as “the lament of a prisoner in a solitary cell.” The sonnet, as well, with its confining and exacting prescription of 14 lines of iambic pentameter, has been widely compared to a cell. And indeed, the context of incarceration has prompted some of the most famous poems of the 20th century, not the least of which comes to us from the gritty voice and compelling beats of Tupac Shakur. What compels writers to turn to poetry to voice their experiences of incarceration? How has poetry itself been conceived of as both so threatening as to warrant incarceration (in the case of several poets who have been jailed for their poetry) or so confining as to mimic incarceration? How do the contexts of Jim Crow segregation alongside worldwide (de)colonization in the 20th century inform our models for theorizing and reading poetry? In this course, we will consider poems written from prison alongside theories of the lyric as a “contained” form in order to investigate the carceral underpinnings of this genre. Primary texts will include selections from Bradley Peters’s Sonnets from a Cell; Reginald Dwayne Betts’s Felon: Poems; Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Zindan-nāmā (“Prison Tale”); Ho Chi Minh's Prison Diary; and Tupac Shakur’s All Eyez On Me.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in three credits of 200- or 300-level ENGL, not including ENGL 205, ENGL 207, ENGL 211 or ENGL 297.

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 383: Topics in World Literature | The Vampire Myth
Term: Winter 2026
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Svitlana Krys

Ever since the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897, the vampire has penetrated the popular culture of Europe and North America and has become a staple of TV series and films. Few people realize, however, that Dracula has his roots in Slavic folklore and that the vampire originally had nothing in common with bats, the fifteenth-century Wallachian prince Vlad Ţepeş or the drinking of blood. This course explores the origins of the vampire myth in Slavic demonology and traces the changes it has undergone as it moved from Slavic lands through several European cultures onto the modern screen. Folkloric, literary and cinematic texts are analyzed, and the evolution of the vampire myth is examined in the context of both national cultures and historical periods. Readings will include Slavic folkloric stories about vampires, historical tracts that addressed the 18-century vampire epidemics in the Balkans and literary works of both Slavic and British gothic authors such as John Polidori, Mykola Hohol, Oleksa Storozhenko, Alexey Tolstoy, Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker and others.

Prerequisites: Minimum grades of C- in ENGL 102 and in three credits of university ENGL, not including ENGL 108, ENGL 111, ENGL 199 or ENGL 211.

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 387: Studies in Film Adaptation | Men of Steel
Term: Winter 2026
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Mike Perschon

While the last decade's deluge of superhero movies might lead one to believe cinematic capes and tights were successful only after the advent of digital wizardry, superheroes have appeared on the silver screen for over 80 years, with Superman being one of the first to thrill moviegoers in 1941. From the Oscar nominated cartoons of Max Fleischer to James Gunn's most recent take on the Man of Steel, Superman has appeared on both the big screen and the TV screen steadily, affording us an opportunity to not only study how film adapts other forms of narrative, but the history of comics, film and television. Furthermore, later Superman adaptations take us beyond the transposition of narrative from one medium to another; we get to see how a narrative changes when it's made into another genre. The TV series Lois and Clark is a romantic comedy; Smallville is a teen drama; and Man of Steel is an alien invasion movie. How does a narrative change when we change the narrative focus? Using Linda Hutcheon's foundational A Theory of Adaptation as our core textbook, readings from 80 years of Superman comics and a strong sampling of Superman onscreen, we'll see how a character changes over time and media. From leaping tall buildings to flying faster than the speed of light, we'll explore how Superman has remained relevant to audiences across generations.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in ENGL 288 or BCSC 205.

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 388: Topics in Film Studies | Metacinema
Term: Winter 2026
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Joshua Toth

This course will consider the assumptions behind and uses of self-referential narrative strategies in 20th- and 21st-century film. While considering the historical and theoretical context in which metafictional forms developed, students will study films that implicitly or explicitly announce their fictionality or process of creation. Such films ostentatiously employ cinematic clichés or ridiculous plotting devices: characters suddenly speak to the camera; boom microphones “accidently” fall into frame; elaborate tracking shots expose clearly artificial sets; directors interrupt and reset scenes; etc. While looking at films such Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983), Sofia Coppola’s Maria Antoinette (2006), David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), Craig Gillespie’s I, Tonya (2017), Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018) and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon and Time … In Hollywood (2019), students will trace metacinema’s roots (in existentialism, absurdism and fabulism), identify its most salient characteristics and define its politics (or lack thereof).

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in ENGL 288 or BCSC 205.

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 391: Topics in Literary Theory | Theories of the Subject
Term: Winter 2026
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. David Hollingshead

This course introduces students to the most influential theories of subjectivity that have shaped the fields of literary and cultural studies over the last hundred years. Drawing from Marxist, psychoanalytic, Foucauldian, poststructuralist, postcolonial, queer, feminist and Black studies frameworks, we will examine how the category of the subject has transformed in response to the historical conditions of its theorization. At the heart of these shifts is a generative paradox whose variations we will unpack over the course of the semester: the subject is both that which acts, observes, and creates and that which is acted upon, observed and created. Which forms of existence are granted subjectivity, how those subjectivities are recognized and reproduced, and through what forms of knowledge production new subjectivities are made legible will be the guiding questions of the course.

Prerequisites: A minimum grades of C- in 6 credits of 200- or 300-level university courses.

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 402: Studies in Authors | Tolkien: Beyond The Lord of the Rings
Term: Winter 2026
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Romuald Lakowski

This course involves studying some of Tolkien’s other works apart from The Lord of the Rings. The main focus will be on Tolkien’s Legendarium culminating in the postumously published Silmarillion (1977), especially on the “Three Great Tales” contained in the “Silmarillion Tradition” (1916-1973): The Children of Hurin, The Fall of Gondolin and Beren and Luthien. These stories are primarily concerned with Tolkien’s elves and their relationships with select mortals: Tuor, Turin and Beren. The first half of the course will involve looking at some of Tolkien’s short stories: Roverandom, Farmer Giles of Ham, Smith of Wootton Major and Leaf by Niggle as well as at least a couple of Tolkien’s major critical essays on Beowulf and fairy stories. We will also consider The Hobbit and its relationship to the “Silmarillion Tradition” using John Rateliff’s edition of the drafts of The History of the Hobbit. The second half of the course will focus on the Legendarium especially the “Three Great Tales” as outlined above. Throughout the seminar, we will cover a chapter or two of the published Silmarillion each week in conjunction with the weekly readings/presentations. Among the themes that could be investigated are Tolkien’s tragic love stories (especially between elves and mortals) and Tolkien’s dragons and other monsters. Students are encouraged to read the published Silmarillion beforehand. Reading List: J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion; J.R.R. Tolkien, Tales from the Perilous Realm (includes The Essay on Fairy Tales); J.R.R. Tolkien, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics; J.R.R. Tolkien, The Children of Hurin; J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fall of Gondolin; J.R.R. Tolkien, Beren and Luthien; J.R.R Tolkien, The Hobbit in conjunction with John Rateliff, Ed., The History of the Hobbit (in library)

Prerequisites: Minimum grades of C- in 12 credits of 200- or 300-level ENGL courses.

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 489: Literary Themes, Traditions and Phenomena | King Arthur in Literature and Film
Term: Winter 2026
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Pam Farvolden

This course traces the origins and development of the legend of King Arthur, its place in medieval English literature and culture, and its enduring popularity across time. The course begins with a brief look at the British origins of the Arthurian tradition, its chronicle treatment in Geoffrey of Monmouth and its medieval culmination in Malory’s monumental Morte d’Arthur. We will then turn to the transformations and uses of the legend in the 19th century, which saw a rekindling and explosion of interest in Arthurian material, and, finally, examine 20th- and 21st-century treatments of the tradition in both literature and film. Students can expect to read, view and analyze a variety of works in addition to Geoffrey and Malory, possibly including (and not necessarily limited to) works by Tennyson, T. H. White, Mary Stewart, Marian Zimmer Bradley, John Boorman, and—of course—Monty Python. As students examine these and other representative Arthurian works, they will not only learn about the underpinnings, background and attraction of this most potent of tales but also gain insight into the ways legend itself can grow, change, shape and be shaped by forces of literature, history and culture.

Prerequisites: Minimum grades of C- in 12 credits of 200- or 300-level ENGL courses.

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 494: Nineteenth Century Literature | Modernity and Mania in the Victorian Sensation Novel
Term: Winter 2026
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Daniel Martin

This seminar introduces students to an advanced study of Victorian popular fiction of the 1860s, focusing exclusively on the genre of the sensation novel. Students will read novels by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, two of the most celebrated sensation novelists of the decade. Seminar discussions will emphasize the influence of the gothic, mystery and romance genres; Braddon’s and Collins’s respective representations of the speed and pace of modern life in the 1860s; the sensation novel’s narration of scandalous and shocking representations of identity, gender, sexuality, class, race, disability, criminality and deviance; the emergence of the detective as a representative character type of modernity; and the forensic circulation of bodies and evidence in an age of accelerating modernization and mania. Students will also study the sensation novel’s debt to economic changes in Victorian print media and contemporary criticism of its shift in emphasis from character development to narrative incidents and formulaic plot devices.

Prerequisites: Minimum grades of C- in 12 credits of 200- or 300-level ENGL courses.

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 389: Topics in Children's Literature | From Fantasy to Climate Change
Term: Spring/Summer 2026
Section: OP95
Instructor: Dr. William Thompson

This course explores the development of fantasy in relation to climate change fiction, from the Grimms’ fairy tales to dystopian texts for children and young adults. Using a range of texts spanning two hundred years, the course will examine the development of fantasy for children and young adults and its connection to climate change fiction of the twenty-first century.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in three credits of 200- or 300-level ENGL, not including ENGL 205, ENGL 207, ENGL 211, or ENGL 297.

Permission Required: No

Course: CRWR 314: Topics in Fiction | Plot Your Novel
Term: Fall 2026
Session: AS01
Instructor: Jacqueline Baker

In this introductory novel prepping workshop, students learn about novel structure and conventions and how to create a synopsis and working outline. They write, workshop and revise their own opening sections. Significant emphasis is placed on peer editing.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in CRWR 295

Permission Required: No

Course: CRWR 317: Topics in Creative Writing | Writing the Self: Auto-Biography to Auto-Fiction
Term: Fall 2026
Session: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Lisa Martin

In this advanced workshop, we focus on crafting literary prose that draws from personal experience. Moving from flash memoir and the autobiographical essay to autofiction in the mode practiced by contemporary writers such as Annie Ernaux, Maggie Nelson, Sheila Heti and Billy-Ray Belcourt, this course gives students the opportunity to consider where their own creative work might fit among the various conventions (as well as controversies and challenges) of literary genres that take “writing the self” as central to their artistic task. Students in this course have the opportunity to experiment with a range of different approaches and genres, and each student produces, revises and polishes a portfolio of original creative work.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in CRWR 295

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 382: Topics in Literary Studies | Women’s Writing and Digital Humanities Field Placement
Term: Fall 2026
Session: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Kathryn Holland

How can we sharpen our knowledge of women’s writing by exploring authors’ expansive careers and the shifting conditions of possibility across historical periods? As we move through our own era, which some describe as “post-print,” how can we use digital humanities tools and methodologies to connect the knowledge we develop in academic contexts to public discussions of women’s writing in the online world? Course participants bring together the study of women’s writing with digital research. Through hands-on learning, they become credited contributors to the Orlando Project, a long-running initiative in literary studies and digital humanities based at multiple Canadian universities. Both academic and commercial, its team of scholars, students and technical personnel produce Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, an online textbase published by Cambridge University Press. Students receive training and supervision as they gain experience in the use of varied digital tools and platforms supporting literary research for international audiences, text encoding and data reconciliation.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in three credits of 200- or 300-level ENGL, not including ENGL 205, ENGL 207, ENGL 211 or ENGL 297, and consent of the department

Permission Required: Students should email the instructor, Dr. Kathryn Holland, at hollandk5@macewan.ca to learn more about the class and to receive a permission number.

Course: ENGL 383: Topics in World Literature | Literature of Freedom
Term: Fall 2026
Session: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Robert Wiznura

This course takes a critical notion in our society—freedom—and examines what it means from a literary-historical, contemporary and cross-cultural perspective. Students read literary texts on freedom from 17th-century Britain with more recent historical and contemporary works from Ukraine. Students produce both independent and collaborative work. Students from Ukraine and Canada work together on the collaborative projects in this hybrid-delivered course. 

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in ENGL 102 and in three credits of university ENGL, not including ENGL 108, ENGL 111, ENGL 199 or ENGL 211

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 389: Topics in Children’s Literature | From Utopia to Dystopia
Term: Fall 2026
Session: AS01
Instructor: Dr. William Thompson

Children’s and young adult books consistently reimagine utopias and dystopias from the nostalgic and the sentimental to the political and the subversive. This course examines the ways these polarized and often conflicting states represent a spectrum of texts that both challenge the boundaries of genre and interrogate the nature of childhood.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in three credits of 200- or 300-level ENGL, not including ENGL 205, ENGL 207, ENGL 211 or ENGL 297

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 401: Studies in Genres | Steampunk
Term: Fall 2026
Session: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Mike Perschon

Steampunk, for those who have not yet been properly introduced, is what happens when the nineteenth century refuses to stay politely in the past. It is a literary movement, an artistic aesthetic, a gaming culture, a fashion statement, a maker manifesto and occasionally a very good excuse to put gears on something that does not require gears. Each week, we sample from this great brass buffet of steampunk expressions, ranging from literature to film to a storytelling game where students play as the crew of a flying steam engine—because one should never discuss airships without at least briefly commandeering one. The goal of this seminar is simple: to provide students the freedom to research in a way that plays to their strengths, demonstrating the intellectual toolkit they have assembled over the course of their degree. By the end, students won't merely understand steampunk. They'll have polished it, reverse-engineered it and likely added unnecessary brass filigree. Which in this context is entirely necessary.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in 12 credits of 200- or 300-level ENGL courses

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 402: Studies in Authors | Bob Dylan
Term: Fall 2026
Session: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Josh Toth

In the liner notes for his 1965 album, Bringing It All Back Home—which signaled his infamous break with the folk movement—Bob Dylan addresses a crisis in American cultural production, one that necessitates an effort to overcome the declining efficacy of both musical and literary forms. He asserts that he does “not want t’ be bach. mozart. tolstoy. joe hill. Gertrude stein or james dean/they are all dead. The Great books’ve been written. the Great sayings have all been said.” Neither music nor literature nor popular culture can address the crisis he perceives. The implied alternative is to transgress or simply abandon the current boundaries of aesthetic and political delimitation. Dylan therefore embraces while distancing himself from specific categories of artistic production: “a song is anything that can walk by itself/i am called a songwriter. a poem is a naked person . . . some people say that i am a poet.” Instead of suggesting a type of hierarchy (with songs reigning over poems or vice versa), Dylan expresses a desire to work as both poet and songwriter (and therefore as neither). His songs need to “walk all by themselves” while remaining also intentionally pure (or “naked”), governed solely by a singular “poet” who can articulate nothing but himself. The goal of this course is to track and interrogate Dylan’s various efforts to identify and then refuse the restrictions of (folk) music and (traditional) literature, a refusal that largely echoes and then calls into question Mikhail Bakhtin’s efforts to maintain a distinction between novelistic and poetic discourse—the former being polyvocal; the latter, hegemonic and authorial. Students consider a variety of representative particulars (from albums to books and films) so as to glean the contours of Dylan’s aesthetic and political philosophy. We strive to answer the following questions: How and why does Dylan position his particular forms of literary music as a balance between the novelistic and the poetic, the musical and the literary? Does he avoid abandoning the author to the vagaries of polyvocal potential while also eschewing a finite (i.e., authorial) perception of a socio-political reality? Does his unpredictability signal an effort to get beyond (what we might think of as) a postmodern sense of aesthetic and political “exhaustion”? What are Dylan’s politics?

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in 12 credits of 200- or 300-level ENGL courses

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 495: Twentieth Century Literature | Trauma Narratives
Term: Fall 2026
Session: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Lana Krys

This course examines how traumatic experiences are represented—often through Gothic aesthetics—in twentieth-century literature and film at individual, national and global levels. Focusing on the portrayal and theories of trauma, its long-term effects and strategies to cope with it, the course aims to deepen our understanding of psychological and cultural traumas and the events that caused them. We address the following areas of concern: WWI and WWII, the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Holodomor (the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33), the Holocaust, the Cold War and the Chornobyl nuclear disaster of 1986. We read exemplary texts and watch several films, situating these works in their historical and cultural contexts, examining (where applicable) their engagement with the Gothic genre and drawing on theories from cultural, gender and post-colonial studies to address representations of trauma. A selection of readings includes (but is not limited to) works by Erich Maria Remarque, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Celan, Tadeusz Borowski, Cynthia Ozick, Maria Matios, Helen Simpson, Svetlana Alexievich, Sarah Perry and several films.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in 12 credits of 200- or 300-level ENGL courses

Permission Required: No

Course: CRWR 315: Topics in Writing Poetry | Form and Invention
Term: Winter 2027
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Chris Hutchinson

Søren Kierkegaard once said, “The more you limit yourself, the more inventive you must become.” This course moves between peer workshop and an inquiry into the generative constraints of poetic form—from the sonnet and ghazal to the sestina, villanelle, triolet, cento and beyond. We write within and against both traditional and evolving poetic structures, approaching form not as a rulebook but as a system of pressures that shape language and release its energies. In-class exercises and prompts help us along the way.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in CRWR 295

Permission Required: No

Course: CRWR 316: Topics in Literary Non-Fiction | The Lyric Essay
Term: Winter 2027
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Lisa Martin

In this advanced course in writing literary non-fiction, we focus on crafting the lyric essay. What makes something a lyric essay? How do the conventions of the essay genre and the conventions of the lyric mode converge in the form we call the lyric essay? Students read a number of contemporary examples of the lyric essay and experiment with their own approaches to the form. Over the course of the semester, students write, workshop and revise original work with the goal of producing a polished portfolio in this genre.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in CRWR 295

Permission Required: No

Course: CRWR 317: Topics in Creative Writing | The Writer’s Material
Term: Winter 2027
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Lisa Martin

In this course, we take an advanced look at the ways that writers find, develop and work with their “material.” How does a writer know whether to develop an idea as a short story or an essay, a memoir or a book of poems? How do different literary genres, with their conventions and expectations, help to determine and shape the work we do? In this course, we consider the processes of generating and cultivating our own bodies of work. In the process, students refine their understanding of the requirements, limits and capacities of different literary genres. Through artistic exploration and experimentation, workshopping and revision, and with a core focus on learning to locate and develop their own artistic material, each student in this course produces a portfolio of original creative work.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in CRWR 295

Permission Required: No

Course: CRWR 317: Topics in Creative Writing | Creepy Shorts, The Short Horror Film
Term: Winter 2027
Section: AS02
Instructor: Jacqueline Baker

In this introductory screenwriting course, students learn about short film structure and script conventions, making reference to contemporary examples of the genre and outline, write, workshop and revise their own original short horror scripts.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in CRWR 295

Permission Required: No

Course: CRWR 404: Advanced Seminar Creative Writing | The Poetics of Narrative
Term: Winter 2027
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Chris Hutchinson

In this advanced poetry seminar, students study and write narrative poetry, a mode often positioned in productive tension with the lyric. Where lyric poetry tends toward the compression and intensification of a moment, narrative poetry unfolds across time, giving life to characters, events and consequences. We study how contemporary poets complicate this distinction, blending lyric interiority with narrative scope and momentum. Readings include major contemporary narrative poets as well as selected thinkers and critics who have reflected on the poetics of narrative. Alongside discussions of assigned texts, the course functions as a workshop where students’ original narrative poems are rigorously discussed, critiqued and revised.

Prerequisites: A minimum grades of C- in 9 credits of 300-level CRWR and consent of the department

Permission Required: Yes. Students should write to the instructor (hutchinsonc5@macewan.ca) with a rationale for wishing to take the course and a list of creative writing courses they have already taken.

Course: ENGL 350: Topics in Romantic Literature | Prose Works of the Romantic Period
Term: Winter 2027
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Mark Smith

In this course, students read a selection of prose works by novelists and essayists of the Romantic period (roughly 1780–1830) such as William Godwin, Frances Burney, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (in translation), Sir Walter Scott, James Hogg, Mary Shelley, Thomas Love Peacock, Heinrich von Kleist (in translation), Jane Austen and Thomas De Quincey.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in three credits of 200- or 300-level ENGL, not including ENGL 205, ENGL 207, ENGL 211 or ENGL 297

Permission Required: No.

Course: ENGL 368: Topics in Race and Gender | Women on Fire
Term: Winter 2027
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Sara Grewal

In this topics course, we take as our subject representations of gender in relation to the practice of self-immolation: how do race, gender, sexuality and their intersections impact the way audiences “read” the act of self-immolation? We begin with literary representations of fire and gender from both fictional and nonfictional genres including excerpts of Fahrenheit 451, the Ramayana and various representations of the practice of sati. We then complicate our reading of these texts with reference to several key research texts that problematize the representation of such acts from the combined perspective of both gender studies and postcolonial studies. Students complete a research essay combining the research texts from class with their own independent research in order to support a close reading of one of our literary texts that explores questions of gender, agency and representation.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in ENGL 102 and in three credits of university ENGL, not including ENGL 108, ENGL 111, ENGL 199 or ENGL 211

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 381: Topics in Post-Colonial Lit | Between the British and Russian Empires
Term: Winter 2027
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Lana Krys

The events of the twentieth century saw the fall of the imperial world order that extended over Africa, the Middle East and the Caribbean and the birth of new forms of imperialism, expressed, for instance, in the political power struggle of the Cold War that divided Europe into two separate areas of East and West. It also saw an emergence of a cohort of national states that tried to reassess their colonial past and develop their own, autonomous political and cultural identities. The literature exploring these processes and produced out of such imperial conditions is the subject of this course. We employ the post-colonial theory as a unifying arch to focus on the topics of hegemonic discourses, othering, subaltern people and their resistance to colonial power, the question of identities as well as the effects of colonialism. Readings include a selection of works from the ex-colonies of the British Empire as well as from the national states, particularly Ukraine, that emerged out of the Russian Empire. Overall, the goal of the course is to map historical linkages between colonialism and neo-colonialism and identify the role literature can play in challenging the predominant imperial discourses.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in ENGL 102 and in three credits of university ENGL, not including ENGL 108, ENGL 111, ENGL 199 or ENGL 211

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 382: Topics in Literary Studies | Literary Disability Studies
Term: Winter 2027
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Daniel Martin

This course introduces students to literary disability studies. Students examine how literary texts across periods and genres represent intellectual and physical disabilities and how disability studies scholars read those texts critically. Class discussions explore how narratives shape and are shaped by cultural understandings of embodiment, normativity and difference. Readings focus on works by authors with disabilities alongside canonical texts that engage with themes of illness, impairment and neurodivergence. Critical readings explore how disability intersects with race, gender, class and sexuality and how literary expressions both challenge and reinforce ableist ideologies.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in three credits of 200- or 300-level ENGL, not including ENGL 205, ENGL 207, ENGL 211 or ENGL 297

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 388: Topics in Film Studies | Special Effects
Term: Winter 2027
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Mike Perschon

Francis Ford Coppola said that “the very earliest people who made film were magicians,” referring to the likes of French filmmaker Georges Méliès, a stage magician who turned his hands to “trick films” in the earliest days of cinema. Today, the special effects that smashed a spacecraft into the man in the moon are everywhere, not just in the “trick films” of genre movies like Avatar or The Avengers, but in serious period dramas and avant-garde film. This course takes students on many journeys: from the earth to the moon, along the Yellow Brick Road, speeding away from an enraged T. Rex, before navigating the complexity of walking into Mordor, discovering the folks behind the curtain who continue to be magicians of sight and sound on the silver screen.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in ENGL 288 or BCSC 205

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 391: Topics in Literary Theory | Ideology and Representation
Term: Winter 2027
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Joshua Toth

This course examines influential efforts to theorize the relationship between dominant Western ideologies and mimetic acts—or representational forms (both literary and visual). By engaging such efforts directly, students consider the possibility that artistic expression never escapes, even if it manages to subvert ideological inertia. At the same time, students look at the various ways theories of ideology and representation have informed or run parallel to the practice of literary production and study. A broad range of primary texts by influential philosophers and theorists are considered (e.g., texts by Plato, Aristotle, Marx, Freud, McLuhan, Foucault, Kristeva, Jameson, Hayles and Žižek). In the end, the course functions as both a historical survey of influential theoretical texts and an introduction to theory as a tool for productive textual analysis. Students thus encounter and examine the various recurrent themes or problems that define “literary theory” from the fact that all art is a “lie” to the ideological function of reproductive technologies and electronic media.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in 6 credits of 200- or 300-level university courses

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 488: Studies in Auteurs | Yasujiro Ozu, Mike Leigh
Term: Winter 2027
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Mark Smith

This seminar explores a selection of work by two important film-makers: the mid-20th-century Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu and the late-20th-century English director Mike Leigh. Both auteurs produced a body of fictional work distinguished by the effort to represent everyday life in their respective lands. “Everydayness” is an elusive concept, but film scholar Ray Carney pinpoints one such quality in the work of both directors: “Leigh’s characters…like Ozu’s, do not move through their experiences to get out of them, to arrive at a point of clarification and resolution beyond them. There are no visionary insights, no flashes of awareness, no position attainable outside of these movements.” Typical Ozu and Leigh storylines are driven by shifting relationships between characters—especially shifting family relationships—rather than by startling external events, crises or recoveries. There is usually no clear hero or heroine we are guided to identify with; both directors eschew expository shortcuts such as flashbacks and voice-overs as well as manipulative lighting and extra-diegetic sound. The viewer must interpret the “turbulent expressive surfaces” of an Ozu or a Leigh film just as its characters must make sense of the utterances and body language of the other people they interact socially with. While those conditions could make for dark moodiness or alienation effects, Carney describes both Ozu’s and Leigh’s oeuvres as “essentially comical”: “they hold experience lightly.”

We watch half a dozen of Ozu’s films—Late Spring (1949), Tokyo Story (1953), Equinox Flower (1958), A Story of Floating Weeds (1959), The End of Summer (1961) and An Autumn Afternoon (1962)—and six or seven of Leigh’s—Bleak Moments (1971), The Kiss of Death (1977), Meantime (1983), The Short and Curlies [short] (1987), High Hopes (1988), Life Is Sweet (1990), Secrets and Lies (1996) and Another Year (2010).

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in one of ENGL 288 or BCSC 205 and in 9 credits of 200- or 300-level ENGL courses

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 489: Themes, Traditions, Phenomena | Tree Lit: Ecocritical Approaches
Term: Winter 2027
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dave Buchanan

This course explores trees in literature as a case study for ecocriticism, an ecological approach to literary studies that focuses on relationships between humans and the environment. We’ll consider how trees in literature are associated with ideas of spirituality and biophilia (the human tendency to be drawn to nature); capitalism and colonialism; resilience and reciprocity; and how the fate of trees has become central to concerns around climate change. Students will engage with a selection of key works of ecocritical theory and mostly contemporary primary works of literary non-fiction, fiction, poetry and film in which trees play a central role. Readings could include works by John Muir, Mary Oliver, Dr. Seuss, John Green, Michael Christie, Elif Shafak, John Vaillant and Robin Wall Kimmerer as well as films such as Avatar and The Hidden Life of Trees.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in 12 credits of 200- or 300-level ENGL courses

Permission Required: No