Courses

Course: CRWR 316: Topics in Literary Non-Fiction | The Lyric Essay
Term: Fall 2023
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Lisa Martin

This advanced course in writing literary non-fiction will focus on writing the lyric essay. In this course, we will ask: 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 will read a number of contemporary examples of the lyric essay and will experiment with their own approaches to the form. Over the course of the semester, students will write, workshop, and revise original work with the goal of producing a polished, long-form lyric essay or a collection of linked short-form lyric essays.

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

Permission Required: No

Course: CRWR 317: Topics in Creative Writing | Creepy Shorts: The Short Horror Script
Term: Fall 2023
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Jackie Baker

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

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

Permission Required: No

Course: CRWR 317: Topics in Creative Writing | Voiceprints: Collaborative Storytelling
Term: Fall 2023
Section: AS02
Instructor: TBA

In this seminar, students will explore techniques of interviewing and shaping stories in a collaborative process. For their main project, each student will interview a member of the Edmonton Police Veterans’ Association and write, workshop and revise that member’s story, taking into account storyteller feedback. The course provides a foundation in the genres of memoir, biography and community storytelling as well as introduces best practices in interviewing, transcription and confidentiality. Students ultimately learn to shape and craft a story while reproducing the rhythms of a storyteller’s voice.

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

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 342: Topics in Long 18th Century | The Age of Satire
Term: Fall 2023
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Dave Buchanan

Satire, which Northrop Frye defined as an attack using wit or humor, was the dominant literary mode of the long eighteenth century, prominent in the poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction of the period. Almost all of the great figures of Augustan literature, from Swift and Pope to Behn and Montagu to Fielding and Burney, wrote some form of satire, and readers of popular pamphlets and periodicals in the 1700s couldn’t get enough of it. And despite the passage of 300 years, satire may well be the literary mode of the eighteenth-century that mostly strongly resonates with the tastes of our current one. This course will explore the various types, purposes, and impacts of satire in the long eighteenth century, as well as the debates around it, touching on subjects ranging from the Woman Question to politics, literary feuds, class tensions, marriage, and social mores of the day.

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 | Tales from Ukraine: Culture and Politics
Term: Fall 2023
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Sergiy Yakovenko

The course will introduce students to a representative range of twentieth-century Ukrainian authors in translation. A site of major geopolitical shifts, Ukraine in the twentieth century never stopped being an integral part of Europe; therefore, this course aims to show how the best works of Ukrainian literature have reflected the ever-changing political and cultural reality while preserving its distinct national element and intellectual power. Students will read and discuss a selection of texts by writers as diverse as Lesia Ukrainka, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Valerian Pidmohylny, and Valeriy Shevchuk. In addition, we will consider some hallmark works about historical Ukraine from other national literary traditions: Russian (Nikolai Gogol), English (Joseph Conrad), and Polish (Bruno Schulz). The selection will cross genres—short story, novella, drama—and feature themes of national identity, social status, psychological struggle, and ethical choice. The course will also include a creative writing component.

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 389: Topics in Children’s Lit | Children of the Anthropocene
Term: Fall 2022
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Bill Thompson

This course examines the children of the Anthropocene, that most recent period of geological time defined by the impact of humanity on global ecosystems. The course will include a range of children’s and young adult authors within the framework of the Anthropocene, from L. M. Montgomery to C. S. Lewis to Lev Grossman, exploring the ways in which these authors locate their characters in relation to their impact on the natural world.

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 | Short Story Collections in the Academy and Literary Marketplace
Term: Fall 2023
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Sarah Copland

How does publication context—in a collection, a periodical, or an anthology, for example—affect the production and reception of short fiction? What makes a short story collection a collection? Must it have a unifying principle? What kinds of textual features might function as unifying principles? What is the relationship between the short story collection and the short story cycle? How has the short story collection developed, in the breadth and depth of its interests, forms, techniques, publication formats, practitioners, and readership over the past century? This course invites students to explore these questions via engagement with a range of modern and contemporary short story collections as well as with short story theory, genre theory, and studies in book history and print culture. Exploring these questions from a range of theoretical perspectives while reading a range of modern and contemporary short story collections will also help students to understand and respond to the form’s continuing marginalization in the academy and in the literary marketplace.

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

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 402: Studies in Authors | Rainer Werner Fassbinder & Mike Leigh
Term: Fall 2023
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Mark Smith

This seminar will explore a selection of work by two major Western European film-makers (born in 1943 and 1945 respectively), both of whom came to maturity in the late 1960s/early 1970s – Fassbinder in the time of the West German “economic miracle” and Leigh at around the same time in the U.K. Fassbinder was a prodigy who died in his late thirties after having created dozens of films. Leigh made his first full-length film at around the same time as Fassbinder but matured as an artist later (and has lived into old age). Both were playwrights as well as auteurs. The two share a progressive politics. Leigh is known for his attentiveness to working class life and to the way the boundaries and exclusions of social class were re-asserted in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. Fassbinder was relentless in his prosecution of the residual fascisms and historical amnesia of German society in the decades after WW II. His queer sensibility – not at all well received in West Germany in the seventies and eighties – is celebrated today. And several films by both Leigh and Fassbinder have taken up the complexities of inter-racial relationships. Above all, what these two film-makers have in common, and what the course will attempt to bring into focus, is a certain literary quality – one indebted to modern writers including Chekhov, Beckett, Brecht, and Pinter. Fassbinder’s oeuvre has attracted much scholarly commentary, and a couple of book-length studies of Leigh’s work have appeared in recent years as well. Over the semester, we will watch six of Fassbinder’s films – Baal (1970), The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Fox and His Friends (1975), The Third Generation (1979), The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) – and six of Leigh’s – Bleak Moments (1971), Meantime (1983), Life Is Sweet (1990), Naked (1993), Secrets and Lies (1996), Another Year (2010).

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

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 489: Literary Themes, Traditions, and Phenomena | Gothic and Politics
Term: Fall 2023
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Lana Krys

This seminar introduces students to a representative sampling of West and East European Gothic fiction. We will examine the main writers of the Gothic genre during the “long” nineteenth century, paying attention to how the movement originated in Britain and then spread across Europe, developing various offshoots (the comic Gothic, the sentimental Gothic, the psychological Gothic, and the frenetic Gothic). The course will start with the West European Gothic novel and then explore its development in the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, tracing the manner in which the Gothic form became naturalized and filled with local monsters, horrific experiences, and haunted places related to these lands. Given that the Gothic discourse historically served as a platform for exploring social fears and anxieties that were too controversial to be addressed directly, we will look at how various taboos (social, racial, and political) as well as questions of gender, ethnicity, national culture, and nationalism manifest themselves through Gothic symbolism. We will read representative texts (by Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Prosper Mérimée, Mykola Hohol/Nikolai Gogol, and Bram Stoker, among others) and watch several films, placing the respective works in their historical and cultural contexts. In short, the seminar will explore the conventions and local manifestations of Gothic fiction, while examining the ideological uses to which the genre was put by the writers of the time.

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

Permission Required: No

Course: CRWR 315: Topics in Writing Poetry | The Return of the Sonnet
Term: Winter 2024
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Chris Hutchinson

On the recent occasion of Diane Seuss winning the Pulitzer Prize for a book of so-called “sonnets”, we will read excerpts from Seuss’s well-received book, frank: sonnets, as well as other examples of sonnets — both conventional and unconventional — from the past and present. Our primary focus will be to write and workshop our own sonnet-like poems, all the while pushing, pulling, bending, and maybe even breaking this received form for our own purposes and amusement.

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 2024
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Lisa Martin

In this course, we will 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 poem, short story, essay, screenplay, or song? How do different literary genres, with their conventions and expectations, help to determine and shape the work we do? In this course, we will consider the processes of generating and cultivating our own bodies of work, while drawing on the same material to experiment with writing in multiple genres. What might writing both a poem and a personal essay about the same memory teach us? Or a short story and a piece of literary journalism based on the same incident? Through discussion, reading, workshopping, reflection, and revision, each student will develop a portfolio of original work in at least two genres. In the process, students will reflect on the relationship between their material as writers and the genres they choose to write in.

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

Permission Required: No

Course: CRWR 404: Advanced Seminar in Creative Writing | A Dream of Mid-late 20th Century American Poetry and Poetics
Term: Winter 2024
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Chris Hutchinson

According to Freud, poets are wishful daydreamers who “make use of an occasion of the present to construct, based on the patterns of the past, a picture of the future.” Conducted primarily as a workshop, this course will also serve as a brief introduction to a group of mid-late 20th century American poets who were prone to dreaming on the page in prescient ways. We will make use of the present moment and, based on our readings of the recent past, create and critique our own poetic visions of the future.

Prerequisites: Minimum grades of C- in 12 credits of 300-level CRWR and consent of the department.

Permission Required: Yes

How to Enrol: Students must write to the instructor (hutchinsonc5@macewan.ca) by October 15, saying why they wish to take the course and including a list of creative writing courses previously taken. Students will be notified by October 30. After October 30, applications will be considered on a first-come, first-served basis.

Course: ENGL 218: Reading Gender | The Female Gothic
Term: Winter 2024
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Lana Krys

This course will explore the power of female Gothic writing in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. We will study the manner in which the Gothic literary sensibility, associated with horror, violence, mystery, eroticism, sentimental excess, ghost-haunted rooms, secret passages, and sinister settings, became a fitting mold for women writers to both expose and express a number of concerns associated with women’s dissatisfaction with patriarchy, their entrapment in domestic spheres, their fears of expected childbirth, their demands for universal suffrage, the rise of feminism, and women’s views on sexuality and the body. Exemplary texts will be considered, and the course’s survey of three centuries of Female Gothic (a term originated by Ellen Moers in 1976) will allow us to examine how women writers inquired into the horrors that arose from public mythologies related to gender and how they created space to explore hidden aspects of gender formulation.

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 350: Topics in Romantic Literature | British Romantic Poetry
Term: Winter 2024
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 382: Topics in Literary Studies | Literature and Dysfluency: Stutter, Stammer, Block, Blurt, Repeat 
Term: Winter 2024
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Daniel Martin

This course introduces students to the emerging field of Dysfluency Studies with a particular focus on the representation and expression of stuttering, stammering, and similar forms of dysfluent speech in literature and popular culture from the nineteenth century to the present day. Students will read fiction, poetry, autobiography, and literary/critical theory that engage with and challenge the cultural, subjective, and aesthetic ‘problems’ often associated with stuttering, stammering, aphasia, echolalia, coprolalia, and other forms of dysfluency. Additionally, students will also watch a range of films and multimedia performance pieces about stuttered speech. A central goal of the course will be to interrogate how Western culture privileges fluency and marginalizes dysfluent voices. We will focus on finding personal and political agency and creative expression in dysfluent voices that are all too often marginalized or mocked as ugly, nervous, suspicious, or generally irritating.

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 389: Topics in World Literature | Studies in Diasporic Fiction
Term: Winter 2024
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Rashmi Jyoti

This course aims to map the dimensions of diasporic literature through a range of fiction drawn from across the globe, with special focus on texts that are the subject of postcolonial critique. This course will explore how this concept has shifted over time and how diasporic fiction at the intersections of race, class, gender, migrancy, transnationalism, national identity, hybridity, belonging, resistance, and creativity has transformed our ways of understanding the possibilities of diasporic writing. The students will study the formal elements and conventions of this genre with a focus on how diasporic writers adapt this literary form to their own ideological and aesthetic purposes. The main objectives are to critically analyze these works in all their complexity and diversity, and to explore how these writers with their experience of the broader world, utilize their unique artistic modes to refract their intertwined historical, social, and cultural contexts in which the texts were created. The core texts focused on the 20th and 21st centuries texts, including novels and short fiction, will be studied from a range of critical perspectives. The students will broaden their understanding of the diasporic fiction and examine how its recent interventions impact our socio-cultural landscape today.

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 | Visions of the Posthuman
Term: Winter 2024
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Josh Toth

This course explores depictions of the “posthuman” in 20th and 21st century film. Class discussion will be guided by the following question: how do cinematic representations of posthumanity contribute to ongoing debates about human identities (racial, gendered, sexual) and humanity’s relationship to non-human others? The films studied will be as varied as the “cyborgs” and “monsters” depicted – from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Tod Browning’s Freaks to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, David Cronenberg’s The Fly, Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You. In considering such films alongside critiques of patriarchal humanism and theories of posthumanism, students will grapple with two distinct but interconnected issues: 1) the way in which the computerization and bio-manipulation of “humanity” has undermined our ability to appeal to a universal moral core, or “soul”; and 2) the way in which the growing reality of the cyborg and/or transhuman liberates us from the restrictions of “humanism” – i.e.. the philosophical position that there is an essential human quality that can be identified and thus employed as an excuse for hatred and exclusionary behavior (from misogyny, to racism, to animal cruelty).

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 391: Topics in Literary Theory | Ideology, Representation, Interpretation
Term: Winter 2024
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Josh 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 will consider the possibility that artist expression never escapes, even if it manages to subvert, ideological inertia. At the same time, students will 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 will be considered (e.g., texts by Plato, Aristotle, Marx, Freud, McLuhan, Foucault, Kristeva, Jameson, Hayles, and Žižek, etc.) In the end, the course will function as both an historical survey of influential theoretical texts and an introduction to theory as a tool for productive textual analysis. Students will 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 three credits of 200- or 300-level ENGL, not including ENGL 205, ENGL 207, ENGL 211, or ENGL 297.

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 391: Topics in Literary Theory | Theorizing Embodiment
Term: Winter 2024
Section: AS02
Instructor: Dr. Daniel Martin

This course introduces students to critical and theoretical approaches to the relationships between bodies, texts, and their cultural contexts. What does it mean to have a body? How do writers represent the body in poetry and prose? What are bodies composed of? What is the relationship between language and embodiment, or between language and desire? How do writers represent the body in print, or on screen? What are the differences between an individual body and a social body? How do cultural representations and metaphors of embodiment influence identity? What is cyborg embodiment? What is affect? What is a ‘normal’ body in the first place? Students explore such questions through a wide range of readings in literary and critical theory focusing on readings in psychoanalysis, deconstruction, post-structuralism, feminism and gender studies, queer theory, affect theory, disability studies, medical humanities, film/screen theory, and trans studies.

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 489: Themes, Traditions, Phenomena | Building Imaginary Worlds in Fantasy and Science Fiction
Term: Winter 2023
Section: AS01
Instructor: Dr. Daniel Martin

This course seeks to explore the creation and building of imaginary worlds through a curated selection of texts and films from twentieth and twenty-first century fantasy and science fiction. According to Mark J. P. Wolf in Building Imaginary worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation, “World-building is often something that occurs as a background activity, allowing storytelling to remain in the foreground of the audience’s experience. At times, however, world-building may overtake storytelling.” Authors and film-makers build their imaginary worlds using a variety of techniques, such that the storyworld often becomes inextricably woven into the fabric of the text. Beginning with such texts as J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Frank Herbert’s Dune, the course will explore the process of sub-creation and the ways in which these and other authors and media franchise create and build their imaginary worlds.

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

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 489: Themes, Traditions, Phenomena | Interlacing and Intermediality in Beowulfiana
Term: Winter 2024
Section: AS02
Instructor: Dr. Mike Perschon

While arguably the oldest work of English literature, Beowulf continues to be reinvented in new forms, from film to comic book to board game. This course will engage in a series of comparative studies of the original Anglo-Saxon poem (albeit in translation) and modern retellings. The course will include several secondary sources in adaptation theory as well as Beowulf scholarship. In addition to several translations of the original poem including Howell D. Chickering’s scholarly edition, Seamus Heaney’s celebrated version and Maria Dahvana Headley’s revisionist translation, we will study Tolkien’s, “The Monsters and the Critics,” his ground-breaking essay on the poem; John Gardner’s Grendel, which retells the poem’s events from the monster’s perspective; the first three Alien films and the first and most recent Predator films; Michael Crichton’s historical fiction, Eaters of the Dead and its film version, The Thirteenth Warrior; Santiago Garcia and David Rubin’s graphic novel; Roger Zemeckis’ animated film; Maria Dahvana Headley’s literary novel, The Mere Wife, and the Beowulf: Age of Heroes roleplaying game.

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

Permission Required: No

Course: CRWR 314: Topics in Writing Fiction | Crafting the Literary Short Story
Term: Fall 2024
Session: AS01
Instructor: Lisa Martin

What makes a short story “literary”? Other than length, what are the differences between short fiction and longer fiction? What skills do writers need to develop in order to craft a unified and cohesive literary short story? Through the use of targeted writing exercises, this course will help students to identify and develop the component skills for crafting the literary short story.

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

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 218: Reading Gender | Women in Gothic Literature
Term: Fall 2024
Session: AS01
Instructor: Lana Krys

This course will explore the theme of gender in Gothic literature, starting from the nineteenth century to the present. We will study the manner in which the Gothic literary sensibility, associated with horror, violence, mystery, eroticism, sentimental excess, ghost-haunted rooms, secret passages, and sinister settings, became a fitting mold for writers to both expose and express a number of concerns associated with patriarchy, women’s entrapment in domestic spheres, their fears of expected childbirth, their demands for universal suffrage, the rise of feminism, and views on sexuality and the body. Exemplary texts will be considered to examine how writers inquired into the horrors that arose from public mythologies related to gender and sexuality and how they created space to explore hidden aspects of gender formulation.

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 350: Topics in Romantic Literature | Prose Works of the Romantic Period
Term: Fall 2024
Session: AS01
Instructor: Mark Smith

In this course, students will read a selection of prose works by novelists and essayists of the Romantic period (roughly 1780-1830) such as William Godwin, Matthew Lewis, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sir Walter Scott, James Hogg, Mary Shelley, Thomas Love Peacock, 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 | Queer Women's Writing of the 20th and 21st Centuries
Term: Fall 2024
Session: AS01
Instructor: Kathryn Holland

This course introduces students to texts by and about queer women that have advanced debates about identity, art, and agency within the larger cultural upheavals of the past century. The course will focus on narrative techniques and language depicting women’s varied sexualities; the formation of intertextual networks; and the reception of queer literature by generations of readers.

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 381: Topics in Post-Colonial Lit | The Pakistani Novel
Term: Fall 2024
Session: AS01
Instructor: Sara Grewal

This course considers the wide range of writing from Pakistani novelists in the late 20th and 21st century, including works by Bapsi Sidhwa, Mohsin Hamid, Kamila Shamsie, Sorayya Khan, Muhammad Hanif, and Fatima Bhutto. In considering these works that range from poignant memoir to political satire to social drama, students will gain a familiarity with the historical, social, economic, and political circumstances that influence the shape of Pakistani society. We will also discuss the historical trajectory that brought the novel to prominence as an English-language literary genre in Pakistan. Finally, we will ask to what extent these writers’ works can and/or should be circumscribed by the label “Pakistani”; how do each of these authors simultaneously address both national audiences and international audiences, as well as both local and global concerns?

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 389: Topics in Children's Lit | Monsters and the Monstrous
Term: Fall 2024
Session: AS01
Instructor: Bill Thompson

This course examines monsters and the monstrous in children’s and young adult fantasy and science fiction, from Alice’s Adventures to Harry Potter, and from John Christopher to Suzanne Collins. Using a range of texts, the course will examine the monsters of children’s and young adult literature in relation to shifting definitions of the monstrous and cultural constructions of the child.

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 405: Topics in Canadian Literature | Diasporic and Indigenous Intersections in Contemporary CanLit
Term: Fall 2024
Session: AS01
Instructor: Camille van der Marel

Texts by Indigenous and diasporic authors are often taught in the same Canadian literature classes and tend to share concerns with race, displacement, national community’s limits, and anti-colonial resistance. Despite these overlaps, scholars are only beginning to place diasporic and Indigenous literature in direct dialogue. Instead of isolating each in single-subject analyses or routing their study through a larger CanLit survey, this class draws on a range of Indigenous and diasporic texts—novels, poetry, drama, essays, films, comics, and short stories—to ask: how are Indigenous and diasporic texts marketed, taught, and archived differently from one another in Canada? How have events like the 1994 Writing Thru Race conference drawn connections between Indigenous and diasporic literary communities, and what do lasting controversies over this conference tell us about literary production in Canada today? Is there a role for racialized diasporic communities in Truth and Reconciliation? What about in Indigenous resurgence This class will additionally address the criminalization of racialized and Indigenous peoples, guest-host hierarchies, urban Indigeneity, solidarity’s possibilities and limits, and constellations of co-resistance in Canadian contexts.

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

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 495: Twentieth Century Literature | Narrative Theory: Narrators and Narratees
Term: Fall 2024
Session: AS01
Instructor: Sarah Copland

This course explores the range of innovations narrative fiction writers have undertaken in their use of narrators and narratees, exposing students to concepts of unreliability, omniscience, focalization, unnatural narration, second-person narration, “we” narration, and the often-overlooked narratee. Focusing mostly on modern and contemporary short stories and novels, the course hones students’ understanding of narrative technique and its relation to the texts’ diverse themes and subjects. For example, the political, ethical, and affective engagements of texts like Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, Junot Diaz’s “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie,” and William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” will be understood as rooted in and inextricably tied to these texts’ use of unreliable narration, second-person narration, and “we” narration, respectively. The course pairs primary texts with accessible selections from narrative theorists.

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

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 496: Intersections-Theory & Culture | Historioplastic Metafiction
Term: Fall 2024
Session: AS01
Instructor: Josh Toth

Since (at least) the 1990s, critics have struggled with the ostensible death of postmodernism. While many have argued (or simply assumed) that postmodernism’s cultural dominance has come to an end, its most notorious narrative form—metafiction (or “self-aware” fiction)—has continued to flourish. If postmodernism has indeed come to an end, how do we account for the persistence of metafiction? Are these new works of metafiction no longer postmodern, no longer corrosively ironic? Alternatively, does the persistence of metafiction simply denote the persistence of postmodernism—or even the possibility that postmodernism has dangerously metastasized in the new millennium? How, in short, does this new metafiction tend to function, and to what end? Students will grapple with these questions—and their broader implications (e.g., our contemporary understanding of mimesis, ontology, ethics, etc.)—by examining American metafictional texts produced in the so-called “post-postmodern” era. More specifically, and while considering metafiction’s relation to a number of disparate philosophical trends (from German idealism to “speculative materialism” and “object-oriented ontology”), students will consider texts such as Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Saldivar Plascencia’s The People of Paper, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, Percival Everett’s Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, and Craig Gillespie’s I, Tonya. Proof of metafiction’s persistence, such texts seem indicative (also) of an emergent aesthetic trend that is both a repetition and an “overcoming” of postmodernism. More specifically, students will explore the possibility that recent works of metafiction often sublate the apparent nihilism and moral vacuity of postmodernism by renewing the possibility of grasping what is true, what is real.

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

Permission Required: No

Course: CRWR 316: Topics in Literary Non-Fiction | Why I Write: Writing about Writing
Term: Winter 2025
Section: AS01
Instructor: Lisa Martin

This course will focus on personal autobiographical writing about literary artistic practice. Together, we will consider a number of approaches to “writing about writing” and students will write, workshop, and revise their own original literary essays. Possible model texts will range from James Baldwin’s personal essays to Seamus Heaney’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech to the work Joan Didion famously “stole the title” for from George Orwell—i.e. “Why I Write.” Each student will also leave the course having drafted and revised a short-form Artist Statement suitable for grant applications or applications to graduate programs in Creative Writing.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in CRWR 295

Permission Required: No

Course: CRWR 317: Topics in Creative Writing | Film Adaptation
Term: Winter 2025
Section: AS01
Instructor: Jackie Baker

In this intermediate screenwriting course, students will build on writing and workshop skills learned in CRWR 295 and short film conventions and structures learned in previous screenwriting courses by selecting a short story in the public domain and adapting it to an original short film script. This course will be structured as a workshop. Collaborative peer editing will be weighted equally with creative work.

Prerequisites: A minimum grade of C- in CRWR 295

Permission Required: No

Course: CRWR 404: Advanced Seminar in Creative Writing | The Ghost Story
Term: Winter 2025
Section: AS01
Instructor: Jackie Baker

This intensive seminar will focus on the development of writing and editing skills in the short fiction subgenre of the literary ghost story. In original short stories, students will explore broadly the idea of what it means to be “haunted,” ranging from the purely supernatural or speculative to how hauntings can manifest out of issues of grief, loss, and trauma. Work may include elements of classic horror, fantasy, or science fiction, but high fantasy, YA, and children’s literature will not be appropriate for this course. During the workshop process, students will be required to act as professional writers and editors, critiquing and making suggestions for revision in the work of their peers. Collaborative peer editing will be weighted equally with creative work. Students will be expected to be reading widely both contemporary and classic ghost stories and to make reference to the techniques of the writers of those stories in peer edits and during class discussions.

Prerequisites: Minimum grades of C- in 12 credits of 300-level CRWR and consent of the department. By October 15, 2024, students should write to the instructor (bakerj20@macewan.ca) with a rationale for wishing to take the course and a list of creative writing courses they have already taken. Eligible students will be notified in early November and will be issued a permission number. Please note that after October 30, 2024, applications will be considered on a first-come, first-served basis.

Permission Required: Yes

Course: ENGL 364: Topics 20th/21st Century Lit | Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality in Virginia Woolf and Her Heirs
Term: Winter 2025
Section: AS01
Instructor: Sarah Copland

This course explores selected novels, short stories, essays, and lectures by modernist writer Virginia Woolf, as well as contemporary novels, graphic novels, films, and other media productions based on her work. Our central aim is to understand Woolf’s contributions to the feminist movement, gender theory, sexuality studies, and women’s writing and her legacy in these areas on contemporary writers, artists, and theorists. We trace a lineage of descent and development from, for example, Woolf’s Orlando (1928), whose protagonist changes sex and gender and lives for centuries, to Sally Potter’s 1992 film adaptation. We explore Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), whose representation of marriage, motherhood, childhood, and art are central to the ways in which Alison Bechdel comes to grips with her sexuality, her vocation, and her relationship with her mother in her graphic novel Are You My Mother? (2012). We ground our engagement with the work of Woolf and her heirs in a survey of contemporary feminist Woolf scholarship.

Prerequisites: Minimum grades 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 | Passing
Term: Winter 2025
Section: AS01
Instructor: Josh Toth

This course will consider the way in which “passing”—the act of racial passing, especially—has been depicted in American literature and film since the late-19th century. By considering a wide spectrum of texts—from Mark Twain’s Pudd'nhead Wilson and Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer to James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Nella Larsen’s Passing and (even) Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—we will consider the way in which representations of passing highlight while often subverting America’s tendency toward exclusionary identity politics. Students will consider (also) the ways in which the very possibility of passing frustrates assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, class, national belonging, and humanity. At the same time, students will explore the possibility that literature itself can (and often does) “pass” in ways both radical and subversive.

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 382: Topics in Literary Studies | EcoGothic
Term: Winter 2025
Section: AS01
Instructor: Lana Krys

This course traces the representation of human relationships with the environment in literature and film that have been labelled “ecoGothic.” The course will focus on the cultural productions of the mid to late twentieth century and twenty-first century, exploring the environmental imagination of the Gothic/horror genre through the framework of ecoGothic/ecohorror theories (drawing on recent scholarly investigations in Anthropocene Gothic and folk horror). A selection of readings will include (but is not limited to) works by Margaret Atwood, Stephen King, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Halyna Pahutiak, Helen Simpson, Olga Tokarczuk, Jeff VanderMeer, and several films.

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 | The Horror Movie
Term: Winter 2025
Section: AS01
Instructor: Mike Perschon

Horror is a popular genre that has historically lacked critical and popular respect, despite master director Brian De Palma’s contention that horror is “the closest thing we have today to pure cinema.” This course will look at some of the greatest horror movies ever made, from the silent era all the way to today’s “new horror.” We’ll start with one of the earliest horror films, the German classic Nosferatu, and proceed with a noteworthy example from each decade, experiencing some of horror’s definitive moments, with classics such as Bride of Frankenstein and Cat People, along with drive-in "trash" such as Night of the Living Dead and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, reviled cult classics like John Carpenter’s The Thing, and more recent hits like It Follows. Using Julian Hanich's excellent study of the horror film and affect, Cinematic Emotion in Horro Films and Thrillers, we'll investigate the peculiar pleasure of choosing to be scared out of our minds.

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 391: Topics in Literary Theory | Imitation, Translation, Modernity
Term: Winter 2025
Section: AS01
Instructor: Mark Smith

In this course, students will trace the literary theoretical concepts of imitation and translation from canonical ancient texts by Plato, Aristotle, and Horace through critical statements by writers of the late 17th c., 18th c., Romantic, and modernist periods. After the Enlightenment and the Romantic reaction to it, the concepts of historicity and modernity (or “the modern”) become central to most working theories of poetics and writing. The question is no longer only how does one write? or how does one learn the craft of writing well? It becomes as well how does one write in a way that is right or fitting for the (modern) era in which one lives? How to represent “modern life” in poetry or narrative? The concept of modernity, coiled around the older concepts of mimesis and translation, insinuates itself into all of the texts we will read in the second half of the semester.

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 | Lyric Theory
Term: Winter 2025
Section: AS01
Instructor: Sara Grewal

This course will focus on the genre of lyric poetry by examining theoretical approaches to the form in various schools of thought, from Romanticism to New Criticism to Post-structuralism and beyond. The course will also trace a historical trajectory through which lyric ballooned from a designation for a specific sub-type of poetry to a designation for poetry and “poetic-ness” as a whole. Finally, we will examine debates in approaches to lyric poetry in academic scholarship produced within the last 5-10 years, while also discussing the extent to which lyric holds as a genre and/or theoretical body when applied to poetic practices outside of the West.

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

Permission Required: No

Course: ENGL 489: Themes, Traditions, Phenomena | Nonhuman Narration
Term: Winter 2025
Section: AS01
Instructor: David Hollingshead

This course examines the use of nonhuman narrators in literary fiction over the last fifty years and asks why representations of nonhuman consciousness – including animals, aliens, artificial intelligence, and even inanimate objects – have become an increasingly common response to a variety of sociopolitical problems, from anthropogenic climate change to the afterlives of slavery and settler colonialism. Nonhuman narration is not a recent invention: folk and Indigenous literary traditions have invoked animal perspectives for millennia, while the genre of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “it-narratives” depicted capitalism’s global of extraction and exchange from the commodity’s point of view. And yet, the recent insistence on rendering nonhuman narrators as active political agents suggests that literature’s capacity to imagine perspectives beyond the human makes it an important site for theorizing the uneven and sometimes unpredictable dynamics of social change.

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

Permission Required: No