These seminars are intended specifically for students in the English Honours Program. However, other students who have demonstrated a high level of competence in literary studies may be admitted to the seminars when space is available by applying to one of the Co-Directors of Majors and Honours, preferably before the general university registration period. The subjects of Honours seminars change each year. Interested students should consult the Department's Undergraduate Handbook.

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ENGL5083Literary Theory and Critical Practice3 ch (3C) (W)
A study of the development of literary theory and criticism, with some attention to critical practice. Required for the Single and Joint Honours programs.

NOTE: Students cannot obtain credit for both ENGL 3083 and ENGL 5083.

ENGL5127William Blake's Early Illuminated Poetry (O)3 ch (3S) (W)
"I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's" – so wrote William Blake (1757-1827), a radical Romantic poet-engraver, painter, and printmaker. In this course, we will examine some of Blake's best known early illuminated poems, many of which Blake produced during an exceptionally productive and turbulent period of the 1790s, when he lived in Lambeth, on the south side of the Thames. In addition to close readings and grappling with Blake's visionary mythology, we will keep a foot in what Saree Makdisi, in his study of Blake, aptly calls "the impossible history of the 1790s." Against the caricature of Blake as an ahistorical madman-artist outside of his own time, we will track how Blake's work confronts the economics, politics, religion, and emergent ideas in the arts and sciences of the Romantic era.

Prerequisite: B+ average in ENGL; open to ENGL Honours Students.
ENGL5138Beasts and Beauties (O) 3 ch (3S) (W)
Woof. Meow. Oink. This course examines the wide array of representations of animals in nineteenth-century British literature. While acknowledging the importance of Darwinian evolutionary theory, we will focus on the literary and artistic representations of humanity's changing relationship with the animal. Threaded throughout the novels, poetry, essays, political cartoons, and taxidermy art, the figure of the animal becomes a vexing intersection for the overlapping discourses of race, gender, class, community, and ethics in the nineteenth century. At once an object to be preserved and displayed in the cabinets of natural history, the animal was also garnering increased sympathy and legal protection as new societies against animal cruelty were founded and Acts were passed (e.g., the Cruelty to Animals Act, 1876). In order to enrich our understanding of the animal's role within the nineteenth-century British imaginary, we consider popular representations of nineteenth-century animality, including the political cartoons of James Gillray and the public's response to the development of zoos.

Prerequisite: B+ average in ENGL; open to ENGL Honours students.
ENGL5144Poverty and American Literature (O)3 ch (3S) (W)
A striking feature of the United States is the weakness of its welfare state. One reason for this weakness is many Americans' belief that welfare recipients fall into the category of the undeserving poor: citizens who are responsible for their poverty. This course explores literary texts that address causes and effects of poverty and grapple with the problem of representing it. The course asks questions like the following: How have the aesthetics of poverty changed since the early twentieth century? How might writers represent the poor without abjecting them?

Prerequisite: B+ average in ENGL; open to ENGL Honours students.
ENGL5148African-American Literature (O)3 ch (3S) (W)
"The problem of the Twentieth-Century is the problem of the color line," W.E.B. Du Bois announced in 1903. Du Bois wrote when Jim Crow racism was firmly in place in the United States, segregating African Americans, ensuring their impoverishment, and denying them political representation. This course explores Jim Crow's legacy in twentieth- and twenty-first century African-American literature. Why are Americans still haunted by Jim Crow? What would it take to exorcise that ghost?

Prerequisite: B+ average in ENGL; open to ENGL Honours students.
ENGL5153Narratives of the Sea (O)3 ch (3S) (W)
Examine novels and poems featuring the sea by international authors. Narratives of sea voyages alternate with land-based tales with oceanic obsessions, prompting discussion of the varied meanings attributed to the sea by literary writers. While archetypal themes of exploration, discovery, return, initiation, endurance, risk, immobilization, and the quest have traditionally shaped sea narratives, the course also considers imperialism and nationalism, slavery and naval power, diaspora and exile, ecology and the environment, and masculinity and femininity.

Prerequisite: B+ average in ENGL; open to ENGL Honours students.
ENGL5167The American Sitcom and Feminist Theory (O)3 ch (3S) (W)
This course examines American sitcoms and feminist writing and activism from the 1950s to the present. Taking into account the generic conventions of the situational comedy, the seminar explores how the sitcom has engaged with debates within feminist thought, especially around race, economic structures, gender and sexual identities, reproductive rights, and gender-based violence. By linking theory to television, the course investigates both intellectual and activist history and the ways corporate culture resists, responds to, and creates social change.

Prerequisite: B+ average in ENGL; open to ENGL Honours students.
ENGL5184Identity in Atlantic-Canadian Literature (O)3 ch (3S) (W)
In this course, we will examine the central theme of identity in the poetry, fiction, drama, and film of contemporary Atlantic Canada. We will study a diverse range of primary course texts, addressing key questions concerning personal and collective identities as they relate to race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and region. Region will indeed play a significant role in our readings of these texts – from the representation of racism and violence in Halifax-based poet El Jones's spoken word pieces and the social tensions of 1940s Fredericton in George Elliott Clarke's novel George & Rue to Maritime mental health care in Lynn Coady's Strange Heaven and the (figurative and literal) journey of two Two-Spirit brothers in Bretton Hannam's short film Wildfire. Our central readings of authors from the Maritimes and Newfoundland will be guided by secondary sources about issues related to Atlantic-Canadian histories and identities.

Prerequisite: B+ average in ENGL; open to ENGL Honours students.
ENGL5189Contemporary Canadian Long Poem (O)3 ch (3S) (W)
Survey the breadth of contemporary Canadian long poems, exploring such issues as the long poem’s relationship with genre and postmodernism; formal and thematic innovations; the tensions between lyric and narrative, with connections tothe oral roots in epic poetry; and the politics of voice and identity. Poets studied include Dionne Brand, Anne Carson, George Elliott Clarke, Louise Bernice Halfe, Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, bpNichol, Michael Ondaatje, Lisa Robertson, Fred Wah, and Phyllis Webb.

 
Prerequisite: B+ average in ENGL; open to ENGL Honours students.

ENGL5193Dirty Nature Writing (O)3 ch (3S) (W)
Explore dirty nature writing, a “composter” genre that embraces messiness and rejects the nature/culture distinction, through hybrid critical/creative writing. Walk through the weeds and get hands dirty on course excursions. Readings include a wide sampling of works across genres of poetry (Pico; Whitehead), fiction (Simpson; Hurston), academic essays (Sloane; Haraway), and creative non-fiction (Blackwell; Kolbert). Choose to submit creative or critical writing for a final portfolio project.

Prerequisite: B+ average in ENGL; open to ENGL Honours students.
ENGL5198Space, Place, and Identity in Postcolonial Fiction (O)3 ch (3S) (W)

Examine contemporary postcolonial novels from Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia, Australia, the UK, and Canada. Through brief lectures, class discussion, presentations, and short secondary readings, learn how these fictions engage imaginatively with ideas of space, place, identity, and related concepts such as land, nation, boundary, territory, migration, exile, home, dwelling, environment, and self. A recurring theme is displacement: the experience of characters who are forcibly, voluntarily, or otherwise moved from familiar surroundings and prompted to re-establish their identities and renegotiate relations with others. Readings include historical novels and ones set in the present or future, as well as a mix of realistic and more fantastical or speculative narratives. 

Prerequisite: B+ average in ENGL; open to ENGL Honours students.
ENGL5283The Culture of Physic: Women's Writing and Medicine in Early Modern England (O)3 ch (3S) (W)
Examine how the textual practices associated with medical care and knowledge infiltrated women’s literary writing. Diagnosis of illness, making medicines, and preventing disease were recognized as essential knowledge for seventeenth-century mothers and housewives, and women practised medicine at home and as professional practitioners. Beginning with feminist critiques of medicine and relevant history of medicine scholarship, readings explore how early modern autobiography, poetry, fiction, and drama consider reproductive care, childbirth, disease, sociability, disability, race, and empire.

Prerequisite: B+ average in ENGL; open to ENGL Honours students.
ENGL5446Radical Victorian Fiction: Narrating Social Inequality (O)3 ch (3S) (W)

Examine the representation of social inequality and gain insight into the form and function of difference in Victorian fiction. Develop an understanding of the relationship between literature and the formation of social identities - particularly how novels give expression to the evolution of ideas about class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability during this period. Investigate themes such as the representation of difference as 'monstrous' in gothic fiction: the connection between literary realism and revolution; the role of racial Otherness in the construction of Empire; and the formal impact of gender and sexual dissidence. Discover how difference is conceived of and represented historically - as well as how it shapes our world today. 

Prerequisities: B+ average in ENGL: open to ENGL Honours students.
ENGL5623Re-Conceiving the Long Poem (O)3 ch (3S) (W)
Engage with current theories of the contemporary long poem — using recent long poems by Dionne Brand, Maggie Nelson, and Tommy Pico as case studies — through discussion, seminar presentations, facilitation questions, and a final assignment that offers both a critical and a creative writing option.

Prerequisite: B+ average in ENGL; open to ENGL Honours students.
ENGL5684Indigenous Futurism: Speculative Fiction and New Media for a New World (O)3 ch (3S) (W)
How can Indigenous epistemologies help in a world on the edge of economic, environmental, and spiritual catastrophe? This course examines how Indigenous authors use science fiction to reimagine the present and future of Indigenous communities. We explore what alternate realities authors envision and how they repurpose sci-fi conventions to reflect Indigenous knowledge and histories and to address issues such as colonization, history, land claims, and environmental destruction. The course examines a range of topics including time travel and reclaiming history, as well as dystopian visions of the city, the land, and the body.

Prerequisite: B+ average in ENGL; open to ENGL Honours students.
ENGL5687Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous Literature (O)3 ch (3S) (W)
Explore how Indigenous people viewed gender prior to European contact and how the imposition of Christianity and the Indian Act have impacted gender and sexuality in Indigenous communities. Colonization has had a significant impact on gender and sexuality in Indigenous cultures across Turtle Island. Explore the ways in which contemporary Indigenous authors reclaim Indigenous conceptions of gender and sexuality in a selection of novels, poems, and nonfiction works.

Prerequisite: B+ average in ENGL; open to ENGL Honours students.
ENGL5743Neoliberal Fictions (O)3 ch (3S) (W)
Examine contemporary American novels that respond to neoliberal ideology and imagine alternatives to it. Neoliberalism, a doctrine that asserts the primacy of the free market, has shaped what seems politically, economically, and culturally possible since the 1980s. Explore how neoliberalism transformed the contemporary novel and how certain works of literature, in turn, guided the evolution of neoliberalism or challenged its dominance. Authors discussed may include Don DeLillo, Karen Tei Yamashita, Colson Whitehead, Chang-Rae Lee, Jennifer Egan, Jesmyn Ward, Jonathan Lethem, Rachel Kushner, and Richard Powers.Prerequisite: B+ average in ENGL: open to ENGL Honours students.
ENGL5983Women's Writing in the Atlantic World (O)3 ch (3S) (W)
This seminar explores writing in English from the early modern to the contemporary period by English women and by Indigenous, Black, and Settler women living in what we now call northeastern North America. The Atlantic World is defined by the colonial project that links the Americas with England and western Africa and by the circulation of commodities, ideas, diseases, and enslaved and free people. The course looks at how women's writing variously participated in or resisted this colonial history in thinking about issues such as race, slavery, nature, place, violence, history, and gender and sexuality.

Prerequisite: B+ average in ENGL; open to ENGL Honours students.
ENGL5985The Double in Women's Fiction (O)3 ch (3S) (W)
Survey the role of the double with a focus on contemporary fiction, exploring how social constraints have shaped literary doubles in women's literature. Examine how the double allows women writers to navigate, survive, and undermine the continued limitations placed on them. Authors include Charlotte Brontë, Daphne Du Maurier, Patricia Highsmith, Jean Rhys, Louis Erdrich, Namwali Serpell, Ottessa Moshfegh, Toni Morrison, and Bora Chang. Tropics to be discussed include the body, beauty, race, class, and sexuality.Prerequisite: B+ average in ENGL: open to ENGL Honours students.