Second-Year Courses 2025-26

Fall 2025

Spring 2026

Fall 2025 – Course Descriptions

ENGL 204: Business and Technical Writing

Multiple Sections

An introduction to business and technical communication skills with a focus on documents (such as letters and reports) and presentations. Topics may include planning, outlining, summarizing, presenting data, handling references, and editing. The course comprises several practical assignments, including a formal report and an oral presentation. ENGL 204 was formerly called ENGL 225; credit will not be granted for both courses.

ENGL 208: Introduction to Public Speaking

Multiple Sections

An introduction to public speaking that focuses on the creation, organization, and delivery of speeches for non-dramatic purposes. It provides the rhetorical principles of effective and ethical public speaking, offers opportunities to become familiar with different speaking situations, and attempts to instill a sense of the importance of public speech. ENGL 208 was formerly called THEA 203; credit will not be granted for both courses.

ENGL 220: Canadian Literature in Context

Professor Amelia Horsburgh

This iteration of the course explores Canadian literature, specifical the home and kinship with community, of the past 100 years. Race, Indigeneity, immigration, and colonization will be our lens. We will explore what makes a Canadian family, barriers we face, and how this colours our literature. Select authors and works may include Sinclair Ross’s novel As For Me and My House, Margaret Laurence’s short story collection A Bird in the House, Mavis Gallant’s short story collection Home Truths, Bonnie Burnard’s novel A Good House, and Métis poet Gregory Scofield’s Singing Home the Bones.

ENGL 231: Speculative Literature

Professor Bryn Skibo

An exploration of speculative literature, such as science fiction, fantasy, or utopian or dystopian writing, with some historical background. The course might explore a single speculative mode or differences and crossovers between modes.

ENGL 240: Ways of Reading (online asynchronous)

ENGL 273: Ancients and Moderns

Professor Farah Moosa

RESPONDING TO THE CANON

William Hogarth, scene from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, c1735

Join us as we read selected classic British literary texts alongside twentieth and twenty-first century responses to them (primarily plays and novels). Situating our readings in their historical, social, and cultural contexts, we will consider how and why contemporary writers have decided to “write back” to, re-vision, or reimagine canonical works. We will discuss issues of colonialism, empire, nation-building, class, race, gender, sexuality, home, and homecoming. Texts may include William Shakespeare’s The Tempest alongside an English translation of Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe alongside J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre together with Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. We may also watch Julie Taymor’s The Tempest.

Spring 2026 – Course Descriptions

ENGL 204: Business and Technical Writing

Multiple Sections

An introduction to business and technical communication skills with a focus on documents (such as letters and reports) and presentations. Topics may include planning, outlining, summarizing, presenting data, handling references, and editing. The course comprises several practical assignments, including a formal report and an oral presentation. ENGL 204 was formerly called ENGL 225; credit will not be granted for both courses.

ENGL 208: Introduction to Public Speaking

Multiple Sections

An introduction to public speaking that focuses on the creation, organization, and delivery of speeches for non-dramatic purposes. It provides the rhetorical principles of effective and ethical public speaking, offers opportunities to become familiar with different speaking situations, and attempts to instil a sense of the importance of public speech. ENGL 208 was formerly called THEA 203; credit will not be granted for both courses.

ENGL 221: North American Indigenous Literatures

Professor Bryn Skibo

This seminar will read Indigenous apocalyptic fiction and consider how these texts speak to and against discourses in social and civil disruption, environmental disaster, and loss. We’ll explore what social mores and conventions are abandoned, what/who survives and thrives after destruction, and what is valued throughout. Close readings of these works will illuminate not only how authors of different Indigenous communities dramatize worlds coming to an end and worlds blossoming anew, but also how these texts act as commentary and a means to interpret the destruction and potential regrowth that is present in our yesterdays, todays, and tomorrows. Basically, while apocalypses may sound bleak, we’ll likely spend even more time discussing the unique hope and power that these novels and short stories offer, precisely in their emphasis on destruction.

Image: Steven Paul Judd (Kiowa/Choctaw). “The Summer They Visited.” (2014).

In American Indian: The Magazine of Smithsonian’s National Museum, vol. 17, no. 14, Winter 2016, https://www.americanindianmagazine.org/story/pop-culture-native-satire

ENGL 230: Literature and Popular Culture

Professor Sandra Hagan

THE 21st-CENTURY SENSATION NOVEL

In seeking to define chick noir—a new publishing phenomenon that emerged a decade ago—one journalist described these books as “thrillers thrown into the domestic sphere, tales of intimate betrayal and mistrust.”[1]  Critics of popular culture looking farther back to the Victorian era would have found a ready-made term for such domestic thrillers: the sensation novel.  Emerging in 1860s Britain from a society in flux, the sensation novel capitalized on cultural realities like first-wave feminism, Darwinism, and mass market publishing.  It offered a voracious reading public stories that served up one part bigamy and one part danger; some drugs, disguise, and fine furnishings; and a series of strange coincidences that kept them returning for more.   In this course, we’ll trace a direct line from the 19th-century sensation novel to current chick noir bestsellers and investigate the ways that, like the Victorian sensation novel, they upend the comfortable domestic sphere.  Readings are likely to include Thomas Hardy’s sensation novel Desperate Remedies and contemporary bestsellers The Guest List, Where the Crawdads Sing, and Gone Girl.

ENGL 232: Children's Literature

Professor Nicole Klan

Secret Escapes and Heroic Journeys: An Introduction to Children’s Literature (Spring 2026)

This course will explore themes and trends in contemporary children’s literature with some attention to origins of the genre in folk tales and religious texts. We’ll read picture books and novels to expand our understanding of the ways authors represent children and their worlds and consider how these texts reveal and respond to current social concerns and critical perspectives in the field. Possible texts may include Where the wild things are (Sendak), They say blue (Tamaki), The Secret Garden (Burnett), The Wild Robot (Brown), Wolf Wilder (Rundell), The Wolves in the Walls (Gaiman), Danny Champion of the World (Dahl), Extra Yarn (Barnett), Ebb and Flow (Smith), and The Girl and the Wolf (Vermette).

ENGL 274: Literary Traditions

Professor Neil Surkan

Ruin Ruminations

The Old English word “dustsceawung” translates, roughly, to “contemplation of the fact that dust used to be other things — the walls of a city, the chief of the guards, a book, a great tree.” Simply put, the destination of all things is dust, and remembering that we will someday be dust can be a means of finding peace. This course will examine the literary tradition of ruminating on ruins, from the earliest English poems all the way up to our present moment, in order to find both consolation and inspiration in the aftermath. Across the centuries, abandoned, eroding, wrecked, and deserted places — both metaphorical and literal — have fascinated poets, novelists, playwrights, and essayists alike. Whether nostalgically recollecting the “good old days,” lamenting the current state of disrepair, or enthusiastically looking ahead to whatever fantastical future will rise from the ashes, the speakers, narrators, characters, and essayists in this course begin at the end as they survey the damage — facing off with fate and faith alike. We presently find ourselves in an increasingly tenuous (and dire) relationship with the environment, which is forcing us to reckon with a future where previous ways of life will no longer be sustainable: how might reading a historical array of ruin ruminations heighten our sense of accountability, encourage us to scrutinize our complicities, and steady our resolve? Might we refresh our convictions among the wastes?

FILM 201: Introduction to Film Studies

Professor Paul Watkins