In our intimate, inspiring environment, you’ll find a sense of community with others who share a passion for the written word. A major strength of the English program at Glendon is the variety of ways you can express your vision and learn.
While you focus on studying literature, you’ll have opportunities to discuss the craft with engaged professors and fellow students. For over two decades, we have hosted the prestigious Michael Ondaatje Reading Series, which welcomes poets, novelists and playwrights to speak at Glendon. Past guests have included novelists Michael Redhill, Barbara Gowdy and Jane Urquhart, as well as poets Dionne Brand and Don McKay.
Interested in drama? Our program provides courses covering the history of Western drama, from its classical roots in ancient Greece to the present, as well as courses in post-colonial theatre from across the English-speaking world, opening up possibilities for an additional major or minor in Drama and Creative Arts. Our Visiting Playwrights Series welcomes actors, playwrights, directors and dramaturges to share their experiences with the students.
Explore what each year of your degree could look like, as well as how you can boost your major and career options.
Wondering what each year of your degree will look like? Check it out here.
Courses
You’ll find the courses in the English program offer a four-year sequence of increasing specialization in English literary studies, from introductions to the field of literary study and types of literature to in-depth historical periods, as well as overviews of critical theory. You’ll develop your writing skills while gaining the ability to research, analyze and synthesize data and present effectively.
View course timetables on York University’s site
GL/EN 1900 3.0 RECONCILING LITERATURE: UNDERSTANDING TEXTS & CONTEXTS
Category: Foundation Set General Education Credit: HUMA Cross-list: CDNS, CORE
Calendar Description
This course responds to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action by examining literature representing Canadian Indigenous peoples. While building student capacity for intercultural understanding, this course introduces literary elements and techniques, and the methods of textual analysis.
Expanded Course Description
This course responds to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action by examining literary texts representing the experiences of Canadian Indigenous peoples: namely, those related to the residential school system, Crown treaty obligations, and Indigenous peoples’ historical and contemporary contributions to Canada. A wide range of texts will be studied, including orature, autobiographical works, exploration and travel writing, scientific discourse, political speeches, journalism, legal testimony, historical writing, graphic novels, literary prose and verse, and drama. Students will develop their critical reasoning skills by learning how such works operate to convey complex ideas within a fraught Canadian colonial context.
GL/EN 1901 3.0 READING WITH PURPOSE: CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE
Category: Foundation Set General Education Credit: HUMA
Calendar Description
This course introduces students to the interpretive methods and theoretical concepts used in contemporary literary criticism. By studying both primary texts and numerous critical responses, the goal is for students to develop their own critical thinking and writing about literature.
Expanded Course Description
This course introduces students to the interpretive methods and theoretical concepts used in contemporary literary criticism. In addition to a selected core of literary texts, a number of corresponding critical approaches will be studied, including psychoanalytic, Marxist, cultural, feminist, gender, and reader-response criticism; the schools of New Criticism and New Historicism; as well as deconstruction. By learning the various ways in which literary critics and scholars find meaning in literature, students will develop their own critical thinking and writing skills.
GL/EN 1903 3.0 ENGLISH IN THE WORLD; THE WORLD IN ENGLISH
Category : Foundation Set General Education Credit: SOSC Cross-list: ILST
Calendar Description
This course introduces students to the historical development and current state of English as a world language, particularly in the context of cultural, economic and political globalization. Course themes explore the world of English through literatures, popular culture, and new media, drawing attention to their implications for English Language Teaching.
Expanded Course Description
This course introduces students to the development and current state of English as a world language, particularly in the context of cultural, economic and political globalization. Readings discuss the original spread of English to countries such as the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, followed by the period of colonial expansion and exploitation in Africa and Asia, and its current status as a global lingua franca serving a wide variety of administrative, commercial, and educational purposes across national and regional borders. Indeed, the global prominence of English in the world is reflected in the fact that so-called “non-native” speakers of the language, and of the many varieties of World Englishes, now represent the vast majority of its speakers, raising questions about the desirability or possibility of imposing linguistic standards of use.
Course texts examine both positive and negative aspects of English in the world. As a lingua franca, English facilitates international communication and collaboration in many fields and endeavors. Yet, English is also a form of social capital, unevenly distributed in many countries where wealth determines access to instruction and improved life chances. In some countries, English is also viewed as a potential threat to local cultural and religious beliefs as well as minority and indigenous languages.
Students will explore the complexities of English through a variety of texts: post-colonial literatures, popular cultural forms such as global rap and hip hop; English-Hindi mixing in Bollywood movies; the language of email, Twitter, and Business Process Outsourcing (i.e., call-centre English); as well as public advertising in multilingual landscapes such as Toronto. Course materials and themes also draw attention to the implications for English Language Teaching.
This is a required course for the Certificate in the Discipline of Teaching English as an International Language.
GL/EN 2800 3.0 INTRODUCTION TO CREATIVE WRITING
Category: Certificate in Creative Writing Across Contexts
Calendar Description
This course introduces students to the root genres of creative writing, including creative nonfiction, poetry, and fiction. Students will explore the core principles of each genre by studying model texts and learning to produce short stories, poems, and narrative nonfiction.
Expanded Course Description
In this course, students survey the root genres of creative writing, including creative nonfiction, poetry, and fiction. Students explore the core principles of each genre by studying model texts and learning to produce their own short stories, poems, and narrative nonfiction through writing exercises, collaboration, and workshop. Additionally, students partake in regular peer-to-peer workshops, wherein they learn the art of giving and receiving constructive and compassionate editorial feedback related to the creative works of their peers. Students build their skills as public-facing writers by performing their work aloud for their peers and enthusiastically engaging with guest authors throughout the semester.
GL/EN 2900 3.0/6.0 SEX, SWORDS, AND SANDALS: CLASSICAL FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
Category: Foundation Set General Education Credit: HUMA Cross-list: CLST, CORE
Calendar Description
This course studies classical Greco-Roman texts and mythology, which have influenced the development of English literature, through a variety of theoretical approaches, including Freudian psychoanalytical readings and Jungian archetypal criticism.
Expanded Course Description
This course explores classical Greek and Roman texts whose literary forms and mythology proved to be the foundations of English and European literature and culture for two millennia. A broad selection of Greek and Roman literary works will enable a study of the birth of literary forms such as the epic, lyric, pastoral eclogue, ode, tragedy, and even the first “novel.” Beginning with the socio-cultural contexts that gave rise to these texts, the course will identify the transhistorical importance of these works and their ideas for the evolution of the Western “canon,” from the Renaissance to influential “modern” readings by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell. The literary telling of classical myths that situates humans in relation to the pantheon of Greco-Roman gods may have begun as a quest to define our cosmic place, but two thousand years later, influential modern readings saw in it the key to the mystery of our very selfhood. The timeless theme of the hero journey remains the core of our own popular culture’s myths made in Hollywood, to whose blockbusters like Star Wars and many others we will make frequent comparisons.
GL/EN 2901 6.0 THE STORY OF ENGLISH: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF LITERATURES IN ENGLISH
Category: Foundation Set General Education Credit: N/A
Calendar Description
The course provides a text-based study of major theatrical achievements This course investigates the processes by which texts or genres emerge from British history. Students are exposed to key texts and historical events in the development of Literature in English. We will consider how these developments are negotiated and resisted.
Expanded Course Description
How did the language and literature of an island-dwelling people on the edge of Europe become a global phenomenon? This course surveys the long cultural history of English literature, situating authors, texts, and artistic movements, in time and space, from its origins to the dawn of the Modern Age. In other words, this course investigates the socio-cultural processes by which specific texts or genres emerge from particular moments in British history. Covering over a millennium of cultural history informing writing in English, from the early Middle Ages to the Modern Era, this course exposes students to key texts, concepts, and historical events in the development of Literature in English. Connecting several literary examples from each of the cultural periods in question to their historical and socio-cultural milieus, we will consider how these developments are embraced, negotiated, and resisted.
GL/EN 2902 3.0 IDEA, OPINION, ARGUMENT: RHETORIC FOR ACADEMIC SETTINGS
Category: Foundation Set General Education Credit: MODR Cross-list: COMS
Calendar Description
This course introduces students to the theory and practice of effective persuasion in academic discourse. Focusing on written forms of persuasion from various fields, students will gain argumentative expertise by understanding the history and written techniques of rhetorical communication.
Expanded Course Description
What is an argument, and what makes it persuasive in the modern academy? We encounter claims and counter-claims all the time, and we are exposed to ideas, facts and their interpretation from an ever-increasing number of sources. But how often do we ask ourselves why—or more importantly, how—we are convinced by one claim and not by another? This course addresses questions by examining the long history of the art of persuasion—rhetoric—as the foundation for a satisfactory answer. The course will show how rhetorical writing heuristics are an important foundation for academic discourse, and how these tools help shape compelling academic writing. Investigating attitudes about persuasion through the ages, students will also gain perspective on why argument itself is so important in the creation and expression of academic knowledge. Further, this course will also emphasize the practical construction of written ideas and forms to hone students’ academic understanding. Students will gain the expertise they need to express themselves more appropriately, effectively and successfully. The course will follow a traditional learning format, with the course being equally split into lectures and in-class group or individual analysis, along with discussion of various persuasive texts. Because effective persuasive writing is closely tied with close reading and analytic practices, the course will incorporate documents from many fields. A special focus, however, will be on key argumentative structures from various disciplines in the Arts and Social Sciences.
GL/EN 2903 3.0 SCRIPT, STAGE, SOCIETY: WORLD DRAMA AND PERFORMANCE
Category: Foundation Set General Education Credit: HUMA Cross-list: DRCA
Calendar Description
The course provides a text-based study of plays and theatrical production through the ages and across continents. From its origins to 1900, we situate the dramatic text culturally and historically to probe the ever-changing literary and staging conditions of theatre.
Expanded Course Description
The course provides a text-based study of major theatrical achievements from ancient times to the late nineteenth century, in a transhistorical survey that includes drama from across the globe. This study situates the plays within cultural and historical contexts while also focusing on practices of theatrical staging. Additionally, the textual study includes numerous theoretical perspectives on the drama, including considerations of questions of gender, ethnicity, and race as part of larger discussions of the socio-historical and cultural contexts in which the plays were written. While the course is mostly text-based, students may be asked to work on staging assignments in order to better understand questions of theatrical staging and how they impact our reading of the texts.
GL/EN 2911 3.0 FOUNDATIONAL QUESTIONS: LITERARY CRITICISM & THEORY I
Category: Foundation Set Cross-list: COMS, PHIL
Calendar Description
This course introduces students to the foundational debates on literature that philosophers, artists, and critics have been having for over two thousand years. It surveys critical and theoretical texts from antiquity to the early twentieth century.
Expanded Course Description
This course introduces students to the foundational debates on literature that philosophers, artists, and critics have been having for over two thousand years. What is literature? What is it good for? What is its relationship to the world? How are we to interpret it? What is the role of the author? This course surveys critical and theoretical texts from antiquity to the early twentieth century, which consider literature in terms of its social purposes, genres, and underlying meanings as they pertain to class struggle, the psyche, and mythic archetypes.
GL/EN 2912 3.0 CONTEMPORARY QUERIES: LITERARY CRITICISM & THEORY II
Category: Foundation Set Cross-list: PHIL
Calendar Description
This course introduces students to the foundational debates on literature that philosophers, artists, and critics have been having for over two thousand years. It surveys critical and theoretical texts from the early twentieth century to the present.
Expanded Course Description
This course introduces students to the foundational debates on literature that philosophers, artists, and critics have been having for over two thousand years. What is literature? What is it good for? What is its relationship to the world? How are we to interpret it? What is the role of the author? This course surveys critical and theoretical texts from the early twentieth century to the present, which consider literature in terms of formal and linguistic theories, cultural politics, and identity.
GL/EN 3205 6.0 POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES AND THEORY
Category: 3
Calendar Description
This course introduces students to key texts, authors, theorists, and concepts in postcolonial studies that pertain to the former regions of the British Empire, including Canada. The links between literature and broader cultural and political struggles are closely examined.
Expanded Course Description
This course offers an introduction to postcolonial studies and a selective survey of fiction, poetry, and drama from Africa, Canada, the Caribbean, Ireland, South Asia, and the South Pacific. Topics under consideration may include the politics of the English language; the role of artistic representation in imperial expansion; the transformation of European literary forms; notions of exile, hybridity, and nation; indigenous and diasporic writing; and the persistence of colonial discourses of race, class, and gender. The course introduces students to literary study in a global rather than national context, and to enable them to develop critical skills and a vocabulary to interpret texts that relate to the history of British imperialism.
GL/EN 3210 6.0 CHAUCER AND MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
Category : 1
Calendar Description
A study of Chaucer’s works. Attention is paid not only to Chaucer’s own writings but also to works illustrating the historical and literary context in which he wrote.
Expanded Course Description
Chaucer is usually categorized as a writer of the late medieval period. At the same time the Italian writers, whose work he often drew on, are generally placed in the context of the earliest phase of the Renaissance. We will look at Chaucer’s writings in relation to the many and varied literary traditions he drew on. As we discuss his characteristic transformations of this material, we will try to articulate how his poetry expresses the development of modernity in Western culture.
The focus of the course will be a careful reading of Chaucer’s poetry, in particular the following: The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, and The Canterbury Tales.
GL/EN 3221 3.0 WRITING THE “GOLDEN AGE”: ENGLISH 16th-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Category: 1
Calendar Description
This course focuses on the non-dramatic literature of the English Renaissance. A selection of authors and works will exemplify the main cultural, political, and ideological trends that shaped the emergence of a national literature in the vernacular as well as the adoption of European cultural trends and concepts that culminated in the Elizabethan culture of courtship.
Expanded Course Description
The course focuses on the non-dramatic literature of the Tudor period (1485-1603). The study of a broad selection of authors and works from the period will introduce the main cultural, political, and ideological trends of the Renaissance era. We will trace the gradual transformation of an essentially medieval society into an early modern one, and note the adoption of European Renaissance trends and concepts that culminated in the Elizabethan culture of courtship. Most notably, we will investigate the cultural, artistic, and linguistic debates that surrounded the birth of a “national” literature in the vernacular and birthed a reading public. In addition, we will study the English authors’ experimentation with a variety of literary genres such as chivalric romance, pastoral poetry, the sonnet, narrative and lyric verse, and various types of prose narratives. The study of the literary works will combine contemporary sixteenth-century poetic and rhetorical theory with twentieth- and twenty-first century critical approaches.
GL/EN 3222 3.0 COURTIERS, REBELS, AND SAINTS: ENGLISH 17th-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Category: 1
Calendar Description
The course studies English literature of the seventeenth century and explores the main cultural, political, and ideological trends before, during, and after the Wars of the Three Kingdoms—a time of political, religious, and cultural upheaval and change, in which the remaining medieval aspects of Renaissance culture yielded to the dawn of the modern era brought about by civil war, colonial expansion, and the scientific revolution. The works studied reveal experimentation in a variety of literary genres such as romance, pastoral, the sonnet, the elegy and ode, the epic, and various types of prose.
Expanded Course Description
The course studies English literature of the seventeenth century and explores the main cultural, political, and ideological trends before, during, and after the Wars of the Three Kingdoms—a time of political, religious, and cultural upheaval and change, in which the remaining medieval aspects of Renaissance culture yielded to the dawn of the modern era brought about by civil war, colonial expansion, and the scientific revolution. The works studied reveal experimentation in a variety of literary genres such as romance, pastoral, the sonnet, the elegy and ode, the epic, and various types of prose. The study of the literary works will combine contemporary seventeenth-century poetic and rhetorical theory with twentieth- and twenty-first century critical approaches.
GL/EN 3225 3.0 TOWN, COUNTRY, EMPIRE: British 18th- CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Category: 2
Calendar Description
This course studies British non-dramatic literature of the eighteenth century. It explores the print culture and the contemporary reading public’s attitudes towards the most important political, social, and cultural developments of the period, as well as the dynamics in British society such as the relationship between the genders, between the classes, and between Britain and its colonial empire. It analyzes the generic diversity and literary experimentation, especially in the novel, and traces the profound influence of classical thought and literature.
Expanded Course Description
This course studies British non-dramatic literature of the eighteenth century. Through a broad selection of works, we will explore contemporary attitudes towards the most important political, social, and cultural developments of the period such as the Glorious Revolution, the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745, the rise and subsequent conflict between the interests of the “Town” and the “Country,” or Whig and Tory, and illustrate important dynamics in English society such as the relationship between the genders, between the classes, and between England and its colonial empire. The selected works reflect the generic diversity and experimentation in the literature of the period as well as the profound influence of classical thought and literature on its development. In the study of the texts, among which particular emphasis will be placed on the emergence of the novel, we will begin with contemporary eighteenth-century approaches to poetics, rhetoric, and genre-theory, but will also consider the texts through twentieth- and twenty-first century approaches including the history of the book and print-culture.
GL/EN 3331 3.0/6.0 INTO THE FRAY: BRITISH LITERATURE FROM THE ROMANTIC PERIOD
Category : 2
Calendar Description
This course focuses on British literary works from the Romantic Period (1770-1832), a period of literal and literary revolutions with writers actively engaging with real world issues. Topics under consideration include the role of the individual in society, the effects of technology, poverty, race relations, class, and gender expectations, and the question of what “counts” as literature.
Expanded Course Description
This course focuses on British literary works from the Romantic Period (1770-1832). It is a period of literal and literary revolutions with writers actively engaging with real world issues which continue to resonate in our time—the role of the individual in society, the effects of technology, poverty, race relations, class, gender expectations, and the question of what “counts” as literature. Recognizing the prominence of poetry in the Romantic Period, works by both canonical and lesser-known poets such as Joanna Baillie, William Blake, George Gordon Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charlotte Smith, and Dorothy and William Wordsworth will be studied. Attention will also be given to novelists including Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, Gregory Lewis, Walter Scott, and Ann Radcliffe; essayists like Edmund Burke, William Hazlitt, Richard Price, and Mary Wollstonecraft; and journalists such as William Cobbett and Leigh Hunt.
GL/EN 3332 3.0/6.0 DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE: BRITISH LITERATURE FROM THE VICTORIAN PERIOD
Category: 2
Calendar Description
This course focuses on British literary works from the Victorian Period (1832-1901): a period of vast and fast-paced social, cultural, and technological change. Topics under consideration include the effects of science and technology, changing social and political conditions, the Empire, class and race issues, and gender and sexuality anxieties.
Expanded Course Description
This course focuses on British literary works from the Victorian Period (1832-1901). It is a period of vast and fast-paced social, cultural, and technological change—positive and negative—which saw a dramatic rise in literacy rates. This expanding readership created new “markets” and triggered debates about the very nature of literature. The resulting atmosphere of anxiety and anticipation, confusion and clarity, was both disorienting and inspiring. Poets such as Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Alfred Tennyson, and Oscar Wilde, and essayists including Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and John Ruskin offer a wide range of responses to these conditions. The novel, in its various manifestations—Bildungsroman, historical, regional, industrial, sensation, detective, fantasy, and science fiction—dominates in this period. Canonical and lesser-known novelists like Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Makepeace Thackeray, H. G. Wells, and Oscar Wilde will contribute the majority of our readings, with additional non-fiction prose and poetry texts.
GL/EN 3365 3.0 TRANSATLANTIC MODERNISMS
Category: 3
Calendar Description
This course surveys a diverse body of literary works from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that fall under the rubric of “modernism.” Taking a transnational approach, the course examines the production and dissemination of works by British, American, Irish, and Canadian authors, poets, and playwrights whose competing engagements with modernity have had enormous influence on subsequent generations of writers around the world.
Expanded Course Description
This course surveys a diverse body of literary works from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that fall under the rubric of “modernism.” Taking a transnational approach, the course examines the production and dissemination of works by British, American, Irish, and Canadian authors, poets, and playwrights whose competing engagements with modernity have had enormous influence on subsequent generations of writers around the world. The course also considers literary development within an interdisciplinary context, drawing on the history of visual art, advertising, music, architecture, psychoanalysis, and philosophy to explore the emergence of modern forms of expression. The bearing that concepts such as race, class and gender had on modernist writers is scrutinized alongside topics that include: the manifesto, the salon, literary magazines, the Harlem Renaissance, the Depression, and the World Wars.
GL/EN 3471 3.0/6.0 CONTESTED ORIGINS: AMERICAN LITERATURE TO THE CIVIL WAR
Category: 2
Calendar Description
This course surveys American literature from the beginnings of European settlement through to the end of the Civil War. Topics under consideration include first encounters; American exceptionalism/Puritan origins; racism, slavery, and the paradox of democracy; issues of national identity; and Manifest Destiny.
Expanded Course Description
This course surveys American literature from the beginnings of European settlement through to the end of the Civil War. Designed to introduce students to a wide variety of both canonical and lesser-known writers, this course looks at the ways in which both literary production and culture in what is today the United States changed from the colonial period through to the early Republic and antebellum period. A range of texts are examined, such as discovery and exploration narratives, histories, political speeches, sermons, autobiographies, short stories, poems, non-fiction prose and novels. Discussions will consider a wide range of issues, such as first encounters; American exceptionalism/Puritan origins; racism, slavery, and the paradox of democracy; issues of national identity; and Manifest Destiny. This course traces the political, intellectual, and cultural histories of the United States in order to help students understand its contested values and rich literary traditions.
GL/EN 3472 3.0/6.0 FRACTURED IDENTITIES: AMERICAN LITERATURE FROM THE CIVIL WAR TO WORLD WAR II
Category: 2, 3
Calendar Description
This course surveys the diverse scope of American literature from the end of the Civil War to the brink of Second World War, considering a wide range of issues such as the effects of modernization and urbanization on racial, ethnic, and gender relations; the question of national identity/identities; class structures; and the struggle to achieve literary and social diversity.
Expanded Course Description
This course surveys the diverse scope of American literature from the end of the Civil War to the brink of the Second World War. Designed to introduce students to a wide variety of both canonical and lesser-known writers of short stories, poems, and novels, this course looks at the ways in which both literary production and culture in the United States has changed from the Realism of the late nineteenth-century through to Modernism. Discussions will consider a wide range of issues such as the effects of modernization and urbanization on racial, ethnic, and gender relations; the question of national identity/identities; class structures; and the struggle to achieve literary and social diversity. This course traces the cultural histories of the United States in order to help students understand its contested values and rich literary traditions.
GL/EN 3473 3.0/6.0 NAVIGATING NATIONHOOD: AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE WORLD WAR II
Category: 3
Calendar Description
This course examines American fiction from the Second World War to the present. Discussions will consider such themes such as family, home, cultural hybridity; the search for identity; the consequences of war; forms of social oppression; and the increasing technological saturation of American life.
Expanded Course Description
This course examines American fiction from the Second World War to the present. Our focus will be on questions of gender, race, and sexuality, which have emerged as key social topics both in contemporary American life and a wider globalizing world. For this reason, we examine writers of short stories, poems, and novels from a cross-section of racialized and gendered backgrounds. Discussions will consider such themes such as family, home, cultural hybridity, and the search for identity. We will also study writers who address the more negative aspects of contemporary American society by looking at the consequences of war; forms of social oppression; and the increasing technological saturation of American life.
GL/EN 3595 6.0 THE NUTS & BOLTS OF ENGLISH: GRAMMAR FOR TEACHING & LEARNING
Calendar Description
This course studies English grammar, including aspects of vocabulary and pronunciation, in ways which are useful both for English majors and for future teachers and learners of English as an international language.
Expanded Course Description
Through interactive lectures and tests, ENSL classroom observation tasks focusing on grammar teaching and learning, participation in a mentoring program for the College’s ENSL learners focusing on providing feedback on spoken and written grammar, and tasks intended to develop a meta-awareness of language learners’ acquisition of formal aspects of English in instructed and non-instructed ENSL settings, students will develop a comprehensive professional understanding of the varieties of linguistic patternings of typical of learners’ experience of learning English as an international language.
Students of English, whether or not they intend to become future teachers of EIL, will acquire the descriptive grammatical metalanguage needed to explain formal concepts of EIL grammar, lexis and pronunciation to learners, a pre-requisite to developing an ability to scaffold language forms and functions in relation to learning activities and tasks. Students will also learn to contrast formal systems of English with functionally similar systems in English-learners first languages and to develop strategies to provide feedback to learners from a variety of language backgrounds. They will be encouraged to see the importance of attending to formal features in contemporary meaning-/task-/(academic) content-based approaches to English language teaching internationally, typically at the post-secondary level.
For students in the D-TEIL Certificate Program, this analytical ability is important for students to be integrated into D-TEIL’s post-method approach to language teacher education for a global society, which is the framework for the capstone course of the D-TEIL Certificate EN 4696 9.0. Students enrolled in the D-TEIL Certificate must achieve at least a grade of B in this course for it to be counted as fulfilling Certificate requirements.
This is a required course for the Certificate in the Discipline of Teaching English as an International Language.
GL/EN 3606 3.0 LEARNING ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE
Cross-list: LIN
Calendar Description
The study of the process of acquisition of a second language, considered in the light of relevant theory and research, and the analysis of linguistic, psychological, sociocultural and other factors in second language learning.
Expanded Course Description
The course will focus on the following main topics: Language learning (1st and 2nd language acquisition); Processes of L2 acquisition (e.g., skill development; input & interaction); Individual differences (e.g., age, aptitude, motivation); Learning environments (natural & instructional). The course content is presented through a variety formats including print and audio-visual materials, lectures, oral presentations and group discussion. Students are expected to reflect on their own history of second language learning in relation to the theories and research discussed in the course.
This is a required course for the Certificate in the Discipline of Teaching English as an International Language.
GL/EN 3620 6.0 READING SHAKESPEARE
Category: 1 Cross-list: DRCA
Calendar Description
A study of a representative selection of Shakespeare’s play texts, with particular attention to how we produce their meanings.
Expanded Course Description
Students coming out of high school into university feel that they “know” what Shakespeare is. In other words, they have already accepted “Shakespeare” as a cultural artifact, one used for different purposes in our society. But how did we get to this point? How did Shakespeare evolve from being a who to being a what? This course studies how theatrical and interpretive meanings are made through various ways of reading Shakespearean scripts, and trace the evolution of Shakespeare as a playwright and thinker in his own time, in specific cirtcumstances that influenced the production and reception of his works, down to our time. . We will study the textual and performative aspects of approximately a dozen plays in addition to a selection of Shakespeare’s non-dramatic verse, and explore the various contexts that inform our understanding of his oeuvre in his own time as well as our own, by considering factors such as his socio-political and cultural background, the nature of early modern theatre, Renaissance poetics and rhetorical theory, and numerous modern and postmodern theories and interpretive performances. We will also think about Shakespeare as a continuously generated product of cultural encounters by examining his engagement with literary sources, as well as the reception, interpretation, and editorial history of his plays.
GL/EN 3622 6.0 POSTCOLONIAL DRAMA IN ENGLISH
Category: 3 Cross-list: DRCA
Calendar Description
This course examines contemporary English-speaking postcolonial drama issuing from one or a combination of the following regions: South and West Africa, Southeast Asia, India, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean and Canada.
GL/EN 3625 3.0/6.0 MEDIEVAL ENGLISH DRAMA
Category: 1 Cross-list: DRCA
Calendar Description
This course studies the early development of English drama from the Biblical cycles of the medieval craft guilds, and the moralities and interludes, through to the humanist drama of the first half of the 16th century.
Expanded Course Description
This course introduces the concerns and lively techniques of native English theatre traditions that flourished long before Shakespeare. We will look at early drama in the vernacular, including representative Corpus Christi plays, saints’ plays, morality plays, and possibly humanist interludes. And we might also expand our horizons with consideration of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (that most medieval of all Early Modern plays).
GL/EN 3630 3.0/6.0 ENGLISH RENAISSANCE DRAMA
Category: 1 Cross-list: DRCA
Calendar Description
This course studies major plays from the flowering of the London professional theatre between 1576 and 1642.
Expanded Course Description
This course studies some of the most popular plays from the “golden age” of the Renaissance theatre in England, beginning with the repertories of the professional playing companies of the Elizabethan era, through the London “duopoly” of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the Lord Admiral’s Men, to its greatest diversity in the Jacobean and Caroline periods until the closing of the theatres in 1642. We will study the textual and performative aspects of various works written by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, such as Kyd, Marlowe, Marston, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Dekker, Middleton, and Ford—as well as some famous anonymous plays. We will consider factors such as the socio-political and cultural background, the nature of early modern theatre, the original contexts of production and audience reception, Renaissance poetics and rhetorical theory, and numerous modern and postmodern theories and interpretive performances.
GL/EN 3631 3.0 RESTORATION & 18TH CENTURY DRAMA
Category: 2 Cross-list: DRCA
Calendar Description
This course focuses on English drama, 1660-1800, and examines the plays and playwrights in their socio-cultural contexts including performative history and the material conditions of the theatre, as well as considering a variety of modern and postmodern theoretical approaches.
Expanded Course Description
This course focuses on English drama, 1660-1800, and examines the plays and playwrights in their socio-cultural contexts including performative history and the material conditions of the theatre, as well as considering a variety of modern and postmodern theoretical approaches. Important topics covered by the course include: 1) The Political and Cultural Moment of the Restoration: the re-opening the professional theatres, and the emergence of female actors. 2) Restoration drama and the critics: the rise of Neo-Classical Theory. 3) The evolution of “inherited” dramatic genres and the emergence of “new” dramatic genres. 4) The “ghost” of Shakespeare and the influence of Ben Jonson. 5) The professional theatres and their audiences. 6) Censorship and drama. 7) The eighteenth-century great actors and impresarios.
Depending on the choice of 5-6 play-texts, the course will include examples of the following types of drama and explore their socio-cultural contexts and impact: heroic romance, tragedy (personal and political), tragicomedy (tragicomic romance), comedy (social, subversive, sentimental, and laughing), melodrama, satire (corrective and Menippean).
The authors typically considered in this course include: John Dryden, William Wycherley, William Congreve, Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, John Gay, Thomas Otway, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
GL/EN 3635 3.0/6.0 MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY DRAMA
Category: 3 Cross-list: DRCA
Calendar Description
This study of modern and contemporary drama in Europe and North America relates the practice of theatrical production to the literary features of plays within their historical and cultural contexts.
Expanded Course Description
We will examine key trends in the development of modern theatre such as realism, expressionism, and epic theatre. In addition to examining the impact of these stylistics trends on contemporary drama, we will also examine the development in the late twentieth century of identity-based drama devoted to questions of gender, race and sexuality.
GL/EN 3636 3.0 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
Category: 3 General Education Credit: HUMA
Calendar Description
The course will consider what constitutes children’s literature, what distinguishes it from adult literature, and how the adult writer views the child’s world, as demonstrated in the themes, characterization, and styles of the works studied.
Expanded Course Description
This course focuses on children’s literature from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will explore possible ways of reading children’s literature taking into account cultural and historical contexts and audiences. In addition to a wide range of works of fiction, we will consider a variety of theoretical texts which address such concerns as constructions of childhood, definitions of children’s literature, gender roles, and the issue of power and childhood.
GL/EN 3800 3.0 CREATIVE WRITING ACROSS GENRES AND CONTEXTS
Category: Certificate in Creative Writing Across Contexts
Calendar Description
This course studies the field and practice of creative writing through the lens of multimodality, enabling students to explore how writers can expand their abilities by creating work at the intersection of genres, discourses, and media.
Expanded Course Description
Students in this course study the field and practice of creative writing through the lens of multimodality to explore how writers can expand their abilities by creating work at the intersection of genres, discourses, and media. Students in this course will survey a range of practitioners and model texts from across cultural contexts, time periods, and traditions that fuse genres or combine writing with sonic, visual, performative, digital, and collaborative creative components. Through the study of exemplary multimodal texts, writing, revising, and workshopping, students cultivate an approach wherein the relationship between a writer’s decisions and different media and modes contribute to the creation of their texts. Informed by readings and discussions, students will produce work that may blend genres, incorporate images, text, and/or sound, or may be intended for non-print platforms.
GL/EN 3801 3.0 CREATIVE WRITING AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Category: Certificate in Creative Writing Across Contexts Cross-list: CORE
Calendar Description
This course enables students to study and create poetry and prose in dialogue with local and global environmental issues. In particular, this course utilizes Glendon’s unique outdoor green spaces to encourage students to write with a sense of their positionality within the immediate environment.
Expanded Course Description
This course is a workshop and seminar wherein students study and write poetry and prose that attend to their surroundings and with an awareness of local and global environmental issues such as ecology, ecosystems, environmental injustice, animals, plants, agriculture, climate change, energy, pollution, waste and waste management, and resource extraction. This course will also utilize the outdoor green spaces unique to Glendon, including the Glendon Community Garden and Glendon Forest Trail by encouraging students to write with a conscious sense of their positionality within these spaces. Through readings, writing exercises, and discussions, students will explore how authors such as Jordan Abel, Rachel Carson, Stephen Collis, Adam Dickinson, M. NourbeSe Philip, Angela Rawlings, Craig Santos Perez, Jennifer Scappettone, Jordan Scott, Jonathan Skinner, and Orchid Tierney have engaged environmental issues in their works using an array of writing strategies and techniques. With these authors as their models, students critically and creatively engage environmental issues at global and local scales while developing ways of representing nature’s diversity with language.
GL/EN 3802 3.0 WRITING DIVERSITY: ISSUES IN CREATIVE WRITING
Category: Certificate in Creative Writing Across Contexts
Calendar Description
This course studies the field and practice of creative writing through the lens of diversity with an emphasis on recent and ongoing discussions and debates.
Expanded Course Description
In this course, students study the field and practice of creative writing through the lens of diversity, focusing on topics which may include but are not limited to decolonization, Indigeneity, cultural diversity and representation, literary movements and communities, multilingualism, writing and the environment, small press literary movements, publishing, prize culture, and digital media. Guided by readings and discussions, students will analyze the demands, concerns, limits, and possibilities of creative writing’s culture and the ways it shapes the writer’s creative processes and powers. Though this course will focus on these issues in a predominantly Canadian context, students will also focalize on their local literary community by engaging current events and authors, bringing their experiences as an active member of a creative community into the classroom. In doing so, students will develop familiarity with the relationship between the labour of creative writing and the cultural industry within which writers work.
GL/EN 3806 6.0 DIGITAL MEDIA AND PUBLISHING
Category: Certificate in Creative Writing Across Contexts
Calendar Description
This experiential course gives students the opportunity to develop skills in writing, editing and digital production that will allow them to design and produce a digital arts and culture magazine.
Expanded Course Description
In this experiential learning course, students will get hands-on experience designing and producing a digital arts and culture magazine. In doing so, students will engage with the changing definitions, theories, and implications of publishing both as a cultural practice and profession within a digital economy. The course emphasizes three main components of this process: writing, editing, and producing the magazine. The first semester is devoted to media theory and writing in various genres, while the second semester will be dedicated to studying digital tools and producing the magazine. In the first weeks of the course, students will study examples of online magazines like The Walrus, Hazlitt, Canadian Art, Jacket2, and others to gain an understanding of the various roles, topics, formats, and media platforms involved. They will then study examples of nonfictional genres (e.g., profile, personal essay, book review), which they will develop into fully-fledged articles. Students will collaborate to refine and edit their ideas into successful magazine pieces, keeping in mind issues like tone, argument, and audience. In second semester, students will be introduced to programs and applications such as WordPress, Photoshop, Mail Poet, InDesign, and Canva, which they will use to design and publish the magazine online.
GL/EN 3940 3.0/6.0 FROM CONTACT TO CONFEDERATION: CANADIAN LITERATURES BEFORE WORLD WAR I
Category: 3 Cross-list: CDNS
Calendar Description
This course surveys literary production in Canada from the beginnings of European colonization to the First World War. Particular attention is paid to the contributions of Indigenous, regional, and women writers to the literary tradition in English Canada; translated Francophone works are also examined to provide a comparative study of the literary tradition of Quebec. By covering a variety of texts from across the country, the course aims to provide students with a firm grounding in the historical development of literary cultures in Canada.
Expanded Course Description
This course surveys literary production in Canada from the beginnings of European colonization to the First World War. The focus is on the major genres of the period and their historical and cultural contexts: exploration and settlement narratives, the romance, the long poem, Confederation poetry, and social realism. Particular attention is paid as well to the contributions of Indigenous, regional, and women writers to the literary tradition in English Canada, and translated Francophone works are also examined to provide a comparative study of the literary tradition of Quebec. By covering a variety of texts from across the country, the course aims to provide students with a firm grounding in the historical development of literary cultures in Canada.
GL/EN 3941 3.0/6.0 FROM DOMINION TO DOMAIN NAME: TWENTIETH-CENTURY CANADIAN LITERATURES
Category: 3 Cross-list: CDNS
Calendar Description
This course surveys literary production in Canada from the First World War to the late twentieth century. Particular attention is paid to the problems of canon-formation, transnational political issues, and the importance of Indigenous and multicultural works within the literary tradition in English Canada. Translated Francophone works are also examined to provide a comparative study of the literary tradition of Quebec. By covering a variety of texts from across the country, this course aims to provide students with a firm grounding in the historical development of literary cultures in Canada.
Expanded Course Description
This course surveys literary production in Canada from the First World War to the late twentieth century. The focus is on the major genres of the period and their historical and cultural contexts: realism, modernism, the long poem, the short story, and postmodernism. Particular attention is paid as well to the problems of canon-formation, transnational political issues, and the importance of Indigenous and multicultural works within the literary tradition in English Canada. Translated Francophone works are also examined to provide a comparative study of the literary tradition of Quebec. By covering a variety of texts from across the country, the course provides students with a firm grounding in the historical development of literary cultures in Canada.
GL/EN 3942 3.0/6.0 POSTNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES: CONTEMPORARY CANADIAN LITERATURES
Category: 3 Cross-list: CDNS
Calendar Description
This course examines recent Canadian fiction, poetry, and drama, from the late twentieth century to the present. While course themes vary from year to year, issues of globalization, cultural diversity, and national reconciliation are closely examined. Translated Francophone works are also included to provide a comparative study of the literary tradition of Quebec. By covering a variety of texts from across the country, the course aims to establish current trends in literary production in Canada.
Expanded Course Description
This course examines recent Canadian fiction, poetry, and drama, from the late twentieth century to the present. By connecting contemporary literary texts with postwar and contemporary critical theory, this course aims to chart the development of post-canonical, cosmopolitan literary cultures in Canada. While course themes vary from year to year, issues of globalization, cultural diversity, and national reconciliation are closely examined. Translated Francophone works are also included to provide a comparative study of the literary tradition of Quebec. By covering a variety of texts from across the country, the course explores current trends in literary production in Canada.
GL/EN 3950 6.0 ENGLISH-SPEAKING THEATRE IN CANADA
Category: 3 Cross-list: CDNS, DRST
Calendar Description
A study of the development and present state of English-speaking theatre in Canada, focusing on the major companies and the emergence of contemporary Canadian drama.
Expanded Course Description
There has always been theatre in Canada, but the presence of Canadian theatre is relatively recent. This course studies the evolution of Canadian drama itself—from its beginnings with collective creations and small stages, to the establishment of alternative theatres, to its growth into major theatre spaces and onto mainstages in venues all over the country and beyond. As well as Canadian theatre history—its changing context and challenges—and the socio-cultural elements which influenced it, we will discuss many specific plays. Some of these are now considered iconic, others have only lately premiered. But what becomes quickly evident is that Canada now has a flourishing, varied and vibrant community of playwrights and theatre practitioners. The course also aims to study changing trends, styles and concerns and to discern how this most communal of art forms expresses the growth and new directions of contemporary Canadian culture. Topics include issues of cultural diversity, national reconciliation, and the consistently contested borders of gender, race, class and sexuality. Plays may include those by Paul Thompson, Sharon Pollock, Judith Thompson, Ann-Marie McDonald, Andrew Moodie, George Walker, Hannah Moscovitch, Jordan Tannahill, among others.
EN 4100 3.0/6.0 DIRECTED READING
Calendar Description
Students will do independent reading and/or research, together with written assignments, under the guidance of a member of the English Department.
Prerequisite: Permission of the Department.
GL/EN 4232 3.0 CANADIAN WRITERS’ “TAKE” ON THE WORLD
Calendar Description
This course will study texts in which Canadian writers, born in or outside of the country, explore other parts of the modern world in novels, stories and poems.
Expanded Course Description
This course will explore how Canadian authors write about other parts of the world in plays, stories, and novels. We will examine the interrelationship between Canada and the United States to other parts of the world, including Africa, the Caribbean, South America, India, and the Middle East. We examine such issues as colonialism, post-colonialism, the African diaspora, and American neo-imperialism. We also consider how Canadian identities cut across borders, making them multiple and hybrid, due to the impact of cross-cultural affiliations from cultural diasporas and migrations. Our readings also take into account the effect of wars between nations as part of our discussion of cross-cultural encounters and experiences.
GL/EN 4245 3.0 ADAPTATION STUDIES: LITERATURE AND FILM
Calendar Description
This course grounds students in interdisciplinary methods for examining the relationship between literature, film and other forms of media in popular culture. Literary texts and their media adaptations may vary with each offering of the course.
Expanded Course Description
This course adopts Adaptation Studies as a pedagogically engaged discipline which offers students new critical insights into the textual and cultural relationships between canonical literature, popular fiction and a variety of modes including film, television, performance and digital media. Not only an examination of how old and new media can adapt literary texts, this course constitutes an introduction to diverse critical practices in the field of Adaptation Studies which range from feminism and media theory to cultural theory and studies in globalization.
GL/EN 4255 3.0 CONFESSIONAL LITERATURE FROM THE INQUISITION TO INSTAGRAM
Calendar Description
This course surveys confessional literature from the medieval period to the contemporary. It considers the major texts, developments, and theories of confessional literature, with a special attention to issues of gender, sexuality and race.
Expanded Course Description
The French philosopher Michel Foucault once called the modern subject a “confessing animal,” and never has this characterization been truer: from the most banal Instagram post to the #MeToo groundswell, practices of self-disclosure are ubiquitous in our culture. Situating contemporary ‘selfie culture’ within its historical lineage, this course studies how literary texts have adapted and promoted confessional discourse throughout the ages, beginning with St. Augustine’s distillation of Christian practices in his 4th-century Confessions. It will then move through the Enlightenment and into the modern period, considering how confessional practices come to underpin various personal, institutional and aesthetic discourses. The course culminates in a study of contemporary literary phenomena like the “memoir boom” and the explosion of confessional writing online. Particular attention will be paid to the ways race, gender, sexuality and other identity positions triangulate confessional modalities. Topics to be discussed include: the main formulations and critiques of confessional discourse; the major milestones in confessional writing and how they have evolved; the theories of selfhood embodied in these practices; ‘fake’ confessions; the relation between confession and identity politics; the multimodal forms of self-disclosure in the digital age.
GL/EN 4330 3.0 THE FUNNY MEN OF THE 18TH CENTURY: SWIFT, FIELDING, AND STERNE
Calendar Description
This course studies the comedic and satirical narratives by three of the greatest humourists of the eighteenth century (Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne), in their socio-historical contexts and with regard to various theoretical approaches to satire, humour, and laughter.
Expanded Course Description
This course studies three of the most successful prose satirists and humourists whose works targeted as well as entertained audiences in the eighteenth century: Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne. The course elucidates the socio-cultural contexts of the texts’ production and original reception, and explores them through Neo-Classical, modern, and postmodern theories of genre and reader-response. We will begin with Swift’s early experimentation with prose forms for mostly political purposes. Next comes Fielding’s tongue-in-cheek Neo-Classical poetic theory that adapts “epic” and “comedy” in combination with the gendered prose form of “romance” into an early iteration of the novel for purposes of literary parody as well as social commentary. Sterne’s intertextual works provide the period’s greatest experiments with form for a variety of purposes, including distinctly “Shandean” hilarity, and anticipate many postmodern critical concerns. By the end of the course, the students will have gained an understanding of an extraordinarily fertile period in the development of English narrative and social satire.
GL/EN 4335 3.0 OUTCASTS AND OUTSIDERS: LITERATURE FROM THE “OTHER SIDE” OF THE VICTORIAN PERIOD
Calendar Description
This course focuses on the Victorian period which has often been inaccurately labelled as the “age of the middle-class”—due to its emphasis on propriety, respectability, duty, honour and “appropriate” sexuality—and analyzes the literary emergence of those who fail to “fit” into mainstream middle class Victorian society: the Outcasts and Outsiders.
Expanded Course Description
The Victorian period is often (inaccurately) labelled the ‘age of the middle-class’. This emerging social class sought to solidify its status through an emphasis on (at least in appearance) propriety, respectability, duty, honour and ‘appropriate’ sexuality (as in female innocence and heterosexuality). There is of course, another ‘side’ to the story: the readings for this course are peopled with outcasts: the poor, fallen women, feisty women, criminals and others who fail to ‘fit’ into mainstream middle class Victorian society. Anxieties about their own status and identity fostered a fear of non-conformity in whatever form it might take. Despite this distrust, the figure of the outsider is prevalent in Victorian literature. Equal parts horrifying and fascinating, these figures offer a ‘counter-narrative’ to the traditional reading of the Victorian period.
GL/EN 4366 3.0/6.0 THE HAUNTED EMPIRE: TRANSATLANTIC GOTHIC LITERATURES
Calendar Description
Surveying the Gothic in the literary canons of Britain, Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States, this course considers the ways in which the transatlantic region remains haunted by what its histories suppress.
Expanded Course Description
This course surveys the transatlantic literary canons to assess variations that the Gothic has taken since the European settlement of the New World. How have writers attempted to come to terms with alien environments, seductive myths of communal identity, and the Others that colonial expansion has created and abused? Examining the persistence of traditional Gothic conventions in exploration and travel writing, the wilderness romance, regional variations of the Gothic, and contemporary Aboriginal and diasporic literatures, this course considers the ways in which transatlantic literatures remain haunted by the histories, peoples, and cultures suppressed by the actions of empire.
GL/EN 4596 9.0 TEACHING ENGLISH AS AN INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE
Calendar Description
This course surveys current principles and practices of teaching English in settings outside Canada. Besides the methodological instruction at Glendon, an integral component of the course is a teaching practicum, normally fulfilled in an international setting, held for 2-3 weeks following the Spring exam period.
Expanded Course Description
This course surveys current principles and practices of teaching English internationally. As one of the two 4000-level courses required to complete the Certificate in the Discipline of Teaching English as an International Language (Cert. D-TEIL), it builds upon various aspects of the students’ background knowledge as acquired in the 2000 and 3000-level courses which form part of the Certificate programme. The teaching practicum is normally fulfilled in an international setting and is an integral component of the course. It involves a 2-to-3-week group trip to Cuba following the spring examination period. Students requiring financial support may apply for a York International Mobility Award to help offset costs.
Note: The course GL/EN 4596 9.0 is only open to students enrolled in the D-TEIL Certificate, and only to those who have achieved a grade of at least B in each of the Certificate courses.
GL/EN 4601 3.0/6.0 BENDING THE BARD: TRANSHISTORICAL ADAPTATION OF SHAKESPEARE
Cross-list: DRCA
Calendar Description
This course studies adaptations of Shakespeare’s works and biography from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, considering a range of multi-media and multi-genre adaptations through the lens of cultural adaptation and appropriation studies.
Expanded Course Description
Ben Jonson famously wrote that Shakespeare “was not of an age but for all time.” In this course, we will consider Shakespeare’s seemingly inexhaustible timeliness by exploring the ways in which his plays and biography have been reimagined and reshaped over the centuries to continue appealing to changing audiences.
This course studies adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays and biography from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, considering a range of multi-media and multi-genre works through the lens of cultural adaptation and appropriation studies. We will trace the development of the Shakespeare myth, from the publication of the First Folio onwards, and interrogate cultural assumptions of authenticity and biographical fact. We will then examine five of Shakespeare’s plays. Each play will be paired up with a selection of primary materials demonstrating how it has been adapted and appropriated through the centuries, and with a cluster of relevant secondary readings. Students will explore how the literary/dramatic canon has been shaped over the centuries and ask what socio-cultural aims it has been made to serve at different times. They will develop the capacity to assess how the Western canon – and Shakespeare in particular – can be made relevant and useful to present-day conversations about such issues as class, race, gender, sexuality, political power and oppression, national identity, green politics, and colonialism.
GL/EN 4620 3.0/6.0 CONTEMPORARY WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS
Cross-list: CDNS, DRCA, GWST
Calendar Description
This course studies selected plays by contemporary American, British and Canadian women playwrights. Primary methodology is close reading. Attention will also be paid to how theatrical and cultural contexts and material circumstances are embedded in the representations of gender.
Expanded Course Description
This course studies a selection of plays created by contemporary women writers. What becomes quickly evident is that there is no such thing as a ‘woman’s play.’ What does exist, are many different kinds of plays by women. There is wide variety in their concerns and their craft. Style ranges from the performance piece to the traditional script, from the realistic to the symbolic and experimental.
Their concerns are also refreshingly diverse. Their plays are as distinctive and various as the women who write them. What unites them is that now, in an unselfconscious way, women are at the centre of the stage—women characters, women’s dilemmas, their subjectivity and perspective. This course gives dramatic testimony to the breadth and diversity of current women’s writing for the stage.
The tentative reading list includes plays by Canadians Sharon Pollock, Judith Thompson, Hannah Moscovitch, Djanet Sears, Marie Clements and Kate Hennig. Other titles will be selected from recent works by Caryl Churchill, Lucy Prebble, Paula Vogel, Margaret Edson, Lynn Nottage and others.
GL/EN 4625 3.0/6.0 IMAGINING THE PAST: LITERARY USES OF HISTORY
Cross-list: HIST, DRCA
Calendar Description
The course explores the literary uses of history and the meaning of historical memory in English literature from the sixteenth century to the present, by focusing on a variety of authors and popular literary forms.
Expanded Course Description
What is historical memory? What is cultural memory? Why does any people wish to remember, and what does it seek to remember? How do literary authors tell stories of a people’s past to that people, or to other peoples, and to what ends? This course studies literary uses of “history” and “memory” in English literature, beginning with some of the most popular and influential historiographic, literary, and dramatic works of the Renaissance period, including Shakespeare, and progressing through the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the present. It explores how authors in each time and place employed what they considered English history, or the memory of the English people, to create literary or dramatic works of great importance and influence. Sometimes the importance is in the invention of a new literary form (e.g., the English “history play,” or the nineteenth-century “historical novel”), at other times it is a cultural influence that launches an artistic movement (such as Romanticism, or neo-medievalism, or the Gothic Revival of the nineteenth century), or it masquerades as personal memoir or pseudo-historical document witnessing a traumatic historical event. Whatever the period, literary and dramatic works contribute to the process of creating cultural memory, preserving and relaying true impressions of the past about as often as they distort it. Fundamentally, literary and dramatic works shape as well as reflect popular audience tastes, and our own time has not proven immune to the commercial lure of historicity, evidenced by pop-culture’s twin cinematic obsessions with pseudo-medieval sword-wielding fantasies (Game of Thrones, Vikings) or with courtly sexual politics set in the Renaissance (Borgias, Medici, Tudors, Wolf Hall) or some other ahistorical “costume-period” (e.g., Bridgerton) typically employed as vehicles for 21st-century Western society’s socio-cultural debates and revisionist repackaging of history’s “lessons.” This course is built around several traumatic memories in English history that have resonated with more than one generation; it studies and analyzes a culture’s approaches to and uses of memory, tracing their evolution and distortions over time. The literary and dramatic texts are grouped in topical clusters related to the memory of an event in English history, and will be studied through various theoretical and contextual prisms: socio-cultural, rhetorical, historical, historiographic, poetical, and performative. In addition to being exposed to the historiographical sources that informed the authors, students will become conversant with the contemporary material conditions of playwrighting or dramatic performance (where relevant), they will become able to analyze the multiple contexts of all texts, considering the authors as readers and interpreters of historical source-narratives, in order to understand their place in the creation and transmission of cultural memory, and to critically evaluate any culture’s (including present-day pop-culture’s) ideological use of and commercial interest in “historical” narratives and exotic “pastness.”
The following is a list of sample units built around cases of continued trans-generational memorial activity:
- Building the early modern English nation on the traumatic memories of the Wars of the Roses
- Keeping France English: English nationhood and the collapse of the Angevin empire (the Hundred Years War)
- Keeping England French: (Mis)Remembering King John, Robin Hood, and the Fetish of Magna Carta
- Plantagenet Game of Thrones: the fall of the House of York, the Princes in the Tower, and the rise of the Tudors: reading “conspiracy”
- Remembering Charles I and the English Civil War: saints and tyrants
- Renaissance imaginings of “Rome”
- Obsessed by Henry VIII: early modern and postmodern reimagining of Henry VIII
- The Elizabethan Golden Age: remembering Elizabeth I and Renaissance women’s power reimagined
- Repackaging medieval and early modern trauma: plague, witches, war
GL/EN 4641 3.0 BEYOND “TWO SOLITUDES”: THE CONTACT ZONES OF CANADIAN LITERATURE
Cross-list: CDNS
Calendar Description
This course challenges the outmoded concept of Canada’s anglophones and francophones as “two solitudes” by studying works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry that reframe this relationship as one of “contact zones.”
Expanded Course Description
People often refer to Canadian anglophones and francophones as “the two solitudes” because the cultures have historically been so separate. Over the past few decades, however, this phrase has become less and less descriptive of the reality on the ground, as Canadian society has diversified, globalized, and begun to reckon with its shared colonial past. These changes are reflected in the literary sphere, where translations and collaborations are putting anglophone, francophone, and Indigenous writers into dialogue like never before. In this course, we will study texts (in English or English translation) that complicate the dichotomous model of Canadian culture. Using the concept of “contact zones” as our guiding principle, we will consider how works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry both reflect and participate in Canada’s evolving cultural politics. Topics we will consider include translation, code switching, cultural contact, language politics and policies, and colonialism.
GL/EN 4642 3.0/6.0 CANADIAN LITERATURE AND THE GREAT WAR
Cross-list: CDNS
Calendar Description
This course evaluates Canadian concepts of nationalism, historiography, and remembrance by examining Canadian literature pertaining to the First World War (1914-1918). A variety of genres produced by combatants, individuals on the home front, veterans, and contemporary writers are considered.
Expanded Course Description
The Canadian cultural response to the First World War stands out from those of the war’s other belligerents, whose remembrances of the atrocities of 1914-1918 tend to be the ones of unequivocal loss and mourning. In Canada, both the historiographical and popular consensus on the cultural significance of the First World War is that it served as a crucible in which both Canadian values and national identity were forged. At the centenary of this traumatic and transformative period of modern history, this course examines the ways in which Canadian literature has engaged with history, collective memory, and a compelling national mythology to offer competing narratives about Canada’s participation in this conflict. Surveying prose, poetry, and drama produced by combatants, individuals on the home front, the war’s veterans, and contemporary writers working long after the Armistice, this course scrutinizes Canadian notions of national identity, historiography, and civic remembrance. In order to evaluate the position of the Great War in Canadian culture, European and American works are also studied.
GL/EN 4643 3.0 WRITING TORONTO
Cross-list: CDNS
Expanded Course Description
This course examines the representation of Toronto in Canadian novels, poetry, and short fiction. As with the traditional regions of Canada (the Atlantic, Quebec, Ontario, the Prairies, the West Coast, the North), Toronto signifies a place in which economic, racial, ethnic, and linguistic differences play out and connections to the land and modern forms of identity are established and maintained. But how exactly is Toronto invented, imagined, (re)presented, and (re)produced? Themes addressed in this course are all central to the critical debates in Canadian studies as a whole: colonization and settlement; indigeneity and indigenization; immigration and multiculturalism; issues of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation; modern and postmodern modes of representation; and transnationalism and antimodern sentiment. The objective of this course is to enable students to understand how the literary representation of Toronto relates to broader questions of Canadian literary regionalism and nationalist myths of identity.
GL/EN 4644 3.0 THE GOLDEN AGE OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE (1863-1911)
General Education Credit: HUMA
Calendar Description
This course focuses on the “Golden Age” of Children’s literature (1863-1911). Landmark texts are considered in terms of their innovation, experimentation and enduring influence. Cultural, historical, and sociopolitical contexts are considered.
Expanded Course Description
This course offers a detailed analysis of a pivotal phase in the development of Children’s Literature. Landmark texts from 1863-1911—works that continue to influence literary developments are examined. Secondary sources help students place the primary texts in historical, cultural, political, and literary contexts. The course assignments further enable students to develop both the critical skills and theoretical frameworks for discussing Children’s literature.
GL/EN 4645 3.0/6.0 CANADIAN DRAMA ON THE MARGINS
Cross-list: DRCA, CDNS, GWST
Calendar Description
This course studies plays by minority artists who dramatize their stories and their issues from the unique perspective of their particular marginalized group.
Expanded Course Description
Contemporary dramatists who are members of marginalized groups are combating their former erasure and enlarging the understanding of their perspectives by bringing their stories to the stage. In a society of increasing diversity, theatre becomes the genre of choice for its ability to perform different communities and identities while engendering cross-cultural solidarity. Many of the plays present fractured narratives of negotiating ‘home’ and a conflicted identity. The themes may be universal ones but since the voices are culturally diverse and emerge from varied and different Canadian communities, so is the point of view. Topics include identity and belonging, assimilation and cultural survival, generational conflict (especially for second and third generations), troubled legacies of secrecy and trauma, while also traversing the contested borders of gender, race, class and sexuality. The course will study the multiple dimensions of selected texts with an emphasis on textual and performative aspects. Plays may include those by writers such as Ines Choi, Andrew Moodie, Djanet Sears, Wadji Mouawad, David Yee, Trey Anthony, Jordan Pettle, and Hannah Moscovitch, among others.
GL/EN 4646 3.0 THE LIVES OF GIRLS AND WOMXN: FEMINIST WRITING IN CANADA
Cross-list: GWST
Calendar Description
This course studies the ways Canadian literature has shaped—and been shaped by—feminist discourse, with a special emphasis on the developments that have taken place in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Expanded Course Description
In this course, students will examine the ways Canadian literature has shaped—and been shaped by feminist discourse, with a special emphasis on the developments that have taken place in the 20th and 21st centuries. Writers in this period pushed the boundaries of gender and genre, encoding their resistance to normative social roles in texts that experimented with form and rejected stereotypical models of femininity. They also carved a new space for women by founding feminist publishing houses, magazines, and literary networks that transformed the cultural landscape. Students will learn the cultural history, aesthetics, and political engagements of modern and contemporary feminist writing in Canada. Using an intersectional lens, they will moreover demonstrate the capacity to assess and critique this legacy by weighing how issues of gender, sexuality, race, Indigeneity, class, and language were variously interpreted, debated and often overlooked throughout the 20th-century. This background will allow them to unpack the concerns of the contemporary moment, analyzing how these topics remain both central and contentious in the present.
GL/EN 4655 3.0 A TARNISHED AGE: DYSTOPIAS FOR CHILDREN
General Education Credit: HUMA
Calendar Description
This course focuses on the “Third Golden Age” of Children’s Literature. The darkness and violence of contemporary dystopias for young adults is highly politicized. Cultural, historical, and sociopolitical contexts and rhetorical strategies are considered.
Expanded Course Description
This course offers a detailed analysis of a pivotal development in contemporary Children’s Literature. In these works of speculative fiction, the future is distorted by science, racism, war, genetic mutation, and technology. Discussions and course assignments consider cultural, historical, and sociopolitical contexts. The rhetorical strategies employed in order to accommodate a young audience are also considered. Secondary sources help students place the primary texts in historical, cultural, political, and literary contexts. The course assignments further enable students to develop both the critical skills and theoretical frameworks for discussing Children’s literature.
GL/EN 4662 3.0/6.0 EARLY MODERN WOMEN WRITERS
General Education Credit: HUMA Cross-list: GWST
Calendar Description
This course introduces students to the writings of early modern women (1500-1700). Texts are considered in terms of their relationship to each other, to contemporary male texts, and to the historical context.
Expanded Course Description
This course introduces students to the writings of early modern women writers. For centuries, many of these women’s voices were silent and silenced, but over the last three decades early modern women’s texts are steadily being reintroduced and made accessible in a proliferation of anthologies, on-line data bases, etc. Even with their renewed popularity, many of these writers are not included in most literary courses for a variety of reasons. In this course, we explore some of the reasons which have led to their exclusion from most literature courses, their historical silencing, and their contemporary re-emergence. Early modern women writers write in a wide range of genres and on a variety of subjects and themes. While some of these genres are familiar to most of us — drama, the sonnet, the lyric, memoir or life-writing, travel writing, prose fiction, etc. — others are not. In this course, we study both the familiar and such less familiar genres as the “controversy about women,” religious writings, letters, education for women, translations and applied art.
GL/EN 4680 3.0 MEDIEVAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
General Education Credit: HUMA
Calendar Description
Epic and romance in English and in French provide a focus for the course. Texts from other literatures and in other literary forms will also be studied by way of comparison.
Expanded Course Description
The course will examine the development of some of the major genres of the earliest vernacular literatures of Europe beginning with the medieval Dawn Song which can be found in a wide variety of cultures, including Arabic and Icelandic. Early literary texts in the heroic traditions, such as Beowulf in Old English and The Song of Roland in Old French, along with comparable texts in other languages will be considered. These will be followed by some early examples of the courtly romance by writers such as Marie de France and Crétien de Troyes. The course will conclude with a comparative study of lyrics for the Advent season.
Translations will be used for the continental and Old English texts; there will be a few Middle English texts, which will be glossed so that they can be read in the original language.
GL/EN 4681 3.0/6.0 MEDIEVAL WOMEN’S WRITING
Cross-list: GWST
Calendar Description
This course explores texts in a variety of genres by women from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period. The strategies and techniques used by women in their attempts to set forth their views will also be considered.
Expanded Course Description
This course surveys women’s writing in translation from pre-modern England and Europe. Perspectives from theories in gender and sexuality guide our analysis of restrictions on women’s literacy and the ways in which they constructed their audiences.
GL/EN 4695 3.0 ENGLISH AS A WORLD LANGUAGE
Cross-list: LIN/ILST
Calendar Description
The course examines a number of varieties of English in the world today from three major standpoints: their historical development, their social and geographical deployment, and their linguistic characteristics.
Expanded Course Description
This course will examine the development and current state of English as a world language, particularly in the context of cultural, economic and political globalization. The emphasis of the course will be on the external or ecological aspects of the topic rather than formal linguistic aspects, by paying attention to historical, socio-political and geographical issues. Drawing on these perspectives, we will examine the global and local implications for English Language Teaching.
GL/EN 4800 6.0 CREATIVE WRITING AND COMMUNITY
Calendar Description
This course engages students with two distinct literary communities: the smaller, intimate personal community of their peers, and the larger, national and international community of published authors, through participation in literary workshops, events, and critiques of submitted material.
Expanded Course Description
The notion of the solitary author, of the “writer in the garret,” has never been an accurate representation of the majority of writers. Most of them, from Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus’s literary circle of ancient Rome to the Bloomsbury group of the twentieth century, have located themselves within a community. Today that social context is even more pronounced. Our contemporary writing community is not only interconnected and vibrant; it is a multicultural pastiche of unique voices, each with its distinctive literary and cultural context.
In this course, students create, evaluate, analyze, and refine their own writing, and the writing of their peers while developing familiarity with the task of producing substantial excerpts of a work-in-progress that they hope to one day publish. Students develop the self-discipline needed to sustain a creative writing project in a genre of their choosing over a long period of time while also––through discussions, presentations, and readings––building their skillset as community-facing writers. Additionally, they will engage with the larger, national and international community of published authors. Several working writers will give in-class lectures and/or lead workshops, and students are required to attend and to contribute to planning for the Michael Ondaatje Reading Series (or bpNichol Reading Series). In this capacity, student responsibilities may include selecting the visiting writers, organizing, hosting, and/or promoting events. This is a required class for completion of CCWAC.
Degree Types & Program Requirements
The English program offers the following degree types and certificates:
- Specialized Honours BA/iBA
- Honours BA/iBA
- Bachelor of Arts
- Minor
- Certificate in the Discipline of Teaching English as an International Language
- Certificate in Creative Writing Across Contexts (CWAC)
The English program is also available as a bilingual or trilingual international Bachelor of Arts.
This program is also available as a Glendon BA, with flexible language requirements.
Certificate in the Discipline of Teaching English as an International Language
Make a difference around the world in a growing professional field. Gain the flexibility to live abroad and learn about other cultures with a career in the international field of English language teaching.
Certificate in Technical & Professional Communication
Make the world more accessible. As a technical and professional writer, you’ll put scientific and technical information into easily understandable language.
Certificate in Creative Writing Across Contexts (CWAC)
Learn the fundamentals of creative writing in a diversity of genres, media, cultures, and social contexts. This certificate positions creative writing as an expressive art form and frames it as an interdisciplinary and collaborative practice rather than a solitary pursuit.
Other Program Details
Join Our Student Group
Get involved in the Glendon Undergraduate English Students’ Society (GUESS), a student-run organization that offers a variety of activities and events that promote a sense of community and connection among students in English courses at Glendon College. You’ll find safe and welcoming learning opportunities for growth and exploration outside the classroom.
