English Courses

ENGLISH 510

The Writing of Creative Non-Fiction

"Simply by choosing to write in the genre of ‘nonfiction,' one makes an artistic statement. One must assume that the work is rooted in the real world; though the writing might contain some elements of fabrications, it's directly connected to the writer as the author behind the text."

This course is a seminar in the reading and writing of literary nonfiction and in the development of a critical appreciation of its various forms. This course will examine life writing in terms of its literary forms, as the authors' responses to their culture, and as texts within which identity is shaped and altered by the intentional acts of their writers. It will examine current theories of life writing, based on the assumption that life writing participates in the construction of the identity and the historicity of the individual. Chosen texts will demonstrate the art of life writing, as well as paradigms for its interpretation and its literary and cultural influence. As the genre of literature in ascendency among readers and writers during this century, it bears careful examination as a means of navigating the reclamation of human selfhood and spirituality in our postmodern condition.
The purpose of this course is to provide approaches to the reading and writing of literary nonfiction. Studies will include the techniques of writing creative nonfiction and the critical appreciation of this form, known as the "fourth genre." Such forms as (auto)biography, memoir, letters, diaries, travel and nature writing, and personal essays will provide the models for students' exploration of this genre. Examples will be drawn from writers such as C.S. Lewis, Thomas Merton, E.M. Forster, George Orwell, Michael Ondaatje, Annie Dillard, Kathleen Norris, Flannery O'Connor, John Bunyan, Virginian Woolf, and others who form part of the literary canon of such writing.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 512

Studies in Twentieth-Century American Literature

This course will examine representative works of twentieth-century American literary prose and the development of its themes in various historical, political, and socio-cultural contexts, including the major wars and social upheavals in which American society has been involved in the last hundred years.In so doing, students will examine the major themes and values that comprise a canon of literature which addresses the literary movements characterized by Realism and Naturalism and the contexts of Modernism and Postmodernism in which literature has responded to them in the American tradition.American literature and its contributions to the discussions on religion, morality and Christianity, and the relationship between the three, will be engaged.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 522

Chaucer

This course focuses on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, The Parliament of Fowls, and The Book of the Duchess. Care is taken to develop a good reading knowledge of Chaucerian Middle English. The social, economic, political, and spiritual principles in Chaucer's texts, and the aesthetic techniques employed to shape them, will be situated within the historical and cultural context of Ricardian, or late fourteenth-century England. Chaucer wrote for a populace that had confronted decimating plagues as well as social, economic and religious upheaval. We will draw out the competing medieval voices that emerge in the works composed in this context, which often articulate searing critiques of a complex, disorderly, patriarchal, violent, and humorous medieval world.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 530

Medieval Literature

In medieval Europe, a vital tradition of Christian spirituality emerged and flourished. The urgent longing to know, commune with, and abandon the self in, the divine was articulated in myriad spiritual works. Though many spiritual sojourners sought and experienced union with God, they did not always describe their mystical paths and encounters in the same terms. Each medieval mystic’s experiences emerged out a particular historical moment and cultural context. So too was each numinous experience shaped by the gender, social station, familial context, occupation, institutional affiliation, and living conditions of each mystic.

This course will focus on the rich and varied visionary and mystical literature of the Early, High and Late Middle Ages, including the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux, Richard of St. Victor, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Richard Rolle, the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, and Meister Eckhart. The influence of early theologians and philosophers (such as Origen, Plotinus, and Augustine) on these mystics will be considered in some detail, as will the influence of the medieval mystics on mystical thinkers of Renaissance Europe (including Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross).This course also seeks to read the ontological and epistemological elements of medieval mysticism through the filter of modern philosophical paradigms.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 534

European Literature in Translation

A survey of European drama and prose classics from the 13th to the 20th century, this course explores and critically evaluates the shift in world views from Dante's Christian humanism to Kafka's and Camus' modern existentialist view of human existence. In order to provide depth to our analysis of the works and to highlight the significance of the shift in world view, the works will be discussed in their historical, philosophical, and cultural context, in combination with close reading and various theoretical interpretative approaches.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 551

Shakespeare I

This course will analyze seven plays by William Shakespeare, including three tragedies, a history play, a comedy, and two romances, in addition to his narrative poem Venus and Adonis. It will consider Shakespeare’s plays as both established literary works and as scripts written for performance and will apply different critical approaches to his works in an attempt to discover the source and nature of their aesthetic power and dramatic force. In the process, we shall determine whether William Shakespeare is, as some have claimed, the greatest and most influential writer of all time.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 552

Shakespeare II

In this course, we will analyze seven plays by William Shakespeare, including three tragedies, two comedies, a problem play and a romance, in addition to a selection of his sonnets. The Shakespearean works will be read within the historically specific cultural context in which they were produced. We will consider Shakespeare's plays as dynamic scripts written for performance and as established literary works. We will pay particular attention to the way in which Shakespeare blurs generic, thematic, and ideological boundaries in his poetic and dramatic works - exploring his fusion of the tragic and the comic, the sacred and the profane, the noble and the plebeian, the fantastic and the historic, and the orthodox and the transgressive. We will apply different critical approaches to his works in an attempt to discover the source and nature of their aesthetic power, dramatic force, and political significance.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 553

Milton

The poet and polemicist John Milton sought to create a public identity for himself in a time of political and cultural change. Convinced that he was the “sole advocate of a discount’nanc’t truth” in a fragile emerging state, Milton sought cultural capital through aesthetic, priestly, and political discourse. He presented himself as an official, divinely inspired public spokesman for the evolving British nation, averring, in the Defensio sedunda: “It is a singular favour of the divinity towards me, that I, above others, was chosen out to defend the cause of liberty.” In this course, we will read the major poetic works and selected prose of Milton in light of his claim to be the delegated spokesperson for God and Parliament in early-modern England. Milton’s works will be seen both to reflect the tension and trauma of the Civil War, Interregnum and Restoration, and to participate in shaping a new state and new modes of existence.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 554

Renaissance Poetry and Prose

In this course, we will examine representative selections of the poetry and prose of the “High” and “Late” Renaissance periods in England, covering a century from about 1580-1680. This era was characterized by an impressive range of literary output that has never been rivalled in the western world. Even apart from the work of the most eminent figures -- Shakespeare and Milton -- this period offers a rich and varied legacy of poetry and impressive essays, treatises, and allegories, by such great literary figures as Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Jonson, Bacon, Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Browne, Walton, Pepys, and Bunyan who, along with other selected authors, will be represented in this course. Since literature cannot be fully appreciated in a vacuum, we will also address the political, religious, and theological controversies that energized so much of the writing of this dynamic century.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 556

Seventeenth-Century Women Writers

A survey of women’s writing in seventeenth-century Britain and America. This course will examine the poetry, prose and dramatic works of literary figures such as Lady Mary Wroth, Aemilia Lanyer, Anne Bradstreet, Katherine Philips, Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn.

During the seventeenth-century, political, religious, and economic formations in the were interrogated and fundamentally altered. Between the reigns of James I and Queen Anne, the monarchy was abolished, restored and redefined and the authority of the Parliament established. Many men and women cried out for freedom of religion and liberty of conscience, some seeking religious independence in the New World . The authority of the British Church , fractured as beliefs diversified, was threatened by the “scientific” rationalism of Francis Bacon and his successors, some of whom founded the Royal Society.Though dependent on the newly emerging commercial economy for its wealth and power, the nation was still largely dominated by the landed elite; this state of affairs fostered resentment in the mercantile class.

This turbulent period saw an upsurge of literary activity by women. More than two hundred and fifty women authors in and published poetry, fiction, drama, epistles, translations, pamphlets, manifestos and manuals. Those who rejected print culture circulated their works in manuscripts among an exclusive network of family and friends. The writings of these early-modern women address not only what it is to be a woman in early-modern , but what it is to be human, an activity which involves their engagement with historical practices, philosophical concepts, political theories, and theological tenets.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 567

Drama to 1627

The study of selected dramatic works written in English prior to the closing of the theatres in 1642, including medieval mystery and morality plays and works by Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline playwrights, excluding Shakespeare.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 572

Romantic Poetry and Poetics

Representative works by such "Pre-Romantic" authors as Burns and Blake precede a more intensive study of the poetry and critical theories of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Some attention is given to the essays of Lamb, Hazlitt, and Thomas De Quincey.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 573

Victorian Poetry and Prose

This course will explore the poetry and non-fictional prose of significant British literary figures from 1830-1900, a period of controversial and divergent thought. We will pay particular attention to how the literature of this period reflects its society’s preoccupation with politics, history, religion, education, art, and the “woman question.”

Back to Top

ENGLISH 584

Contemporary Canadian Novel

A study of representative works of contemporary Canadian fiction and the development of the post-modern, post-colonial, post-national novel. Authors (a minimum of six) may include a selection of Atwood, Brand, Findley, Hodgins, Hood, King, Martel, Mistry, Munro, Ondaatje, Sky Lee, Urquhart, Vanderhaeghe, and Wiebe.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 591

Children's Literature

In this course we will examine children’s literature from the seventeenth century to the present, analyzing representative texts and changing attitudes toward children and their books. Beginning with early didactic stories and traditional folk and fairy tales, and then moving on to British, American, and Canadian novels, we will focus on questions of history, philosophy, authorship, readership, and genre. Our emphasis will be on close critical readings of the texts.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 592

Studies in Individual Authors

This course is designed to give students the opportunity of studying for an entire semester the works of no more than two significant authors.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 593

Fantasy Literature

The rising popularity of contemporary fantasy fiction as possible ‘counter-text’ to mainstream realism may lead readers to assume that this is a relatively new genre, and indeed one outside the usual canon of academic attention as it has been sometimes regarded. While some make the bold claim that fantasy is “the dominant literary mode of the twentieth century” and J.R.R. Tolkien “the most influential author” (Shippey), other critics have dismissed the genre and Tolkien in particular (Duggan, Toynbee). But fantasy literature which enjoyed a renaissance in the nineteenth-century with George MacDonald, who in turn influenced twentieth-century authors such as C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Madeleine L’Engle, is in fact a much older form of literature that points to all things magical, mythic, and supernatural. In this course we will examine the long history of fantasy texts by first locating these works within the Anglo-Saxon epic and the Medieval romance literary traditions in English literature, Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and then consider how these shape the imagination of creators of modern fantasy. We will also consider the argument that modern fantasy is a response to post-Enlightenment rationalism in its tendency to marginalize both imaginative and religious epistemology, and so is a discourse of recovery. As Le Guin claims, “fantasy is the natural, the appropriate, language for the recounting of the spiritual journey and the struggle of good and evil in the soul.” Through close reading of the texts and considering these in relation to various forms of theoretical inquiry—historical, sociological, psychological, ethical, and spiritual or theological—students will have the opportunity to assess the ongoing impact of fantasy literature. And notably, since many of the achievements in this genre have been works of the Christian imagination, students will engage in the critical task of considering various Christian cultural responses and our possible readings of these fantasies.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 594

Studies in the Writings of C.S. Lewis

In this course we will focus on the literary achievement of C.S. Lewis, prominent Inklings author, analyzing representative texts in his poetry, essays, and novels. Beginning with his allegory, The Pilgrim’s Regress, and then moving on to some of his Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, and various fantasy novels such as Perelandra and Till We Have Faces, together with selected poems and essays, we will examine his mythopoeic vision and its contribution to Christianity and culture. Through close reading of the texts, and considering these in relation to various forms of theoretical inquiry—historical, sociological, psychological, gender discourse, ethical, and spiritual or theological—students will engage in the critical task of assessing the ongoing impact of the literature of C.S. Lewis.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 595

Literary Theory and Criticism

Back to Top

ENGLISH 599

Language & Style

When we use the English language to communicate with others, we are consciously or unconsciously applying our knowledge of English language structure at many levels. In literary communication, these same language structures are used for an aesthetic purpose. To interpret and evaluate a work of literature, it is fundamentally important to be able to identify and describe the way in which language is used in the text.

The course has four main components, beginning with the sound level of English. We study the description, classification and phonetic transcription of speech sounds and their combination in spoken English (phonology). From this basis, we proceed to the words of English, including units of meaning and principles of word formation (morphology), the classification of words into word classes and word meaning (semantics). This is followed by an investigation of English sentence structure (syntax), including the structure of phrases and clauses. Finally, we consider the meaning of sentences and their communicative functions as well as the contexts of language use (pragmatics). Throughout the course, salient literary usages of the linguistic structures are demonstrated by the detailed analysis of examples chosen from English poetic, narrative and dramatic texts.

The course is offered from a descriptive perspective, an approach not situated exclusively in any specific linguistic theory. The course is informed by the central importance of language in the Christian tradition of faith and learning.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 600

CORE SEMINAR - Reading the signs of the times: Text and Interpretation

In accordance with interpretive theories over the last fifty years, this course recognizes the central and foundational importance of texts in our relation to the world around us. Postmodern criticism has questioned and changed the way we understand texts and their interpretation by emphasizing the mediated nature of all perception, and the importance of language and texts for this mediation. As an introductory course to the English stream of an interdisciplinary program, this course is designed to orient students to the crucial transition from modernist to postmodernist and post-postmodernist models of texts and interpretation, models which depend on changing philosophical views of truth and reality. At the heart of textual and interpretive theories lies the question of human nature and its engagement with reality. This has been the focus of liberal humanist models of interpretation (From Plato to structuralism), their postmodern critique (poststructuralism and beyond) and should be the focus of a Christian humanist response to these developments. The world-constituting power of texts requires literary studies philosophy, theology and the poetic must come together. In full awareness of this intrinsically interdisciplinary nature of literature, this course examines the main interpretive paradigms in literary studies in order to show how our views of reason, language, and textuality continue to shape our life horizons. Reading the signs of the times is part of the Christian vocation, whether these are texts of literary or cultural signs; this course is meant to address this calling. The course segments will be ordered thematically to facilitate thematic coherence rather than chronological order.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 607

Life Writing as a Literary Genre: Biography as Identification of Self and Subjectivity

This course will examine life studies/biographies as their authors’ responses to their culture, as texts within which identity is shaped and altered by the intentional acts of their writers. It will examine current theories of biography by including life studies written by individuals whose association with the literary order has its origins in marginalized/ immigrant experience. This course assumes that life writing participates in the construction of subjectivity. Chosen texts will interrogate how authors resist or subvert, through biographical writing, institutional attempts to define and control their identity; how gender/class/religious beliefs impact life writing. Theorists including Paul Ricoeur, Michel Foucault, Terry Eagleton, George Steiner, Judith Butler, Susan Sontag, Carol Heilbruner, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-Paul Sartre will be foundational to this study of literary biography and identity in its examination of how life writers situate themselves in the conflicts between family and cultural circles in their attempts at successful acculturation. Works studied will include biographical writings from canonical authors including Elie Wiesel, Maxine Hong Kingston, Eva Hoffman, Anne Michaels, James Baldwin, Frederick Buechner, Paul Balakian, Andrei Mekine, Frank McCourt and others, less known but representing particularized Canadian marginalized immigrant voices, including Modris Eckstein and Janice Kulyk Keifer.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 607

Shakespearean Trauma and The Early-Modern Suffering Self

This course will examine the treatment of the “traumatic” in the dramatic works of William Shakespeare. Given that the concept of psychological trauma was formulated and developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the course will examine the extent to which this modern psychological concept can be appropriately applied to pre-modern texts, particularly the early-modern plays of William Shakespeare. Modern discourses used to categorize and describe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder will be compared with the early-modern discourses of suffering, violation, grief, melancholy, despair etc. that appear in Shakespearean texts. This comparison will assist in the determination of whether such Shakespearean emotions are historically-embedded and culturally-specific or whether they are universal, transhistorical emotions that can, and should, be aligned with modern accounts of the traumatic.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 607

Studies in George MacDonald

This course is designed to give students the opportunity to study the contributions of the nineteenth century author, George MacDonald, to fantasy and realistic fiction. MacDonald, a prolific and popular writer, was a formative figure in the Victorian “renaissance of wonder,” and is also considered to be an influential writer to various 20th century authors. The uniqueness of his Christian mythopoeic vision, blending Scottish Calvinism and a Romantic celebration of imagination and spirituality, is the subject of growing critical attention. In this course, we will read representative texts from the fantasy novels and fairytales, the realistic novels, and essays on literature and theology.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 607

Kierkegaard's Postcript

Concluding Unscientific Postscript stands at the end of Kierkegaard's ‘first authorship', and constitutes the turning point between the pseudonymous aesthetic writings and the religious writings to which Kierkegaard put his own name. Because of its transitional nature, Postscript serves as an excellent introduction to Kierkegaard's philosophical and religious thought. However, Postscript not only occupies an important place in Kierkegaard's corpus and in the Western philosophical canon, but also within the overall corpus of Western literature. Kierkegaard's own familiarity with literature and the fine arts saturates his aesthetic writings, resulting in a unique corpus that crosses key disciplinary boundaries. As such, Kierkegaard's thought is not only important philosophically, but for a range of cultural studies. While our primary goal in this course is to mine the philosophical and religious insights of Postscript, a secondary goal will be to examine how the writings of Walker Percy and Guy Vanderhaeghe, which owe a large debt to Kierkegaard, can effectively disclose certain aspects of his thought.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 607

Studies in the Late-Victorian Fiction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The purpose of this directed study is to examine Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's representation of crime in London through the character of detective Sherlock Holmes and his assistant Dr. Watson. Through an in-depth study of the Sherlock Holmes stories published in the Strand magazine between 1891 and 1905, we will analyze Doyle's presentation of the ethical questions raised by Holmes' detective work and his scientific methods, as well as the representation of the heroic and the reader's understanding of Holmes through Watson's meta-narrative. In the course of this study, we will examine Doyle's own scientific and medical background, the true-life inspiration for the character of Sherlock Holmes, and the reception and continuing cultural reinterpretation of the Sherlock Holmes stories. We will examine the heroic model of Holmes, situated between the romantic era and the burgeoning scientific era; the search for truth through narrative; the epistemological necessity of "the other"; and the role of sacrifice in the pursuit of truth.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 607

The Poetics of Resistance, Affirmation and immigrant Voices and the Poetry of Trauma

A study of twentieth-century poetics, its forms and conventions, as investigated through the poetry of immigrant experience in North America, particularly in terms of trauma and its assimilation in the personal and public spheres. This course will offer students a thorough exposure to the various schools of North American poetry in the modern and postmodern periods with an emphasis on the ruptures in and establishment of conventions new to the genre: War Poetry, Confessional Poetry, Spiritual Poetry, Protest Poetry and Identity Poetry. Poets studied will include Czeslaw Milosz, Sarah Klassen, Michael Ondaatje and Anne Michaels. Students will be required to apply literary analysis of theoretical aspects of poetics such as voicing, music, syntactical manipulation, complex metaphor and imaging. Historical contexts and cultural influences will be the contexts for these studies as will various theoretical and interpretive practices, including New Criticism, New Historicism, Psychoanalytic and Feminist approaches.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 607

James Baldwin: The Dialectic of Race and Religion

This course will engage the fiction and nonfiction writings of James Baldwin, twentieth century black American writer of more than a dozen works between (dates). His works reflected the struggle for identity and its definition in terms of race, religion and sexuality. In his self-definition, religion and race grounded his narratology in its earlier stages. Ultimately, the nexus of race and religion set the parameters of his quest for identity; sexuality was the concealed aspect of personhood which confounded his search. In examining Baldwin's works, literary and theoretical analysis will be employed in the discovery of the power of language to expose and determine the nature of Baldwin's engagement of this search and its reflection of his own black American community and culture.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 610

Bibliography

Back to Top

ENGLISH 611/612

Thesis

Back to Top

ENGLISH 613

Major Essay

Back to Top

ENGLISH 615

Of Paradise and Light: Early Modern Devotional Writing

This course is focused on the study of the literary expression of religious desire, doubt, and despair in early-modern British literature. The aesthetic shaping of spiritual belief and sentiment, within specific historical and cultural contexts, will be investigated in a selection of early-modern works, including those by Anne Vaughan Lock, Robert Southwell, George Herbert, John Donne, Elizabeth Melville, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, An Collins, Thomas Traherne, John Bunyan, George Fox, and Margaret Fell Fox. Their works will be read alongside religious texts central to the Catholic and Protestant traditions, including the Geneva Bible, the Douay-Rheims Bible, the King James Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, John Fox's Book of Martyrs, the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, and Joseph Hall's The Art of Divine Meditation.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 620

(Auto)biography as Literary Genre: Self-Identification and Subjectivity

This course will examine auto/biographies as literary artifacts, responses to culture, and as texts within which identity is shaped and altered by the intentional acts of their writers. It will examine current theories of auto/biography by including life studies written by individuals whose association with the literary order has its origins in intellectual and cultural spheres.This course explores how life writing participates in the construction of identity and engages subjectivity as a narrative strategy. Chosen texts will interrogate how authors resist/subvert/assume, through auto/biographical writing, institutional attempts to define and control their identity; how gender/class/religious beliefs impact life writing; how consciousness of the self and its identification becomes a hermeneutic for interpretation. Theorists including Paul Ricoeur, George Steiner, Richard Kearney, and Eva Hoffman will be foundational to this study. The reading list will include auto/biographical writings from authors such as Elie Wiesel, Victor Frankl, Eva Hoffman, Anne Michaels, Michael Ondaatje, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Richard Foster, John Bunyan, Frederick Buechner, Annie Dillard, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Thomas Merton, C.S. Lewis, and other significant auto/biographers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 625

Christian Humanism

Back to Top

ENGLISH 630

Religion, Gender and Literature in Nineteenth C Britain

This course will provide an intensive study of how the writers of influential nineteenth-century British literary texts (including short and long poems, a novella, novels, and prose non-fiction), chose to portray the intersection of religious faith and gender. This course will not only familiarize students with the most significant nineteenth-century British authors, but will also enable a thorough exploration of two of the most prevalent areas of debate in the nineteenth century: gender roles and questions of faith. We will focus on these texts as literature, taking into consideration genre, literary techniques, and audience, but the course as a whole will cross disciplinary boundaries as students read philosophical and historical writers such as John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin. Students will also become familiar with the major theoretical approaches applied to these texts by contemporary literary critics.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 645

The Great Tradition: Christian Thought in Western Literary Classics

This course will focus on one overarching theme: how Christian thought is embedded in some of the greatest literary classics of the Western World, selected from the Patristic period up to the twentieth century. These include, in chronological order, such diverse genres as St. Augustine’s autobiographical ruminations in his Confessions; Dante’s Inferno, the most famous section of his tripartite theological epic, The Divine Comedy; Shakespeare’s most popular, yet enigmatic, tragedy, Hamlet; Milton’s epic theodicy, Paradise Lost; Bunyan’s dynamic biblically infused allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress; Goethe’s multifaceted poetic drama, Faust; Hardy’s reassessment of Christian mores in late nineteenth century England in his great novel, Tess of the d’Urbervilles; T.S. Eliot’s dramatic modern affirmation in Murder in the Cathedral.

Back to Top

ENGLISH 655

Children's Literature: An Historical Survey of Philosophy and Genre

Back to Top