Students study of seven representative plays (not covered in ENGL 551) of William Shakespeare and a selection of his sonnets. The Shakespearean works are read within the historically specific cultural context in which they were produced. The course pays 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.

Students study seven plays by William Shakespeare (representative histories, tragedies, comedies, and romances) in addition to his narrative poem Venus and Adonis. Shakespeare's plays are considered as both established literary works and as scripts written for performance, and students apply different critical approaches to his works in an attempt to discover the source and nature of the play's aesthetic power and dramatic force. The course attempts to determine whether William Shakespeare is, as some have claimed, the greatest and most influential writer of all time.

A survey of European drama and prose classics from the thirteenth to the twentieth century, this course explores and critically evaluates the shift in worldviews 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 worldview, the works will be discussed in their historical, philosophical, and cultural contexts, in combination with close reading and various theoretical interpretative approaches.

Focuses 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 is considered in detail, as is the influence of the medieval mystics on mystical thinkers of Renaissance Europe (including Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross).

A study of the diverse and complex ways that gender is represented and gendered identities are expressed in poetry, drama, fiction, and/or creative nonfiction. Literature studied will come from a range of historical periods and cultural contexts, and from a range of communities, including racialized and queer communities. The representation and expression of gender in literature will be considered in relation to other overlapping social variables, such as class, religion, race, age, sexual orientation, and dis/ability.

This course takes up the study of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Parliament of Fowls, and Legend of Good Women. Care is taken to develop a good reading knowledge of Chaucerian Middle English. The literary, 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 contexts 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.

A study of poetry, its forms, conventions, and innovations in its development during the twentieth century, with particular representation from the American tradition.

A survey of English literary texts reflecting changing conceptions of and attitudes toward nature across time and place. Using an ecocritical framework, students will integrate and apply a variety of literary theories to diverse texts that explore relationships among human and non-human beings and the environment, with attention given to issues of creation theology, rural and urban landscape, conservation, sustainability, and environmental justice.

Literature has been at the centre of the human story from its beginnings as recorded in ancient sacred texts to its current study as cultural narrative with transformative and transcendent possibilities for interpretation and creativity. This course will explore literary themes integral to the pursuit of Christian spirituality, past and present. The movement to interdisciplinary interpretation and literary hermeneutics demands that students, as readers of text, understand the role that Christian thought and aesthetics have played in their influencing of contemporary literature.

Examines 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 one hundred years. Students 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 to which literature has responded in the American tradition.