Course Descriptions

This course is an introduction to Old English grammar, with select readings in the original language. Successful completion of the course will enable students to enroll in English 310.3, where they will have the opportunity to read more Old English literary texts. Included also will be selections from Beowulf in the original language, accompanied by study of the complete poem in Modern English.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): 6 credit units of 100-level English.
Note: Students with credit for ENG 208 may not take this course for credit. Category 1 course.

This course focuses on the techniques of writing poetry in a variety of forms. We will read challenging and experimental work by a variety of writers, with the aim of developing aesthetic sensibility and writing original poetry. Class sessions will be organized around craft topics and assigned readings, covering topics essential to an advanced understanding of poetry, such as: the line, the image, compression, the prose poem, music, sound, ekphrasis, and revision. Students will learn to read poems analytically to understand poetic techniques and how they function, and students will practice various techniques and forms in their own poetic compositions. Participants must be prepared to have their poems discussed by the instructor and their fellow students in a workshop atmosphere.

Weekly hours: 3 Seminar/Discussion hours
Prerequisite(s): ENG 220.3 or by permission of the instructor.
Note: Students requesting permission to register in this course should contact the Department of English, english.department@usask.ca.

This course studies the development of Canadian fiction in English to 1960 and may examine other forms of storytelling and non-fictional prose.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note: Students with credit for ENG 352 may not take this course for credit. Category 4 course.

An introduction to digital narrative, poetry, and media theory. This course investigates the ways in which text, language, and writing have been used in creative and experimental digital media, including artworks and installations, e-literature and e-poetry, video games and websites. Students will read a variety of digital works alongside critical readings in new media theory and practice.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): 42 credit units at the university. Category 4 course.

An introductory seminar/workshop in the basic techniques and methods of writing creative nonfiction. By examining the works of established writers, studying craft and history, engaging in workshop discussions, and producing a portfolio, students will be prepared to move forward to the advanced study of creative nonfiction. Participants must be prepared to have their work discussed by the instructor and their fellow students in a workshop atmosphere.

Weekly hours: 3 Seminar/Discussion hours
Prerequisite(s): ENG 220.3 or permission of the instructor.
Note: Students requesting permission to register in this course should contact the Department of English, english.department@usask.ca.

A study of several poems and some prose passages in Old English, including elegies, battle narratives, and a more extensive consideration of Beowulf than in English 301, including its backgrounds and analogues.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): ENG 301.3
Note: Students with credit for ENG 208 may not take this course for credit. Category 1 course.

An introduction to the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, with principal attention to The Canterbury Tales.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note: Category 1 course.

The course examines Geoffrey Chaucer’s literary works before The Canterbury Tales, namely, the dream visions and the romance tragedy Troilus and Criseyde.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note: Category 1 course.

An introduction to late medieval stories of adventure, through the Middle English romance genre and its contexts.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note: Category 1 course.

An introduction to the varieties of drama produced in the British Isles up to the inception of permanent theatres in late-sixteenth-century London.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note: Category 1 course.

In England, the late Middle Ages (1100-1500) were a time of social and political upheaval as well as literary innovation. This course examines Middle English literary texts that reflected and participated in historical and intellectual change and debate.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note: Category 1 course.

Sixteenth-century English literature absorbed and contributed to the European Renaissance, led at Henry VIII's court by the Thomas More circle, while popular culture developed new expressions of older traditions. These rich courtly and popular traditions unite in the achievements of the Elizabethan younger generation, especially the Sidneys, Spenser, and Shakespeare. Omitting full-length drama and epic treated elsewhere, this course highlights other major genres of prose and poetry in English from 1485 to 1603.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note: Students with credit for ENG 320 may not take this course for credit. Category 2 course

Seventeenth-century literature reflects a nation emerging into modernity through a revolution in politics and science and a reshaping of social bonds and relationships. Excluding full-length drama and epic, this course focuses on both sacred and secular poetry by such writers as John Donne, George Herbert, Aemelia Lanyer, and Ben Jonson, and prose by such writers as Francis Bacon and Thomas Browne.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note: Students with credit for ENG 325 may not take this course for credit. Category 2 course.

A study of English drama, 1580-1640, including such playwrights as Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, Jonson, Dekker, Middleton, and Ford. The course will investigate the philosophies, techniques, power, and popularity associated with Tudor, Stuart, and Caroline plays.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note: Category 2 course.

This course explores two of English literature’s grandest, longest, and most demanding poems, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It investigates Spenser's and Milton's transformation of classical epic and medieval romance conventions in the context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English culture, politics and religion.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note:Students with credit for ENG 325.6 or ENG 323.3 may not take this course for credit. Category 2 course.

A study of the drama of the Restoration and the eighteenth century, emphasizing the comedy of manners, but also dealing with dramatic genres particular to the period.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note: Category 3 course.

A study of poetry, drama, and prose in relation to the historical and political contexts of Britain and Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century. Authors may include Sitwell, Sassoon, Yeats, Auden, Shaw, Synge, Joyce, Forster, Lawrence, Woolf, Sayers, Waugh, Orwell.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note: Category 4 course.

A study of British literature from 1780 to 1830, examining the nature of Romanticism and the usefulness of the term "Romantic," and emphasizing the works of such writers as William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and John Keats.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note Category 3 course.

A study of the period 1830-1890, with emphasis on such prose writers as Carlyle, J. S. Mill, Newman, Huxley, Arnold and Pater, and such poets as Tennyson, the Brownings, Arnold, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Hopkins.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note Category 3 course.

Examines the emergence of written literature among Indigenous people in Canada from first contact to the 1970s. Attention will be paid to how and why Indigenous people took up literacy and literature and to the distinctive forms of writing that emerged.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note(s): Prior completion of ENG 243.3 is recommended but not required. Meets the College of Arts & Science Indigenous Learning Requirement.

A survey of Indigenous literature from 1968 to the present, examining the explosion of Indigenous writing in the United States and in Canada during that period. Drawing on a range of genres, we will investigate the causes of this literary "renaissance" and the literary forms that have emerged from it.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note(s): Prior completion of ENG 243.3 is recommended but not required. Category 4 course. Meets the College of Arts & Science Indigenous Learning Requirement.

A time of rebels and reactionaries, Enlightenment Britain (1660-1800) saw writers respond to dramatic social change. In this brief but grand tour of literary modes and genres, students will encounter many of the ideas that underpin contemporary Eurocentric culture. The course will include works of satire and sentiment, amatory fiction and conduct books, political poetry, slave narratives, plays of wit, and the first periodicals. Featured authors may include Behn, Swift, Pope, Richardson, Fielding, Burney, and Johnson.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note: Students with credit for ENG 336 and/or ENG 337 may not take this course for credit. Category 3 course.

A study of the development of the British novel, beginning with the mature work of Charles Dickens and George Eliot, and culminating in the late century work of authors such as Meredith, Hardy, Stevenson, and Wilde.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note: Students with credit for ENG 374 may not take this course for credit. Category 3 course.

The development of Canadian drama in English, with emphasis on the period since 1960.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note: Category 4 course.

A study of Western Canadian literature in English, especially fiction, poetry, and drama, produced on the Canadian prairies.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note: Category 4 course.

A study of poetry, drama, and prose in relation to the shifting political and cultural landscapes of Britain and Ireland since 1950. Authors may include Larkin, Smith, Heaney, Beckett, Friel, Kureishi, Selvon, Kelman, and Carter.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note: Category 4 course.

A study of the development of the British novel, beginning with Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott, and ending with the early work of Dickens, Gaskell, and the Brontës.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note: Students with credit for ENG 374 may not take this course for credit.
Note: Category 3 course.

This course examines major works of twentieth and twenty-first century fiction, including short fiction, across national boundaries. Students will explore literary genres and modes such as realism, modernism, postmodernism, magic realism, and metafiction. Authors may include Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison, Naipaul, Rushdie, Atwood, King, Munro, Carter and McEwan.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note Category 4 course.

Intended for students who are seriously interested in the practice of imaginative writing (fiction, poetry, etc.). Course work will include an assignment of writing each week. Participants must be prepared to have their work discussed by the instructor and their fellow students in a workshop atmosphere.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): 6 credit units of 100-level English and permission of the instructor.
Note: Students requesting permission to register in this course should contact the Department of English, english.department@usask.ca.

This course focuses on the techniques of writing successful fiction, such as character creation, dialogue, narrative strategies, and prose style. Participants must be prepared to have their fiction discussed by the instructor and their fellow students in a workshop atmosphere.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): ENG 220.3 or permission of the instructor.
Note: Students requesting permission to register in this course should contact the Department of English, english.department@usask.ca.

A study of poetry and poetics from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. The course examines the tension between established forms of poetry and the efforts of modern poets to "make it new" (Pound), to reinvent poetry. In poetry since the Second World War, we will examine the enduring influence of modernism as well as anti- and post-modern strategies, forms, and styles. Twentieth and twenty-first century cultural and historical contexts will be crucial throughout. Poets studied may include Yeats, Pound, H.D., Williams, Moore, Eliot, Stevens, Auden, Ginsberg, Plath, Heaney, Walcott, Atwood, Brand, Halfe, and Wah.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note: Category 4 course.

A study of various types of prose fiction from early romances, travel tales and rogue biographies, to Defoe and the rise and development of the novel in England. Particular emphasis will be given to the major novels and novelists of the eighteenth century.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note: Category 3 course.

Reflecting the remarkable transformation of theatre in modernist and postmodern contexts, this course engages with dramatic texts and movements from the late nineteenth century through to contemporary plays and performances. While works in translation will be addressed, including those by Ibsen and Strindberg, the primary focus will be British, Irish, and American dramatists, such as Shaw, O’Neill, Beckett, Pinter, Williams, Hansberry, Stoppard, Churchill, and Kane.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units 200-level ENG
Note: Students with credit for ENG 348, 349, or 380.6 may not take this course for credit. Category 4 course.

The nineteenth century was a turbulent and formative period in American history, marked by the legacy of revolution along with civil war, the abolition of slavery, the emergence of feminism, and the settlement of the West. This course will examine how different writers engaged with the political, moral, and cultural implications raised by these issues, and the distinctive literary culture that grew out of this engagement. Although most course time will be spent in the nineteenth century, the course will look back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to examine the literary, intellectual, and religious contexts that were relevant to the shaping of this culture.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note: Students with credit for ENG 343 or ENG 344 may not take this course for credit. Category 3 course.

From the turn of the twentieth century, the United States has been marked by two important literary and cultural phenomena: modernism and postmodernism. As a survey of American literature from 1900 to the present, this course is an attempt to figure out what these two large movements look like, to understand how and why the shift from modernism to postmodernism occurred, to account for the differences and similarities between them, and, in a post-9/11 present, to ask: what’s next?

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note: Students with credit for ENG 345 or ENG 347 may not take this course for credit. Category 4 course.

A study of Canadian fiction in English, and some non-fictional prose, from 1960 to the present.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note: Students with credit for ENG 352 may not take this course for credit. Category 4 course.

This course provides a foundational grounding in decolonial theories and literatures. Themes to be examined include subaltern knowledge, land, language, hybridity, environment, gender, power, and history. A wide range of theorists from (post)colonial and decolonizing contexts will be considered in tandem with a selection of contemporary Anglophone literature.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units 200-level English.
Note: Students with credit for ENG 283 may not take this course for credit. Category 5 course for the 2020-21 program year and later.

A study of the changing forms of poetry, drama, and fiction in relation to the major events and shifting political and cultural landscapes of Britain and Ireland since 1900. Areas of focus will vary, but may include feminism, the modernist revolution in the arts, the World Wars, Irish independence, and the decline of British imperial rule and its long aftermath. Authors may include, for example, Shaw, Yeats, Sassoon, Conrad, Woolf, Joyce, Orwell, Beckett, Larkin, Kureishi, Selvon, and Carter.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s) or Corequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level ENG
Note: Students with credit for ENG 330 or ENG 360 may not take this course for credit.

Literary theory serves as a kind of base for all modes of criticism and interpretation; it can be thought of as playing a similar role as math does for the sciences, or philosophy for history. This course offers an introduction to some of the major texts and approaches to literary and cultural theory, going as far back as antiquity, but with an emphasis on relatively contemporary debates.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): 3 credit units of 200-level English.
Note: Students with credit for ENG 203.6 may not take this course for credit.

Offered occasionally by visiting faculty and in other special situations to cover, in depth, topics that are not thoroughly covered in regularly offered courses.

Weekly hours: 3 Seminar/Discussion hours

Offered occasionally by visiting faculty and in other special situations to cover, in depth, topics that are not thoroughly covered in regularly offered courses.

Weekly hours: 3 Seminar/Discussion hours