Second-Year Courses 2018-19

FALL 2018

SPRING 2019

Fall 2018 – Course Descriptions

ENGL 204: BUSINESS AND TECHNICAL WRITING

Multiple Sections

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

ENGL 208: INTRODUCTION TO PUBLIC SPEAKING: COMMUNICATION

Multiple Sections

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

ENGL 221: NORTH AMERICAN INDIGENOUS LITERATURE

Professor Sally Carpentier

ENGL 221 will examine the content, form, and nature of North American Indigenous literatures and their relation to oral traditions and post-contact. Through an exploration of a rich body of writers, the course will encourage an understanding of Indigenous writing as a way of acknowledging and qualifying cultural and personal experience while simultaneously representing some of the ordinary challenges, dreams, sufferings, and victories of Indigenous Peoples. Oral stories (some transcribed) will facilitate understanding of how, through these stories, traditions are maintained, renewed, and transmitted. Elders, guest lecturers, and films will also be an integral part of our educational journey.

ENGL 222: TRAVELS IN WORLD LITERATURE: Mobile Subjects

Professor Melissa Stephens

ENGL 230: LITERATURE AND POPULAR CULTURE: Espionage Fiction

Professor Sandra Hagan

Whom can you trust? Stories of espionage play on readers’ anxieties about one another to create thrilling plots that expose a web of themes involved in human interrelatedness. Besides the twin concerns of trust and betrayal, such stories encourage us to consider questions of identity. Can you ever really know anyone else—or yourself? Is there a fixed identity—a you—that would persist even if you went undercover? And where does one’s first loyalty lie—to self or to socio-political organizations, including one’s country? In this course, we will explore such themes over a broad range of espionage stories, complicated by gender and by political context. We’ll begin with the roots of the genre in the nineteenth century and then explore some of the most popular espionage fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries. With the recently dubbed phenomenon “Chick Noir,” we’ll discuss how espionage fiction is once again exploring the intimate space of domestic relations where it began with the Victorian Sensation Novel. We’ll discuss also the notion of privacy as it relates to the radical sharing encouraged by social media. If, as Dave Eggers’ technological thriller The Circle claims, “privacy is theft” in a communal social media space, is the concept of spying meaningless? Or have we simply sanctioned the very gaze that once was considered illicit. Readings will be selected from texts such as James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy; or, a Tale of the Neutral Ground; Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White; John le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity; or Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl.

ENGL 231: SPECULATIVE LITERATURE

Professor Paul Watkins 

ENGL 240: WAYS OF READING

Professor Daniel Burgoyne

ENGL 273: Ancients and Moderns: Animals With Human Faces

Professor John Lepage

This course will examine ways in which literature uses animals to mirror human identity while satirizing social morality. The course will reflect the relationship between ancient literary traditions, in which social relationships and hierarchies are upset (including those of tradition itself), and modern social and literary preoccupations. The texts include the fables of Aesop, Aristophanes’ Birds, Apuleius’ Golden Ass, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, and Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. These works are mostly comic and often spectacularly funny, but there is always a serious edge. We will discover that to make its own claims to literary greatness (or simply dignity), comic literature must from time to time mock serious literature. The most distinctive feature of this course will be your opportunity to read widely for pleasure and serious contemplation.

Spring 2019 – Course Descriptions

ENGL 203: INTERMEDIATE ACADEMIC WRITING

Professor Toni Smith

Academic writing is a unique genre that asks us to enter into ongoing conversations about important issues.  Skilled writers are able to simultaneously juggle multiple sources—voices in the conversation—with their own focused arguments in a seamless, engaging way.  Improve your academic essay-writing skills in this practical class, where we’ll learn the tips and techniques that enable you to gain confidence in managing more complex essay assignments.

ENGL 204: BUSINESS AND TECHNICAL WRITING

Multiple sections

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

ENGL 208: INTRODUCTION TO PUBLIC SPEAKING: COMMUNICATION

Multiple Sections

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

ENGL 220: CANADIAN LITERATURE IN CONTEXT

Professor Paul Watkins

ENGL 232: CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

Professor Dawn Thompson

This historical survey course traces the development of children's literature from its roots in folk and fairy tales to the mid-twentieth century with a focus on the imagination. What does children’s literature tell us about how adults have conceived of the imagination, and specifically, the child’s imagination? How has reading, and reading to children, attempted to engage their imagination? And in what ways has literature tried to limit the child’s imagination? These are a few of the questions we will ask as we explore some of the most famous classics of children’s literature.

ENGL 274: TRADITIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS

Professor Anna Atkinson

An examination of transformations within distinct literary traditions. The course may focus on specific topics or themes or examine the representation of history in literary traditions, of literature as social criticism, or of literatures shaped by the technologies of communication and memory. 

ENGL 280: BOOK CLUB: A Feast of Words: Food in Literature

Professor Toni Smith 

Food—as a central aspect of human life—has long preoccupied writers and readers, operating as a metaphor for consuming, for culture and belonging, and for relationships with the natural world.  Eating as a bodily function has also made relationships with food a regular device for exploring relationships and challenges for the human body.  And, of course, eating is a pleasure that leads to pleasurable reading and writing!  Join us to read books from a variety of times and places that write about food in interesting ways, from Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, to Atwood’s The Edible Woman, to Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, and many more.

FILM 201: FILM STUDIES

Professor Jay Ruzesky

VIU Calendar Description of Courses