4000-Level Course Descriptions
FALL 2026 | WINTER 2027
ENGL-4116-050 | Topics in Creative Writing: Occult/Somatic Poetics | S. Pool
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
This course explores the intersections of creative writing the occult, and paranormal practice, examining how these forces remain influential in contemporary poetics. We will investigate the work and practices of writers such as Alice Notley, CA Conrad, Ariana Reines, Hoa Nguyen, Bhanu Kapil, Joy Harjo situating their poetics within both historical and contemporary frameworks. Central to the course is (Soma)tic Ritual, a practice that provides all writers and artists a window into the creative vitality of the world around us. Through these rituals, students will engage with an “extreme present,” learning to thrive creatively even in crisis and collaborate across artistic disciplines. Course topics include the influence of occult practice on form and content, covering diverse areas such as intersectionality, ritual, spirit worlds, witchcraft and magic, non-human communication, divination, shamanism, tarot, mysticism, numerology, and symbolism. Students will explore how these practices expand both creative possibility and critical understanding, linking ritual, and artistic experimentation in the study and creation of creative texts. This is a creative writing workshop course with a heavy reading list. Attendance, reading and participation is extremely important. This course will require an application portfolio for admission emailed to cwportfolio@uwinnipeg.ca
ENGL-4741-001 |Topics in Screen Studies: Cinephilia Past and Present | A. Burke
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Translated directly, “cinephilia” means “the love of film.” This course explores the concept of cinephilia, examining the ways in which the compulsion to watch films is entangled with the desire to write about them. The course will begin with a consideration of traditional forms of cinephilia that defined the post-war period and the cinematic new waves that emerged around the world in the 1960s and 70s. During this first phase of the course we will watch Douglas Sirk’s melodrama All That Heaven Allows (1955, USA) and consider its critical fate, from its marginalization as a “women’s picture” on its release to its elevation as a film classic in the decades that followed, a rise fueled by critical re-evaluations and cinematic homages, such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974, West Germany) and Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven (2002, USA).
Following this, the course will pivot to the present, taking up Girish Shambu’s recent call “For a New Cinephilia” in the Spring 2019 issue of Film Quarterly. If traditional cinephilia was largely defined by the crafting of best-of lists and the celebration of predominantly white male Euro-American genius, the new cinephilia Shambu identifies is global in scope, diverse in constituency, and political in spirit. This new cinephilia, far from retreating into the world of film, demands that film open up the world and create new ways of seeing it. This new cinephilia, as Shambu puts it, “is fully in contact with the present global moment.” This course takes up Shambu’s challenge to think about and transform cinephilia and to imagine a politically progressive love of film.
Films will primarily be accessible online via the UW Library and students are expected, with a few exceptions, to watch the films at home in advance of each class. I have minimized the readings for the course on the basis of this. We will treat the films themselves as primary texts. The final screening list will be decided over the course of summer 2026, but the directors under consideration include Wong Kar-wai, Mati Diop, Sky Hopinka, Hong Sang-soo, Rhayne Vermette, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Matthew Rankin, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Chantal Akerman, Kleber Mendonça Filho, and Claire Denis.
Students need not have any prior experience studying film! Part of the work of the course will be developing the basic skills to watch and write about film.
ENGL-4742-001 | Topics in Cultural Theory: Indigenous Stories, Listening, and Beading | C. Lypka
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
This course will focus on the connection between Indigenous storytelling and material art by combining hands-on learning in traditional beadwork with listening to and reading works of resistance and resurgence. Indigenous beading is a research paradigm that has been used to resist colonial violence by maintaining and preserving Indigenous identity, transmitting stories and knowledge, and enacting cultural resurgence. The class will reflect on and put into practice how Indigenous ways of knowing are activated through listening while working with your hands.
ENGL-4841-001 | Old English Literature | Z. Izydorczyk
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
WINTER 2027
ENGL-4211-001 | Romanticism | P. Melville
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
This course focuses on British literature from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, otherwise known as the English Romantic period. The course will not only consider the Romantic movement as a complex and conflicted response to a shared set of literary and philosophical anxieties, but will also pay close attention to the interplay between the socio-political concerns of the Romantic period and the literature the period produced. We will cover a variety of poems and non-fiction prose (all available online), but primary texts to purchase (new or used) will include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818 version) and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
ENGL-4294-001 | Contemporary Literature: The Graphic Novel | C. Rifkind
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
The graphic novel is one of the fastest-growing forms of contemporary storytelling that has roots in comics and takes influences from (and in turn influences) literature, film, visual art, games, and other contemporary media.
Emerging from the alternative and undergound comix scenes of the late 20th century, 21st century graphic novels continue to draw into view the lives and stories of marginalized subjects and suppressed histories, often experimenting with style, structure, and genre. Graphic novels are therefore complex visual-verbal texts that invite readers to combine literary analysis with approaches from film studies, art history, communications and media studies, cultural studies, graphic design, and object studies.
This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of comics studies through landmarks in North American contemporary graphic fiction that range from realism to surrealism, historical fiction to speculative fiction, and with a healthy dose of gothic/horror linking many of the readings. Topics we will explore include: coming-of-age and family dynamics; race and ethnicity; city and suburb; illness and disability; history and memory; secrets and detection; culture and identity; class and gentrification; gender and sexuality; love and loss.
Students need no prior experience reading or studying comics or graphic novels, but they do need an open curiosity about what the form can do and a willingness to participate actively in a collaborative learning environment.
Additional readings in comics studies and related disciplines will be posted to Nexus. Assignments will include regular reading responses, short presentations, a short textual analysis, and a major research project (academic or creative). No Generative AI tools are permitted in this course in order for students to build essential skills in thinking, reading, and writing within a supportive environment.
ENGL-4717-001 | Indigenous Literature and Culture | P. DePasquale
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
This course focuses on representations of Indigenous peoples and cultures across a range of contemporary Indigenous literary and non-literary texts. The course will examine: intersections of Indigeneity, class, gender, and sexuality across diverse texts and imaginaries; Indigenous theory, research methodology, ethics, epistemology, and praxis; Indigenous cultural productions as sites of cultural enquiry, resistance, and critique; the aesthetics of Indigenous literary and non-literary cultural productions; and other topics as they relate to contemporary concerns in Indigenous and cultural studies today such as: MMIWG2S+, cultural appropriation, identity, sovereignty, land and land back, water, the natural world, health and futurity. Students taking this course will have the option of an experiential learning volunteer placement with a local Indigenous organization. This course meets the Indigenous Course Requirement.
ENGL-4903-001 | Critical Race Studies: The Black Atlantic | K. Sinanan
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
Transatlantic slavery, ‘race’, abolition, and emancipation are now understood to occupy a central place within the history, literature, and philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Western wealth was forged out of chattel slavery and the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean and Americas: we still live with the present legacies of this long history that persist today. This course explores the Black Atlantic as a real and symbolic, transhistorical and geographic space, joining Europe, Africa, and Vast Early America, in which the racializing practices of colonialism may be read and analyzed in ways that center the Black, Brown, and Indigenous lives that were seized. This course focuses on the narratives of enslaved people and the visual cultures of slavery, race, and the Caribbean plantation from the 17th century to the present day. Texts will include autobiographies of the enslaved, alongside portraiture, prints and material culture. We will discuss how visual media, such as statuary and portraiture, is used to forge race in British and European conversation pieces and portraiture, and we will look at the work of contemporary artists such as Titus Kaphur and King Cobra to unmake the race-craft of material culture.