For one University of Toronto English class, the syllabus comes with body slams, heel turns and a trip to the wrestling ring.

Professor Daniel Tysdal is teaching a course that asks students to treat professional wrestling as a serious storytelling form, combining literary analysis with hands-on experience in and around the ring.

The course, ENGD54 “Extremely Revealing Bullshit” – The Art of Professional Wrestling, looks at wrestling through character, narrative structure and audience response. Tysdal says the class grew out of his own return to wrestling in the early days of the pandemic, when he started watching All Elite Wrestling, or AEW, at home with his wife.

A fan as a child, Tysdal said his casual viewing turned into something deeper and eventually fed into his own writing.

“I just started to see it as an art form,” says Tysdal, an award-winning poet and short fiction writer. “Like fiction or film, when it comes down to it, pro wrestling is all about storytelling.”

Tysdal wanted to understand that storytelling more closely, so he signed up for classes at Superkick’d, a Toronto wrestling gym near his home. That was where he first stepped into the ring.

What he found, according to the course description, was a form that demanded physical and creative discipline. The first lesson was basic and unforgiving.

“The first thing you learn is how to fall properly,” he says. “Everything you do is built around that.”

Training includes repeated drills on how to land safely, move with a partner and perform sequences that look violent but are carefully controlled. The work is physically exhausting, combining strength training, cardio and choreography.

Tysdal has since developed his own in-ring character, “A+” Mr. Croxtin, described as a reluctant teacher turned unlikely hero. He debuted the persona at the OssFest street festival.

His time in wrestling also shaped how he teaches it. In the ring, he says, matches usually follow a seven-part narrative arc, moving through set-up, rising tension, climax and resolution. Wrestlers use pacing, moves and character work to tell that story, while the crowd helps shape it in real time.

“You’re telling a story with your body, and the crowd plays a big part of that story,” he says.

That idea sits at the centre of the class. Students study wrestling with literary frameworks, looking at how heroes, heels and more complicated characters drive action. They also study “kayfabe,” the convention of presenting staged events as real, and how that relationship between fiction and reality affects audience engagement.

“It’s just like watching a good play,” says Tysdal. “You’re not thinking these are actors, you just get swept up in the story.”

The course mixes analysis with practice. Students read poetry, comics and academic essays, watch weekly wrestling broadcasts, write reflections and complete critical and creative assignments. Some focus on themes such as race or gender in wrestling. Others build original characters or stories.

For fourth-year English and creative writing student Rekha Samlal, the course opened up a form she had never followed before.

“I didn’t have a background in wrestling at all, but I was intrigued,” she says.

Over the semester, Samlal said she became invested in the storylines and the characters she watched each week.

“I was very confused at first, but then you get heavily invested. You want to know what will happen next,” she says.

The course also takes students out of the classroom. As part of the class, they attend a live wrestling event and visit the gym where Tysdal trains. There, they learn basic techniques and get a closer look at the physical demands of the work.

For Samlal, that experience sharpened the line between performance and pain.

“It made me realize, yeah, it might be staged, but what they put their bodies through is still real,” she says. “They’re still hitting the ground; they’re still executing these moves.”

Tysdal says that the mix of intellectual and physical engagement matters. He describes professional wrestling as a way to think about storytelling at the meeting point of sport, theatre and popular culture. He also says it creates room for broader discussion in class.

“Pro wrestling is very political. It’s a great vehicle for talking about class, gender, race, all of these topics,” he says, adding that the industry has also become more progressive and inclusive in recent years.

For Tysdal, the point of the course is to take wrestling seriously as an art form and to show students how stories are built, performed and felt by an audience.

“Once you start looking at it that way, you realize there’s something here for everybody.”