200-level / Introductory Courses

Prerequisite: Open only to English Majors and Minors, or by special written permission of instructor. 

 Description: Required for English Majors and Minors, ENGL 202 is foundational to further study of literature in the department of English. Through readings of and lectures/discussions on a range of major non-dramatic works from the Anglo Saxon period to the mid 18^th century, it introduces students to English literary history, while reflecting upon the meaning of tradition, the idea of a canon and of literary history, the concept of “Englishness,” and the significance and purpose of literature. We will trace the development through time of specific literary forms and genres, including lyric, elegy, epic, satire, sonnet, romance, and pastoral. At the same time, we will consider the relation between literature and religion, politics, and culture broadly, asking why people read and write literature, and following the changing ideas of the writer and his/her role in society. This course gives students a knowledge of early literature in English that prepares them for more advanced and specialized study in the department. Class discussions (especially in conferences) and written assignments will help students develop skills of interpretation and communication.

Texts: (texts are available at McGill Bookstore):

Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol 1. 9^th Edition.
Edmund Spenser’s Poetry. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Anne Lake Prescott and Andrew D. Hadfield. (Included with the Anthology if purchased at the Bookstore)
The Canadian Writer’s Handbook. 6^th Edition. Ed. William E. Messenger et al. Toronto: Oxford, 2015. (RECOMMENDED)

Evaluation: 20% mid-term; 40% 5-6 page term paper; 30% formal final exam;10% conference participation

Format: Lectures, conferences, discussion

Prerequisites and Anti-requisites: English 202 or permission of instructor. Limited to students in English programs only. Not open to students who have taken ENGL 201.

 Description: This course surveys English poetry and fiction written between the late eighteenth century and the twentieth century. For the sake of intelligibility, “English” should be understood to include British and Irish literature, with an occasional example of a writer who hails from elsewhere, such as the New Zealander Katherine Mansfield. We will ask how English literature models itself on traditions and perceived breaks with tradition. In this light, we will consider romantic, Victorian, modern, and contemporary works in a roughly chronological order. Students are required to read speedily, thoroughly, critically, and astutely. Even if these poems and narratives are somewhat familiar from high school or CEGEP courses, students should read them again. This course is intended to provide a sampling of the English literary tradition as a gateway to future study. Attention will be paid to form, cultural conditions of production, genre, content, gender, visual culture, labour and leisure, grief, children, and other topics.

Texts:

Norton Anthology, 10th edition
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (Oxford)
​Charles Dickens, Hard Times (Norton)

Evaluation (tentative): essay one 25%; essay two 25%; attendance and participation 15%; final exam: 35%

Format: Lecture and conference

 Prerequisite: none

Description: A survey of American literature from its beginnings to the Civil War (1860). While we may begin with early writing—Native Americans, explorers, Puritans, or 18^th-century figures such as Benjamin Franklin, for example—the main emphasis will be on literature from the first half of the 19^th century: authors such as Irving, Douglass, and Stowe, with a special focus on the major writers of the “American Renaissance”--Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Dickinson. Particular attention will be paid to representative American themes, forms, and literary techniques. No attempt will be made to cover all major writers or writings.

Texts:

Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings
The Norton Anthology of American Literature: 8th edition, Vol. B (1820-1865)

Evaluation (tentative): 20% mid-term exam; 25% essay; 15% conference participation; 40% final exam. (All evaluation—on exams as well as essays—tests abilities in literary-critical writing and analysis; none involves short-answer or multiple-choice exams graded by computer.)

Format: lectures and weekly conferences

Description: A survey of the American novel from 1945 to turn of century, tracing continuities and disruptions both formal and thematic. Topics will include postwar triumphalism and its discontents; the legacies of modernism and romanticism; anxieties of lineage, whether literary, familial, tribal, or regional; the pressure of technology on the forms and idioms of the novel; oral performance and other sources of vernacular energy in the changing American language; the emerging opposition of “highbrow” and consumer culture; the American spatial imaginary (city, suburb, network, frontier); the formal tensions between novels of culture and novels of individual consciousness; and the ideological tension between universalist claims and particular identities.

Texts:

Jane Bowles, Two Serious Ladies
Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Saul Bellow, Herzog
Marylinne Robinson, Housekeeping
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater
Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

Evaluation: Attendance and participation, 10%; 4-page essay, 20%; 6-8-page essay, 35%; final exam, 35%.

Format: lectures and conferences

Prerequisite: None

 Description: A survey of English Canadian poetry and prose from the Second World War to the present. We will read poetry and short fiction to explore the development of Canadian literature. In addition to looking at the work of specific authors from 1945 to the present, the lectures will cover such topics as Canadian literary nationalism, realism, postmodernism, and different forms of experimentation. We will also look at the idea of nordicity as a central metaphor in Canadian writing and discuss the economic and cultural forces accounting for the construction of a national literature. 

Texts: Lecker, Robert, ed. Open Country: Canadian Literature in English. Toronto: Nelson, 2007.​

Evaluation: TBA.

Format: Lecture.

 Description: TBA

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: lectures, conferences

 Description: This course will serve as an introduction to a few of the elements, characteristics, and conventions that define the novel as a form. While the novels will be read in chronological order, our discussions will emphasise the formal dimensions of the works. The novels cover a diverse range of styles, subgenres, and types of stories. We will encounter monsters, ghosts, and visions of hell; we will also encounter stories of childhood trauma and the development of an artist. The novels studied in this course constantly skirt between the mundane and the fantastical. Students are asked to reflect on how a novel represents its world, and how that representation challenges our assumptions and perceptions of our own world. The six novels covered in this course are from 19th-21st century Britain, Ireland, or the United States. Representative rather than exhaustive, these novels present an introduction into a number of important features and genres that will be of use in upper-year courses. Lectures, conferences, and in-class assignments will provide students with an overview of key terminology to enhance their formal reading comprehension of this major literary form. Because these novels represent worlds adjacent to the “real” world, we will also examine how historical and political contexts complement our readings of formal qualities in the works.  

Texts: (subject to change)
Mary Shelley. Frankenstein
Henry James. The Turn of the Screw
James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Shirley Jackson. We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Toni Morrison. Sula
Anne Enright. The Gathering

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lecture and conferences

Prerequisite: This class is restricted to declared Majors in Drama and Theatre who have completed or are completing ENGL 230 and ENGL 355. Admission is by permission of the instructor only: sean.carney [at] mcgill.ca

 Description: This course will introduce you to basic tools and techniques used in acting, improvisation, and dramatic analysis.  You will develop vocal and physical warm-ups, learn about breath support and a free and placed voice, explore the performance of Shakespeare monologues, participate in improvisation exercises, explore spontaneity, imagination and creativity, learn about the analysis of a contemporary dramatic script and the use of that analysis in the actor’s work.  Throughout the course you will be asked to commit fully to the class, the group and the process, and you will be expected to work on your own, outside of class, rehearsing your monologues and scenes.

Texts: TBD

Evaluation: A combination of class participation (various exercises and presentations totaling approximately 50% of the evaluation) and various types of written assignments (approximately 50% of the evaluation).

Format: Group discussions, practical exercises, class presentations

 Description: TBA

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: lecture, weekly TA-led conferences

 Description: This course is designed to prepare students for future film courses at McGill.  It is therefore dedicated to three main goals: establishing a frame of reference for the history of film and film theory, introducing key analytical concepts and skills, and inspiring an ongoing interest in film.

This course is restricted to Cultural Studies majors/minors and Film Studies minors.

Texts: coursepack

Evaluation: quiz 10%, 3-4 page paper 15%, 5-6 page paper 25%, conferences 15%, posted class notes 5%, final 30%

Format: lecture and conferences plus weekly screenings

 Description:  Popular media and their technologies of exhibition and consumption shape our daily experience, our sense of the space around us, and our relationship to the world both inside and outside our homes.In this course, we will study film as a mass medium by examininghow film represents other media—and its own medium. Wewill tracethe evolving experience of new media as various forms of virtual experience, from early film to contemporary reality-based and social media. We will examine what new forms of perception these media made possible, what kinds of tensions they brought to light, and how new media technologies change people’s relationships to space and to each other.We will trace shifts in exhibition and consumption practices, such as the private experience of in-home entertainment provided by radio and TV, whichpromise unprecedented connection and simultaneous experience, but also open the home to the threats the outside world presents. We will ask how various media represent—and create—reality, in films about news media and reality TV, and examine what media films tell us about our relationship with the technologies that increasingly shape our daily experience.Throughout the course, we will pay special attention to the shifting relationships between the individual, the home, and the public sphere, as popular media’s address becomes both more private and more mobile.

By the end of the course, students will be able to situate developments in mass media forms and technologies in their wider social and historical context.

Possible course texts:

Selected early short films
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Lang, 1933)
Modern Times (Chaplin, 1936)
Sorry, Wrong Number (Litvak, 1948)
Selected radio plays
Singin’ in the Rain (Donen, 1952)
Ace in the Hole (Wilder, 1951)
A Face in the Crowd (Kazan, 1957)
Selected TV episodes
Poltergeist (Hooper, 1982)
The Ri The Ring (Verbinski, 2002)
Real Life (Brooks, 1979)
Unfriended (Gabriadze, 2014)
Her (Jonze, 2013)
Eighth Grade (Burnham, 2018)

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lectures, discussions, conferences, and screenings

 Description: This course provides a critical introduction to the field of postcolonial and world literature studies, drawing specifically on texts from South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. We will examine how these authors conceptualize and represent their lifeworlds and ideas about community, family, history, space, gender, race, and class in their works. As we read these texts we will query the various – and often contested – meanings of the term “postcolonial” and ask how it relates to categories such as “anti-colonial” and “colonial.” The course will also familiarize students with some of the key concepts from postcolonial theory (for instance, “orientalism” and “the subaltern”). The course offers the fundaments of the field and prepares students for further study in postcolonial and world literature.

NOTE: Attendance to film screening(s) and conference(s) is mandatory.

Texts: 

• Aime Cesaire – Discourse on Colonialism
• Chinhua Achebe – Things Fall Apart
• Khushwant Singh – Train to Pakistan
• Buchi Emecheta – Second-Class Citizen
• Salman Rushdie – Haroun and the Sea of Stories
• Film: Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (Dir: Satyajit Ray, 1969)

Evaluation: Attendance; assignment; midterm; final paper

Format: Lectures, discussions, conferences, and screenings