300-level / Intermediate Courses

Prerequisite: None.

Description: This course will canvas some of the “origins” of the English novel and trace its development (particularly as anti-romance satire and realism) up to the mid-eighteenth century. Our readings and discussion will refer to the European context of the evolution of this narrative form in England. We will consider the novel as responding to a network of interrelated problems – of the self and its imaginative politics – at the representational crossroads of medieval epic, courtly romance, spiritual autobiography, picaresque satire, colonialist adventure, gallant intrigue, baroque casuistry, bourgeois conduct book, sentimental love story, moral treatise, psychological realism, and mock-heroic “comic epic in prose.” As the emerging literary “form of forms,” the early modern novel vibrantly juxtaposes and interweaves all these different generic strands. Our work together will aim at a critical analysis of the textual ideologies articulated in this experimental process of historical combination.

Texts: The required reading for this course will include most or all of the following books, which will be available at The Word Bookstore (469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640). (The list of texts and editions below is tentative and incomplete, to be confirmed in September 2020.)

• The Song of Roland (Hackett)
• Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose (Oxford)
• Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur (Oxford)
• Abelard and Heloise, The Letters and Other Writings (Hackett)
• Lazarillo de Tormes (Norton)
• Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote (Norton)
• Madame de Lafayette, The Princess of Clèves (Norton)
• Aphra Behn, Oronooko and Other Writings (Oxford)
• Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess (Broadview)
• Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (Norton)
• Samuel Richardson, Pamela (Oxford)
• Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela (Oxford)

Evaluation: Paper (50%), tests (40%), participation (10%). Regular attendance is required for a passing final grade (a maximum of two absences will be allowed except for documented medical or similar emergencies).

Format: Lectures and discussion.

Prerequisite: None.

Description: A tour through the English literary Renaissance from around 1500 to 1600, apart from drama, emphasizing literary authors and texts of particularly high quality and influence, and relating them to significant or interesting cultural contexts and nonliterary discourses, including the visual arts. Further readings sample those contexts and discourses. Featured texts and authors will include Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, Edmund Spenser, including his Shepheardes Calender and the iconography of its twelve illustrations, Mary Stuart (Queen of Scots), and William Shakespeare’s nondramatic poetry. Other parts of the course will address various topics through study of relevant English and translated continental texts, including the gender debate enhancing the status of women; the beginnings of female authorship in English; contemporary erotica; the advent of printing and controls upon print; sixteenth-century literary theory; the relation of visual iconography and emblematics to literature; Neoplatonic love theory and its literary and social impacts; and mythography.

The Course Reader and other texts will be available in paperback for purchase at the Word bookstore, 469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640.

Texts:

• Sir Thomas More, Utopia
• Shakespeare, Sonnets and Narrative Poems
• Baldesar Castiglione, The Courtier
• Spenser, Book VI of The Faerie Queene
• Course Reader, providing the various other texts.

Evaluation: Term paper, 50%; take-home final exam 40%; class attendance and participation 10%.

Format: Lectures and discussion.

Description: In this course we will survey the impressive yield of English Renaissance drama written by writers other than William Shakespeare. We will read twelve plays from the period, about one a week, including The Spanish Tragedy (Thomas Kyd), The Tragical History of Dr Faustus (Christopher Marlowe), Arden of Faversham (Anon), The Tragedy of Antony (Mary Sidney), The Shoemaker’s Holiday (Thomas Dekker), A Woman Killed with Kindness (Thomas Heywood), The Knight of the Burning Pestle (Francis Beaumont), A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (Thomas Middleton), The Duchess of Malfi (John Webster), Bartholomew Fair (Ben Jonson), The Changeling (Middleton and Rowley), and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (John Ford). We will study these plays as exemplars of swiftly-changing and varied theatrical tastes in the period. Many of these works provide purviews onto the cultural situation of early modern London that are rarely found in Shakespeare’s works. One essay from this course will be nominated for the Catherine M. Shaw Early Drama Award.

Texts (available at the Word on Milton): Kinney, Arthur F. (ed). Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments. Blackwell, 2005. ISBN 978-1-4051-1967-2.

Evaluation:
First Essay, 7-8 pages (25%);
Final Essay, 10-12 pages (35%);
Final Exam (30%);
Participation (10%).

Format: Lecture and class discussion.

Average Enrollment: 35 students.

Prerequisite or co-requisite: ENGL 202 or ENGL 200. This course is open only to English majors in the Literature stream. All Literature Majors must sign up for a section of ENGL 311 in their first year in the Literature program.

Description: This course introduces students to the formal and stylistic elements of poetry and prose fiction, provides them with a shared vocabulary for recognizing and analyzing different literary forms, and develops their reading, writing, and critical discussion skills.

Although many critical methods can be applied to the works in this course, Poetics focuses on teaching students how to talk and write precisely about a wide range of formal and stylistic techniques in relation to literary meaning in poetry and prose fiction. All the critical methodologies you will learn in your other English courses will benefit from your knowledge of the material of ENGL 311. You will read some works in Poetics that are also required in other courses, such as ENGL 202 and 203, the Departmental Surveys of English Literature. In Poetics, we study such works not primarily in historical context, or as engagements with literary, cultural or social history, but for the techniques of literary art with which they communicate. The course instructors assume that students enrolled as English majors will already have some facility explaining what given works of literature mean; we instead focus on understanding how literature creates meaning. Discussions and assignments will therefore involve the memorization, identification, and application of concepts and terms essential to the study of literary techniques. The English Literature program requires that ENGL 311 be taken in U1 so that all Literature students will be well prepared for their other studies with a shared terminology and training in critical writing.

Texts: 

• Abrams, M.H., and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 11^th edn. Wadsworth-Cengage, 2014.
• Bausch, Richard, and R.V. Cassill, eds. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Shorter 8^th edn. New York: Norton, 2015.
• Ferguson, Margaret, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy, eds. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 6^th edn. New York: Norton, 2018.
• Messenger, William E., et al., eds. The Canadian Writer’s Handbook. 6^th edn. Toronto: Oxford, 2015.

Evaluation: First essay, close reading, 4 pp., 10%; second essay, comparison of poems, 5 pp., 15%; third essay, on short story, secondary research required, 6-7 pp., 15%; mid-term exam, 10% (in class); formal final examin­ation common to all sections of Poetics, 30%; class attendance and participa­tion, 10%; willing and effective completion of occasional short assign­ments, such as pop quizzes, writing exercises, scansions, and recitations, including such assignments and discussion opportunities as may be posted on the course website, 10%. This evaluation is the same for all sections of Poetics.

Format: Lecture and discussion, chiefly discussion.

Prerequisite: None.

Expected Student Preparation: Previous university-level courses in drama and theatre, literature, or cultural studies.

Description: This seminar will engage in a study of a wide range of performance texts, examined not simply as dramatic literature but as works in their original manuscript form, and thence transformed by the nature of theatrical performance, and by the meanings generated for them by their popular and critical responses. The seminar will also attend to the material conditions of performance, the work of actors and actresses, actor-managers and actress-managers, designers, musicians, et al, and to the semiotic and sociopolitical significances of the venues and cities, London pre-eminently, in which the productions were first performed, along with a consideration of their theatrical afterlives and the ways in which they served to create a performance repertoire. Some of the playwrights do not often appear in anthologies, if only because their works do not readily lend themselves to the dead hand of canonization or being fitted for the Procrustean bed of generic classification. The playwrights to be studied will come from a selection of works by George Colman, the Younger, Col. Ralph Hamilton, James Smith, R. B. Peake, George Henry Lewes, Dion Boucicault, T. W. Robertson, B.C. Stephenson, Alfred Cellier, Joseph Addison, Netta Syrett, with a nod to a comical satire by J.M. Barrie and the inclusion of the ‘original’ text of Paul Potter’s Trilby, based on the novel of that name by George du Maurier and two texts performed by Christy’s Minstrels / Christy Minstrels. We shall also study Henry Irving’s / Leopold Lewis’s The Bells (a text in LION). The word “British” in the anthology of plays we shall be studying draws attention to the ways in which theatre formed--and was formed by--the constructions of nation(s) and empires, both real and imaginary.

Recurrent themes and topics will include racialization / racism; ‘The Other;’ ‘Othering;’ stereotyping; classism; ageism; ethnicity; religion; blackface and brownface and yellow face; ‘the scramble for Africa;’ slavery and anti-slavery movements and practices; asymmetrical power relations; white supremacy; the depredations of the Industrial Revolution; foundational ethnography; Orientalism and Occidentalism; the exploitation of minorities; diasporas; colonialized abjection; the poetics of comedy, tragedy, melodrama, and tragi-comedy; imperialistic machinations; performances as acts of historically-, politically-, and ideologically sedimented engagements with resistance against oppression; demonization; imprisonment; the trauma of guilt and remorse; hypnosis and mesmerism; gender oppression and occlusion; cross-dressing; juridical practices; the carnivalesque; the charivari; the “Angel in the House” and similar tropes, along with their mystifying principles and practices; the “woman question;” programmatic, strategic patriotism and its cognate, jingoism; the geopolitical construction of nineteenth-century London; the semiotics of place; engagements with cultural recuperation in the face of loss; the construction of theatrical repertoires; inter-culturalism; intra-culturalism; the phenomena of theatrical ghosts and ghosting; cultural literacy; the educated imagination; the poetics of realism, naturalism, melodrama, and of virtuosic acting; and the antinomies of “civilization,” on the one hand, and “barbarism / savagery,” on the other.

Passages from the plays will be regularly read out loud to get a visceral and palpable sense of their affective properties and to develop, as the whole seminar will do, a detailed understanding of the vocabulary and syntax of nineteenth-century performance practices. You do not have to be an actor to read out loud; as I have found over my years of teaching, every student is an actor, fully developed or waiting to be formed. I’ll be happy to give you advice on how to make reading out loud not only instructive but fun.

Texts: Davis, Tracy C., ed., The Broadview Anthology of Nineteenth-Century British Performance (Broadview Press, 2012)

Evaluation (tentative): Active ongoing participation in the intellectual and creative life of the seminar: 15%; one seminar ‘positionality’ presentation on a theoretical, critical, or historical text or on a case-study: 15%; a distilled critical argument arising from the seminar ‘positionality’ presentation advanced in a 8-page long essay: 20%; a 16-page scholarly essay on an individually-negotiated topic: 50%.

Format: Brief, mid-sized, and longer lectures; led-discussions; individual and collective presentations including interrogative Q & As; and mini-performances.

Expected Preparation: Previous university courses in drama and theatre, literature, or cultural studies. Or admission will be decided by the professor.

Description: In addition to reading plays by means of various interpretative strategies, along with critical, theoretical, and historical essays, exercises in life-writing, and watching selected productions on Vimeo, YouTube, et al, and, ideally, a stage production if one is produced in the Montreal winter theatre season, or nearby, we shall be examining recurrent themes and subjects in the study of Contemporary Canadian Indigenous Theatre, among them: critical vocabulary and fraught terminology, insightful and occluding; mythologies, original and imposed by the Imperium; colonization and de-colonization; (spiritual) journeys and vison-quests; embodiments, embodied knowledge; epistemologies of the body; living libraries; (sacred and profane) rituals; the dis/ease(s) of memory; death and alienation by institutions; homelessness; sexuality, gender, two-spiritedness, Queer Indigenous Studies; humour for survival and resistance; disparaged and misunderstood aesthetics; imperial rule(s) and rulers; constructing the Other; the problematics of empathy; the enduring antinomy of the West and all the Rest; resisting / resistant audiences and critics; ‘native’ theatre principles, practices, and experiments; traditions and innovations; orality and ocularity and the relationships between them; story telling / story weaving modalities along with story work; Indigeneity and the academy; land as pedagogy, pedagogy as land; Tricksters and their progeny and variations;, the phenomenon of what Jill Carter has described as “repairing the web;” Monique Mojica’s poetics of “blood memory” and “ethnostress;” critical race theory and its discontents; destructive and “healing” modes of mourning; sustained and sustaining traumas; absence; (ethically-informed) witnessing; the politics of disappearance, investigating how aesthetic practices of representing absence and materialising presence engage with the embodied experience of those facing the trauma of being vanished; both historical and current and imagined future acts of erasure, together with exercises in officially-sanctioned narratives of nation, nations, and nationhood, as occurred during the Sesquicentennial of “Canada”; Turtle Island in the cultural imaginary; treaties, kept and broken; the politics of the “contact zone;” the Residential School System; The Sixties Scoop; the work of the Truth And Reconciliation Commission, its recommendations, and its critics; and the work of The National Inquiry Into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women And Girls, its recommendations, and its critics. “I. Have. Lived. Here. Since. The World Began.”.

Instructive are Yvette Nolan's chapter titles in Medicine Shows: Poison Exposed, Survivance, Remembrance, Ceremony, The Drum, Making Community, Trickster, Rougarou, Mahigan, and the Weeping Forest, Bad Medicine, The Eighth Fire, and This Is How We Go Forward.

An Invitation: No matter the final size of the seminar, it will be possible to ensure that your particular interests are made an integral part of (y)our learning. I am your professor; I am also a student, in the Paulo Freirean sense of the word; the seminar is based, as are most of my seminars, on Freirean principles and practices (with links to the theatre work, writings, and talks of Augusto Boal). This means, among many things, that each of us is here not so much to acquire—and ‘bank’ information qua information--but rather to experience the acquisition of (embodied) knowledge, with which we have a vested interest borne of curiosity and the desire to free ourselves from the shackles of received ideas.

We bring our politics and our ideologies with us, 'self-consciously,' in the good sense of that word, not to impose them upon one another, but to understand them as our determinants of meanings, with the possibility always in mind of changing them as we enhance our critical awareness, thinking, and feelings and recognize that we--students, professors, in our case--are (perhaps? definitely? oppressed), acceding authority to cultures of silence, rather than working pro-creatively to figure out how to interrogate them and to liberate our voices. We are an interdependent community of scholars / artists / seekers working individually and collectively for the 'greater good.' We have what in oral history is known as "shared authority." For more on Freire, I recommend his Wikipedia entry, which can make for ideal reading before our first meeting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire. Time permitting, I also recommend reading the man himself, particularly his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970).

Traditional Territories
“McGill University is located on land which has long served as a site of meeting and exchange amongst Indigenous peoples, including the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabeg nations. McGill honours, recognizes and respects these nations as the traditional stewards of the lands and waters on which we meet today.”

The Significance of Acknowledging Traditional Territory
“A connection to the land is inextricably linked to Indigenous identity. Historically, the cultural protocol of acknowledging traditional territory symbolizes the importance of place and identity for Indigenous peoples. Within many Indigenous communities, protocol requires that individuals situate themselves, and their relationships to the people and the land. For many Indigenous peoples in Canada, and increasingly in broader Canadian society, traditional territory acknowledgements are an important cultural protocol practiced at ceremonial events as a way to acknowledge and honour Indigenous peoples’ connections to their ancestral lands.”

For more information, go to https://www.mcgill.ca/edu4all/other-equity-resources/traditional-territories

We shall be discussing in some detail why the above institutionally-sanctioned words are full of problems, mantras designed to mollify and obscure. See Dylan Robinson, Kanonhsyonne Janice C. Hill, Armand Garnet Ruffo, Selena Couture, and Lisa Cooke Ravensbergen, “Rethinking The Practice and Performance Of Indigenous Land Acknowledgement,” Canadian Theatre Review 177 (Winter 2019): 20-30 [e-journal].

(Play) Texts (provisional):

• Appleford, Rob. Ed. Aboriginal Drama and Theatre. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2005.
• Cardinal, Cliff. HUFF + STICH. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2017.
• Clements. Marie and Rita Leistner. The Edward Curtis Project: A Modern Picture Story. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2010.
• Highway, Tomson. Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005.
• Loring, Kevin. Where The Blood Mixes. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2009.
• Mojica, Monique and Ric Knowles. Eds. Staging Coyote's Dream: An Anthology of First Nations Drama In English, 2 vols. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2003 and 2008.
• Selected plays will be chosen from these two volumes.
• Monkman. Kent. Taxonomy Of The European Male, Séance, And Justice Of The Piece, in Two-Spirit Acts: Queer Indigenous Performances. Ed. Jean O’Hara. Toronto: Playwrights
• Canada Press, 2013.
• Moses. Daniel David. Almighty Voice And His Wife. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 1991.
• Murphy. Colleen. Pig Girl. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2015.
• Nolan. Yvette. Annie Mae’s Movement. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 1998.
• ---. The Unplugging. Drama Online. https://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/plays/the-unplugging-iid-168112
• St. Bernard, Donna-Michelle, Ed. Indian Act: Residential School Plays. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2017. Selected plays will be chosen from this volume.

Selected articles from various journals, including alt. theatre: cultural diversity and the stage.

A substantial body of critical essays and historical documents etc. will be made available to you by means of a shared Dropbox folder. The latter allows for a high standard in providing you with iconographic material of various productions and, as you undertake your projects and presentations and the work of your Constituent Assembly, will make it possible for you to contribute significant material, as, individually and collectively, we build up a very significant source of primary and secondary materials, which can be used not only by us but in other seminars.

Preparatory Reading:
Note: I shall have expected each of you to have read at least two books on this list before our seminar begins in January. This work is essential for many reasons, one being that you need to have an understanding of various salient Indigenous historical, political, social, and gendered, etc., issues and contexts in order to orient yourselves in preparation for our engaged study of and with Contemporary Canadian Indigenous Theatre. The works will be available on Reserve in the Library or available from the library as e-texts.

I shall ask you, individually and collectively, from the beginning of our seminar right through to its final meetings, for your thoughts, feelings, insights, impressions, confusions, etc. drawn from the particular two books you chose to read, to repeat, in advance of the seminar, and, ideally, to reread, in whole or in part, throughout the term. Reading them will provide you rich material to draw from for the work of your Constituent Assemblies.

• Burelle. Julie. Encounters On Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances Of Sovereignty And Nationhood in Quebec. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2019.
• Coulthard. Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting The Colonial Politics Of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
• Fee. Margery. Literary Land Claims: The ‘Indian Land Question’ From Pontiac’s War To Attaswapiskat. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015.
• Hargreaves. Allison. Violence Against Indigenous Women: Literature, Activism, Resistance. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2017.
• Highway. Tomson. Ed. From Oral To Written: A Celebration Of Indigenous Literature In Canada 1980-2010.Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2017.
• Joseph. Bob. 21 Things You May Not Know About The Indian Act: Helping Canadians Make Reconciliation With Indigenous Peoples A Reality. Port Coquitlam, B.C.: Indigenous Relations Press, [2018].
• Joseph. Bob with Cynthia F. Joseph. Indigenous Relations: Insights, Tips & Suggestions To Make Reconciliation A Reality. Indigenous Relations Press, 2019.
• Justice. Daniel Heath. Why Indigenous Literature Matters. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier Press, [2018].
• King. Thomas. The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2013. 9th edn.
  I also recommend the recently revised edition which includes a cornucopia of rich array of iconographic material. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2012.
• ---. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2003.
• Keavy Martin, Dylan Robinson, and David Garneau. Eds. Arts Of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action In And Beyond The Truth And Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier, UP, 2016.
• Metcalfe-Chenail. Danielle. Ed. In This Together: Fifteen Stories Of Truth & Reconciliation. Victoria: TouchWood Editions, 2016.
• Moreton. Robinson. Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements In First World Locations. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016.
• Nolan. Yvette. Medicine Shows: Indigenous Performance Culture. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2015.
• ___ and Ric Knowles. Eds. Performing Indigeneity. New Essays On Canadian Theatre. Volume Six. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2016.
• Ray. Arthur J. An Illustrated History Of Canada’s Native People: I Have Lived Here Since The World Began. Revised and Expanded Edition. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2010.
• Royal Canadian Geographical Society. Indigenous Peoples Atlas Of Canada. 4 vols. [v.1]. Indigenous Canada; [v.2]. First Nations; [v.3]. Inuit. [v. 4]. Métis. There’s an instructive glossary of terms on p. 4 of vol. 1. This is an exemplary work of scholarship, complete with a wide array of iconographic material, much of it in colour.
• Simpson. Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across The Borders Of Settler States. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
• Simpson. Leanne Betasamosake. Lighting The Eighth Fire: The Liberation, Resurgence, and Protection Of Indigenous Nations. Winnipeg: ARP BOOKS, 2017.
• ___. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
• ---. Dancing On Our Turtle’s Back: Spirits Of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence And A New Emergence. Winnipeg: ARP BOOKS, 2011.
• Smith. Linda Tuhiwal. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: ZED BOOKS LTD, 2012.
• Talaga. Tanya. All Our Relations: Finding The Path Forward. Toronto: House Of Anansi Press, 2018. This is the textual version of her CBC Massey Lectures. I urge you not only to read the book, but also to listen to the lectures, available on the CBC radio podcast, “Ideas.” They were recorded live in the various communities across the country where she gave the lectures. There is wonderful drumming and so on.
• Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015. http://www.trc.ca/assets/pdf/Honouring_the_Truth_Reconciling_for_the_Fut.... I urge you to read other volumes published by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
• Vowel. Chelsea. Indigenous Writes: A Guide To First Nations, Métis, & Inuit Issues In Canada. Winnipeg: HighWater Press, 2016.
• What We Have Learned: Principles Of Truth And Reconciliation. Ottawa: Truth And Reconciliation Commission Of Canada, 2015.
• Wilson-Raybould. Jody. From Where I Stand: Rebuilding Indigenous Nations For A Stronger Canada. Vancouver: Purich Books, UBC Press, 2019.
• Younging. Gregory. Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples. Brush Education, Inc., 2018.

Evaluation:

• One seminar “positionality” presentation followed by an eight-page paper, drawing from the presentation and developing a distilled critical argument: 35%. I strongly encourage praxis, in whole or in part, as part of a presentation or as an autonomous event.
• Early in the term, I shall divide you into “Constituent Assemblies,” with three or four seminarians in each one. The CAs will then meet with me early on to settle on a research subject / theme, organized in relation to a set of interrelated key questions, which, through shared research throughout the term, you will seek to answer in all of your own meetings and when each CA near the end of the term gives a joint-presentation to the seminar, explaining your research findings, and your sustained answers to your questions. After the presentation, with a Q + A, you will prepare a “diary” or “map” of your journey from beginning to end. These can be done in various ways: they are an instance of content determining form. I shall send you pdfs and links to ones that have been created by CAs in previous iterations of this seminar. Each CA must have regular meetings with me throughout the entire term: 50%.
• Consistent participation in the intellectual and creative life of the seminar: 15%.
• Note: All written materials for this seminar, including the positionality presentation essay and the diaries / maps must follow the writing guidelines prescribed by Chelsea Vowel and Gregory Younging. See their bibliographic details in the section above on “Preparatory Reading.”

Format: Discussions, discussions, discussions; lectures, small, medium-sized, long; presentations / performances and other pedagogical means which can be arrived at through an exchange about efficacious possibilities.

Description: This course will examine European and North American drama of the twentieth century. We will begin by studying the great realists of the late nineteenth century and the philosophy underlying their dramaturgy. This will lead us into a consideration of various positive and negative responses to the realist tradition. We will examine these plays in their original theatrical contexts, while at the same time positioning these dramas in relation to their individual social and political moments. We will interrogate the specificity of drama as an art form, the implications raised by repetition, performance, the theatre as a collective activity, and the role of the audience in the determination of meaning on the stage. The overall goal of the course is to impart to students a foundational understanding of this dominant trend in modern drama.

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: 
First essay: 25%
Class Participation: 15%
Major Essay: 30%
Final Exam: 30%

Format: Lectures and conferences.

Prerequisite: None.

Expected Student Preparation: This is a challenging course. Previous university courses in English literature, especially ENGL 202; some knowledge of Renaissance literature or culture are desirable.

Note: If course is full, students who would like to take it should contact the professor to be put on the waiting list and should come to the first class.

Description: A study of the poetry and selected prose of one of England’s most important, influential, and still controversial writers. While to many people today Milton seems the epitome of literary and political orthodoxy, in his own time he was known as a radical thinker, an advocate of regicide and divorce. His writing is complex and challenging, demanding close and active engagement from his readers. In this course we will take up his challenge to see especially how he speaks to current concerns. In the first few weeks, we look at Milton’s early poetry and some of his political writings, tracing his development as a poet in relation to his social, political, and literary context. The centre of the course will focus on a close reading of Paradise Lost. In conclusion, we will look briefly at his last works, Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes, and discuss Milton’s later reputation and his place in the Western literary tradition.

Texts: (required texts are available at McGill Bookstore)

• Stella Revard ed, John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)
• Barbara Lewalski, ed. John Milton: Paradise Lost (Blackwell, 2007).
• Selections from the prose: on MyCourses
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (recommended)
• King James Bible (recommended)

Evaluation: 25% mid-term; 40% term paper on Paradise Lost; 25% take-home exam; 10% class participation.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Average Enrollment: 40 students.

Prerequisite: Limited to students in English programs.

Description: This course will survey the emergence of theories and methodologies in philosophy and scholarship, especially in literary criticism, both from ancient intellectual models and in modern thought since the seventeenth century. As a basis for understanding and evaluating the role of “philosophical approaches” in literary and cultural studies, we will compare and contrast several kinds of critical thinking with the distinctive claims of philosophical formalism articulated influentially by Immanuel Kant. The Kantian legacy – not only its principles of moral and aesthetic autonomy and disinterestedness but also its emphasis on the conditions of knowledge and criteria of judgment – provides a powerful and continuing alternative to the nineteenth-century revival of dialectical thinking in Hegel, hermeneutics, and Marx. Our readings will reflect the far-reaching impact of the ideological opposition between the Enlightenment and Romanticism as exemplified by Kant and Hegel. We will examine the history of this opposition as a pattern of methodological assumptions and institutional practices. We will also review the claim that one literary genre in particular – the novel – embodies or expresses the characteristic philosophical problems of modernity.

Texts: Most of the books for this course will be available at The Word Bookstore (469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640). The textbooks listed below will be among those required. (Please note that Pluhar's translation of Kant is the only acceptable edition! The full list of texts and editions will be confirmed in January 2021.)

• Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle, eds., Critical Theory Since Plato (edition to be discussed)
• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Hackett)
• Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (MIT)
• Gerald Graff, Professing Literature (University of Chicago)

Evaluation: Papers (80%), test (10%), participation (10%). Regular attendance is required for a passing final grade (a maximum of two absences will be allowed except for documented medical or similar emergencies).

Format: Lectures and discussion.

Description: From a socio-historical approach that begins in the 19th century and moves to the ‘culture wars’ fought inside English departments in recent decades, this class examines theories about what art does. The writers and intellectual movements we will analyze variously argue that art sustains or dismantles social hegemony, or that art ennobles and empowers society. The common thread of critical readings will be a Marxist orientation towards the social structure and material conditions that produce works of art and command their reception. Two dominant strains of Marxist theory, the means of historical materialism to analyze history, and the alienation of labor in modern capitalism, will organize the class texts, which broadly move between “high” and “low” culture. As a critical study of art’s efficacy in modern society, this course accommodates the student’s choice of close textual readings for the final assignment, to be drawn from a variety of artistic mediums including literature, performance, film and television.

Texts: (subject to change)

• 318 Online Course Reader
• Life in the Iron Mills – Rebecca Harding Davis (1861)
• Pygmalion – G.B. Shaw (1917)
• Shoplifting from American Apparel – Tao Lin (2007)

Evaluation: Attendance and participation (in conference section): 20%, midterm: 20%, short essay: 20%, take-home final: 40%.

Format: Lectures and weekly conferences.

Prerequisite: None.

Description: This course is a survey of some recent developments in cultural theory, especially as they apply to the study of literature; film, television and other screen media; and theatrical and other modes of performance. We will focus on theoretical interventions that seek to grasp new developments in the cultural field; in turn, we will consider how these interventions cause us to look at the literary and cultural past with new eyes. We will situate these theoretical approaches in relation to the wider traditions of Marxist, feminist, queer, affect, trans, Indigenous, and critical race theory. We will likely address such topics as: financialization, debt, and late capitalism; immaterial labour; Indigeneity and decolonization; ecological catastrophe and the idea of futurity; contemporary modes of racialization; the evolving sex/gender system; disability studies; and different kinds of reading (close, distant, surface). Finally, we will also examine some primary works of literary and cultural production to “test out” these theories.

Required Texts: These will likely include essays by Joshua Clover, Annie McClanahan, Jasper Bernes, Silvia Federici, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Lauren Berlant, Sianne Ngai, Sara Ahmed, Derrick Bell, Kim TallBear, C. Riley Snorton, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, Rob Nixon, Lee Edelman, José Esteban Muñoz, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Rita Felski, Franco Moretti and others.

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: This course will introduce students to a range of thinkers invested in how literary texts come to be. Yet rather than focus on the individual talent or overarching historical forces, we will take up what James English has called the “middle zone of cultural space.” This is the zone of agents, publishers, translators, booksellers, prize committees, university English departments, creative writing programs, canon warriors, Goodreads, Amazon and Oprah. Pairing critical readings with novels and short fiction, we will investigate the central institutions, figures, and forces that mediate contemporary literary production and reception. Who are the “unacknowledged legislators” of the literary field, and how do they come between writer and reader to shape what each can and should do? What forces influence our conceptions of aesthetic value, and how is literary prestige measured and doled out? How do literary texts circulate within a culture, and how have they travelled across national and linguistic boundaries? Critical readings will include work by Pierre Bourdieu, Sarah Brouillette, Pascale Casanova, Clayton Childress, Phillipa K. Chong, Beth Driscoll, James English, Henry Louis Gates, John Guillory, Amy Hungerford, Mark McGurl, Jodi Melamed, Janice Radway, Juliana Spahr, Claire Squires, John B. Thompson, Rebecca Walkowitz, and others. We will also encounter fiction and poetry by authors such as Julia Alvarez, Martin Amis, Mona Awad, Percival Everett, Nam Le, Ben Lerner, and others.

Texts:

• Coursepack
• Clayton Childress, Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel
• Percival Everett, Erasure
• John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century

Evaluation (tentative): Participation (10%); Midterm (20%); Two Critical Essays (20% each); Final Exam (30%).

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Expected Student Preparation: Previous coursework in American Literature before 1900, or in 19th-century British fiction, or permission of instructor.

Description: Intensive study of a diverse range of shorter prose fictions produced by American authors—mainly over the course of the long nineteenth century, but culminating in close readings of some of the classic short stories produced in the early twentieth century, and ending with a quick look at some contemporary case studies that develop and test the potential in earlier models. Rather than tracing a singular evolution of the short story mode, we will explore a variety of authors whose works test the possibilities of the short form in very different ways. Each of these writers discovered early on that the short story is not simply a miniaturized novel but operates as a literary vehicle with its own distinctive powers and limitations. After an introductory review of recent scholarly work on the theory of the modern short story, and on the history of its development, we will survey a selection of foundational and influential short fictions that reveal the short story’s uses in relation to myth, romance, and the fantastic; to uncanny plots about ghosts and haunting; to evocation of suppressed emotional or psychic states; to representation of neglected cultural identities; to the impulses of regionalism; to urban experience; to crime and detection; and to self-reflexive interrogations of fictional form itself. Indeed the short story has often served for thoughtful and ambitious American writers not only as a simple form with which they could begin their literary training but as a privileged site for self-conscious experimentation with new modes of imagery, new subject matter, and new narrative techniques. Though it may sometimes be seen as minor, low-brow, and popularizing, always hidden in the shadow of the high art of the Great American Novel, the short story in fact frequently functions as a rarefied realm for serious ideological and formal critique—a testing-ground for the most advanced critical and self-critical thinking by American writers. We will focus on the foundational works of authors selected from the following list: Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Hale, Harte, Twain, Cable, Chesnutt, Crane, Gilman, Chopin, Jewett, London, James, Wharton, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Anderson, Porter. More contemporary case studies may include works by authors such as O’Connor, Updike, Salinger, Ford, Baldwin, Diaz, Chabon, Mukherjee, Lahiri, Paley, Carver, Ohlin, Saunders, and Davis.

Texts: Course-pack collections of a wide range of short fiction.

Evaluation (Tentative): Attendance and participation in discussions, 15%; series of 3 one-page textual analyses, 15%; two critical essays, 20% each (or one extended research paper, 40%); take-home final exam, 30%.

Format: Lecture and seminar discussion.

Average Enrollment: Capped at 25 to 30 students.

Expected student preparation: No formal pre-requisite, but students will be expected to have the skills of close reading and command of critical terms developed in ENGL 311 (Poetics). ENGL 228 (Introduction to Canadian Literature 1) provides appropriate background knowledge for this course.

Description: A survey of the emergence and development of Canadian prose fiction in English from the later nineteenth century to the centennial of Confeder­ation in 1967. We will seek to grasp the developing poetics and shifting generic boundaries of the Canadian novel to 1967, including works of political romance, prairie pastoral, modern prairie and urban realism, and experi­mental modernism. A substantial portion of our studies will involve the situation of Canadian fiction within the context of the novel’s international development from realism to modernism.

Texts: TBA, including 6-8 of the following:

• Richardson, Wacousta (1832)
• Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush (1852)
• DeMille, Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888)
• Duncan, The Imperialist (1904)
• Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (1908)
• Leacock, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912)
• Ostenso, Wild Geese (1925)
• Knister, White Narcissus (1929)
• Grove, Fruits of the Earth (1933)
• ---. Settlers of the Marsh (1925)
• Callaghan, They Shall Inherit the Earth (1935)
• Ross, As For Me and My House (1941)
• MacLennan, Two Solitudes (1945)
• ---. The Watch that Ends the Night (1956)
• Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945)
• Klein, The Second Scroll (1951)
• Buckler, The Mountain and the Valley (1952)
• Wilson, The Equations of Love (1952)
• Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959)
• Watson, The Double Hook (1959)
• Laurence, The Stone Angel (1964)
• Cohen, The Favourite Game (1963)

Evaluation:

1. An essay of 10-12 pages, from a choice of assigned topics (50%)
2. A formal final examination, involving both short-answer and essay questions (40%)
3. Partici­pation in class discussions, 10%. Please note before choosing this course: I assess active participation in discussion, not attendance. Full attendance throughout the semester without speaking will earn 0/10 in this category and will substantially affect your final grade.

Please note regarding this evaluation:

There is only one essay in this course. It is longer than most essays assigned at the 300-level, and it weighs more heavily in your final grade than most such assign­ments. Please consider these issues carefully in making your final course choices.

To help you succeed with such an essay, I encourage you to submit the following voluntary preparatory materials throughout the semester. You may submit one, two, or all three (the first is particularly strongly recommended for anyone new to my courses and my high marking standards). Each task below that you choose to complete will reduce the total weight assigned to the essay itself by 5%:

• a two-page close reading of a chapter or other section from a novel on the reading list that you think you might like to discuss in your essay, to be submitted no later than January 31^st. You may alter your choice of topic after completing this task.
• a sentence outline of your argument, breaking the paper down into at least three major sections, each of which is to be broken down at least one further level (see your Canadian Writer’s Handbook for information about sentence outlines). You may not alter your choice of poet and topic after completing this task.
• a draft of your paper’s opening paragraph, in which you identify and detail your topic and state your paper’s thesis. You may not alter your choice of poet and topic after completing this task.

Thus if you complete all three of these voluntary tasks your essay will be worth 35% of your total mark. Note however that if your mark on any of these assignments is lower than the mark you receive for the completed essay itself, the higher mark on the essay will stand. Thus the essay’s weight of 50% will only be lowered by preliminary assignments that improve on the grade you receive on the essay itself. This is clearly to your advantage.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Average Enrollment: 30 students.

Prerequisite: None.

Expected Student Preparation: Familiarity with literary analysis.

Description: This course explores how prominent Nineteenth-Century novelists opened and closed their complex narratives. We will analyze how their opening gambits and end moves engage and challenge the cultural expectations of their era in terms of social manners and literary conventions such as genres. We will compare sets of works by the same author to reflect on how and why they handle social and literary problems differently in divergent instances. This method of analysis will draw us more actively into the world of the Nineteenth-Century English novel, sharpening the tools that we use when we talk about complex and nuanced literary productions.

Texts: 

• Pride and Prejudice & Persuasion by Jane Austen
• Barnaby Rudge & The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens
• Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
• Critical studies by Elizabeth Ermarth, Northrop Frye and E. M. Forster

Evaluation:
Class participation and attendance (15%);
3 short essays 20% x3 (60%);
Final essay (25%).

Format: Lectures and discussion.

Description: In this course, we will examine a range of English, Irish, African, and Scottish writings from the early Romantic period in order to explore literature’s central role in representing and generating the era’s many revolutions: aesthetic, political, cultural, scientific, and religious. Our study of the Romantic period will focus in particular on six literal and figurative forms of literary and cultural change: 1) the French Revolution and human rights; 2) originality, myth, and the Romantic imagination; 3) nature, enclosure, and environment; 4) feminism, sensibility, and domesticity; 5) slavery, empire, and abolition; and 6) Four Nations Romanticism (England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland).

We will balance aesthetic appreciation with a healthy skepticism of the period’s claims to revolution. Some guiding questions: What are the formal, ethical, technological, and thematic continuities and ruptures between neoclassical and Romantic literatures and cultures? Were there aesthetic revolutions during the Romantic era? What poetic and fictional forms are most amenable to revolutionary thinking? Is the Romantic Movement escapist or engaged, radical or reactionary? How do feminist, laboring-class, abolitionist, and African writers participate in the period’s many revolutions? How does critical theory represent Romanticism in our present time? In what ways has Romantic poetry influenced the formation of the English canon and our modern practices of close reading?

Our syllabus neither follows a strict chronological nor historical narrative. Instead, we will look at six related clusters of development within Romantic writing. As a result of this survey’s emphasis on important constellations of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and culture, certain formal and historical topics will recur: representations of imperial conflict; attempts to define the self in solitude; depictions of emotional and sexual intimacy; vacillations between sincerity and irony; critiques of empiricism, utilitarianism, and industrialism; originary turns to the fragment poem and the locodescriptive lyric; and revisionary returns to the satire, the sonnet, the idyll, and the ode. Finally, this remarkably transformative epoch of literary history encompasses the proliferation of new aesthetic theories of the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque.

Texts: 
Selected works by William Blake, Robert Burns, Jane Austen, Joanna Baillie, Walter Scott, Olaudah Equiano, Charlotte Smith, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Helen Maria Williams, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Edmund Burke, Ann Yearsley, Matthew Lewis, William Cowper, Thomas Paine, and Maria Edgeworth.

Evaluation:
10% participation
20% mid-term exam
40% term paper
30% take-home final exam

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Prerequisite: None.

(Note: For English Majors, this course qualifies for the required three credits from a course in Canadian literature)

Description: This is a course about really reading poetry, in this case, Canadian poetry. It focuses on a group of approximately ten Canadian poets who have formed and responded to the Canadian literary landscape since World War II. Most of the poets covered in the course are writers who confront modern and contemporary ideas about the nature of self, society, sexuality, gender, and art, but we also look at the ways in which these writers are trying to deal with the existential implications of new views about science, God, and the poet’s place in his or her rapidly changing world. Since part of the reading involves thinking about aesthetic and theoretical issues, the course will deal with these issues, just as it will pay close attention to the meaning and resonance of particular poems. At the same time, it will consider the ways in which these poets (and us, as readers) construct the place called Canada as a metaphor that’s central to our daily lives. Students are encouraged to explore multi-media material related to each poet in question. The writing component of the course (frequent short essays but no term papers or exams) is designed to improve interpretive abilities and to encourage creative forms of critical expression. For this reason, this course will appeal to students who wish to broaden their understanding of poetry in general and will provide new ways of thinking about how poetry works. Students enrolling in this course should be prepared to write short essays on a weekly basis, and to participate actively in class discussion.

Texts: Lecker, Robert, ed. Open Country: Canadian Poetry in English. Toronto: Thomson Nelson, 2007.

Evaluation (Tentative): A series of short essays on each of the poets studied in the course, 80%; attendance, 10%; participation, 10%.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Average Enrollment: 25 students.

Prerequisite: None.

Description: “You can make queerness come to life,” T. E. Lawrence (also known as Lawrence of Arabia) wrote to James Hanley in August 1931. This course concentrates on early twentieth-century British fiction with an emphasis on texts about deviant gender and / or sexuality. We will explore different ways in which writers “make queerness come to life,” with a special focus on the role of beauty and shame in the texts we examine. In this course students will gain experience with close reading, literary analysis, and the writing process more broadly.

Texts:

• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
• E. M. Forster, Maurice
• D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love
• Radclyffe Hall, “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself”
• Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mr. Fortune’s Maggot
• Virginia Woolf, Orlando
• James Hanley, “The German Prisoner,” “A Passion Before Death”

Evaluation: Oral presentation & acting as a respondent (20%), reading journals (20%), two papers (60%).

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Prerequisite: None.

Description: Ireland possess a remarkably large and varied corpus of medieval literature, especially vernacular literature, still extant. These works inspired many later Irish writers, especially from the nineteenth century, when there was an upsurge of interest in these early works and the vernacular Irish in which they were recorded. They continue inspire writers today.

This course explores some of these early works, in more recent English translations, and the world that they depict, and the ancient art and tradition of storytelling in Ireland. They include the tales of the mythological origins of Ireland by the Tuatha Dé Danaan; the stories of Finn mac Cumhail and his fianna; the tales of the Ulster Cycle, focussing on the great hero, Cúchulainn; tales of love and adventure; and stories of saints and madmen.

Texts:

• Tales of the Elders of Ireland (Acallamh n Senórach), trans. Ann Dooley and Harry Roe (Oxford, 1999).
• The Táin: from the Irish Epic Táin Bó Cuailnge, trans. Thomas Kinsella (Oxford, 1969).
• Early Irish Myths and Sagas, trans. Jeffrey Gantz (Penguin, 1981).
• Seamus Heaney, Sweeney Astray.

Others to be determined.

Evaluation: essays, presentation, participation and attendance.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Prerequisite: None.

Description: This course aims to be an intensive introduction to the study of Old English, the earliest form of the English language. We will begin with the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the language (that is, basic grammar, which is necessary but not necessarily painful), and advance to the reading of selected texts in prose and poetry.

The aim is to give students a grounding in the language to enable them to read works in the original. Along the way, we will look at some of the history of the English language, how it works as a language, and how it has changed and developed. This may offer some insights into the structure and workings of present-day English. Classes will be devoted at first to grammar and translation, but we will also be examining representations and interpretations of Anglo-Saxon literature through the reading and translating of the texts.

Throughout the course, we will be doing translation exercises and tests. Many of the exercises will be done in class, so attendance is important. We will ‘workshop’ translations through an analysis of the grammar and vocabulary, and eventually discuss possible interpretations of the texts. The course culminates in a reading of one of the finest poems in the English language, regardless of period, The Wanderer, and a translation project with a short essay component.

Texts: An Introduction to Old English, by Peter Baker. 3^rd. edition. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Inc., 2003; 2011. Also available as e-book.

Evaluation: Class tests 35%; homework and exercises 35%; final translation project 20%; attendance and participation 10%.

Format: Lecture, workshop, discussion.

Description: In this course, we ask, is Shakespeare modern? Is he a precursor of the political culture of modernity? Is he the author of our ideas about what it is to be a happy and fulfilled person? And what, after all, do we mean when we say the word “modern”? We address these questions by thinking about our own ideas and practices, by reading plays by other early modern playwrights, some other works from the period and a few key readings in political philosophy. But the focus of our attention is a selection of plays by Shakespeare himself.

The lectures for the course will be posted online on our myCourses site. That feature of the course will free us up to do plenty of work in five-person tutorial sessions. The course will also feature student presentations on all the plays and all the key issues in the course. You will sign up to create one three-minute powerpoint presentation on a topic you will choose from a list of topics.

We will spend time developing effective written and oral presentation skills—how to gather, organize, and analyze evidence, how to develop an idea/argument, how to engage and persuade your readers or auditors.

Texts:

All Shakespeare texts except King Lear are available free from Oxford Scholarly Editions Online. Note that you have to be connected into the McGill system by VPN to access them. Please buy the Folger edition of King Lear (see below). The readings by Taylor, Shapin, and West are available on our myCourses site.

• Taming of the Shrew, ed. Frances E. Dolan (Bedford / St. Martin’s)
  https://www-oxfordscholarlyeditions-com.proxy3.library.mcgill.ca/view/10.1093/actrade/9780198129073.book.1/actrade-9780198129073-div1-12
• A Merry Jest of a Shrewd and Curst Wife
  http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/jest.html
• The Roaring Girl
  https://www-oxfordscholarlyeditions-com.proxy3.library.mcgill.ca/view/10.1093/actrade/9780199580538.book.1/actrade-9780199580538-div2-95?rskey=ctE2Fo&result=2
• Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. Roma Gill
  https://www.oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/view/10.1093/actrade/9780198127697.book.1/actrade-9780198127697-div1-6
• Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel
  https://www.oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/view/10.1093/actrade/9780198129172.book.1/actrade-9780198129172-work-1?rskey=VsB57x&result=1
• Merchant of Venice, ed. Jay Halio
  https://www.oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/view/10.1093/actrade/9780198129257.book.1/actrade-9780198129257-work-1
• King Lear, ed. Mowat and Werstine (Folger Shakespeare Library) Kindle Edition

Evaluation:

• Short essays (2 pages, 650 words approx.), 4 x 10% each: 40%
  I’ll count the best three of four, provided that you write all four.
• Presentation (3 minutes, 1 slide): 15%
• Participation: 25%
• Take-home essay (mostly on King Lear) (6 pages double-spaced, 1,900 words approx.) due Dec 17. Please email your essay to me at paul.yachnin [at] mcgill.ca. Please send it as a Word file or a PDF: 20%

Syllabus: 345_fall_2020.pdf

Description: This course examines the material circumstances and human mediations that condition the ways in which texts are produced and used. In addition to examining the materiality of early printed texts, students will gain first-hand experience working with medieval and early modern manuscripts in McGill’s rare book collections. We will attend to the production, circulation, and use of texts broadly conceived—as objects that are crafted, transacted, read, seen, collected, destroyed, etc. One primary concern of the course will be to come to a nuanced understanding of the transition from manuscript to print. In what ways are manuscripts and printed texts produced, circulated and read differently? How does the physicality of a text condition interpretation and the making of meaning? How does regard for the material circumstances of textual production complicate notions of authorship and intentionality? How does an understanding of the first 1000 years of the history of the book inform our understanding of textuality in our own time? Readings will include modern scholarship on books in society, as well as theories of the book by commentators from earlier periods.

Texts (provisional):

• Johnston and Van Dussen, eds., The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches
• Other required readings available via myCourses

Evaluation: Mid-term exam, 25%; final exam, 35%; short essays, 25%; participation, 15%

Format: Lectures and discussion.

Prerequisite: None.

Expected Student Preparation: Previous university courses in English or classical literature. A basic knowledge of Homeric epic will be assumed in lectures. Students therefore should read the Iliad and the Odyssey before taking this course. Previous work on poetry is also strongly advised.

Description: This course will focus on the writings of Virgil and Ovid, their relationship to the Augustan period, and their enormous influence on later Western literature. The two Roman poets seem to present contrasting models of the poet’s relation to society broadly and to political power specifically: for Virgil, poetry binds society together, for Ovid, it is a means of taking it apart critically. While we will spend most of our time looking at their epics, The Aeneid and Metamorphoses, we will also study the development of both authors through their different works, and discuss the significance of their decisions to use the specific genres of pastoral, georgic, elegy, as well as epic, in relation to larger questions of Roman culture and society. The writers’ antithetical career paths and distinct epic visions offer alternative images for later writers of what it means to be a poet. By looking at the two writers together, however, we will also consider the complex intertextual dynamics between their two positions, noting especially how Ovid intensifies as well as rewrites Virgil’s exploration of desire, exile and alienation, and of the function of poetry itself.

Texts: (required texts are available at the McGill Bookstore):

• Virgil, Eclogues (Penguin); Georgics (Penguin); Aeneid (Vintage)
• Ovid, The Erotic Poems (Penguin); Heroides (selections); Metamorphoses (Harcourt and Brace)
• Augustus, Res Gestae, and other secondary materials will be posted on myCourses

Evaluation: Mid-term, 20%; term paper, 40%; final exam, 30%; class participation, 10%.

Format: Lectures and discussion.

Average Enrollment: 40 students.

Prerequisite: No formal prerequisite, but previous (or concurrent) university-level work in literary studies and a familiarity with the basics of literary analysis are expected.

Description: This course examines several major works of European literature that significantly influenced Western conceptions of literate practice, authorship, religion, and the place of the individual human in society and in the cosmos. Course texts include examples of literature spanning from Late Antiquity to the Italian Renaissance. The course has two main objectives: to introduce students to early literature as an object of study in its own right; and to explore this literature as an important background for the study of concurrent or subsequent Western literature and culture, including in England. We will also discuss the problematics of periodization (e.g., what do we mean by “Late Antiquity”, “the Middle Ages” and “the Renaissance”?). The course will emphasize the following categories in particular: Language and Signification; Autobiography and Conversion; and Sacred and Secular. All course texts were written on the European continent, and will be read in modern English translation.

Texts (provisional):

• Augustine, Confessions
• Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
• Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances
• Dante, Vita Nuova
• Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend
• Marie de France, Lais
• Petrarch, Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works
• Other required readings available via MyCourses

Evaluation: Mid-term exam, 25%; final exam, 35%; short essays, 30%; participation, 10%.

Format: Lectures and discussion.

Prerequisite: None.

Description: This course will examine film in the context of World War II and its immediate aftermath. We will be interested particularly in the capacities of certain key genres and styles to manage the intense pressures of this explosive period in history. Indeed, we find these pressures coming not only from the direct experience of war, but from a pervasive sense of social disintegration. To understand how forties film functioned, we must investigate its various strategies for representing gender, race, and nationality as well as violence and loss. Special attention will be paid to the social and cinematic construction of space as a particularly telling lens. Our focus will be primarily on Hollywood film, with excursions to important European alternatives. Likely films include The Great Dictator, Casablanca, Meet Me in St. Louis, Le Corbeau, Mildred Pierce, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Third Man.

Texts: Coursepack.

Evaluation: Quizzes, film journals, term project, class notes, participation.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Expected Preparation: This course is intended for students in the Drama and Theatre stream who have completed ENGL 230: Introduction to Theatre Studies. It is to be taken in the Winter term of U1 or in the first Winter term after the student’s selection of the Drama and Theatre major or minor program. For Drama and Theatre majors, this is a required course.

Description: This course has two interrelated goals. First, it introduces students to the poetics of performance, that is, the formal and stylistic elements of drama, theatre, and performance, as articulated by 20th- and 21st century-theorists from around the globe, including the “total theatre aesthetics” of African theatre, contemporary Indigenous dramaturgies, postmodern scenography, acting theory, and more. Second, the course offers instruction in a range of critical approaches to interpreting and analysing dramatic texts and live performance – that is, both text-based and image-based works of theatre. These will include the foundational approaches of semiotics and phenomenology, as well as analyses of gendering and racialisation in performance, of “presence” and “liveness”, and of space. To do so, we’ll use The Unplugging by Yvette Nolan (Algonquin) as our touchstone dramatic text and will take advantage of the many online theatrical offerings in Montreal and beyond, with special attention to devised work and new creation. You can look forward to some guest artists and speakers, assignments that draw on your creativity and various modes of expression, select scene-work, and regular viewings of performance clips.

Text: a course-pack of readings in dramatic and performance theory including texts in aesthetics, staging, reception, semiotics, phenomenology, narratology, dramaturgy, reading the body, structuralism and post-structuralism, and more.

Recommended texts: Patrice Pavis, Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms Concepts, and Analysis. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1998; Paul Alain and Jen Harvie, The Routledge Companion to Tehatre and Performance. New York: Routledge, 2006

Evaluation: In-class participation; short, critical interpretation papers; group project; final take-home exam.

Format: Lectures, group discussions, in-class close-reading and analytical exercises.

Description: The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer’s (possibly) unfinished collection of Middle English poetry and prose, canvasses a diverse range of styles, genre, topics, and traditions. Organized around the idea of pilgrimage, the stories and speakers of the Canterbury Tales place romance adventures of Arthurian knights in conversation with ribald fabliaux, juxtapose transcendent hagiographic narratives with all-too-earthy alchemical failures, situate anticlerical satire in relation to orthodox preaching, and on and on. Moreover, Chaucer insists that we interrogate the relationship between tale and teller. How, he asks, ought we to understand the relationship between his vivid portrait of Alison, the famous “Wife of Bath,” and her celebrated tale? In short, the Canterbury Tales relentlessly forces its readers to question the boundaries between art and artifice, work and world, or, in Chaucer’s own words, “sentence” (meaning) and “solas” (pleasure).

This course uses the heterogeneity of the Canterbury Tales to explore the diverse literary, religious, and political cultures of later medieval England. More precisely, we will attempt to elucidate the connections between formal and aesthetic properties of the Canterbury Tales—questions of language, style, genre, etc.—and the social world(s) that both shape and were shaped by Chaucer’s poetry. Along the way we will, among other things, debate the poetics of power, wrestle with language of religious and social dissent, examine the aesthetics of early capitalism, and encounter alternative forms racial and/or sexual identity. Moreover, while this class is rooted in the historicity—the medieval context—of the Canterbury Tales, we will pay close attention to the imaginative and actual links between Chaucer’s world and our own.

To that end, the course concludes with a brief account of the “Chaucerian Tradition” which outlines the long and contested reception of the Canterbury Tales from the fifteenth century “into this day” (to paraphrase the closing lines of Chaucer’s great meditation on literary history, the “Second Nun’s Tale”). In this final unit, we will read the late-medieval critique of the church The Plowman’s Tale (written by a Chaucer imitator), the recent Refugee Tales collaboration, Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales, a 21^st century Anglo-Nigerian “remix” of the Canterbury. Moreover, your final project for this class will require you to participate in this tradition.

Texts: 

• Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed. Jill Mann (Penguin, 2005)
• Patience Agbabi, Telling Tales, (Canongate, 2015)
• Refugee Tales, ed. David Heard and Anna Pincus (Comma Press, 2016)
• The Plowman’s Tale (posted on course website)

Note: While we will read the Canterbury Tales in Middle English, no previous experience is required. Middle English instruction will be provided, especially in the early part of term.

Evaluation:
30% Long Essay
25% Final Exam
15% Critical Responses (3 x 5%)
10% Presentation
10% Midterm
10% Participation (including attendance)

Format: Lecture, discussion and collaborative inquiry.

Prerequisite: None.

Description: This course is designed to teach students how to: 1) meaningfully close read image-based cultural texts, and 2) refine their writerly voice when writing analytic essays about visual media. Using multiple strategies of visual analysis, students will learn how to perform perceptive, informed, and medium-specific interpretations of both still and moving images. Focusing our critical lens on some of the most innovative photography and film texts of the last century, we will study the nuances of composition, color, mise-en-scène, framing, camera movement, editing and sound. Paying close attention to the ways in which visual style creates meaning, students will learn to look beyond narrative and dialogue in order to understand both the semiotics and poetics of the image. In addition to numerous close-reading exercises, we will be supplementing our investigation of images with several classical essays by theorists such as John Berger, Roland Barthes, Laura Mulvey, André Bazin, Kaja Silverman, Jacques Lacan, and Sigmund Freud. Students must come to class prepared with all of the assigned reading and will be expected to participate verbally in class on a weekly basis.

Lectures will be illustrated by copious examples. In addition to lectures, there is a mandatory screening every week as well as several discussion sessions led by a Teaching Assistant throughout the semester.

Required Films:

• (nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, US, 1971)
• La Jetée (Chris Marker, France, 1964)
• The Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, USSR, 1925)
• The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark, 1925)
• Persona (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1964)
• Vivre sa Vie (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1962)
• Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, US, 1943)
• Window Water Baby Moving (Stan Brakhage, US, 1959)
• Fly (Yoko Ono, US, 1970)
• Sanctus (Barbara Hammer, US, 1990)
• Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, UK, 2013)

Evaluation: Attendance and Participation, two-page diagnostic essay; two small five-page sequence analyses.

Format: Lecture, discussion, mandatory weekly screenings, and occasional writing workshops.

Description: This course will explore several topics that are central to modern and contemporary literary criticism and critical theory. These include, but are not limited to, representation, narrative, interpretation, ideology, signification, discourse as well as categories of difference such as class, race, gender, and sexuality. We will read excerpts from key texts from a range of critical thinkers, schools and practices to interrogate and engage with some of the fundamental that have animated literary studies: What constitutes literature? Who determines what texts mean, and how? How do texts relate to broader social structures? Considering these questions will necessitate careful and patient engagement with critical texts that will on occasion be dense and difficult.

Note: This is a required course for students of the Literature Honors stream. All other students should contact me for permission to register.

Texts: Terry Eagleton – Literary Theory: An Introduction

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lectures and discussion.

Prerequisite: None.

Expected Student Preparation: Prior experience in film studies is advantageous.

Description: Divided into a range of concerns and subgenres (the question of sound, the slasher film, the gothic) that ultimately converge on the problem of vulnerable bodies in space, this course will introduce students to the versatility of horror and pose the question of its ongoing adaptability. Central to our approach will be the complication of affect. In other words, no longer will we be content to judge simply whether a horror film is “scary;” instead, we will explore the genre’s production of a broad palette of feeling, including key cousins of fear such as disgust, humour, and shame. Indeed, even fear itself might be usefully divided into slow dread and fast panic (which is one reason why the speed of zombies matters). It is ultimately this rich interplay of response that will help us articulate the genre’s corresponding socio-political work, including its special importance for feminism and queer theory. Possible films include Halloween, Suspiria, Freaks, Babadook, and Get Out.

Texts: Coursepack.

Evaluation: Short assignments, class notes, term project, participation, quizzes.

Format: Lecture/discussions and weekly conferences.

Description: TBA

Format: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Prerequisite: None.

Description: This course explores representations and constructions of U.S. national identity in nineteenth and twentieth century popular theatre and entertainments. As the nation experienced industrialization, urbanization, immigration, changing sexual and gender norms, and fraught cultural and racial contact, popular entertainments attracted mass audiences and created spectacles of national inclusion and ‘othering.’ Units address the following themes and forms: racial and reform melodramas; antebellum and post-Emancipation stagings of race (including blackface minstrelsy and abolitionist performances); frontier spectacles (such as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West); freak shows and “proprietary museums;” popular dance, vaudeville, and gendered displays; imperialism and world’s fairs; and the Jazz Age. We will culminate by investigating the Federal Theatre Project as a moment in which popular entertainments were institutionalized to create new contexts merging labor and leisure. In readings supplemented by contextualizing lectures, we will consider the place of the “popular” – in its classed, ethnic, racial, gendered, erotic, commercial, and hegemonic valences – in forging styles of U.S. citizenship and belonging that persist to the current day, often in camouflage.

Texts:

• Play texts (Metamora; The Octoroon; Uncle Tom’s Cabin)
• Films (The Jazz Singer; The Cradle Will Rock)
• A digital coursepack comprising secondary sources by Jayna Brown, Andrew Erdman, Susan Glenn, Saidiya Hartman, Amy Hughes, Bethany Hughes, Daniel Immerwahr, David Krasner, Eric Lott, Julie Malnig, Bruce McConachie, Robert Rydell, and other scholars of popular entertainment.

Evaluation: In-class participation: 10%; midterm exam: 30%; short response essays: 30%; research paper: 30%.

Format: Lectures and discussions.

Maximum Enrollment: 40 students.

Description: TBA

Format: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Prerequisite: None. Permission of the Instructor required.

Expected Student Preparation: Willingness to work in the atelier and backstage in addition to class time.

Please note: In Winter 2021 the course is designed specifically for online delivery, and provides different opportunities from the version of ENGL377 taught in the atelier. The Winter 2021 course focuses specifically on costume design, whereas the atelier version of the course includes sewing and costume production. Since the course content is significantly different, it is possible to take both versions of ENGL377 in subsequent years. The two versions of ENGL377 will complement each other, and provide students with different opportunities.

Description: Emphasis is on costume design for the theatre, and the development of the various tools and tricks used to communicate design concepts. Zoom delivery of weekly learning modules focuses on design tools such as script analysis, effective use of colour palette, transformation of characters, hair and make-up design, costume breakdown, all focused on the creation of original costume designs.

The concepts covered in class will be practiced by students in weekly skill building exercises, culminating in individual final projects. Students will work from home on creative exercises using the supplies that they have on hand. The main communication tool is sketching, using each student’s medium of choice, such as water colour paints, design markers, coloured pencils, or digital tools. It is not important to be proficient at sketching – it is more important to have creative ideas and the motivation to communicate visually foremost, but also verbally, and in written form. Some exercises may break out of the mold and use non traditional techniques or materials. Unlike the atelier version of this course, sewing and construction techniques will not be covered. For those who are available, it may be possible to pursue the production and backstage aspects in subsequent years.

The various exercises and projects will take a steady amount of time throughout the semester, and culminate in a final project.

Texts: Play scriptS TBD – some may be chosen by the students

Evaluation: Script analysis, weekly design exercises, participation, final design project.

Format: Zoom lectures, demonstrations, collaborative learning processes, and at home artistic exercises. This class will be taught online in an engaged and personalized atmosphere.

Enrollment: 10 students.

Prerequisite: None.

Description: This course offers an introduction to Canadian Inuit, Métis and First Nations literature. Video and film will be discussed to a limited extent. It should be clear that the course is only an introduction because Canada is a very vast and varied country with over 600 different First Nations tribes, 4 distinct Inuit regions and several Métis groups who all have different traditions, different languages and quite distinct histories.

We will look at works in English, either original or translated.

The course will look at oral literature, story-telling and legends handed down through generations as well as contemporary “collaborative life stories”, novels, and essays. Creations in modern media such as television and film have been both forceful and successful; examples are included. A list will be provided of excerpts from films and videos which are considered an integral part of the class material and for which you are responsible.

The common themes are “survival” in the context of colonialism, in whatever form it may take, as well as the search for reconciliation and a renewed or continued identity in the contemporary world.

Texts:

Inuit:

• Wachovich: Saqiyuq
• Excerpts from Voices and Images of Nunavimmiut volume 1. Edited by Stenbaek and Grey
• Legends, handed out in class.
• Website www.inuitfirstcanadians.wordpress.com

Métis:

• Maria Campbell: Half-Breed

First Nations:

• Richard Wagamese: Indian Horse.

Some articles will be posted.

The books are available at the Paragraphe bookstore or you may be able to find them second-hand.

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lectures and discussion.

Prerequisite: It is required that students have previous experience in film or media studies, such as ENGL 277 or FILM 279.

Description: This class explores the work of Agnès Varda, one of the most significant artists (and the only woman director) working in the French New Wave, a member of the Left Bank Group, and a radical practitioner across mediums, eras, formats, contexts and politics. Her work rewrote the rulebooks, breaking down conventional distinctions between documentary and fiction, the personal and the political, the observational and the transformative. From the brilliant Cléo de 5 à 7, with the main character’s real time dérive through streets of Paris, to her recent series of experimental and autobiographical documentaries and multimedia installations, Varda remained a powerful and original voice until her death at the age of 90 in 2019, the same year as her final film Varda by Agnès. Varda’s body of work will be explored in conversation with the historical, artistic and technological contexts in which she worked. We will also in parallel explore the question of “what is feminist filmmaking?” through a practice-based exploration and through a series of workshops with guest filmmakers, programmers, and curators, and through experimental pairings of Varda’s films with other works.  All semester long, students will collaborate on designing, researching and programming a virtual feminist film festival as part of a research-creation approach to the course materials.

Texts: Online coursepack and screenings.

Evaluation: Feminist film festival project; film note journals; short essay; moderated presentations with guest speakers.

Format: Lectures, screenings, discussions; small working groups.

Expected Student Preparation: Previous university-level course work in Shakespeare Studies.

Description: In this course we examine how a range of filmmakers have related to Shakespeare’s cultural and textual authority. Such relationships are inevitably complex, and characterized by a variety of attitudes, including devotion, subversion, opposition, resistance, dialogue, opportunism and appropriation. We will begin by investigating different ways of conceptualizing authority, taking into account early modern modes of textual production, theories of cinematic auteurship, and critical accounts of Shakespeare’s cultural position. The first screening will be Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard (1996), a self–reflexive case study of one director’s attempt to bring Shakespearean material to film. In the second section of the course, “Carrying the Torch,” we will study the work of a number of important directors who have addressed Shakespeare in their cinematic work, including Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Laurence Olivier, Peter Brook, and Kenneth Branagh. The third and final part of the course, “Running with the Ball,” will focus on the work of several directors—Gus van Sant, Peter Greenaway, Jean–Luc Godard, Baz Luhrmann and Lloyd Kaufman—who cinematically express what may be termed a more “postmodern” relationship to Shakespearean authority in their works.

Texts: Course-Pak of selected weekly readings. Students are also expected to familiarize themselves with the textual versions of the plays covered in screenings, and may use any edition they have to hand.

Evaluation: Paper 6-8pp (25%); Paper 10-12pp (35%); Final Exam (30%); Conference Participation (10%).

Format: Lecture and class discussion, conference sections, mandatory film screenings.

Average Enrollment: 70 students.

Prerequisites: None.

Description: This course will examine the role of minority media through a case study of the Canadian Inuit media experience in regard to television and film. The premise is that television and film productions made by members of the cultural and socio-economic group, they are portraying, are usually more accurate, interesting, and truthful than productions made by outsiders.

The course will look at the development right from the start of the advent of satellite communications and ANIK in Canada. The early experiments and policy considerations. The establishment of The Inuit Broadcasting Corporation. The influence of the National Film Board, particularly its Challenge for Change program. The role of APTN (which will also include productions by First Nations and Métis). The films of Zacharias Kunuk and contemporary independent TV and filmmakers.

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Description: In this course, we study key literary works that have helped create our ideas about the private and the public and that think critically about the private and the public. These include three plays by Shakespeare, readings from the two influential “confessions” of St. Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and novels Passing by Nella Larson and Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. Our literary reading will be supplemented by the work of a number of important thinkers, including Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, Michael Warner, and Julia Reinhard Lupton. We will also be visited by two distinguished guests—the elite public media coach Bob Babinski and the internationally celebrated actor Colm Feore.

The course is about the history of the ideas and practices that have created the shifting zones of private and public life. We’ll move toward a deeper understanding of how our world has been shaped by the history of privacy and publicity (i.e., the condition of being public).

You will keep a journal where you can think by writing about the texts and the questions that we are developing. You will also do a three-minute presentation on a topic chosen from a list of topics that will be provided. Finally, you will write a course paper, which will be based on one of list of topics that I will provide or which you will develop from the work you do on your presentation.

Participation counts a lot in the course. That means being there and it also means bringing your ideas and questions to class. It is really true: there is no such thing as a stupid question. Questions of all kinds will drive the intellectual work of the course forward.

Texts: The Shakespeare plays and Tess of the d’Urbervilles are available free from Oxford Scholarly Editions Online. Note that you have to be connected into the McGill system by VPN to access them. You will have to buy the novel Passing and Augustine’s Confessions (see below for the editions we’ll use in the course). All the other readings for the course, including the sections of Rousseau’s Confessions, will be available on our myCourses site.

Available free from Oxford Scholarly Editions Online

• Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard
  https://www.oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/view/10.1093/actrade/9780198129103.book.1/actrade-9780198129103-work-1
• Twelfth Night, ed. Roger Warren and Stanley Wells
  https://www.oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/view/10.1093/actrade/9780198123668.book.1/actrade-9780198123668-work-1?rskey=X70W04&result=5
• All’s Well the Ends Well, ed. Susan Snyder
  https://www.oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/view/10.1093/actrade/9780198129318.book.1/actrade-9780198129318-work-1?rskey=1zjeL6&result=1
• Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell
  https://www.oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/view/10.1093/actrade/9780198124955.book.1/actrade-9780198124955-work-1?rskey=PMLrfe&result=1

Books to purchase

• Saint Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford University Press).
  Either paperback or ebook is OK.
• The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories. Edited and with an Introduction by Charles R. Larsen (Anchor Books, 2001). Please try to get this edition (paperback or as an ebook) so that we will have the same page numbers.

Evaluation: 

Journal (due Friday April 30): 30
Presentation: 15
Participation: 25
Course paper (12 pages; due Friday April 30): 30