300-level / Intermediate Courses

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 below is tentative and incomplete, to be confirmed in September 2014.)

• Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose (Oxford)
• Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur (Oxford)
• The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (Hackett)
• Michael Alpert, ed., Two Spanish Picaresque Novels (Penguin)
• Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (Norton)
• Madame de Lafayette, The Princess of Cleves (Norton)
• Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (Norton)
• 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

Average enrollment: 50 students

Description: ENGL 303 will trace the development of literary culture from the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 to the close of the eighteenth century. Our readings will draw on a range of generic forms and will be organized around a series of eighteenth-century keywords and themes, including utile et dulce (instruct and delight), satire, epic and mock-epic, sentimentality and politeness, empiricism, slavery, the novel, the gothic, and the woman question. These keywords will serve as a rubric for our discussions, but they will also be categories that we’ll challenge, as we probe them for their limitations and inconsistencies. Above all, we’ll try to find links across these keywords and the texts we study. We will focus especially on questions of genre and generic development, and how those in the eighteenth-century made sense of their historical, emerging and experimental literary forms. 

Texts: An anthology of eighteenth-century literature (TBD), Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey, ed. Tim Parnell and Ian Jack (Oxford, 2008: 9780199537181), and Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (Oxford: 9780199537211 or 9780198704447).

Evaluation: 

• Attendance/Participation: 15%
• Two Response Papers (500 words): 30% (15% each)
• Section Moderation: 15%
• Peer Review: 5%
• Final Paper: 35%

Format: Lecture and discussion

Description:  This course will study developments in the English novel from the late 1740s until the turn of the century. It will focus on six novels, grouped in three pairs. We shall begin with two first-person narratives: John Cleland’s erotic, or pornographic, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), followed by Sarah Fielding’s distinctly non-erotic novel, The History of Ophelia (1760). We shall then turn to two novels of the 1790s which take opposing stands in the “war of ideas” pitting Jacobin against anti-Jacobin novelists: William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1796), and Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), which features a parody of Godwin himself. We shall conclude with Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), the most sensational of the many Gothic novels of the 1790s, paired with Jane Austen’s witty parody of the Gothic, Northanger Abbey (1817). Attention will be paid to gender issues, as well as to genre, style, and thematic concerns. 

Texts: 

• John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Oxford)
• Sarah Fielding, Ophelia (Broadview)
• William Godwin, Caleb Williams (Broadview)
• Elizabeth Hamilton, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (Broadview)
• M.G. Lewis, The Monk (Broadview)
• Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Broadview)

Evaluation: 25% mid-term test; 25% final test; 50% term paper (2,000-2,500 words) 

Format: Lectures and discussions

Description: One of the centrally fashionable literary genres of early modern Europe, romance was the most important precursor of the novel, though in many ways different.  It was characterized by much narrative variety, multiple plots, open-ended structures, digression, coincidence, fantasy, wonder, and wish-fulfillment;  in its uniquely serendipitous version of the world, few social conventions or expectations can be taken for granted.  Its great exponents include Ariosto, Tasso, Cervantes, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare.  From around 1575 to 1610, the writing of romance became particularly vibrant in England.  Focusing on the diverse expressions of this literary form at this time there, in prose fiction, narrative poetry, and drama, this course should especially interest those attracted to early modern studies, or to the history and development of the novel, or to the theory and history of literary forms.  Proceeding chronologically, the course will address texts that epitomize romance’s scope in this period, including the qualitatively best and most influential exemplars, as well as those most popular in sales, such as Robert Greene’s, which illustrate the genre’s cultural topicality.  So as best to define romance and its interactions with other genres in particular texts that engineer complex generic mixtures, such as Sidney’s and Spenser’s, attention will be given to the theory of literary genres.

Texts: 

• Robert Greene, Pandosto, Menaphon (both short)
• Sir Philip Sidney, The New Arcadia
• Edmund Spenser, Books I and VI of The Faerie Queene
• Thomas Lodge, A Margarite of America
• William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest

Evaluation: term paper 50%, take-home exam 40%, class attendance and participation 10%

Format: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisite: None. Some texts will be read in modern English translation, but most will be read in (modernized) Middle English. Previous experience with Middle English is not required. Instruction in Middle English will be provided. 

Description: This course traces the origins and development of the theatrical tradition in England by reading a selection of medieval and Tudor drama. It explores the tradition of the cycle or “mystery” plays, which stage Biblical episodes in productions that oscillate between pathos and slapstick. These plays were popular, but also controversial. We will examine medieval critiques of the cycle plays, which, besides providing insight into contemporary attitudes toward drama, furnish important evidence of how medieval drama was performed on stage. From there, we turn to the so-called morality plays, comparing Everyman with its riotous and scatological cousin Mankind. We round out our survey of early drama by reading two Tudor plays, including what is considered the first “secular” play in English. With the aid of supplemental readings, our discussions will interrogate the distinction between the secular and the religious, as well as consider key questions about genre and form. As part of the course, we will view video clips of modern productions of the plays we are reading as a way to consider both the technical aspects of their staging and as a way to think about adaptation and the afterlives of medieval drama. The postmedieval inheritance of medieval drama will be our focus at the end of the course, when we read Sarah Ruhl’s 2003 play Passion Play.

Texts:

• Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama. Eds. Christina M. Fitzgerald and John T. Sebastian (Broadview, 2012).
• Ruhl, Sarah. Passion Play. (Samuel French, 2011).
• Coursepack. 

Evaluation (tentative): 

• Participation: 10%
• Mid-term exam: 20%
• Two short essays: 35%
• Take home final exam: 35%

Format: Lecture and discussion

Description: A survey of 17^th-century poetry and prose (excluding Milton). In England, the 17^th century was a time of revolution: of social upheaval and Civil War, as well as radical changes in philosophy and science. The literature of this turbulent time also is marked by its vitality and its variety. In this course, we will read representative works by writers including Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Herrick, Marvell, Lanyer, Cavendish, Philips, Bacon, Burton, Browne, discussing aesthetic developments in the context of the events of the period.

Texts: 

• The Broadview Anthology of 17^th Century Verse & Prose (available at McGill Bookstore)
• Other supplementary materials will be posted on WebCT.

Evaluation: Midterm (20%), 12-page term paper (40%), final exam (30%); participation (10%).

Format: Lecture and discussion

Average enrollment: 40

Description: This course will study early sixteenth-century English theatre through an examination of plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Texts will range from the sublime comedies of Jonson to the dark, bloody, and melodramatic revenge tragedies for which the period is famous. Primary points of interest in our investigation will be Stuart anxieties about greed, consumption, sexual betrayal, retribution, atypical expressions of sexuality, the blurring of gender distinctions, and inter-class friction—all shared with our own era. We will look at the material conditions of performance, staging techniques, theatrical practices, and the performance spaces themselves—from the public theatres, to the private indoor spaces. 

Texts: Bevington, Engle, Eisaman Maus and Rasmussen, eds. English Renaissance Drama

Evaluation: participation (15%), class presentation (10%), midterm Paper (25%), take home exam (50%)

Format: Lecture and discussion

Prerequisite: None

Description: This lecture course will investigate the evolution of English theatrical comedy through a period of a little over one hundred years. While the principal mode of investigation will involve close readings of the plays, we will also pay close attention to the material conditions of performance, as theatres grew from makeshift spaces for a social elite to vast purpose-built venues able to accommodate thousands of spectators. Central to the course, therefore, is the notion that these plays were written to be performed on stage and before a live audience. The readings will include works by Congreve, Dryden, Etherege, and Sheridan, but also comedies by some less-well-known playwrights, such as Susanna Centlivre. 

Texts: The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Drama (Full or Concise Edition)

Evaluation: 15% participation; 15% Secondary source précis and presentation; 30% short paper; 40% final exam

Format: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisite or co-requisite: ENGL 202 or ENGL 200. This course is open only to English majors in the literature stream.  This course is to be taken in the Fall semester of U1 or in the first Fall semester after the student’s selection of the Literature Major 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.

Texts:

• Abrams, M.H., and Geoffrey Galt Harpham.  A Glossary of Literary Terms.  10^th edn.  Thomson-Wadsworth, 2009.
• Bausch, Richard, and R.V. Cassill, eds.  The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.  Shorter 7^th edn.  New York: Norton, 2006.
• Ferguson, Margaret, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy, eds.  The Norton Anthology of Poetry.  Shorter 5^th edn.  New York: Norton, 2005.
• Messenger, William E., et al., eds.  The Canadian Writer’s Handbook.  5^th edn.  Toronto: Oxford, 2010.

Evaluation: TBA, but usually: essay 1 (5 pp.), 10%; essay 2 (5 pp.), 15%; essay 3 (6-7 pp.), 15%; mid-term examination 10%; formal final examination 30%; short assignments, such as quizzes, writing exercises, and recitations 10%; class participation 10%

Format: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisite: None

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

Description: This course 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 course 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 afterlife 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. 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. We shall also study Henry Irving’s / Leopold Lewis’s The Bells, a text available in LION (Literature Online).

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 course will do, a detailed understanding of the vocabulary and syntax of nineteenth-century performance.

Texts:

• Davis, Tracy C., ed., The Broadview Anthology of Nineteenth-Century British Performance (Broadview Press, 2012)
• Indispensable for our studies are the primary source documents put together for this anthology at http://drama.at.northwestern.edu/performances

Evaluation (tentative): Active ongoing participation in the intellectual and creative life of the seminar: 15%; one seminar presentation on a theoretical, critical, or historical text or on a case-study: 15%; a distilled critical argument arising from the seminar 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

Prerequisite: None

Description: A survey of Canadian and Québecois drama and theatrical institutions from colonial times to the establishment of independent professional theatre in the 20thC. The primary focus of the course will be on the importance of Montreal Anglophone Theatre in the development of Canadian theatre.  Québecois plays will be read in translation.

Texts:

• Wasserman, Jerry. Modern Canadian Plays vol. I, 5th edition., and a course pack. Both are available at the University Bookstore. 

Evaluation: 15% Class participation, 15% Oral Research Presentation, 20% Term Paper, 50% Research Project.

Format: Lectures and discussions

Description: This course examines thirteen key 20th Century plays with attention to formal, thematic, and historical concerns. In particular, we will consider the rise (and evolution) of naturalism as a dominant mode of writing and stagecraft in the period, and its relationship to the development of national theatre. We begin by situating our discussion in the theories of Émile Zola and August Strindberg, who are considered the founders of modern drama. Through Zola’s and Strindberg’s manifestoes we will contextualize performances of Synge’s Riders to the Sea and Strindberg’s Miss Julie, with special attention to the fundamental tenets of the genre: the effects of race (nation/heredity), milieu (environment), and moment (historical period).

Building on this understanding of Naturalism, we will analyze how the genre responded to the nation-building movements of the early 20th Century. Through Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, we will investigate how theatre creates, traffics, and contests images of the nation. Next, we move to drama that responds to national conflict. These plays represent departures from naturalism, and often seek to challenge their audiences’ theatrical and social assumptions. Pirandello’s Six Characters refracts the violence of WWI in content (a focus on the breakdown of grand narratives) and in form (a forerunner of absurdist theatre). Similarly, Brecht’s Mother Courage responds to WWII with staging techniques that forge a radically new affective relationship between audience and stage—one of alienation. And, Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire exposes the social changes at work in post-war America through an increasing use of symbolism to blur the boundaries of class and heritage. These themes are also present in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. Despite their formal differences, these plays share a sense of exile and a concern with ethics and ethnicity that many critics attribute to the growing social unrest of the cold war period.

Finally, we turn to post-colonial theatres. Through Derek Walcott’s The Sea at Dauphin, Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles-Soeurs, Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold” …and the Boys, and Marie Jones’s Stones in his Pockets, we will investigate theatre’s ability to push beyond colonial, racial or national binaries to offer new avenues for cultural performance.

Texts:

• The Norton Anthology of Drama, Volume 2: The Nineteenth Century to the Present
• Course pack 

Evaluation: 

• Participation 10%
• Short Essay (4 pages) 15% (September 25th)
• In-Class Midterm 15% (October 16th)
• Final Paper (8 pages) 30% (November 27th)
• Final Exam 30%

Format: Lectures and discussions

Description: In this course we will focus only on the first half of Shakespeare’s career, the Elizabethan portion, which coincided with the rise of the professional theatre as the centerpiece of an emerging entertainment industry. We will begin with a number of very early plays, including Henry VI, part 1, The Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus, Love’s Labor’s Lost, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, before following Shakespeare out of the theatre and into print with the narrative poem “Venus and Adonis.” We will then join him back at the theatre, where he will write Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (world classics of history, tragedy, and comedy) all within the space of about a single year. The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV, part one, and As You Like It round out the decade of the 1590s, and our course. The plan is to cover approximately one play per week. Are you Shakespearienced? After this course you will be. The pace will be fast and unrelenting, with a view to giving students in the English major and minor programs a fuller appreciation of the scope of Shakespeare’s accomplishment in the first half of his career.

Texts: The Norton Shakespeare Volume I: Early Plays and Poems. 2nd edition. ISBN 978-0-393-93144-0. Available at The Word Bookstore on Milton Street.

Evaluation: midterm essay (30%); final essay (30%); final exam (30%); conference participation (10%)

Format: Lectures and conference sections

Prerequisite: : None, though some knowledge of Renaissance literature or culture is highly useful.

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, and advocate of regicide and divorce. His writing is complex and challenging, asking 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 continuing role 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 WebCT
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (recommended)
• King James Bible (recommended)

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

Format: Lecture and discussion; conference (depending on enrollment)

Average Enrollment: 45 students

Prerequisite: None. Limited to students in English programs.

Description: This course will survey the emergence of theories and methodologies in European philosophy and scholarship, especially in literary criticism, since the eighteenth 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 historical 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, hermenutics, and Marx. Our readings in twentieth-century theory will consider 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. In particular, we will review the claim that one literary genre – the novel – embodies or expresses the characteristic philosophical problems of modernity.

Texts: The books for this course will be available at The Word Bookstore (469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640). The following texts will be among those required (please note that Pluhar's translation of Kant is the only acceptable edition!):

• Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle, eds., Critical Theory Since Plato, third edition (Thomas Wadsworth)
• 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 (40%), tests (50%), 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

Prerequisite: None. Limited to U2 and U3 students in English programmes

Description: This course will introduce students to a pair of concepts absolutely fundamental to the study of literature, cinema, theatre, and artistic culture in general.  The two concepts are, of course, authorship and interpretation.  We’ll survey the on-going debates over what an author is, and what unique contribution, if any, this agent makes to the artwork’s meaning as well as other culturally relevant features and effects.  Likewise, we will inquire into what one is doing when one interprets a work of art.  In trying to answer this question, the first step shall be to say what an interpretation is, i.e., what differentiates interpretive from other kinds of statements about art.  Subsequently, we’ll revisit several long-standing puzzles about interpretation: Is a good interpretation necessarily one that tries to grasp the author’s intentions?  Can an interpretation ever be true or false?  When two interpretations of the same artwork conflict, is there ever any good reason to prefer one to the other?  Does interpretation itself in some sense produce the work’s meaning?  Is there any possible justification for blurring the distinction between the author’s achievements in making an artwork and the interpreter’s achievements in engaging with that work?  Throughout our discussions, attention will be paid to the relation of authorship to interpretation within performing arts, such as theatrical and musical presentations, where performers’ interpretive activities might arguably be said to bring new works into existence

Texts: A representative selection of recent essays within the fields of aesthetic philosophy, literary theory, and cinema studies.

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lectures and discussions

Description: This course will introduce students to the field of postcolonial literary and cultural studies as well as postcolonial theory. It will engage with literatures produced from postcolonial societies of South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean and examine how authors from these regions articulate the (postcolonial) present. Crucially, we will try and understand what is meant by the term “postcolonial” in the contexts of literature, culture, and theory; how it relates to terms such as the “anti-colonial” and the “colonial.” Further, we will investigate the central concerns of postcolonial authors and theorists, and how the various legacies of European imperialism mould the postcolonial perspective. In this course, we will also pay attention to the development of the field of postcolonial studies in the Anglo-American academy in addition to developing a clear understanding of some of the influential concepts developed by postcolonial critics and theorists. Further, we will examine in detail the relationship between postcolonial theory and post-structuralism on one hand, and Marxism on the other. Finally, we will consider the status of postcolonial studies in today’s world and try to understand if, and how, it helps us to understand the processes of contemporary globalization.  

Texts: 

• Mulk Raj Anand: Untouchable
• Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart
• V. S. Naipaul: Miguel Street
• Buchi Emecheta: Second-Class Citizen
• Salman Rushdie: Haroun and the Sea of Stories
• Jamaica Kincaid: A Small Place
• Satyajit Ray (dir): Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne

Evaluation: Attendance and participation (in conference section): 15%; short essay: 15%; midterm: 30%; final paper: 40%

Format: Lectures and weekly conferences

Preparation: Students are expected to have taken at least one 200- or 300-level course in any option in the Department of English

Description: Addressing literary criticism and theory of the first half of the twentieth century, this course spotlights “The New Criticism,” the mid-twentieth century American school of literary criticism that famously developed techniques of “close reading” that are still widely used today, in both “English” and neighbouring fields.  Some have regarded close reading as crucial to the formation of the discipline of English as we now know it; it has even sometimes been regarded as a defining practice of the field. The design of the course takes a cue from a wave of renewed interest in “close reading” these days from contemporary commentators as diverse as Terry Eagleton, Camille Paglia, Jane Gallop, John Guillory, and N. Katherine Hayles, who all raise questions about how techniques of close reading (often considered rather “old-fashioned”) might be revised, reinvigorated, and adapted to today’s climate and needs. One of the primary questions guiding our work will thus be how “close reading” has been theorized and practiced in the field of English over time, what it is aimed to achieve, and how we might draw upon its guiding assumptions and techniques today for work in literature, drama, and cultural studies. Thus we will often reckon with the question of what exactly it means to read texts “closely”—how, for what, to what ends? Another major vector of our work is historical: we will trace the evolution of the field we now think of as “English” as a discipline 1920-1960—exploring debates, convictions, and projects that shaped the field of study we have inherited. Our third major focus is on the concept of “criticism,” the practice which the New Critics (as their name implies) and their forerunners sought to theorize, refine, and make pivotal to the work of English. It remains central to, even dominant among, the work of departments of English.'

In part spurred by the challenges posed by “difficulty” modernist literature of the early twentieth century, the New Criticism theorized now famous concepts such as “the intentional fallacy” and “the heresy of paraphrase,” and in many respects shaped literary studies as we now know it.  Toward demystifying the work of the New Critics, as well as shedding light on the history of the field of English, we will trace a genealogy of the New Criticism, considering the work of nineteenth-century British predecessors such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, and Walter Pater; early twentieth-century precursors such as the Russian Formalists (Roman Jakobson, Viktor Shklovsky); and the British critics at the University of Cambridge who were the New Critics’ most direct predecessors (I.A. Richards, William Empson, Q.D. and F.R. Leavis). Also pivotal to our work will be essays by modernist poet T.S. Eliot, whose verse and prose inspired the work of both the New Critics and their immediate forerunners. As we go, we will consider the legacies of both the New Critics and early twentieth-century criticism more generally to more recent theoretical approaches in literary studies, drama and theatre, and cultural studies.

In decades after its ascendancy at the mid-twentieth century, the New Criticism often came to be regarded as an “ahistorical,” formalist approach to literary study that unfortunately banished social, biographical, and historical concerns from its purview. Indeed sometimes New Critical “close reading” was practiced in ways that yielded such narrow perspectives: even T.S. Eliot (whose work has often been read as foundational to the New Criticism) deplored the abuses of its methods that produced what he called a “lemon-squeezer” approach to criticism. Recent work on the New Criticism, however, reveals it to have been informed by a much richer and more diverse body of aesthetic theory, philosophical work, and social objectives than latter-day caricatures have allowed. We will follow the evolving reputation of the New Criticism, in order to test how many of the criticisms levelled against it seem to “stick” when considered against the body of theory and critical commentary the New Critics developed. 

Texts: Our reading list accents primary texts of  early- to mid-twentieth century theorists/ critics, rather than latter-day accounts of their contributions—so that we can make up our own minds about how their work looks (and might or might not be useful to us) today. We consider essays by major New Critics such as John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, René Wellek and Austin Warren; we also engage leading critics contemporary to the New Critics (often skeptical of their methods) such as Kenneth Burke, Lionel Trilling, Erich Auerbach and Northrop Frye; we consider British predecessors such as Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, I.A. Richards, William Empson, and F.R. Leavis. We will query how New Critical methods stood in dialogue with the work of Russian Formalists; with that of British critic Queenie Leavis, whose pioneering work in sociological literary criticism has been linked to the beginnings of cultural studies; and that of leftist critics of the Partisan Review circle such as Philip Rahv. We will also engage the literary essays and literary-critical manifestoes of such early twentieth-century writers such as T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and Ezra Pound, whose work was often very much behind the theory and practice of much of this early- to mid-twentieth century criticism.  

Evaluation: 2 critical essays (5-6 pp., 20%  and 25%), bi-weekly brief responses (2 pp., 15%), final examination (30%), participation (10%)

Format: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisite: None

Expected Student Preparation: Previous university-level course work in American Literature, preferably before 1900, or permission of instructor

Description: This course will survey, and also critically interrogate, a long line of foundational works in American literature and thought that develop the conception of an “American innocence”—and introduce a new literary character: the “innocent American.” Where does this widely shared notion come from? What does this national self-image imply? What possibilities does it open up? What are its limitations and dangers? A challenging reading list—including selected Emerson essays, Whitman poems, Harte and Twain short stories, Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, James’ “Daisy Miller” and The Bostonians (or “What Maisie Knew”), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Melville’s “Benito Cereno” and “Billy Budd,” Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American—will ground analysis of a variety of distinct versions of this national myth. After first tracing the development of paradigmatic plots, images, and characters associated with this complex of ideas, we will conclude with close readings of several classic literary works that are structured as tests or trials of this “American innocence.” 

Texts (Tentative; editions TBA):

• Coursepack—including critical essays and short works such as: Emerson, selected essays; Whitman, “Song of Myself”; Harte, “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and "The Outcasts of Poker Flats"; Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daughter”; James, “Daisy Miller”;
• Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn;
• Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin;
• Melville, Billy Budd and Other Stories;
• Wharton, The Age of Innocence;
• Greene, The Quiet American.

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 discussions

Average Enrollment: 80 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 development of Canadian poetry from the nineteenth century through the Second World War.  Our discussion of substantial selections from major authors will explicate the historical and cultural contexts of their works and consider their relation to competing poetic traditions in England and America.  We will attempt to articulate each poet’s idea of the Canadian poet’s special task: among them, skilful imitation; mimesis; cultural nationalism and autonomy; originality; psychological realism; and contemporaneity.  We will also, necessar­ily, clarify such period concepts as “Romanticism,” “Victorianism,” “Aestheticism” and “Modern­ism,” and their distinctive Canadian manifesta­tions, as we proceed.

Texts: 

• Gerson, Carole, and Gwendolyn Davies, eds.  Canadian Poetry: From the Beginnings through the First World War.  Toronto: McClelland and Stewart [New Canadian Library], 1994.
• Trehearne, Brian, ed.  Canadian Poetry 1920 to 1960.  Toronto: McClelland and Stewart [New Canadian Library], 2010.

Evaluation: 2 essays, 5 and 8 pp., 20% and 30%; final examination, 40%; Partici­pation in class discussion, 10% (Please note before registering for this course: I assess active participation in discussion and not attendance.  Full attendance through the semester without speaking will earn 0/10 in this category and substantially affect your final grade.)  Evaluation may change depending on class size; if necessary, changes will be announced before the end of the course change period.

Format: Lectures and discussions

Average Enrollment: 25

Description: This course uses five wide-ranging British novels to study a foundational relationship in nineteenth-century fiction: the romantic relationship as a synecdoche of social organization.  Perhaps more precisely, the relationships we will analyze in the course novels reveal anxieties and realities of social disorganization – with broken engagements, and failed or fractured marriages operating as signs of the century’s disruptive transformations in class structure and geopolitical identity.   With this topic in mind, we will better understand how the dominantly private settings in the nineteenth-century British novel and intimate plots yield commentary on industrial, economic, and political change.  

Texts: (available at the University Bookstore):

• Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility 1811
• Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist 1838
• Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 1848
• George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss 1859
• Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady 1875
• 329 Course pack

Evaluation: Attendance and participation (includes reading quizzes in conference section): 25%; midterm: 20%; essay: 25%; final exam: 30%

Format: Lectures and weekly conferences

Description: The primary goal of this course is to acquaint students with English masterpieces from the second half of the Nineteenth Century and a German bildungsroman influential at this time. While keenly engaged with the spirit of ‘progress’ and ‘reform’ sweeping through their country, writers in this period tended to set the action of their novels a few decades back from their time of composition and publication. Keeping this historical perspective in mind, we will focus on how influential novelists such as Goethe and Dickens portrayed their protagonists’ struggle for meaningful employment in an increasingly secular and professionalized society that was still hedged in, however, by barriers of gender, class, and religious affiliation. 

Texts:

• The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• David Copperfield  by Charles Dickens
• Villette by Charlotte Brontë
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

Evaluation: 15% attendance and participation; 60% four ongoing exploratory papers; 25% final essay due a week from last class

Format: Lectures and discussions

Average enrollment: 70 students

Description: Following a roughly chronological route, this course focuses on British literature of the later Romantic period, emphasizing its various prose and verse genres. The period’s rich prose will be represented by the essays of William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, and Thomas De Quincey, and by the fiction of Mary Shelley. We will devote substantial time to Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats, the three poets historically central to studying the period. We will read as well the poetry of Robert Burns, John Clare, and anonymous bards. Our lectures and discussions will focus on the meaning of “romanticism,” craftsmanship and inspiration, historical and biographical context, the figure of the poet, and the relation of genre and gender.

Texts:

• The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period (Vol. D), 9^th edition
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. J. Paul Hunter (Norton)

Evaluation:  

• Participation in class, including one 500-word response to a day’s reading, posted at MyCourses in discussion forum: 15%
• Paper 1 (1000 page close reading): 25%
• Paper 2 (1500 study of one work's influence on another): 35%
• Final exam (identification and brief analysis of short passages): 25%

Prerequisite: None

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

Format: Lectures and discussions

Average Enrollment: 25 students

Description: This course introduces students to the major formal, thematic, and historical concerns of British fiction through a central question: how did notions of Britishness and the role of the British writer change over the course of the twentieth century? Our aim will be to explore ways in which the political and artistic aims of British novelists altered in response to contemporary crises and cultural developments. We will begin with Howards End, E.M. Forster’s depiction of relationships and social conventions in Edwardian England. Works by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce will allow us to map out the key themes and stylistic features of high modernism; we will explore how both “The Dead” and Mrs Dalloway link the literary representation of subjectivity, alienation, and fragmentation with wider social and political concerns in the wake of the First World War. Next, we will ask how two British estate novels, P.G. Wodehouse’s Code of the Woosters and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, reflect the prewar and wartime conditions in which they were written, and how Muriel Spark’s comic novel reflects on Britishness and identity in the postwar world. Finally, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, with its reimagining of Howards End, will allow us to reflect on changing notions of nationalism and narrative at the close of the century.

Lectures and discussions will blend close reading and thematic analysis with reflections on the social and historical conditions of literary production, with particular attention to the First and Second World Wars, the decline of the British Empire, the rise and fall of the Welfare State, postcolonial immigration, class distinctions, “middlebrow” culture, and attitudes toward gender, sexuality, and race. Short stories and essays, as well as excerpts from films, radio broadcasts, and government publications, will supplement our focus on the novel, and allow us to chart its development in relation to wider issues and ideas in the twentieth century.

Texts: (tentative)

• E.M. Forster, Howards End (1910)
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
• P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters (1938)
• Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (1945)
• Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
• Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000)
• Coursepack with critical readings

Evaluation: 

• 15% Participation
• 15% Short Writing Assignment
• 40% Research Paper
• 30% Final Exam

Format: Lectures and discussions

Description: What would you do if a novel otherwise well-written ends on the wrong note or refuses to disclose enough information about a minor character that piqued your interest? The solution, as some contemporary writers discovered, is to redesign the work. “Writing back” is a literary practice established in the latter half of the twentieth century. It is often associated with postmodern and postcolonial writers, but it is not restricted to them. It entails revisiting, modifying, and sometimes radically transforming a canonical work in order to expose its ideological biases, update its plot, or rework its ethics. The targets are almost always eighteenth and nineteenth century novels, works written at a time of economic transformations, technological innovations, the expansion of empires, and changes in social roles and hierarchies. How do twentieth century writers illuminate, transform, interpret and misinterpret the concerns of earlier authors? And what do these rewritings tell us about issues of authorship, canonicity, and literary influence? Aside from the clusters of novels, short stories, paintings, and films to be considered, we will read essays by Marx, Hegel, Cixous, Freud, Spivak, and Achebe.

Texts: N.B. The final reading list will be available in late October 2014.

Coursepack

Novels:

• Daniel Defoe—Robinson Crusoe
• J.M. Coetzee—Foe
• Charlotte Bronte—Jane Eyre
• Jean Rhys—Wide Sargasso Sea
• Bram Stoker—Dracula
• Joseph Conrad—Heart of Darkness

Films:

• Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola
• Nosferatu. Dir. Werner Herzog
• Apocalypse Now. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola

Evaluation (tentative): Short paper 20%; Midterm 30%; Final paper 35%; Participation (including webct assignments) 15%

Format: Lectures and discussions

Description: A rich body of literature developed in the European Middle Ages that explored “worlds” or “realities” that stood somehow apart from the world of everyday experience. Yet these other (or “under”) worlds were never entirely separable from what medieval Europeans regarded as the world of their day-to-day lives; by exploring these worlds, authors and readers were simultaneously cultivating a renewed understanding of their own experience of time, geographical space, and the ways in which their belief systems infused both with meaning. In this course, students will analyze several literary accounts of worlds or landscapes that stand in some way apart from what their authors and audiences regarded as ordinary. We will read dream visions, including visions of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory; we’ll encounter underworlds that are geographically continuous with specific places in Europe; we’ll read narratives in which travelers encounter “the exotic” or “the marvellous”; and we’ll study narratives of fairy otherworlds. This course will introduce students to texts written in England, Ireland, Iceland, and on the European continent during the period c. 900-1500.

Texts: (provisional)

• The Book of John Mandeville
• The Voyage of St. Brendan
• The Vision of Tundale
• St. Patrick’s Purgatory
• The Vision of St. Paul
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• Pearl
• Chaucer, The House of Fame
• Sir Orfeo
• Sir Launfal
• Other required readings (incl. Icelandic sagas) available via MyCourses

Evaluation 

a) Mid-term exam: 25%
b) Final exam: 35%
c) Final essay: 30%
d) Participation and attendance: 10%

Format: Lectures and discussions

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 (necessary but not necessarily painful), and advancing to the reading of selected texts in prose and poetry. The aim is to give students a basic grounding in the language to enable them to read works (like Beowulf) in the original. Classes will be devoted at first to grammar and translation, but we will also be examining representations of Anglo-Saxon literature through reading and translating the texts, some features of Anglo-Saxon culture, and certain aspects of the history of the English language, particularly the origins of words and their semantic evolution. The course culminates in a translation project, which will be a translation and analytical commentary of a selected text.

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 30%; final project 25%; attendance and participation 10%

Format: Lectures, workshops, discussions

Description: In this course, we consider how Shakespeare, his fellow playwrights, the actors, and the playgoers of early modern London rewrote the rules about who could be a public person and about who could take part in discussions about politics and social policy. Before Shakespeare, commoners (the vast majority of the population) were excluded from debates about matters of political concern. From the 1580s to the closing of the playhouses in the middle of the seventeenth century, the commercial theatre invited people of all social ranks to take an active role in thinking about and talking about a great range of social and political questions. Together, the theatrical practitioners and their customers laid the groundwork for the political culture of modernity.

We will read works by a number of Shakespeare’s fellow playwrights, a handful of other works from the period, and several modern historical studies and readings in political philosophy. But the focus of our attention will a selection of plays by Shakespeare himself.

Texts: (all texts available at Paragraph Books)

• Other readings will be posted on the course website.
• Taming of the Shrew, ed. Callaghan (WW Norton)
• Hamlet, ed. Braunmuller (Pelican) 
• Merchant of Venice, ed. Halio (Oxford)
• Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed Sylvan Barnett (Signet Classics)
• Ben Jonson, Volpone and Other Plays (Penguin)
• Tempest, ed. Orgel (Oxford)
• Othello, ed. Neill (Oxford)

Evaluation: 

• Reading responses, 5% each 20%
• Short essays, 15% each 30%
• Participation 15%
• Final Exam 35%

Format: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisite: None

Description: The material forms and circumstances of texts fundamentally affect their meaning. This premise underlies the history of the book, a field of advanced study aimed at understanding the circulation of ideas in connection with technology, sociology, and economics. If the book is not only a vessel of ideas but also a thing of industrial manufacture that is marketed and consumed, then knowledge of the book industry and of the forces that influence it becomes important to literary and historical interpretation. In this course we will survey defining contributions to the history and theory of the book, reading canonical authors such as Shakespeare and Byron in light of new studies on the socioeconomic factors behind their creativity and reputation. Topics will include: the editing of Shakespeare, l’histoire du livre, copyright and piracy, the history of the book in Canada, and print culture. Students will learn the basics of analytical bibliography and scholarly editing, produce a book-history case study, and become familiar with defining contributions to the field.

Texts: 

• Levy and Mole, ed. The Broadview Reader in Book History
• Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Thompson and Taylor (Arden, 2006)
• George Gordon, Lord Byron. Selected Poetry. Ed. Jerome McGann (Oxford, 1998)

Evaluation: response (2 pp.): 20%; short essay (5 pp.): 30%; long essay (10 pp.): 40%; participation in workshops: 10%

Format: lecture 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: While concentrating on the major texts of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid in attractive modern translations, we will consider their role in the literary history of western Europe, especially England, up to and including the eighteenth century.  The course will thus survey the development of classical myth, mythography, allegory, epic, and literary theory from Homer to Addison.  It will provide an effective base of knowledge for reading literature that draws on such contexts, and for appreciating corresponding shifts in literary history and in the roles of myth in western culture.
If you have already taken ENGL 347 (Great Writings of Europe I) as a different course under that number, you may still take this course, but will need to see me in the first or second week of classes so I can arrange your enrollment.
The Course Reader and other texts will be available in paperback for purchase at the Word bookstore, 469 Milton Street, 845-5640. 

Texts: 

• Homer, Iliad, Fagles translation
• Homer, Odyssey, Lattimore translation
• Virgil, Aeneid, Fitzgerald translation
• Ovid, Metamorphoses, Mandelbaum translation
• Supplementary Course Reader

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

Format: Lectures and discussions

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 universe. 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 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, The Divine Comedy
• Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose
• Petrarch, Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works
• Other required readings available via MyCourses

Evaluation: 

a) Mid-term exam: 25%
b) Final exam: 35%
c) Final essay: 30%
d) Participation and attendance: 10%

Format: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisite: None

Description: This course engages meaningful issues and debates that have structured theatre and performance practice and scholarship from ancient Greece to the present. Beginning with an analysis of mimesis and representation in Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Poetics, we will examine a chronological progression of scholarship on theatrical performance, supplementing course lectures with readings in theatre theory, artists’ manifestos, historiography, plays, and performance footage.

We will engage topics including the following:

• Historical debates about the dangers, pleasures, and purposes of theatrical representation
• Changing acting theories and methods
• Approaches to the construction and study of theatrical space
• Theories of reception
• The body onstage: materiality and semiotics
• ‘Positioning performance:’ disciplinary relationships between theatre and performance studies

Texts:

• Daniel Gerould, Theatre/Theory/Theatre: The Major Critical Texts from Aristotle and Zeami to Soyinka and Havel. NY: Applause, 2000
• Suzan-Lori Parks, The America Play and Other Works. NY: Theatre Communications Group, 1995
• A course packet including primary texts (Marina Abramović, Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Augusto Boal, Anne Bogart, Bertolt Brecht, Peter Brook, Edward Gordon Craig, Denis Diderot, Jerzy Grotowski, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Femi Osofisan, Sophocles, Wole Soyinka, Konstantin Stanislavski, Zeami) and secondary sources (Rhonda Blair, Dwight Conquergood, Colin Counsell, Mark Fortier, Helen Gilbert, Gay McAuley, Jacques Rancière, Joseph Roach, Richard Schechner, Diana Taylor, Philip Zarilli)

Evaluation: In-class participation: 20%; critical theatre review: 20%; short response essay: 20%; midterm exam: 20%; final take-home exam: 20%

Format: Lectures and group discussions

Prerequisites: None. We will read Chaucer in the original Middle English. Previous experience with Middle English is not required. Instruction in Middle English will be provided.

Description: Chaucer is one of the most formally inventive poets in English literature. His innovations include establishing iambic pentameter as a dominant poetic meter and introducing the sonnet into English. This course reads a selection of Chaucer’s most important works with a focus on their formal complexity and engagement with the classical and medieval rhetorical tradition. We begin by looking at several of Chaucer’s lyrics, which we will use to help familiarize ourselves with Middle English syntax and prosody. Then we turn to Troilus and Criseyde, a poem that persistently calls attention to its own rhetorical strategies. The second half of the course focuses on the Canterbury Tales, including the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, a brilliant parody of rhetoricians. Alongside Chaucer’s works, we will read some of the classical and medieval rhetorical manuals with which Chaucer would have been familiar.

By the end of the course, students will be able to identify a variety of rhetorical devices and formal structures that are used in Chaucer’s works. This training will be useful both for those who wish to continue their study of medieval literature beyond Chaucer and those studying the ars poetria of later periods. A sampling of secondary criticism will help to contextualize Chaucer’s poetry, as well as provide a sense of how questions of form have been treated by critical paradigms ranging from the New Criticism of the mid-twentieth century through to the recent emergence of New Formalism.

Texts:

Chaucer, Geoffrey. Troilus and Criseyde. Ed. Stephen Barney (Norton, 2006).
--. The Canterbury Tales. 2nd ed. Ed. V. A. Kolve and Glending Olson (Norton, 2005).
[Instead of these two editions, students can use the Riverside Chaucer, but, in order for everybody to be on the same page, so to speak, please do not use editions other than the Norton or Riverside.]
Geoffrey of Vinsauf. Poetria Nova. Revised ed. Trans. Margaret F. Nims (PIMS, 2010).
Coursepack.

Evaluation (tentative): 

• Participation – 10%
• Mid-term exam – 20%
• Close reading exercises – 15%
• Essay (7-8 pgs) – 30%
• Final exam – 25% 

Format: Lectures and discussions

Description: This course is designed to teach students how to meaningfully close read image-based cultural texts. 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 by reading several classical texts by theorists such as John Berger, Roland Barthes, Laura Mulvey, André Bazin, Tom Gunning, Sergei Eisenstein, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, Christian Metz, Kaja Silverman, Mary Ann Doane, and others.  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 visual examples.  In addition to lectures, there is a mandatory screening every week. There are also mandatory conference sections that will meet throughout the term (but not always regularly) instructed by the Teaching Assistant. 

Texts: Selections from

• Roland Barthes
• John Berger
• André Bazin
• Laura Mulvey
• Kaja Silverman
• Mary Ann Doane
• Christian Metz
• Bela Balazs
• Jacques Lacan
• Sigmund Freud
• Tom Gunning
• Sergei Eisenstein
• Laura Marks

Films to be Screened:

• (nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, 1971)
• La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962)
• The Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
• The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
• Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
• The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
• Vivre sa Vie (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962)
• Daisies (Vera Chytilova, 1966)
• Window Water Baby Moving (Stan Brakhage, 1959)
• Sanctus (Barbara Hammer, 1990)
• Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943)
• Fly (Yoko Ono, 1971)

Evaluation: Attendance and Participation: 15%; 2 page mini-paper: 20%; two small papers (first worth 30%, second worth 35%): 65%

Format: Lecture, Discussion, mandatory screening, and conference

Description: This course will explore several topics that are central to modern and contemporary literary criticism and critical theory. These include among others: interpretation; culture; ideology; class, race, gender, and sexuality; discourse; hegemony; signification; and performativity. While we engage with these complex and contested issues of interpretation and criticism, we will read key texts from a range of critical schools and practices, including New Criticism, Marxism, Structuralism, and Post-Structuralism. We will also read selections from, among others, the writings of Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler. These texts will help us articulate and interrogate some of the most fundamental questions pertaining to the practice of literary studies: What constitutes literature? Who determines what texts mean, and how? How do texts relate to broader social structures? Considering these questions and texts will necessitate careful and patient reading and sustained engagement with lecture and discussion during class. The reading for this course will be at times difficult and dense. Thorough preparation for each class meeting is essential. This course is required for, but not restricted to, Honours students in English.

Texts: 

• Terry Eagleton: Literary Theory: An Introduction
• Frank Lentricchia & Thomas McLaughlin (eds.): Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2^nd ed. 

Evaluation: Attendance and participation: 15%; short essay: 25%; Analytical Papers (x6): 60%     

Format: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisites:  None

Expected Student Preparation: Familiarity with concepts and terminology from film studies and cultural studies will be very useful.

Description: This course will survey U.S. cinema during what we might call the decade of Reagan. Indeed, critic Andrew Britton diagnosed the special effects-laden blockbusters that had displaced the more politically and aesthetically adventurous American filmmaking of the 1970s as examples of “Reaganite entertainment,” which acclimated its audience to the military adventurism and “authoritarian populism” of the Reagan administration. But the 1980s also saw the birth of a series of “new” independent cinemas (New Queer Cinema, New Black Cinema, etc.), which generated innovative filmic vocabularies of race, gender, sexuality and class to dissent from Reagan’s political hegemony, as well as the cultural hegemony of Hollywood’s testosterone-fueled, action-adventure fantasies. Meanwhile, older Hollywood genres (the teenpic, the horror film) were being revamped for a new generation of filmgoers. And of course, the 1980s was the decade in which “postmodernism” became a household word. This class will examine all of these developments to trace the ways in which the cinema of this period worked through the political and cultural dilemmas of the period. We will do so while keeping in mind that, as Stephen Prince has observed, the 1980s was the decade in which “film ceased to be primarily a theatrical medium, based in celluloid. … Movies took their place as one ‘software’ stream among others … merchandised by global media companies who viewed their marketplace as the planet itself.” In other words, the decade also marks a moment in which the definitions of “cinema” and even the “national audience” underwent dramatic changes.

Texts: Essays by such critics as Robin Wood, Andrew Britton, Pam Cook, Thomas Schatz, Geoff King, Fredric Jameson, Jon Lewis, Justin Wyatt, Carol Clover, Fred Pfeil, Nicholas Rombes, William Warner, Warren Buckland, Peter Biskind, Janet Staiger, Thomas Waugh, Sharon Willis, and others.

Films:

• Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)                                           
• Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981)
• Friday the 13^th, Part 2 (Steve Miner, 1981)
• Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982)
• Sixteen Candles (John Hughes, 1984)
• Repo Man (Alex Cox, 1984)
• Rambo: First Blood Part II (George P. Cosmatos, 1985)
• Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985)
• Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
• Down By Law (Jim Jarmusch, 1986)
• Parting Glances (Bill Sherwood, 1986)
• Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988)
• Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lectures, discussions and weekly screenings

Average enrollment: 80 students

Prerequisites:  Permission of the instructor required. Enrolment is limited to 15 students.

To apply, please submit a portfolio that includes these items:

1. An imaginative description of a character you’ve met or invented (300-350 words).

2. Think of a moment in your life that is, or was, memorable and imagine yourself back there. Describe what made it so particular – in a good or bad way – why it affected you so deeply, if it changed you and how it did so. You are free to invent that moment if you wish. (300-350 words).

3. A work of fiction or creative non-fiction or a fragment of a longer piece (1500-2000 words)           

Submissions must be submitted as email attachments to the Department of English by 4.30 pm Friday October 24. Late submissions will not be considered. Students will be notified about their applications via email on or before November 14.

Description: In this weekly workshop we will examine the art and craft of writing fiction with a primary focus on the short story. Students will study assigned examples of published short stories each chosen to highlight a specific element such as character, plot, structure, point of view, voice, place, mood, symbol, metaphor, style etc.. You will then be encouraged to use these elements effectively and imaginatively in the creation of your own short stories. Each week we will begin with a brief discussion of the assigned short story and one particular element. The remainder of the class will be devoted to critiquing your work in a respectful workshop environment. You will be asked to provide constructive verbal and written feedback to those of your classmates whose work is being discussed. Your end of term portfolio will consist of four short stories, three of which will be critiqued in class. The fourth story will be a polished piece in which you utilize the skills you have learned during this course. You are expected to attend every class, participate in class discussions, and hand in your assignments on time. There will be a good deal of reading and writing but that is part of the writing life, and if you are game for it, you will have an enjoyable and productive time in this class. Grades will be based on writing submitted to the workshop, constructive participation in the workshop, commentary on assigned readings, and a final portfolio of finished, edited pieces.

Texts: Assigned readings compiled by instructor will include work by Anton Chekov, Junot Diaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, Yiyun Li, Alice Munro, and Francine Prose.

Evaluation: 

• Participation and engagement in class discussions and editing work of self and others: 20%
• Commentary on assigned readings: 10%
• Short fiction submissions for in-class critique: 35%
• Final Portfolio: 35%

Format: Workshop and seminar

Average enrollment: 80 students

Prerequisites: None

Description: Costuming I focuses on skills acquisition.  The process of designing and coordinating costumes for a main stage theatre production is the practical project that fuels this class.  Skills that will be covered include use of industrial sewing machines, hand sewing techniques, taking actor measurements, alterations, and garment fittings with the actors.

Character analysis and research inform our design choices.   The director will provide students with an initial directorial concept and vision for the show, emphasizing clear character delineation. Our discussion will focus on color palette, mood and the individual characters. The director returns two weeks later for the presentation and general discussion of the students’ rough sketches and /or inspiration images. Approximately a week later, the students each present finished renderings to the director and class for a final critique session.  The design for the production will be chosen using the students’ sketches.

The English Department Main Stage theatre production provides an opportunity for students to practice their costuming skills in the atelier and backstage.  The class will be in charge of the costumes for each actor from head to toe, and will be in charge of the costumes backstage. Each student will have a specific production duty as well as a hands-on production project.

Opening night of the production will find some of the costume team working backstage as costume crew. The dressing shifts will be divided among the class, along with day time maintenance of the costumes. The final night of the production all students will be required to attend strike, which is the dismantling of the show.  Expect a very late night, with strike lasting until 2:00am.  Students will be expected to strike the set as well as the costumes. 

Texts: None required.  Script will be provided on mycourses.  

Evaluation: sewing sample 5%, Personal Style Project 10%, charts 5%, Measurements 10%, Design Project (Main stage production) 10%, Production Project 20%, Production Duty 20%, back stage crew and strike 10%.  Attendance 10% (1 mark lost for lateness of 5 minutes or more.  2 marks lost for absence without illness.  Students MUST inform the instructor of illness before class starts).

Format: lectures, hands on projects, demonstrations, and practical work.  Additional production hours outside of class time are required, and are often substantial.  Expect a minimum of 9 hours per week.  There is no maximum.

Average enrollment: 10 students, by permission of the instructor

Prerequisite: None. Limited enrolment. Permission of instructor required. Not open to students enrolled in ENGL 365. This course is extremely time consuming and labour intensive. It requires a great deal of commitment.

Description: This is a practical theatre course that focuses on technical aspects of theatre performances. Students will be introduced to the practices of lighting, sound, stage management, set and prop construction. The class will be involved in the Mainstage English Department Production and be responsible for the backstage running crew work during the run of the production.

Format: Workshop demonstrations and practical assignments

Prerequisites: None

Description: This course surveys modern and contemporary drama, theatre, and performance art from across the Western hemisphere, with special focus on Latin America, the Hispanophone Caribbean, and US Latina/o communities. As we move geographically through the hemisphere, we will learn about the political, cultural, social, and economic factors informing theatrical production. Thematic concerns will include: theatre against dictatorship in the Southern Cone and beyond; migration and exile; indigeneity; political theatre in the “borderlands;” gender and sexuality; populism, protest, and “Theatre of the Oppressed;” histories of collective creation in the Americas; and expressions of Latina/o North American identities. 

Texts: Our syllabus will feature plays and multimedia works by artists including the following:

• Carmen Aguirre (Chile/Canada)
• Lola Arias (Argentina)
• Sabina Berman (México)
• Enrique Buenaventura (Colombia)
• Não Bustamante (USA)
• Guillermo Calderón (Teatro en el Blanco, Chile)
• Carmelita Tropicana (Cuba/USA)
• Migdalia Cruz (Puerto Rico/USA)
• Nilo Cruz (Cuba/USA)
• FOMMA (Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya) (Chiapas, México)
• María Irene Fornés (Cuba/USA)
• Coco Fusco (Cuba/USA)
• Griselda Gambaro (Argentina)
• Guillermo Gómez-Peña (Mexico/USA)
• Astrid Hadad (Mexico)
• LEGOM (Mexico)
• Antonio Machado (Cuba/USA)
• Mujeres Creando (Bolivia)
• Teatro Campesino (USA)
• Teatro Línea de Sombra (México)
• Violeta Luna (México)
• Teatro Malayerba (Ecuador)
• Teatro Oficina (Brazil)
• Juan Radrigán (Chile)
• José Rivera (Puerto Rico/USA)
• Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe (México/Argentina)
• Guillermo Verdecchia (Argentina/Canada)
• Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani (Peru)

Additionally, we will utilize the following base texts:

• Diana Taylor and Sarah J. Townsend, Eds. Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theatre and Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2008).

• Ana Puga, Ed. Spectacular Bodies, Dangerous Borders. Latin American Theatre Review Books (University of Kansas Press, 2011).

• A course pack comprising secondary sources by scholars including Natalie Alvarez, Francine A’Ness, Gloria Anzaldúa, Alicia Arrizón, Stuart Day, May Farnsworth, Jean Graham-Jones, Paola Hernández, Larry LaFountain-Stokes, Jill Lane, José Muñoz, Ana Puga, Rossana Reguillo, Ramón Rivera-Servera, Leticia Robles, Camilla Stevens, Diana Taylor, and Tamara Underiner.

All texts will be available in English translation. 

Evaluation: Group Presentation: 10%; short response essays: 40%; final analytical/research paper: 30%; in-class participation: 10%; question forum: 10%

Format: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisite: None. Limited enrolment. Permission of instructor required. Not open to students enrolled in ENGL 377. Students interested in taking this course are instructed to contact Mr. Roche by email. This course is extremely time consuming and labour intensive. It requires a great deal of commitment.

Description: This is a practical theatre course that focuses on the more advanced technical aspects of theatre performances. Students will be focus on the practices of lighting, sound, stage management, and set and prop construction as well as some aspects of design in these areas. The class will be involved in the Mainstage English Department Production and be responsible for the backstage running crew work during the run of the production.

Format: Lectures, production demonstrations and up to 80 hours of production work

Prerequisite: None

Expected Student Preparation: prior film or television studies is advantageous but not required. Students are asked to see Sunset Boulevard before the first class.

Description: No decade in American history attracts a stranger combination of nostalgia and disgust. Indeed, no decade in American history is more peculiarly American—more attached to the prevailing stereotypes of naive affluence, cynical arrogance, and reckless enthusiasm, not to say bobby socks, hula hoops, malted milks, and Elvis Presley. In this course we will dive headlong into the maw of the fifties beast, with all the suburbs, commercialism, and Cold War paranoia that entails. But our method of comparative media and genre studies will also seek out gaps in that old fifties picture. As an aging and blacklist-ravaged film industry confronts an upstart television culture in search of definition—as film noir rots, the Western peaks, and science fiction surges—we will increasingly seek not just the sleek surfaces of the fifties cliché, but the churning history of our own present.

Possible films include: Ace in the Hole, Johnny Guitar, Glen or Glenda?, Rebel Without a Cause, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Imitation of Life, and Shadows.

Possible shows include: I Love Lucy, Gunsmoke, The Honeymooners, Dragnet, Lassie, The Twilight Zone, and Perry Mason.

Note: As stated above, all students are asked to see Sunset Boulevard before the first class.

Evaluation:  2 Quizzes 5% each, posted course notes 5%, journal 25%, term paper 40%, participation 20%. 

Texts: coursepack

Average enrolment:  80 students

Format: Lecture with discussion, conferences, and weekly screenings

Description: Learning modules in advanced costuming may include designing by draping fabric on the mannequins, and millinery techniques.  Sewing skills that were gained in the first semester will be built upon in the second semester, through costuming the English Department Theatre Lab class production.  This semester, emphasis is on gaining or perfecting skills, as well as working more independently.

The costume class will see the production through from design to closing night. Each student will have a specific production duty as well as a hands-on production project. Costuming II differs from Costuming I in the level of independence and leadership expected from each student.  Production projects will be initiated by the students under the guidance of the instructor.  Students will take an active part in defining and outlining their specific production duties by formulating a contract with deadlines, in collaboration with their classmates and instructor.  This will give students an opportunity to manage all aspects of costume production independently.   The various aspects of production will take a substantial amount of time throughout the semester. It is important to note that there are costume production hours outside of class time. 

Texts: None required.  Script will be provided on mycourses.  

Evaluation: Alterations Project 10%, charts 10%, Measurements 10%, Design Project (Main stage production) 10%, Production Project 20%, Production Duty 20%, back stage crew and strike 10%.  Attendance 10% (1 mark lost for lateness of 5 minutes or more.  2 marks lost for absence without illness.  Students MUST inform the instructor of illness before class starts).

Format: lectures, hands on projects, demonstrations, and practical work.  Additional production hours outside of class time are required, and are often substantial. Expect a minimum of 9 hours per week. There is no maximum.

Average enrollment: 10 students, by permission of the instructor

Description: This course offers an introduction to Inuit literature and media. There will also be a Métis component. The term "literature" includes oral literature, such as legends, stories, and songs handed down through generations and modern "collaborative life stories" as well as written pieces. The emphasis among Inuit has often been on oral culture with a resultant successful transition to modern media such as television and film.

The effects of colonialism will be discussed and whether or not it is now possible or relevant to talk about post-colonial criticism. Do we need a new paradigm?

The course will examine these developments in the context of Canada and, in regard to the Inuit component, in the context of the Canadian North and to a lesser extent of the circumpolar North.

Texts: Books will be available at Paragraphe bookstore. 

• The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Native Literature 
• Wachovich: Saquiaq
• Voices and Images of Nunavimmiut, VOL I.
• Maria Campbell: Half Breed.                                                                                                                   

Excerpts from films and videos will be shown in class and are considered an integral part of the class material for which you are responsible.

Evaluation: There will be a short essay, worth 25 %, a midterm take-home test; one final research paper worth 50%. Topics will be given out in class.

Format: Lectures and discussions

Description: Italian Neorealism remains the most influential cinema of the postwar period. For in addition to forging a genuinely national cinema from the wartime experience of the Italian people, Italian Neorealism created an international model for the development of a politically and aesthetically radically cinema by any means necessary.  Returning to the seminal moment that produced Rome Open City (1945), this course begins in the ashes of World War II, as Italian Neorealist filmmakers like Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti struggled to reclaim and redeem the everyday struggle of the Italian people. As the resistance to Nazism, American occupation, and Fascism was still being fought in the streets, Italian filmmakers--armed only with their cameras and the legacy of Gramscian Marxism--attempted to document everyday reality without conventional adornment. Using non-professional actors, natural lighting, and on-location shooting, the Neorealists changed the history of cinema.

This course examines the major aesthetic, political, and historical developments in Italian Cinema, including: the landmark birth of Neorealism at the end of World War II; the cinema of the economic miracle; the emergence of New Wave auteurs in the 1950s and 1960s; and the retrospective revision of wartime experience by filmmakers in 1970s and 1980s. By situating the innovative work of seminal postwar directors, such as Roberto Rosselini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Liliana Cavani, Ermanno Olmi, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Lina Wertmuller, in the context of Italian culture, society, and politics, we shall gain a deeper understanding of one of the most important national cinemas in the post-war period. In addition to weekly screenings, students will be expected to do a significant amount of reading about Italian film and history. Attendance at weekly screenings in mandatory.

Films Include: 

• Rome Open City (Roberto Rosselini, 1943)Paisa (Roberto Rosselini, 1946)
• Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)
• La Terra Trema (Luchino Visconti, 1948)
• La Strada (Federico Fellini, 1954)
• Big Deal on Madonna Street (Mario Monicelli, 1958)
• Accatone (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1960)
• Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti, 1960)
• Il Posto (Ermanno Olmi, 1961)
• L’Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962)
• 8 ½  (Federico Fellini, 1963)
• I Cannibali (Liliana Cavani, 1970)
• The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1971)
• Love and Anarchy (Lina Wertmuller, 1973)
• Night of the Shooting Stars (The Taviani Brothers, 1982)

Texts: 

• Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy
• Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism
• André Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume 2
• Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks
• P. Adams Sitney, Vital Crises in Italian Cinema
• Noa Steimatsky, Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema
• John David Rhodes, Stupendous, Miserable City
• Angelo Restivo, The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film
• Karl Schoonover, Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian    Cinema

Evaluation: Class Participation: 15%; Midterm Exam: 20%; Final Exam: 25%; Final Paper: 40%      

Format: Lecture, discussion, and mandatory weekly screenings

Description: In this course we examine the (mostly) North American pre-occupation with the Kennedy family. President Kennedy and his family were featured in the news before his assassination but following it – and continuing to this day – there was a plethora of attention to him and them. We will examine the reasons for this intense media fascination: after all, Kennedy wasn’t the first US president to be assassinated but his name resonates like few others. Some of the media scrutiny is due to his being President while television was taking hold in American homes. Among other things, thus, we will focus on the cultural contexts for what can be referred to as the “Kennedy industries.” These will include enhanced visibility of the presidential office and family, charisma and the photogenics of power, the culture of the “cold war” and the transition from the late 50s to the early 60s. But, we will also look at some related issues and questions, among them: the role of trauma and the body in the maintenance of national identities; the investment in secrets, conspiracy theories and gossip in the mass media age; the function of popular memory; and some other central figures to the Kennedy narratives, among them, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Lee Harvey Oswald and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and John Kennedy jr. Key questions here will be, among others, what do we need to remember of them and what do we insist on forgetting? Note: this course will be less concerned with getting at any truths about the Kennedys; rather it seeks to address the circulation of stories, the proliferation of statements, “facts,” and images which go into the “cultural screen saver”* called JFK (*Thomas Mallon, Mrs. Paine's Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy, 2002). Using David M. Lubin’s Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images as our guide, we will look at the media treatment of JFK and others, from the late 50s to the present.

NOTE: to do well in this class students should have taken a university-level course in which literature and/or film were the focus and whose textual analysis was the basis for evaluation.

Texts: (tentative)

• David M. Lubin, Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images (2003)
• Don DeLillo, Libra (1988)

• American Adulterer by Jed Mercurio (2009)
• Jackie Under My Skin by Wayne Koestenbaum (1995)
• November 22, 1963 by Adam Braver (2008)
• The Report of the Warren Commission into the Assassination of President John F Kennedy (1964)

• JFK (dir. Oliver Stone, 1991)
• The House of Yes (dir. Mark Waters, 1997)
• Smash His Camera (dir. Leon Gast, 2010)
• The Kennedy Assassination 24 Hours After (The History Channel, 2009)
• Selections from other documentaries, television shows, & films

Evaluation: (tentative) attendance and participation: 10%; précis of book chapters (from Shooting Kennedy): 40%; précis of films: 30%; précis of Libra: 20%

Format: Lectures, discussion, presentation of visual materials, film screenings.

Description: E. M. Forster  says, “Only connect.”  Janet Malcolm replies, “Only we can’t.”  In Loneliness as a Way of Life Thomas Dumm puts these thoughts into relief when he notes : “… our most important understandings about the shape of our present communal existence – the division between public and private, our inability to live with each other honestly and in comity, the estranged and isolating forms that our relationships with our most intimate acquaintances sometimes assume, the weaknesses of our attachments to each other and hence to our lives in common – are all manifestations of the loneliness that has permeated the modern world.”  In this course we will look at some literary and cinematic manifestations of this issue of solitude, how it is imagined, played out and, if not exalted, presented as inescapable: the experience of being one in a world.  Solitude may be indescribable but it does find its expression in words and images.  Do not despair!  The works we will examine should not lead to responses of forlornness.  Rather, they depict hope, longing and creative imaginings of ways to “connect.”

Texts:

• Nicole Krauss, The History of Love (2005)
• Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses, trans. Anne Born   (2005 [2003])
• Kathryn Harrison, Seeking Rapture (2004)
• Hjalmar Soderberg, Doctor Glas, trans. Paul Britten Austin (2002 [1905])
• Lorrie Moore, “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk,” Birds of America (Picador, 1998)
• Selections from Thomas Dumm’s Loneliness as a Way of Life (2008)

Films & one TV show:

• Hiroshima, Mon Amour (dir. Alain Resnais, 1959)
• Last Tango in Paris (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)
• Paris Texas (dir. Wim Wenders, 1984)
• The Straight Story (dir. David Lynch, 1999)
• In Treatment (HBO, 2008-2010)

Evaluation: (tentative) attendance and participation: 10%; précis of books and films: 90%

Format: Lectures, discussions, and screenings

Description: Balancing critical readings from the Canadian context with broader theoretical approaches, this course considers the preoccupations, anxieties, and eccentricities of Canadian cinema with a particular emphasis on the way it reflects the complex and unstable notion of Canada as nation. We will seek to answer both cultural and aesthetic questions about Canadian cinema: How do Canada’s regions borrow from one another cinematically? How do transnational and transcultural flows contribute to and alleviate problems of distribution and exhibition? What are the relationships of diasporic and queer cinemas to Canadian cinema? Does film in Canada embody the “three-pillar” approach (indigenous, francophone, anglophone) or are there in fact a variety of Canadian cinemas?

The course includes films from a variety of Canada’s regions (specifically the prairies, Quebec, and the east coast), with a particular focus on Québécois cinema. We will use close reading/analysis and critical frameworks to examine how regional filmmaking, multiculturalism, and post-national discourse are re-shaping the production and reception contexts of cinema in Canada. Throughout the course, we will attempt to map out key moments in the development and transformation of the Canadian film industry, including the realist tradition (which stemmed from its documentary origins), the growth of independent film culture, and the increasing influence of digital technology on the creation and reception of films in the twenty-first century. By the end of the course, students will be equipped with the vocabulary and skills necessary to analyze films formally and thematically, and to situate them in their wider social and historical contexts.

Texts: A History of Violence (John Wagner and Vince Locke); essays by such critics/theorists as André Loiselle, Thomas Waugh, Jim Leach, Lee Edelman, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Mark Seltzer, Houston Wood, André Bazin, Mary Anne Doane, Scott Mackenzie, Noreen Golfman, Andrew Higson, Peter Morris

Possible Films (shorts and features):

• Nanook of the North (1922), dir. Robert J. Flaherty
• Neighbours (1952), dir. Norman McLaren
• Les raquetteurs (1958), dir. Gilles Groulx and Michel Brault
• Nobody Waved Goodbye (1964), dir. Don Owen
• Goin’ Down the Road (1970), dir. Donald Shebib
• Mon oncle Antoine (1971), dir. Claude Jutra
• Les ordres (1974), dir. Michel Brault
• Les bons débarras (1979), dir. Francis Mankiewicz
• I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987), dir. Patricia Rozema
• Double Happiness (1994), dir. Mina Shum
• Exotica (1994), dir. Atom Egoyan
• Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner (2001), dir. Zacharias Kunuk
• La grande séduction (2003), dir. Jean-François Pouliot
• Ryan (2004), dir. Chris Landreth
• A History of Violence (2005), dir. David Cronenberg
• Bon Cop, Bad Cop (2006), dir. Eric Canuel
• My Winnipeg (2007), dir. Guy Maddin
• Incendies (2010), dir. Denis Villeneuve
• Bear 71 (2012), dir. Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes
• Laurence Anyways (2012), dir. Xavier Dolan
• Stories We Tell (2012), dir. Sarah Polley
• The Grand Seduction (2013), dir. Don Mckellar

Evaluation: Participation (10%); Panel Presentation (20%); Screening Logs (30%); Final Paper/ Project Proposal (10%); Final Paper/Project (30%)

Format: Lectures; mandatory screenings; panel presentations; discussions; in-class activities

Average Enrollment: 45 students

Prerequisite: None

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

Description: The object of our seminar is to define, at a theoretical level and through applied case-studies, the epistemologically fraught terms 'theatricality' and 'performativity' (and their cognates) to determine not only why, how, and to what ends each term can / might be used, but also to arrive at an understanding of to what extent they are sovereign and / or complementary. As Josette Féral proposes: "I would argue […] that there is no contradiction whatsoever between these two perspectives, which seem widely divergent. Rather, they complement each other, allowing us to better understand the phenomenon of representation, underscoring that performativity, far from contradicting theatricality, is one of its elements. In integrating performativity within itself, theatricality sees it as one of its fundamental modalities, giving theatricality its power and meaning. In fact, such an approach allows us to better understand any spectacle, which is an interplay of both performativity and theatricality."

In defining and using our evolving critical vocabulary, we shall be examining drama, theatre, and performance fields and sub-fields, including theatre and anthropology, gender studies, musicology, philosophy, linguistics, and critical theory. Key topics will include not only ‘theatricality’ and ‘performativity (performance)’, but also presence and representation, embodiment and subjectivity / subject-positions, the archive and the repertoire, and the performance of the trinity of race, class, and gender / sexuality.

Our seminar will first devote itself to a close reading of a selection of mostly theoretical essays, several of which come from a special online issue of SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 31.2 & 3 (2002), ed. Josette Féral. These will include two essays by Féral, and one essay by Freddie Rokem and perhaps some others. Other theoretical readings to be found in the Course Pack and online are by Philip Auslander, J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, David Savran, Dwight Conquergood, Diana Taylor, Rebecca Schneider, Jacques Derrida, W. B. Worthen, Peggy Phelan, Richard Schechner, Marvin Carlson, Victor Turner, Frantz Fanon, Homi K. Bhabha, Andrew Parker, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Michel de Certeau.

Our seminar will then examine some dramatic / film texts as case-studies, exploring, (re)interpreting, and applying the critical vocabulary that we have acquired and created to see what its use-value might be.

Texts: 

• Course Pack
• Michel Tremblay, Albertine In FiveTimes, trans. Linda Gaboriau (Talonbooks)
• Georg Bϋchner, Woyzeck (Nick Hern Books)
• Federico García Lorca, The House of Bernarda Alba, trans. Rona Munro (Nick Hern Books)
• Lorena Gale, Angélique (Playwrights Canada Press)
• Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters, trans. Paul Schmidt, in The Plays of Anton Chekhov (HarperCollins)

Films:

• Baz Luhrmann, Romeo + Juliet (Bazmark Films), Baz Luhrmann, director, written by Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce  (Bazmark Films, 1996 ; Beverley Hills: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, ca. 2002)
• The Wooster Group, director, Elizabeth LeCompte, narrator Kate Valk, Brace Up! (The Wooster Group, 2009)
• Werner Herzog, director, Woyzeck (Anchor Bay Entertainment,  ([2000])
• Mario Camus, director, written by Mario Camus and Antonio Larreta, The House of Bernarda Alba (1987; [Chicago]: Cińemateca, ca. 2005])
• Film Script: Craig Pearce and Baz Luhrmann, Romeo + Juliet - www.script-o-rama.com/snazzy/dircut.html

Evaluation (tentative): Active participation in the intellectual life of the seminar: 15%; one seminar presentation on a theoretical text or case-study: 15%; a distilled critical argument arising from the seminar presentation advanced in a 8-page long essay: 20%; a 20-page long scholarly essay from a choice of individually-negotiated topics: 50%

Format: Brief, mid-sized, and longer lectures; led-discussions; presentations including interrogative Qs & As.