400-level / Advanced Courses

Expected student preparation: previous university-level literature courses. This course is an advanced seminar, in which active participation will be required. 

Description: This course will explore the writings of Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), the greatest satirist in the English language. We shall begin with a study of his astonishing early satire, A Tale of a Tub (1704), together with its two appendages, The Battle of the Books and The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit. We shall then turn to another key satirical work, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1711), before embarking on a sustained analysis of Swift’s masterpiece, Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Gulliver’s Travels is, inter alia, a sustained hoax on gullible readers; the course will consider Swift’s delight in hoaxes and parodies, represented in works such as the Bickerstaff Papers (1708-09). We shall also study some of Swift’s many publications on Ireland, including A Modest Proposal (1729), the most notorious and perhaps the most acerbic of all his satires. Some attention will be given to Swift as a letter-writer, especially in his correspondence with Alexander Pope and in the letters that constitute the Journal to Stella, addressed to Esther Johnson. The course will conclude with a survey of Swift’s poetry, including the excremental verse—with its unparalleled power to offend—and in the brilliant but puzzling “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” which poses a variety of critical challenges. 

Texts: The Essential Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins, Norton, 2010?
Coursepack

​Evaluation: Seminar presentation 25%; participation in class discussion 25%; term paper 50%.

Format: Lectures and class discussion

Description: This course traces the long arc of literary aestheticism from the British Romantics through the fin de siècle decadents to the international modernists of the early twentieth century. We will begin with Keats’ odes and Ruskin’s essays, proceed through Wilde’s dialogues in The Decay of Lying, Pater’s studies in The Renaissance, and Huysmans’ novel A Rebours; and then spend the bulk of the semester reading Proust’s Swann’s Way, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Barnes’s Nightwood. Topics will include rival discourses of nature and artifice; time, memory, and “the moment”; formalism and “medium specificity; synesthesia; and the phenomenology of consciousness. Modernism has often been framed—following influential critics and scholars from T.E. Hulme to T.S. Eliot to Hugh Kenner—as a rejection of or reaction to Romanticism. This course dwells on their continuities.

Texts: Specific Texts TBA

​Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lectures and class discussion

Description: This course examines colonial and postcolonial novels from South Asia, from the late-nineteenth century to the present moment, to understand the emergence and development of the literary form in that region. It will consider how the novel responds to colonial capitalist modernity (and its aftermath) in the South Asian region, inquiring into key formal, aesthetic, and political concerns of these novels. We will read South Asian novels written in English as well as in translation from Bengali and Urdu, two major languages of South Asia with extensive literary corpuses. The course will also introduce students to the emergent area of scholarship called “World Literature.” In addition to reading theorists of world literature, such as, Pascal Casanova, Franco Moretti, Fredric Jameson, Aijaz Ahmad, and the Warwick Research Collective, we will investigate the question of national allegory, as well as the status of realism, modernism, and “irrealism” in the global periphery, seeking to understand how they inform the idea of peripheral aesthetics that engages contemporary scholars of world literature.  

Texts: 

• Bankim Chatterjee – The Sacred Brotherhood (1882)
• Rabindranath Tagore – Farewell Song (1929)
• Mulk Raj Anand – Untouchable (1935)
• Abdullah Hussein – The Weary Generations (1963)
• Upamanyu Chatterjee – English, August (1988)
• Kiran Desai – Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard (1998)
• Aravind Adiga – Between the Assassinations (2010)

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lecture and discussion

Expected Student Preparation: previous university courses in English literature

Description: Alice Munro deserves her reputation as one of Canada’s great writers. Through ordinary settings and characters and an accessible prose style, she nevertheless conveys insights that arrive with the force of shock. Her chosen genre, the short story, is now connected to her name perhaps as much as to James Joyce’s and Edgar Allan Poe’s. In this course we will become Munro scholars, reading across the arc of her oeuvre from her first pieces published in Canadian magazines in the 1950s to her most recent collections. The work of the course will consist, first, in interpreting her brilliant stories one at a time; second, in tracing the shape of her career, which took a decisive turn in 1976 when The New Yorker began publishing her work; and third, in positioning her writing in relation to larger patterns, including regionalism, the Gothic, Canadian literature, feminism, modernism, and postmodernism. In 2009 Alice Munro was awarded the Man Booker International Prize; in 2013 she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. We will follow the juries in compassing her lifetime achievement.

Texts: tentative list

• Dance of the Happy Shades
• Lives of Girls and Women
• Who Do You Think You Are?
• The Progress of Love
• Friend of My Youth
• Runaway
• Too Much Happiness 

​Evaluation: 

Oral Presentation (20%)
Essay (30%) 4–5 pp
Research Paper (40%) 8–10 pp
Participation (10%)

Format: ​Lecture and discussion 

Description: Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood share a closely aligned space in terms of Canadian literary history. Although Atwood began to publish her work almost a decade earlier than Ondaatje, both writers came of professional age during a period marked by profound changes in the Canadian literary landscape. That landscape will be explained in detail. Atwood’s poetry, fiction, and literary criticism transformed the way Canadians understood their national literature. After the publication of Survival, in 1972, a new set of values were introduced that challenged existing norms and set the stage for the arrival of new wave feminism in Canada. At the same time, Atwood was breaking down conventional notions of history, undermining ideas about literary canons, and critiquing received assumptions about sexual norms. Meanwhile, Ondaatje was importing some of the haunting exoticism associated with his childhood years in Sri Lanka. His Canadian poems were set in strange jungles. They explored bizarre transformations and imaginative realms. He liked characters who were “sane assassins” and he insisted that “My mind is poring chaos / in nets onto the page.” Both authors are drawn to difference, eccentricity, lawlessness, madness. Their characters fall off the map. Like Atwood, Ondaatje wants to revise history, undermine the way we see space, and challenge the status quo when it comes to representing memory, eroticism, desire. But above all, both authors redefine the nature of creativity. What does Ondaatje mean when he asks: “Why do I love most / among my heroes those / who sail to that perfect edge / where there is no social fuel”? We will find out. How could Atwood write a poem called “This Is a Photograph of Me,” only to reveal that it “was taken / the day after I drowned”? How can she be writing the poem, if she is dead? There are some interesting solutions to this mystery. But the poems are more than mysterious. In following the poetic careers of these two eminent writers, we will transform our own understanding of the nature of the creative act. Along the way, we will meet murderers, dreamers, executioners, madmen, seducers, deviants, and a host of others who are prepared to challenge us at every turn. This will not be innocent. It will not be easy. Confession may be involved. The first half of the course will be devoted to Ondaatje’s poetry; the second half will focus on Atwood’s. Students should be prepared to write on a weekly basis, in order to effect the inevitable self-transformation.

Texts: Students registered for this course should obtain the two required texts well in advance of the course. These texts are only available online and from used booksellers.

Atwood, Margaret. Eating Fire: Selected Poetry 1965-1995.
Ondaatje, Michael. Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems

Evaluation (provisional): Tentative: participation (10%); attendance (10%); a series of short essays (60%); one group project (20%).

Format: Seminar

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

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

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

Yvette Nolan will be the Richler Writer In Residence at McGill this year; I shall invite her to visit our class. Her schedule, however, is likely to be jam-packed with obligations.

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

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

"McGill is situated on land which has long served as a site of meeting and exchange amongst Indigenous peoples, including the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabeg nations. McGill honours and respects the diverse Indigenous peoples connected to this territory on which we gather today."

(Play) Texts: 

Appleford, Rob. Ed. Aboriginal Drama and Theatre. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2005.
Clements. Marie and Rita Leistner. The Edward Curtis Project: A Modern Picture Story. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2010.
Highway, Tomson. Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005.
Loring, Kevin. Where The Blood Mixes. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2009.
Mojica, Monique and Ric Knowles. Eds. Staging Coyote's Dream: An Anthology of First Nations Drama In English, 2 vols. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2003 and 2008. 
Selected plays will be chosen from these two volumes.
Monkman. Kent. Taxonomy Of The European Male, Séance, And Justice Of The Piece, in Two-Spirit Acts: Queer Indigenous Performances. Ed. Jean O’Hara. Toronto: Playwrights
Canada Press, 2013.
Moses. Daniel David. Almighty Voice And His Wife. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 1991.
Murphy. Colleen. Pig Girl. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2015.
Nolan. Yvette. Annie Mae’s Movement. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 1998.
Selected articles from alt. theatre: cultural diversity and the stage http://alttheatre.ca/

A substantial body of critical essays and historical documents etc. will be made available to you by means of a shared Dropbox folder. The latter allows for a high standard in providing you with iconographic material of various productions and, as you undertake your projects and presentations, will make it possible for you to contribute significant material, as, individually and collectively, we build up a very significant source of primary and secondary materials, which can be used not only by us but in other courses. PPPs can also be uploaded, though with copyright inscriptions by those of you who prepared them. In doing so, you will have to ensure that you have the right granted to you from your sources--e.g. the National Library and Archives Canada, theatre companies, the V + A Collections, the Library Of Congress, the British Museum, and the British Library.

All of these institutions (and others I shall recommend when you are working on your projects) have a striking body of iconographic material that relates to or serves to contextualise "Canadian" (complex word!), "Aboriginal" (another complex word); and “Indigenous” (yet another complex word, which, just as the other two are, is sedimented with a bloody history of conquest and destruction). We shall discuss the connotations and denotations and historical uses and abuses of these words as well as many others in the first meetings of our seminar, along with considerations of their relationships with historically-rooted principles, practices, and performances, including para-theatrical performances, dance-dramas and the like.

Further Reading:
Note: I shall have expected each of you to have read at least two books on this list before our seminar begins in September. This work is essential for many reasons, one being that you need to have an understanding of various salient Indigenous historical, political, social, and gendered, etc., issues and contexts in order to orient yourselves in preparation for our engaged study of and with Contemporary Canadian Indigenous Theatre. 

Coulthard. Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting The Colonial Politics Of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Fee. Margery. Literary Land Claims: The ‘Indian Land Question’ From Pontiac’s War To Attaswapiskat. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015.
Hargreaves. Allison. Violence Against Indigenous Women: Literature, Activism, Resistance. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2017.
Highway. Tomson. Ed. From Oral To Written: A Celebration Of Indigenous Literature In Canada 1980-2010. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2017.
Justice. Daniel Heath. Why Indigenous Literature Matters. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2018.
King. Thomas. The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2013. 9th edn.
I also recommend the recently revised edition which includes a cornucopia of rich array of iconographic material. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2012.
---. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2003.
Metcalfe-Chenail. Danielle. Ed. In This Together: Fifteen Stories Of Truth & Reconciliation. Victoria: TouchWood Editions, 2016.
Moreton. Robinson. Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements In First World Locations. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016.
Nolan. Yvette. Medicine Shows: Indigenous Performance Culture. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2015.
___ and Ric Knowles. Eds. Performing Indigeneity. New Essays On Canadian Theatre. Volume Six. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2016.
Ray. Arthur J. An Illustrated History Of Canada’s Native People: I Have Lived Here Since The World Began. Revised and Expanded Edition. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2010.
Simpson. Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across The Borders Of Settler States. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
Simpson. Leanne Betasamosake. Lighting The Eighth Fire: The Liberation, Resurgence, and Protection Of Indigenous Nations. Winnipeg: ARP BOOKS, 2017.
___. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
---. Dancing On Our Turtle’s Back: Spirits Of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence And A New Emergence. Winnipeg: ARP BOOKS, 2011.
Smith. Linda Tuhiwal. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: ZED BOOKS LTD, 2012.
Vowel. Chelsea. Indigenous Writes: A Guide To First Nations, Métis, & Inuit Issues In Canada. Winnipeg: HighWater Press, 2016.
What We Have Learned: Principles Of Truth And Reconciliation. Ottawa: Truth And Reconciliation Commission Of Canada, 2015. 

Evaluation:

• One seminar presentation followed by an eight-page paper, drawing from the presentation and developing a distilled critical argument: 35%. I strongly encourage praxis, in whole or in part, as part of a presentation or as an autonomous event.  
• 16-page long scholarly essay; all topics individually negotiated, requiring meeting with me as soon as two weeks into the term to get the initial thinking and research well underway, followed by regular meetings with me throughout the term: 50%
• Consistent participation in the intellectual and creative life of the seminar: 15%

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

Description: 

This course focuses on the work of eight poets of the “New York School”: John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, and Bernadette Mayer. This was a “school” not in the sense of collective formal and ideological commitments or technical repertoires: “there were no rules, there were no meetings,” as Koch put it, and the only manifestoes produced were mock manifestoes. The bonding agent was rather that of shared sensibility, a lightness of tone and swiftness of thought, rooted in the urban sensorium of midcentury New York and endowed with postwar American cultural confidence. They inherited the erudition and cosmopolitanism of the Modernists, but not their stridency; unabashed by Europe, they saw themselves as part of a transatlantic avant-garde, with both poets and painters as peers, and took sophisticated, witty, connoisseurial pleasure in culture both high and low.

Our approach will be formal and technical as well as cultural and contextual. We will examine meter, measure, montage, voice, image, syntax, parataxis, narrative, ornament, argument, and so on, always considering the stakes of style (i.e. the ingenuity, daring, and payoff involved). But we’ll also attend to the “moment”: to the collaborative energy within this coterie; to the reciprocal instigations between them and their friends and contemporaries in the visual arts; and to the special status of New York as a cultural capital, at once vulgar and urbane, and in that period still hospitable to impecunious stragglers “waiting to become part of our century.”

Texts: Specific Texts TBA

​Evaluation: TBA.

Format: Lectures and class discussion

Prerequisite: at least 12 prior credits in ENGL courses are expected; this course is at an advanced level

Description: This course offers a selection of British, Irish, and American literary and mass-market narratives about spies and traitors. Espionage narratives are manifestly about paranoia, conspiracy, and treachery. They also communicate ideology and rewrite history. This course pays particular attention to the human roles and political ambiguities of spy plots, with emphasis given to double agents, leaks, moles, recruitment, betrayal, and invasion. In addition, the course will ask questions about the aesthetic uses of fear, as well as the narrative uses of chase scenes. Narrative technique—narrators, implied narrators, disposition, coincidence, focalization—will be addressed during discussions. Some attention will be paid to discursive styles of espionage, including melodrama, realism, and adventure. The course is intended to sensitize students to the changing social and ideological functions of the spy. Thematic observations on abduction, disguise, torture, defection, language, accent, and decoding will also be raised in the course of lectures. Distinctions between “high” and “popular” culture will be examined through points where fiction crosses into film, and history crosses into representation. 

Texts:

John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps (OUP)
Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands (OUP)
Ian Fleming, Casino Royale (Penguin)
John LeCarré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (Penguin)
Joan Didion, Democracy (Random House)
John Banville, The Untouchable (Vintage)
The Manchurian Candidate (film)

Evaluation: first paper 10%; second paper 30%; participation 10%; final exam 30%

Format: lecture and discussion

Description: The multi-billion-dollar self-transformation industry promises to create “a new you” and also to make you into the person you were always meant to be.  That is straight out of Oprah Winfrey. If Oprah is the leading proponent of the modern ideal of self-transformation; then Shakespeare is the progenitor as well as a key critic of transformational modernity. In this course, we study how Shakespeare became the supreme artist of transformation, and we consider how transformation has become an ideal of modern life. We develop a taxonomy of transformation (e.g., metamorphosis, conversion, transversion, kenosis, revolution); we read a number of Western transformational artists and/or thinkers about transformation, including Paul, Lucretius, Ovid, Augustine. From start to finish, our main focus is on six plays by Shakespeare.

Texts: (available at Paragraph Books)

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Peter Holland (Oxford)
• As You Like It, ed. Alan Brissenden (Oxford)
• Much Ado about Nothing, ed. Sheldon Zitner (Oxford)
• Henry IV, Part One, ed. David Bevington (Oxford)
• Anthony and Cleopatra, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford)
• The Winter’s Tale, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford)
• Other readings will be provided in electronic form.

Evaluation: 

Journal 35
Presentation 15
Participation 15
Final paper (12 pages) 35

Format: lecture and discussion

Description: This course will examine George Gordon, Lord Byron’s diverse poetic oeuvre as well as the major works of his central interlocutors, Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley. We will also attend to Victorian afterlives of the Byronic hero. The landmark works of these writers will allow us to explore the literary history of the late Romantic era, from the turn to closet drama and the fragment poem—to the return to satire, mock epic, and romance. Our study of Byron, his circle, and his successors will focus in particular on 1) the definition of poetry and the social role of the poet; 2) Archaism, ruins, and apocalypse; 3) skepticism, world weariness, and Romantic irony; 4) cosmopolitanism, orientalism, and empire; 5) human extinction, deep time, and the “nature poet”; 6) sexuality, plagiarism, and gender performance; and 7) Romantic science, Gothicism, and monstrosity. Moreover, Byron’s poetry generates and captures how his remarkably transformative epoch of literary history encompasses the proliferation of new aesthetic theories of the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque.

Some guiding questions: What are the formal, ethical, technological, and thematic ruptures (and continuities) between first- and second-generation Romantic literatures and cultures? Between Romanticism and Neoclassicism? How did the Byron circle formulate or contest utopian thinking during the aftermath of the French Revolution? What is the relationship between Byron and Romanticism? Is Byron an exceptional figure in the Romantic Movement that he ostensibly helped to inaugurate? How can we account for his various personae and infidelities? His self-conscious and reflexive poetics? Is Byron ultimately a fugitive and impersonal or biographical and personal poet? How has literary criticism and theory represented Byron, his life, and the Byronic hero from the nineteenth century to our present time? What are the legacies of the Byronic mask?

Texts: Selected works by Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John William Polidori, Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L. E. L.), and Emily Brontë

Evaluation: 
Participation (15%)
Quizzes (15%)
Reading responses / short essays (20%)
Class conference / presentation of research essay (10%)
Research essay (40%)

Format: Lectures and discussions

Expected student preparation: No formal pre-requisite.  Because substantial attention will be paid to developments in Eliot’s poetic form and style, however, this course is directed to English Literature Major and Honours students  in U2 and U3 who have completed the required Poetics course (ENGL 311).  Students in other departments must have my advance permission to register.  U1 students may not register for this course. All students wishing to take this course must attend the first class; latecomers will not be admitted, whether they have registered on Minerva or not.

Description: A study of the writings of T.S. Eliot, in cul­tural, historical, and biographi­cal contexts.  Concerns arising from our close primary engagement with the poems will include Eliot’s inquiry into “immediate experience,” the nature of his modernist scepticism, his reconstruction of spiritual conscious­ness between the two World Wars, and his ongoing critique of dualism.  Class discussions will focus on his poetry and on one of his plays, The Cocktail Party, but we will attend intermittent­ly to the major works of prose criticism and to less well-known essays that help to situate the poems in major trends of twentieth-century thought.  Additional contexts of discussion will include the sources of Eliot's poetics and critical ideas, the ambient modernism he enjoyed and furthered, and the challenges to his present-day reputation. In the course of the semester we will hope to articulate the aesthetic radicalism and spiritual anguish that made this paradoxically conservative Anglo-American poet’s writings exemplary for generations of poets.

Texts: 

• Eliot, T.S.  The Cocktail Party.  Edition TBD.
• ---.  The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot (selections).  Online resource through McGill Libraries.  6 vols.  Eds. Ronald Shuchard et al.  London: Faber and Faber; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014-2018.
• ---.  The Poems of T.S. Eliot.  Vol. 1.  Eds. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2015.
• ---.  Murder in the Cathedral.  Edition TBD.

Evaluation: To be determined, but probably:

1. short report on one of the cultural / historical contexts of Eliot’s career, 3 pp. and bibliography, 20%
2. close reading or other short essay topic, 5 pp., 20%
3. term paper, 12-15 pp., 50%
4. active 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.

Format: Lecture with substantial discussion

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

Description: Intensive study of shorter prose fictions and critical essays by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, as these foundational authors can be seen to work in dialogue with one another, exploring aesthetic problems and cultural preoccupations crucial to mid-nineteenth-century America at the same time that they break the ground for the emergence of the modern short story—anticipating fundamental developments in form and theme that would become the bases for self-conscious, experimental short fiction produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Texts: (Tentative; editions of collected short fiction TBA):

• Poe, The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe;
• Hawthorne, Selected Tales and Sketches;
• Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter;
• Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor, and Selected Tales or Great Short Works of Herman Melville.

Evaluation (Tentative): Participation in seminar discussions, 10%; series of one-page textual analyses, 20%; two critical essays, 20% each (or one extended research paper, 40%); take-home final exam, 30%.

Format: Lectures and discussions

Description: Life-writing has a long history, yet it has been said we are living in a memoir boom (though not the first and only). Our focus is less on why that is and more on what is there. We will read and discuss some late-twentieth and twenty-first century memoirs with a view to understanding how, in the words of Vladimir Nabokov, “certain tight parentheses have been opened and allowed to spill their still active contents … Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl” (Speak, Memory). If memoir begins “with the intuition of meaning – with the mysterious fact that life can sometimes step free from the chaos of  contingency and become story” then we will treat these memoirs as if they were fictional stories and ask: what are the stories and how are they told? How can one think of real life in fictional terms?

Texts: books --  (tentative)

Maus, Art Spiegelman
Claiming Anishinaabe, Lynn Gehl
I Love Dick, Chris Kraus
Dear Mister You, Mary Louise Parker
The Kiss, Kathryn Harrison
Are You My Mother?, Alison Bechdel
My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard (selections)
The Folded Clock, Heidi Julavits (selections)
Winter Journal, Paul Auster (selections)
Hunger, Roxane Gay
The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson
Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates

Theoretical essays by: Roland Barthes, Ben Yagoda, Sven Birkerts, Nancy K Miller, Michel Foucault
Essays by: Steve Martin, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, David Sedaris, Daphne Merkin, Katha Pollitt
Autobiographical photography by: Sally Mann, Andres Serrano, Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annie Leibowitz

Evaluation: (tentative) 10% participation; 10% short responses; 40% first essay; 40% second essay (each c. 2000 words)

Format: lecture, presentation of visual material, discussion

Description: TBA

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lecture and class discussion

Expected Preparation: Previous university-level courses in drama and theatre, literature, or cultural studies. Restricted to U2 and U3 students. 

Description: We will read some of the major dramatic theories concerned with the production, management, or solicitation of feeling in the theatre from the Neoclassical period through the recent turn to neuro-cognitive approaches. The actor and the craft of acting will often be our locus of inquiry, but we will also investigate scenography, dramaturgy, and sound. We’ll ask the following questions, among others:  What are the mechanisms by which the stage picture thrills or surprises an audience? What is the relation between an actor’s emotions and those of the character she portrays? Between emotional expression on stage and emotional response in the audience? How is the mind-body relation conceptualised in different historical periods? How is the science of emotion deployed (or not) in theatrical performance? Do different dramatic genres elicit different kinds of feelings in audiences? In each unit of study, we’ll also read a play to which we might connect the theories. Students will conduct research into topics of special interest and present their findings to the class. Each unit will culminate in a student-led creative praxis session, which puts the theory into practice.

Units may include:
Bharata, Natyashastra
Zeami, Fushikaden (Teachings on Style and the Flower)
Descartes, Passions of the Soul
Diderot, Paradox of the Actor
Sturm und drang
Romanticism
Melodrama
Gertrude Stein, “Plays”
Musical theatre
Stanislavski technique: feeling and identification
Feminist feeling
Cognitive science approaches to feeling and acting

Texts: Custom course reader composed of selections from acting theory, reception theory and performance theory; plus Erin Hurley Theatre & Feeling.

Evaluation: reading journal; group praxis session; discussion prompts; Research Paper

Format: lecture, discussion, debates, concept mapping, and practical exercises/explorations

Description: In this course we will explore the various psychological, political, generic, rhetorical, and sociological parameters of comic recognition and misrecognition in theorists and practitioners from classical Athens to the present day. We will read and discuss theoretical accounts of comedy, humour, and laughter by Northrop Frye, C.L. Barber, Mikhail Bakhtin, Thomas Hobbes, Francis Hutcheson, Lord Shaftesbury, Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, Mary Douglas, James Feibleman, Hugh Duncan, René Girard, Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Baudelaire, and Noel Carroll, among others. As a way of grounding these various theoretical accounts in specific examples, we will also study two plays, a novel, and a film.

Texts: Most of the readings are available via the library’s digital holdings. Pride and Prejudice will be available at the McGill bookstore.

Evaluation: midterm essay (30%); final essay (40%); final exam (30%).

Format: lecture and class discussion​

Description: This course will approach the form of autobiography in the Enlightenment through a brief survey of the European tradition of autobiographical texts from antiquity to the Renaissance. Classic models such as Plato’s Apology, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, and Saint Augustine’s Confessions will help us appreciate the motivation and methods of later writing in autobiographical form. Our readings will include not only “real” autobiographies but also first-person narratives in philosophy and literature that provide a background for understanding the emergence of the novel in the “long” eighteenth century (1650-1850). A basic assumption of this course is that the modern novel absorbs and adapts conventions of spiritual autobiography and the presuppositions of selfhood in other forms of first-person storytelling such as dramatic monologue, letter writing, and the diary. We will analyze particular autobiographical narratives to develop a critical vocabulary that should enable us to conceptualize key problems in the evolving relationship between truth and fiction in the history of first-person narrative. Our study of these problems in the representation of inner experience and the sociohistorical conditions of subjectivity will focus on claims to truth or authenticity in relation to the logic of eros, confession, and self-construction.

Texts: The required reading for this course will include selections from 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 January 2018.)

• Plato, Aristophanes, and Xenophon, The Trials of Socrates (Hackett)
• Plato, Plato on Love (Hackett)
• Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations (Oxford, Penguin, or Hackett)
• St. Augustine, Confessions (Hackett or Oxford)
• Benvenuto Cellini, My Life (Oxford)
• Michel de Montaigne, Essays (Hackett)
• John Bunyan, Grace Abounding (Oxford)
• Daniel Defoe, Roxana (Broadview or Oxford)
• Denis Diderot, The Nun (Oxford)
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sufferings of Young Werther (Norton)
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (Oxford)
• Benjamin Constant, Adolphe (Oxford or Penguin)
• Stendhal, Love (Penguin)
• Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (Hill and Wang)

Evaluation: Paper (60%), presentations (20%), and participation (20%). Regular attendance is required for a passing final grade (a maximum of two absences will be allowed except for documented medical or similar emergencies). Two or three optional film screenings may be offered in this course, depending on the interest and schedules of the participants.

Format: Seminar

Limited enrollment. Permission of instructor required. Priority will be given to Drama and Theatre students. Admission to the class requires attendance at an audition and an interview, which will be held in mid to late April.

Please email a statement of interest to Professor Sean Carney at: sean.carney [at] mcgill.ca

Prerequisites: ENGL 230, ENGL 269 and/or permission of instructor.

Description: This course is a practical creative workshop in which students complete a variety of in-class rehearsal exercises and collaborate on the creation of a theatrical performance.  The course also includes critical reflection assignments. The course will culminate in a production in late March 2019 to be performed in Moyse Hall Theatre as the Department’s main stage production. Students must be part of the acting ensemble throughout the course. This course is an extremely large time commitment with a great deal of rehearsal and preparation outside of class time, particularly in the Winter 2019 term.  You must be able to enroll in both the Fall and Winter sections of 465 to be a member of this class.

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Group discussions, practical exercises, class presentations.

Average enrollment: 10 students

Description: TBA

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lecture and discussion

Note: Registration for this class is by application only. Interested students should send me an email with the subject heading “application to ENGL 480” stating their interest in the course and qualifications. In most cases, students will be expected to have earned a solid “B” or better in a film or literature course, but strong students from other fields will be considered. Students interested primarily in fulfilling a degree requirement will be directed elsewhere, as there are many ways to complete requirements. 20 applicants will be admitted. All admitted students are expected to make the course a priority, keeping up with work and attending every seminar meeting.

Description: This course will be an experiment in historical immersion. We will project ourselves into New York City in 1950 and simulate the moviegoing career of a film buff at that time, watching films--including some from Europe--as they would have become progressively available in the theatres. Likely films include: Passport to Pimlico, Intruder in the Dust, Border Incident, Bicycle Thieves, The Third Man, In a Lonely Place, All About Eve, and Born Yesterday.

Texts: none

Evaluation: Term project 40%; film journals 40%; participation and attendance 20%

Format: Seminar and group work

Description: Pausing to consider a select group of pioneering, early female filmmakers, this course focuses primarily on the work of women directors since the 1960s who have resisted or rejected classical Hollywood cinematic conventions. By studying the unique and innovative contributions these directors have made to film aesthetics and narrative, we shall also address the relationship between film form and ideology. Our aim is to analyze the complex issues that inevitably arise when women work behind the camera in an industry that has overwhelmingly privileged male directors and in which women have traditionally existed primarily “as objects to be looked at” in front of the camera. That the chosen films focus mostly on female protagonists shall hone our focus on questions of gendered representation.

Additionally, this class will introduce students to some of the central debates within feminism from the 1970s and into the present, in order to investigate the relationship between feminism and independent female film production. What kind of aesthetic and narrative strategies have women filmmakers used to create alternative fictions and documentations of gender conventions, female pleasure, everyday life, and social experience? How does an audience assess a film made by a woman as explicitly or implicitly feminist?  Please note that due to the instructor's expertise, the emphasis is on North American and European filmmakers (East and West), although a handful of filmmakers working in other regions will also be considered.  Furthermore, some of the films we will see this semester have sexually explicit, violent, or other content that may be offensive to some sensibilities. Please consider this fact carefully before you decide to take this class, as we shall not shy away from discussing even the most difficult aspects of these films head on.

Texts: 

Cleo from 5 to 7 (Agnes Varda, France, 1962)
Daisies (Vera Chytilova, Czechoslovakia, 1966)
Wanda (Barbara Loden, US, 1971)
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (Chantal Akerman, Belgium, 1975)
Harlan County, USA (Barbara Kopple, US, 1976)
Germany Pale Mother (Helma Sanders-Brahms, West Germany, 1980)
Born in Flames (Lizzie Borden, US, 1983)
Sweetie (Jane Campion, Australia, 1989)
Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, US, 1991)
Boys Don't Cry (Kimberly Peirce, US, 1999)
Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat, France, 2001)
Under the Skin of the City (Rahkshan Bani-Etemad, Iran, 2001)
Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, Scotland, 2002)
Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, Canada, 2012)
13th (Ava DuVernay, US, 2016)

Evaluation:
Attendance and participation: 15%
Journal Entries: 15%
Sequence Analysis: 25%
Final Paper: 45%

Format: Alternating lectures by the instructor and oral presentations by the students.

Description: Costumes do not exist in a vacuum; they respond to social and political factors specific to the era in which they were created.  They are inextricably linked to the art and architecture of their day as they are to the current political and moral beliefs. We, along with Webster's Dictionary, use the term “costume” to mean a style of clothing, ornaments, and hair used especially during a certain period, in a certain region, or by a certain class or group.

The structure of this class will alternate between one class where the instructor presents costume information, and the following class where a designated group of students will respond with an oral presentation to contextualize the styles of the era.  The instructor will present the costume history of each specific era through images, example pieces, and embodied learning.

In the next class, students will present their oral projects, which respond to the specific era.  Each student in the presentation group will handle one specific topic relating to the era.  Topics for presentations include Art, Music and Dance, Science and Technology, Popular Culture, and Historical Context.  Additional optional topics include Architecture, Furniture Design, Politics, and Advertising. Each presentation group consists of five students.  Each student presents twice during the semester.

By listening to their fellow students’ presentations, the class will be able to answer questions such as:  What is the common aesthetic between furniture and clothing design of the Victorian era? How does the music of the 1920’s effect dance, and in turn, clothing styles? Historical overview of costumes will be enhanced by an inquisitive look at the link between clothing and the culture that created them. The goal is to see the bigger picture of the inter-related nature of different disciplines, and how each impacts the system as a whole.  Although this class specifically relates to fashion, it is also a way of seeing and understanding larger cultural, social, historical, and political contexts.

Texts: readings will be supplied on mycourses

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Classes alternate between lectures by the instructor and oral presentations by the students.  Each student will do two oral presentations during the semester. 

Prerequisites: None.

Expected Student Preparation: Since much of the reading material will be highly theoretical in nature, some familiarity with literary theory and/or cultural studies will be very, very useful.

Description: This course will critically examine the efforts within the Marxist tradition to theorize literary and cultural production. After starting with an overview of Marxism as a system of thought, we will trace the critical formulations of various Marxist theorists as they address the aesthetic modes of realism, modernism, and postmodernism—modes whose periods of cultural dominance correspond, Fredric Jameson and others have suggested, to different stages in the development of the capitalist mode of production. As we follow a somewhat chronological itinerary through the critical debates each of these aesthetic modes has occasioned, we will also engage with Marxism’s dialogue (and sometimes conflict) with other critical traditions, particularly feminism and queer theory. Throughout the term, we will also examine some primary works of literary and cultural production to “test out” the claims of these theorists. The guiding metaphor for our inquiries will be that of base and superstructure: How are literary and cultural productions related to the realm of economic production? Our inquiries will be undertaken in a collaborative rather than competitive spirit, even as we pursue what Marx once called the “ruthless criticism of all that exists.”

Required Texts:                   

Theory: Marxist Literary Theory, eds. Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne
Aesthetics & Politics, Theodor Adorno et al
Essays by Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Stuart Hall, Heidi Hartmann, Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Silvia Federici, and others
(Recommended: Marx for Beginners, Rius)

Test cases: Père Goriot, Honoré de Balzac (Norton Critical Edition)
Endgame, Samuel Beckett
Tout va bien, dir. Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin
Fight Club, dir. David Fincher
Selected episodes of UnREAL

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lecture, discussion​

Description: This course looks at the ways that biotechnologies, naturecultures (Haraway) and queer and feminist perspectives converge in the contemporary moment to speculatively produce new forms of life and modes of living. How have thinkers, artists and activist proposed new critical possibilities for revisiting ideas of the human, inhuman and life itself? Reading across science fiction and social fact, through interfaces, media and literature, exploring biotechnologies from assisted reproduction to cloning to AI and more, we will explore the stakes of the ambiguous limits of the body and the human today.

Texts: Coursepack

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lecture, screenings, discussion and participation