Past Course Listings

Not open to students who have taken ENGL 200. Open only to students in English Major and Minor programs.

Description: English 202 is a historical survey of nondramatic English literature from Old English up to and including the eighteenth-century writer Swift, highlighting major texts, authors, and shifts in literary thought, with attention to relevant cultural factors.

Covering around 1000 years of literary history in only 13 weeks, this necessarily fast-moving course provides fundamental grounding for understanding the cross-currents, influences, and intertextual relationships involved in the development of nondramatic English literature. Accordingly, English 202 focuses on premodern English nondramatic authors, texts, and genres that have had a major literary and cultural impact: Beowulf, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, a range of Renaissance sonnets, lyrics by Donne and Marvell, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Pope’s Rape of the Lock, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The course thus provides knowledge of English epic, the formerly major narrative genre; its parodic inversion mock-epic; early modern lyric; satire; and other literary forms. It further deals with a wide range of cultural, social, and intellectual contexts relevant to these texts, from philosophy, theology, and iconography to former notions of amorous desire. By examining two representative expressions of Renaissance and Enlightenment esthetics, Sidney’s Defence of Poesy and Pope’s Essay on Criticism, it defines prior concepts of literature, how they differed, and how they contrast with our own. Using Mary Wroth and Aphra Behn as exemplars, it also addresses the origins and development of English female literary authorship. This course combines with English 203 to survey English literary history up the present, and these surveys much facilitate later specialized study of English literature in the Minor, Major, and Honours programs.

The genres, authors, and longer texts covered in this course–such as Beowulf, the Canterbury Tales and its particular sections studied (the General Prologue, the Wife’s and Miller’s Prologues and Tales), a portion of The Faerie Queene, Sidney’s Defence, Books I to IV of Paradise Lost, Pope’s Essay on Criticism and Rape of the Lock, and parts I and IV of Gulliver’s Travels--are thus quite standard for such surveys throughout the English-speaking world.

Texts:

• The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1 (available at the Word bookstore, 469 Milton Street)

Evaluation: Final exam, 40%; term paper, 50%; 10% conference attendance and participation.

Format: Lectures, conferences, discussions.

This course is intended for Faculty of Arts or Faculty of Science Students in a Major or Minor Program in literature in the Department of English. Not open to students in other Faculties.

Prerequisite: English 202. Not open to students who have taken English 201, the non-Departmental Survey of English Literature 2.

Description: Focused primarily on literature of the British Isles, this course surveys literature in English from the years following the French Revolution to the early twentieth century, with particular emphasis on poetry. We engage critically with the received constructs of “Romanticism,” “Victorianism,” and “Modernism” traditionally governing the periodization and study of literature covered by this course, and we interrogate the concept of literary “canon.”

​We open with what has come to be known as the “Romantic” era in British literature, falling between the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth. David Perkins once suggested that we are still living in the “comet’s tail” of the Romantics’ fiery trajectory, such that we still feel the influence of their ideas about the artist’s role, creative process, the power of the imagination, “Nature,” and the relationship between the individual and community. Especially salient in the Romantic inheritance is a conception of the poet—as hero, rebel, solitary genius, and visionary—that still compels readers today.

The Victorian period that followed often critiqued the Romantic emphasis on introspection, feeling, and individual visionary experience, and often shaped their work according to commitments to social justice. We address the Victorian “fin de siècle” is read as a late-nineteenth century revolt against Victorianism from within, together with the movement that the fin de siècle is often read as ushering in: twentieth-century literary “modernism,” associated with pathfinding aesthetic, social, and philosophical innovation. We close with examples from contemporary literature engaging critically with history and literature of these eras and addressing postcolonial experience.

Texts: Readings will likely include work by the following:

Romantic: William Blake, S.T. Coleridge, Olaudah Equiano, John Keats, Mary Robinson, P.B. Shelley, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth,
Victorian: Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walter Pater, Christina Rossetti, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, John Ruskin, Oscar Wilde
Modern and Contemporary: W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H.D., Amy Lowell, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Kiran Desai, Zadie Smith
Possible novels: Jane Austen, Persuasion; Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Ishiguro, Kazuo, Remains of the Day; Dickens, Charles, Hard Times; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

Format (subject to revision): 2 critical essays (6 pp.), final examination.

Description: TBA

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: TBA

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

Texts:

• Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings
• The Norton Anthology of American Literature: 10th edition, Vol. B (1820-1865).

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

Format: Lecture and required discussion sections.

Average enrolment: 140 to 160 students.

Description: An introduction to Canadian literature in English from its beginnings through the Second World War. Early Canadian literature in English represents a diverse country changing with successive waves of colonization and modernization. The representation is vivid and imperfect, showing us Canadian beliefs and experiences as they were filtered through the English language, the book trade, literary movements, and broader ideological trends. The principal goal of this course is literary-historical: we will strive to understand why early English-Canadian writers wrote what they did, how their writing was published and received, what motives drove them, and what ideals structured their different visions of the nation. The problem of representing the First Nations in the colonial language, English, will be one theme of the course. Another will be the various ideals of religion, spirituality, and morality that writers explored through their work. A third theme will be poetics. Concepts of meter, rhyme, rhetoric, figurative language, and genre are fundamental to literary creativity, and learning about their historical application allows us to see the purpose of literature evolving. These and other themes will be traced across three units: (1) contact with the First Nations, exploration of the land, and settlement from the 17th to the 19th century; (2) the literary movement known as Confederation Poetry, which flourished from 1880 to 1900 and enjoyed a long popularity afterward; and (3) literary modernism in poetry and fiction. Students will become familiar with the major genres that writers in this country adopted to give expression to their experience of Canada, such as travel narrative, sketch, romance, lyric, narrative long poem, short story, free verse, and novel. Assessment will be based on quizzes designed to encourage diligent and thoughtful engagement with the assigned texts and lectures, and on essays aimed at improving students’ formal argumentative writing.

Required Books (tentative):

• Graham, Gwethalyn. Earth and High Heaven. 1944. Introd. Norman Ravvin. Toronto: Cormorant, 2003.
• Johnson, E. Pauline. Tekahionwake: E. Pauline Johnson’s Writings on Native North America. Edited by Margery Fee and Dory Nason. Peterborough: Broadview, 2016.
• Moodie, Susanna. Roughing It in the Bush; or, Life in Canada. Edited by Carl Ballstadt. Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1988.
• Thompson, David. The Writings of David Thompson. Edited by William E. Moreau. Vol. 1, The Travels, 1850 Version. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009.
• Further readings will be available online through McGill Library.

Recommended: Those wishing to improve their writing should order a copy of the following:

• William E. Messenger et al. The Canadian Writer’s Handbook (Oxford)

Evaluation: Quizzes on readings and lectures; assignment; two essays; participation.

Format: Lecture, with weekly conference sections for discussion.

Description: Theatre is a tree with deep roots and many branches: not only does the history of world theatre stretch millennia long, but theatre studies encompasses both textual analysis and investigation of all the aspects of a staged production: lighting, sound, movement, vocalizations and uses of language, set design, and stage-audience interactions. Given the complexity and breadth of the field, this course provides a critical introduction to theatre studies, focusing on play texts, drama theory, and theatre history. We will cover both western and non-western theatrical events, examining a range of works from Ancient Greek tragedy through contemporary and postcolonial performance, and including the Department of English mainstage show. Through the plays, we will examine what “theatre” is and does in different periods and places. We will learn how theatre is constituted by the material and social conditions of performance, codified in dramatic genres, and conceptualised in dramatic theory.

Texts:

• The Norton Anthology of Drama, Shorter Third Edition.
• Additional play texts and production videos, where available, will be provided through MyCourses. These may include Oedipus Rex; Bharata Muni’s Natya Shastra; extracts of Kālidāsa’s works; Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Loa to Divine Narcissus; Zeami’s Astumori; Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or What You Will; Anton Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard; Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman; Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play; Carol Churchill’s Cloud Nine; Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview; David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly.

Evaluation: Quizzes: 20%; short essays: 20%; midterm exam: 30%; final exam: 30%.

Format: Lecture, discussion, and group work.

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

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

Texts: TBA

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

Format: Group discussion, practical exercises, class presentations.

Description: This course, a required course for Cultural Studies majors and minors, will introduce various critical efforts to theorize the aesthetics, semiotics, and politics of popular culture over the past century. Beginning with a few crucial theoretical touchstones (Marx, Freud, structuralism), we will survey such movements as the Frankfurt School, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, critical race studies, queer theory, affect theory, and various feminisms, as they each formulate critical frameworks to explain how popular culture works. Along the way, we will consider the following questions: What does the “popular” in “popular culture” mean? Does the distinction between “high” and “low” culture have a political dimension? Furthermore, when we do cultural studies, whose culture should be investigated? What is the role of the critic? Finally, how can we grasp the meanings of popular culture: by examining the texts themselves, or by studying the audiences’ interpretations and uses of these texts?

Texts:

• Roland Barthes, Mythologies (either Hill and Wang editions)
• Essays by Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Richard Dyer, Dick Hebdige, Stuart Hall, John Fiske, Janice Radway, Constance Penley, Lisa Nakamura, Sara Ahmed, Eric Lott, and others.

Evaluation: Quizzes, two short papers, final exam.

Format: Lecture; weekly, TA-led discussion sections.

The course will initially be restricted to Cultural Studies majors/minors and Film Studies minors. If space permits, some other students may be admitted.

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

Texts: Coursepack.

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

Format: Lecture and conferences plus weekly screenings.

Expected Preparation: This is a required course for World Cinemas minors.

Description: Designed as one of the two core courses for World Cinemas Minors, this course introduces key historical moments, cinematic movements, formal styles, as well as historiographical and theoretical debates in the history of world cinema. The course maps out diverging trajectories and merging paths of exemplary filmmakers and filmmaking collectives in various nations and geo-political regions against the backdrop of the changing technological media environments. While we distinguish chronology from history, the course follows the transformation of cinema from its emergent era to the present. Students will read both historical and contemporary texts to gain a broad sense of the seminal debates in film studies, reception and criticism. This course aims to foster a critical understanding of cinema as an international, distributed and polycentric phenomenon.

Texts: Coursepack.

Evaluation: TBD

Format: Lecture, screenings, discussion.

Description: This course provides a critical introduction to postcolonial and world literature by engaging with the rich corpus of literary and filmic texts from South Asia. At the same time, it provides a critical introduction to modern South Asia by drawing on a range of novels, poems, short stories, travelogues, and films produced in that region during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The course examines how these texts conceive of, and represent, the lives and life-worlds of the South Asian region while situating them in relation to the critical and theoretical preoccupations of postcolonial and world literature studies. The course interrogates the (often contested) meanings of the term postcolonial and asks how it relates to categories such as anti-colonial and colonial besides familiarizing students with some of the key issues and contemporary debates in the field. In so doing, the course prepares students for further study in postcolonial and world literature.

Note 1: Attendance to TA conferences and, if scheduled, film screenings is mandatory. No exceptions.
Note 2: This is one of the required courses for the South Asian Studies minor (Stream 1: Culture and Civilization).

Texts:

Novels:

• RK Narayan – The Guide (1958)
• Salman Rushdie – Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990)
• Mohammed Hanif – The Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008)
• Megha Majumdar – A Burning (2020)

Travelogues:

• Vikram Seth – From Heaven Lake (1983)

Short Stories:

• Selections from Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain, Sadaat Hasan Manto, Manik Banerjee

Poetry:

• Selections from Rabindranath Tagore; Arun Kolatkar

Films:

• Shatranj ke Khiladi [The Chess Players] (Dir: Satyajit Ray, 1977)
• Peepli, Live! (Dir: Anusha Rizvi, 2010)

This is an indicative list and course texts will be finalized later.

Evaluation: Take home exams and papers.

Description: This course will provide students with a broad survey of twenty-first-century American fiction—or, at least, what we know of it thus far. Through the close study of a diverse group of writers, we will work to identify the central authors, historical contexts, and aesthetic features of what might otherwise fall under the amorphous label of “contemporary fiction.” We will investigate how literary fiction has responded to 9/11 and the forever wars it launched, the election of Barack Obama and the 2008 financial crisis that marked his early presidency, the meteoric rise of digital technology and mobile computing, and the ongoing global climate crisis. Along the way, we will consider not only how writers have engaged with their immediate historical, political, and economic circumstances, but also how they have communed with literary history, reimagining the texts, styles, and genres that came before them.

Texts:

• Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)
• Colson Whitehead, Zone One (2011)
• Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (2016)
• Tommy Orange, There There (2018)
• Ling Ma, Severance (2018)
• Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)
• Final Text TBD by Student Vote. Possible nominees include: Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) or 10:04 (2014); Richard McGuire, Here (2014); Mohsin Hamid, Exit West (2017); Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017); Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive (2019); Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019); Raven Leilani, Luster (2020).

Evaluation:
Lecture Attendance and Quizzes (10%)
Conference Participation (10%)
Midterm Exam (20%)
Midterm Essay (20%)
Final Essay (20%)
Final Exam (20%)

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

Texts: The required reading for this course will include most or all of the following books, which will be available at The Word Bookstore (469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640). (The list of texts and editions below is tentative and incomplete, to be confirmed in January 2023.)

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

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

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Note: There will be multiple sections of this course, each with a different instructor: Eli MacLaren, two graduate course instructors and another instructor to be announced.

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

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

Texts:

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

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

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: The plays that we will be reading in this course span from the 1970’s to the present day with a concentration on the last twenty years. Among the twelve texts selected, most were written in French and translated into English, others were written in English, and one was created in Inuktitut, French, and English and has been performed and published with English and French subtitles. We will investigate points of transition in the texts that magnify cultural shifts in society. We will investigate similarities and differences between the plays in terms of themes, language, familial and sociopolitical dynamics. We will investigate how the plays sit in relation to the political landscape regarding time and place, and we will examine what that might mean to an audience. This course will be a rough dramaturgical overview of fifty years in Quebec drama drawn from a survey of twelve plays.

Theatre artists from various backgrounds and experience in Montreal will share their expertise in the form of lectures and conversations throughout the term.

Texts:

• 1971 The Savage Season, Anne Hébert. Translated by Pamela Grant and Gregory Reid.
• 1972 Forever Yours Mary-Lou, Michel Trembley. Translated by Linda Gaboriau.
• 1995 The Orphan Muses, Michel Marc Bouchard. Translated by Linda Gaboriau.
• 2001 Je me souviens, Loreena Gale.
• 2003 The Malaceet Hamlet, Yves Sioui Durand & JF Mercier.
• 2005 Scorched, Wajdi Mouawad. Translated by Linda Gaboriau.
• 2009 The Sound of Bones Cracking, Suzanne LeBeau. Translated by Julia Duchesne and John Van Burek.
• 2012 The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs, Carole Frechette. Translated by John Murrell.
• 2013 And Slowly Beauty…Michel Nadeau. Translated by Maureen LaBonté.
• 2018 Collective Aalaapi. Akinisie Novalinga, Samantha Leclerc, Audrey Alasuak, Mélodie Duplessis, Louisa Naluiyuk, Marie-Laurence Rancourt, Daniel Capeille, Hannah Tooktoo, Nancy Saunders, Laurence Dauphinais, Ulivia Uviluk and Angel Annanack
• 2010 or 2018 Instructions to Any Future Socialist Government Wishing to Abolish Christmas, Michael Mackenzie.
• 2020 Sal Capone, Omari Newton.

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lecture, discussion, play-readings.

Expected Preparation: This course is intended for students in all three streams of McGill’s English program who wish to expand their knowledge of the development of drama in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and to hone their skills in reading and analyzing dramatic texts.

Description: This course offers a study of key plays, ideas, and movements that have animated drama, theatre, and performance over the course of the twentieth century. Throughout the semester, will consider how the form and style of our selected dramatic texts and theatrical productions reflected new ways of thinking about the world and the role of theatre in relation to the world—between what anthropologist Michael Taussig has called “the real” and “the really made up.” Rather than approaching twentieth-century drama from the perspective of a single lineage arising out of one cultural centre, we will bring mainstream and countercultural dramatic movements of Europe and North America into conversation and juxtaposition with theatrical innovations happening in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Twentieth-century drama is marked by playwrights mobilizing theatre for intellectual and emotional expression and political change. In this course, we will explore how our selected playwrights used dramatic and performance texts to express the experiences of socially marginalized groups and to effect social transformation. By the end of this course, students should be able to discuss major playwrights and movements in twentieth-century drama and articulate their own theoretically- and historically-informed perspectives on them. 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.

Required texts: a course pack of plays and readings in theory, an anthology of moderns plays, and several individual plays

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

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

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

Description: A representative sampling of Shakespeare’s plays will survey the scope and variety of his drama as it relates to his cultural context and to most of the main genres of his writing. Shakespeare began creating plays around 1589, and the plays addressed in this course represent the development of his art from somewhat after its beginnings, up to its final phase, around 1612. They will be dealt with in chronological order, as in the following list of the course readings. The course will thus provide a strong foundation for appreciating and understanding Shakespeare’s drama.

Texts will be available in paperback for purchase at the Word bookstore, 469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640.

Since this course will have conferences, one particular day of classes (TBA) will be cancelled after the first week or two of term, throughout the rest of the term, and conferences will instead be provided at various times on that particular day instead. You will choose the conference time that suits your other commitments.

Please note: this course is not open for credit to students who have taken ENGL 215, Introduction to Shakespeare, at McGill in prior years.

Texts:

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• As You Like It
• Twelfth Night
• Othello
• King Lear
• The Winter’s Tale
• The Tempest

Evaluation: Term paper, 45%; take-home final exam, 35%; course attendance and participation, 20%.

Format: Lecture and weekly conferences.

Prerequisite: Limited to students in English programs.

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

Texts: Most of the books for this course will be available at The Word Bookstore (469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640). The textbooks listed below will be among those required. (Please note that Pluhar's translation of Kant is the only acceptable edition! The full list of texts and editions will be confirmed in September 2022.)

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

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

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: This course will introduce students to a range of thinkers invested in how literary texts come to be. Rather than focus on the individual talent or overarching historical forces, we will take up what James English has called the “middle zone of cultural space.” This is the zone of agents, publishers, translators, booksellers, prize committees, university English departments, creative writing programs, canon warriors, Goodreads, Amazon, and Oprah. Pairing critical readings with novels and short fiction, we will investigate the central institutions, figures, and forces that mediate contemporary literary production and reception. Who are the “unacknowledged legislators” of the literary field, and how do they come between writer and reader to shape what each can and should do? What forces influence our conceptions of aesthetic value, and how is literary prestige measured and doled out? How do literary texts circulate within a culture, and how have they travelled across national and linguistic boundaries? In all, students in this course will encounter a variety of critical and artistic texts that do not rely on the concept of “literariness,” but rather investigate how such a thing is produced in the first place. Note: This courses is not open to students who took ENGL 322 in the previous two academic years.

Texts:

• Percival Everett, Erasure (2001)
• John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (2010)
• Richard Jean So, Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (2020)
• Various readings available on myCourses

Evaluation:
Participation (10%)
Midterm Exam (20%)
Midterm Essay (20%)
Final Essay (20%)
Final Exam (30%)

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Expected Preparation: This course is one of the 300-level offerings that fulfills the theory and criticism requirement for students majoring in Literature, Drama and Theatre, or Cultural Studies. It is recommended that students take this course after they have completed the introductory required courses in their stream. Students not enrolled in an English program but who are interested in cultural theory may also take the course, if space is available.

Description: This course is a survey of some recent developments in cultural theory, especially as they apply to the study of literature; film, television, and other screen media; and theatre and other modes of performance. We will focus on theoretical interventions that seek to grasp new developments in the social and cultural field; in turn, we will consider how these interventions cause us to look at the literary and cultural past with new eyes. We will situate these theoretical approaches in relation to the wider traditions of Marxist, feminist, materialist, queer, affect, trans, Indigenous, and critical race theory. The course is organized in five thematically linked units: Theories of Reading, Then and Now; Identity Now; Capitalism Now; Colonialism and Empire Now; and Climate Now. The course aims not simply to instruct the student in recent theoretical approaches to these topics, but also to encourage the practice of theoretical reflection on one’s literary and cultural encounters more generally.

Texts: Essays by Sharon Marcus, Ted Underwood, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tavia Nyong’o, Cáel M. Keegan, Annie McClanahan, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Lauren Berlant, Sianne Ngai, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, Jasbir Puar, Rob Nixon, José Esteban Muñoz, and others.

Evaluation: Short summary and response papers; one longer final paper/project OR take-home final exam (students may choose).

Format: Lecture and discussion.

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

Description: A mid-level survey of later-19^th-century prose fiction forms representing a wide range of literary movements and modes. The course will be organized to trace ever-widening geographical, literary, and cultural horizons. A first unit will explore “regionalist” or “local color” writings (by authors such as Irving, Harris, Harte, Twain, Chopin, Stowe, Jewett, Cable, Chestnutt, and Alcott) rooted in the specificity of a unique geographical place that is seen to define a unique cultural or psychological identity. The second course unit will survey classic writerly responses to the late-19^th-century city—seen (in authors such as Dreiser, James, and Wharton) as a new sort of humanly-constructed, hybrid environment or economy in which diverse strangers from a variety of homes and backgrounds are brought together to work out forms of coexistence. The final unit will then follow another group of turn-of-the-century writers as they expand American horizons even further, reflecting the nation’s move into the international arena with new fictional treatments of the International Theme. Authors such as James and Wharton ground their writing in the ever-shifting experience of cross-cultural travel and meditate anxiously on the situation of the writer as “cosmopolite”--perfectly placed (or dis-placed) to explore the problems and possibilities of inter-national interchange in a modern, globalizing world.

Texts (tentative; editions TBA): To be selected from authors noted in the description above. Readings will include not only short stories but also several longer novels; the amount of assigned reading will be fairly substantial—especially at the end of the semester.

• A collection of short stories—available in pdf on myCourses.
• Alcott, Little Women;
• Dreiser, Sister Carrie;
• Wharton, The Age of Innocence;
• Baym, ed., The Norton Anthology of American Literature (10^th ed., Vol. C).

Evaluation (tentative): 25% mid-term exam; 25% term paper; 10% class attendance and participation; 40% formal final exam. (NB: All forms of evaluation in this course—on exams as well as essays—test abilities in literary-critical writing and analysis; there will be no short-answer or multiple-choice exams graded by computer.)

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Although she published only three novels in her lifetime, Charlotte Brontë is a major Victorian novelist whose works continue to generate critical interpretation. Along with her sisters, writers Emily and Anne Brontë, she has inspired such public fascination that the story of a socially isolated woman who achieves literary celebrity rivals the novels themselves. This class considers Brontë’s major novels and their preoccupations with privacy and autonomy against a clamorous public determined to read them as transcripts of Brontë’s own thoughts and feelings. The novels will be contextualized in reference to realism, sensation, and the gothic, three primary genres of nineteenth-century fiction, and students will come to recognize their affiliations and disaffiliations with the Victorian novel more broadly. Other topics include the rise of the professional woman writer and the ramifications of reading fiction as history (or biography). Texts include Elizabeth Gaskell’s controversial biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), as well as critical and historical readings.

Note: This course fulfills the major author requirements for English majors.

Texts:

• Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre (1847); Shirley (1849); Villette (1853); Emma (fragment) (1860);
• Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857)
• Additional materials (articles, book chapters) will be made available online.

Evaluation: In-class participation; short, close-reading assignments (2); choice of 2 essays or 1 essay, 1 take-home exam.

Format: Lecture, discussion, group work.

Description: This course will survey a range of late Romantic literature through versions of ‘confessional’ writing, broadly conceived. We will read British, Scottish and Caribbean authors with a general interest in marginal texts: those overlooked or neglected in literary studies (even in the case of overtly canonical writers) and those that seek to represent experiences on the social, cultural and political margins. We will encounter social histories spanning the optimism of fugitive nineteenth-century queer communities and the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, as well as murder, addiction, bad marriages, nightwalking and a multitude of creative (sometimes questionable) lovers’ memorials. Within the extensive vocabulary used by Romantic writers to articulate suffering and anguish, we will seek moments of idealism and revelation, as well as considering the way in which literary disclosures of individual “pleasures and pains” can be either (and sometimes both) intensely conservative and highly reactionary. We will immerse ourselves in Romantic self-absorption and introspection, then aim to think beyond it. Beginning with William Blake’s curious would-be biography For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise (1818) and ending with Emily Brontë’s notoriously violent Wuthering Heights (1847), this course follows neither a strictly chronological nor thematic order. We will examine both fictional and autobiographic texts, with an eye to the limitations of this generic distinction in the nineteenth-century and the functions of anonymity and pseudonym.

Texts (provisional):

*With the exception of the major novels (Hogg, De Quincey, Brontë), texts will be made available online or via myCourses.

Evaluation: TBC (essays and assignments – no final exam).

Format: Discussion, lectures.

Expected Preparation: At least two prior university courses in English literature, such as Survey (ENGL 202 and 203), Poetics (ENGL 311), or two courses at the 200 or 300 level.

Description: This course focusses on a selection of British novels published since 1990. Some novelists turn to the past, especially in light of Thatcherite conservatism and the Brexit crisis. Taking a longer view of history, Pat Barker reinvents the Great War and Hilary Mantel, in one of her shorter novels, reflects on Irish migration to Britain in the eighteenth century. Other novelists, especially Zadie Smith and Andrea Levy, think about race relations in Britain. These novels adopt a variety of genres: historiography, comedy, diagnosis, dossier, autofiction.

Texts: A selection of six novels will be made in October 2022 from the following list.

• Muriel Spark, Symposium (1990)
• Pat Barker, Regeneration (1991)
• Hilary Mantel, The Giant, O’Brien (1998)
• Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000)
• Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001)
• Andrea Levy, Small Island (2004)
• Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (2004)
• Jim Crace, Harvest (2013)
• Rachel Cusk, Outline (2014)

Evaluation: Mid-term test (30%), essay (30%), participation (10%), final take-home exam (30%).

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Enrollment: 40 students.

Note: Students who have taken ENGL 348 under a different course topic are free to take this version of the course. Although the course number is the same, the content is entirely different; therefore, these will count as two different courses toward university and program requirements. For English Literature majors, this course counts in either the “backgrounds” or “medieval” categories. 

Description: This course examines several major works of European literature that significantly influenced Western understandings of the place of the individual human in society and in the cosmos. Among other things, course texts will present sensitive explorations of interiority, sexuality, ethics, and justice; authors will experiment with literary form, question received canons, and display radical dignity in the face of humiliating crisis. Readings include examples of literature spanning Late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages (4th through 15th centuries). We’ll read profoundly moving texts written in prison or in the rawness of regret; early romances that throw characters into impossible ethical ordeals; stories that represent flourishing creativity in a time of epidemic; and texts whose authors are torn between the sublimity of mystical ascent and the allure of human contact. This course introduces students to early literature as an object of study in its own right; it also provides important background for the study of concurrent or subsequent Western literature and culture, including in England. 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 
• Boccaccio, The Decameron (selections) 
• Chrétien de Troyes,  Arthurian Romances (selections) 
• Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies 
• Dante,  Vita Nuova 
• Marie de France, Lais 
• Petrarch,  Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works 
• Other required readings available via MyCourses 

Evaluation (provisional): Mid-term exam, 25%; final exam, 35%; analytical reading essays (x2) 30% (15% each); participation and attendance, 10%. 

Format: Lecture and discussion.

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

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

Texts: Coursepack.

Evaluation: Quizzes, short assignments, term project, class notes, participation.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Expected Preparation: This course is intended for students in all three streams of McGill’s English program who wish to enhance their ability to read critical theory broadly focused on social justice and to use it for cultural interpretation.

Description: This course offers a study of some of the most influential thinking about the transformation of difference (social, cultural, sexual, gender-based, racial, economic, geographic, colonial) into hierarchies of power from the early twentieth century through to the present. Paying close attention to the ways in which we exist at the intersection of multiple axes of identity, we will think along with our selected critics, activists, and writers about the sometimes messy ways in which different individuals are denied or given power by reason of the overlapping social groups to which they belong. We will also learn about the many ways in which individuals and groups who have been denied power (social, economic, cultural, sexual, corporeal) have worked to transform the systems and conditions responsible for their oppression. Key topics in this course will be intersectionality, colonialism, postcolonialism, decolonialism, critical race theory, feminism, and queer studies. By the end of the course, students should be able to discuss major theorists and theories of power differences and the historical processes that led to their creation. They should also be able to articulate their own theoretically- and historically-informed perspectives on these differences. 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.

Required texts: a course pack of readings in critical theory

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

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

Note: Students who have taken ENGL 391 in Summer 2022, 2021, or 2022 are not eligible to take this course for credit.

Description: Moving chronologically through the 20th century, this course will be structured around core cultural texts from different periods, communities, and moments in queer history, including novels, poetry, film, theatre, and performance. We will explore the cultural texts themselves, as well as the communities, scenes and cultures that produced, received, and formed around these texts.

The course begins with the turn of the century, examining early 20th century touchstones by artists such as Raclyffe Hall, Jennie June, and Gladys Bentley. This section will draw on scholarship such as George Chauncey’s study of gay culture from 1890-1940 and Susan Stryker’s work on early 20th century transgender history.

The course will then develop through the era between 1940 and 1969. We will study poetry and literary communities, examining the works of Audre Lorde and James Baldwin. We will also explore publications from rising advocacy groups such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis.

The next section will focus on post-Stonewall queer culture (1969-1980), looking at performance acts such as the Cockettes and Sylvester, as well as drag performance. The course will then end with the period between 1980-1999, looking at cultural responses to the AIDS crisis, New Queer Cinema, and other late 20th century cultural texts.

The course will also engage with Two-Spirit identities and Indigenous nations throughout the century, including readings by Qwo-Li Driskill, poetry by Billy-Ray Belcourt and performance by Waaawaate Fobister and Muriel Miguel.

Required books:

• Angels in America by Tony Kushner
• Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
• Two-Spirit Acts edited by Jean O’Hara.
• All other readings available via myCourses.

Recommended Texts: Gay New York by George Chauncey and Transgender History by Susan Stryker.

Literature will include: Audre Lorde, W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Cameron Awkward Rich.

Films will include: Kenneth Anger, Cheryl Dunye, Barbara Hammer, Jack Smith.

Performances will include: Waawaate Fobister, Kent Monkman, Muriel Miguel, Tony Kushner, and the Cockettes.

Evaluation: Short paper, longer paper (or creative alternative), quizzes, public engagement project.

Format: Lecture, discussion, and optional community connection component.

Description: TBA

Text: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: TBA

Note:  Students who have taken ENGL 356 under a different course topic are free to take this version of the course. Although the course number is the same, the content is entirely different; therefore, these will count as two different courses toward university and program requirements. For English Literature majors, this course counts toward the “medieval” or “Middle English” requirement. 

Description:  The fifteenth century in England was a dynamic time when concepts of authorship, communication, textual production, and literacy were undergoing tremendous change. English was developing quickly as England’s official language—something that hadn’t been the case for centuries, following the Norman Conquest—now overtaking French and Latin. Heresy and its suppression met with a burgeoning humanist movement, and mainstream religious practice was vibrant and varied. At the end of the fifteenth century, the medieval invention of print technology coexisted with a lively manuscript culture in England.  

This course situates fifteenth-century English literature in its dynamic cultural contexts, examining how late-medieval literature in England intersected with developments in politics, popular culture, literacy, religious controversy, technology, and gender relations. Readings will range from a devout woman’s defiant memoir to a bureaucrat’s struggle with anonymity; from a legalistic dream vision to romantic treatments of the outlaw Robin Hood. We’ll analyze the explosion of fifteenth-century dramatic production and culminate with Thomas Malory’s sophisticated re-imagining of Arthurian romance traditions during the Wars of the Roses. Students will also get to see original medieval manuscripts and early printed texts during workshops in McGill’s Rare Books and Special Collections. 

All primary texts will be read in the original Middle English, though no previous knowledge of the language is required. Portions of several classes will be spent developing proficiency in Middle English. 

Texts (provisional):

• Hoccleve,  My Compleinte and Other Poems 
• Lydgate,  The Temple of Glass 
• Malory,  Le Morte D’Arthur 
• The Book of Margery Kempe 
• Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales 
• Selections from collections of medieval drama 

Evaluation (provisional): Mid-term exam, 25%; final exam, 35%; analytical reading essays (x2) 30% (15% each); participation and attendance, 10%.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Expected Preparation: This is a required course for those in the Cultural Studies stream. Students are encouraged to take it after ENGL 277: Introduction to Film Studies and ENGL 275: Introduction to Cultural Studies. If you have not taken these courses beforehand, students are encouraged to contact the instructor before enrolling, as some concepts learned in those courses will prove beneficial for assignments. There is also a chance the course can contribute to the World Cinema minor, although students should contact their advisor to confirm.

Description: This course is designed to introduce students to close analysis skills for the study of visual media. Focusing on close, primary text analysis, students will leave the course with strong technical language and formal knowledge of media that will allow them to pay careful and close attention to objects of analysis. Looking at a variety of art forms including painting, film, photography, video games, comic books, manga, collage & mixed-media work, students will learn the formal building blocks that make up a piece of visual media and how to notice, interrogate, investigate, and understand how these fundamentals come together to make meaning. The course will then teach students how to connect form to content - understanding how these formal building blocks connect to a piece's themes or ideas and communicate this connection. Finally, students will learn how to push this understanding of form and content a step further by making innovative, original arguments that express their own ideas and critical thoughts about the work. Students will learn to develop a strong critical voice and a sense of who they are as critics, analysts, and close readers of visual media.

The following lists required texts, films, and media: however, a lot of these will be available through MyCourses or the McGill Library, so it's best to avoid buying anything before checking to see if you have to. 

Required Texts: 

• Berger, John. Ways of Seeing.
• Mock, Janet. Redefining Realness.
• Gaku, Keito. Boys Run the Riot Volume 1.
• Yamaguchi, Tsubasa. Blue Period Volume 1.

Required Films:

• Riggs, Marlon. Black Is, Black Ain’t.
• Gondry, Michel. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
• Dunye, Cheryl. The Watermelon Woman.
• Deer, Tracey. Beans.
• Kwan, Daniel and Daniel Scheinert. Everything Everywhere All at Once.
• Todd, Loretta. Monkey Beach.
• Young, Amanda. Biidaaban (The Dawn Comes)
• Episode 1 of Cowboy Bebop, “Asteroid Blues.”

Additional Material: 

• Visual art by Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Daphne Odjig, Jackson Beardy, Alex Janvier, Norval Morrisseau, Jane Ash Poitras, Edvard Munch, Bill Reid, Wangechi Mutu, Félix González-Torres, and Claude Monet.
• Critical readings by Scott McLeod, Nathalie Atkinson, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Kaja Silverman, Miguel Gutierrez, Neta Gordon, and others.
• Video games: Braid and Dark Souls.
• Videos from: Megan Thee Stallion, Nicki Minaj, Todrick Hall
• Photography by: Barry Pottle, Mike Ruiz, James Van Der Zee, Ernest Withers, Carrie Mae Weems, Cindy Sherman, and Ansel Adams.

Recommended Texts: Jade Armstrong, Scout is Not a Band Kid. Lee Lai, Stone Fruit.

Evaluation: 

• Form and Content Assignment: 10% (Due Feb. 13)

• Evaluative Writing Assignment: 15% (Due March 15)

• 2 Essays: 45% (Due Feb. 26 and April 11)*

• Online Quizzes (Feb. 22 and April 4) 2 x 15%
  *Note: only the highest grade of the 2 essays will be taken, making one of them optional.

Format: Lectures, group discussions, analysis activities.

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

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

Texts:

• Terry Eagleton – Literary Theory: An Introduction
• Readings from works by specific theorists will be provided.

Evaluation: Take home exams and papers.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: TBA

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: TBA

Expected Student Preparation: Priority will be given to Drama and Theatre majors and minors; ideally students enrolled in this course will have already taken ENGL 230 Introduction to Theatre Studies.

Description: An overview of dramatic forms and theatrical practice in Britain from the Restoration through the eighteenth century to the Romantic period (c. 1660-1843). The course is divided into four chronological units encompassing the reopening of the professional theatre and the advent of the professional actress, the rise of morality and sentiment in drama, the age of Garrick and the professionalisation of theatre, and the development of stage spectacle. Each unit will cover the theatrical conditions of the period and will examine a representative play staged at the time. Emphasis is placed on the plays as theatrical works rather than literary texts. Students will be asked to conceptualise performances of the plays as they might have taken place in the long eighteenth century and to consider how these plays might have been performed and received at the time they were written. We will also analyse historical documents to explore themes such as genre, acting style, audience experience, theatre architecture, financial practices, regulation of the stage, and company management. We will visit McGill Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections (in person or virtually) to complete a series of hands-on workshops and assignments with a collection of playbills from the period. This will allow us to deepen our understanding of eighteenth-century theatre through the study of print culture.

Texts: Peter Thomson, The Cambridge Introduction to English Theatre, 1660-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); a selection of representative plays (tentative): Aphra Behn, The Rover (1677); Richard Steele, The Conscious Lovers (1722); David Garrick and George Colman the Elder, The Clandestine Marriage (1766); Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Pizarro (1799); historical documents to provide context.

Evaluation (tentative): Participation 10%; production proposal assignment 20%; series of playbill assignments 30%; take home final exam 40%.

Format: Lecture, discussion, group work, work with rare books and special collections.

Note: Students who have taken ENGL 371 previously, with a different topic, may take ENGL 371 again for credit with the signature of a Department of English advisor.

Description: This course explores representations and constructions of U.S. national identity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular theatre and entertainments. As the nation experienced industrialization, urbanization, immigration, changing sexual and gender norms, and violent cultural and racial conflicts in the afterlife of Trans-Atlantic slavery and Indigenous genocide, popular entertainments attracted mass audiences and created spectacles of national inclusion and othering. Units on blackface minstrelsy, “Indian plays,” vaudeville, social dance, and other popular form address antebellum and post-Emancipation stagings of race; frontier spectacles; freak shows and penny museums; imperialism; and the complexities of social inequity in the Golden Age/Progressive Era. Through discussions and lectures, we will consider the place of the “popular” – in its classed, ethnic, racial, gendered, erotic, commercial, and hegemonic valences – in forging styles of U.S. citizenship and belonging that persist to the current day, albeit often in camouflage.

Texts:

• Play texts (Metamora; The Octoroon; Uncle Tom’s Cabin)
• Films (The Jazz Singer; Ethnic Notions)
• Online secondary sources including texts by W.E.B. Du Bois, Andrew Erdman, Susan Glenn, Saidiya Hartman, Julie Malnig, Andrea Most, Robert Rydell, David Savran, Kiara Vigil, and S.E. Wilmer, among others.

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

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: TBA

Format: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: TBA

By permission of the instructor only. Please contact catherine.bradley [at] mcgill.ca.

Description: Costuming for the Theatre II builds on skills acquired in Costuming I, including costume construction techniques, and developing efficient costume production techniques. There are two main learning modules in advanced costuming: Technical Sewing, and Draping. Sewing skills that were gained in the first semester will be built upon through specific practical exercises, and by costuming the English Department Mainstage production (TDC). Draping techniques will be practiced on half-scale mannequins, and will culminate in a themed project.

More information will become available as the Winter semester theatre production plans are solidified.

Required texts: One selected play script TBA.

Evaluation: In-class participation, script analysis, hands-on projects, backstage experience (to be confirmed)

Format: Learning through doing. Demonstrations, lectures, hands-on learning, and practical projects, experiential learning. Class time + time spent in the atelier on practical projects.

Enrollment: 10 students.

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

We will look at works in English, either original or translated. The course will look at oral literature, storytelling and legends handed down through generations as well as contemporary “collaborative life stories”, novels, and essays. Examples of productions in television and film are included.

The common themes are survival, reconciliation and the effects of colonialism, in whatever form this may take, as well as a search for a renewed or continued identify in the contemporary world.

Texts:

Inuit texts:

• Nancy Wachowich: Saqiyuq
• Excerpts from Voices and Images of Nunavimmiut volume 1. Edited by Stenbaek and Grey (will be posted online)

Métis texts:

• Maria Campbell: Half-Breed
• Cherie Dimaline: The Marrow Thieves

First Nations texts:

• Richard Wagamese: Indian Horse
• Drew Hayden Taylor: Chasing Painted Horses
• Thomas King: The Truth About Stories. A Native Narrative
• CBC Massey Lectures, 2003

Supplementary material may be made available online.

Evaluation: Five reviews of a text (10% marks each) as well as one final longer essay (50%).

Format: Lectures, group discussions. In addition, there will be one or two pre-recorded modules every week consisting of additional lectures, power points, films, or videos. They will be posted on myCourses.

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

The course will look at the development right from the start of the advent of satellite communications and ANIK in Canada. The early experiments and policy considerations. The establishment of The Inuit Broadcasting Corporation. The influence of the National Film Board, particularly its Challenge for Change program. The role of APTN, including productions by First Nations and Métis. The films of Zacharias Kunuk will be a main focus of the course.

Texts: Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada (2010). Ed by Waugh, Baker, Winton. McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Articles will be distributed on myCourses.

Please contact Prof. Stenbaek if you have trouble accessing course materials.

Evaluation: Five reviews of a text (10% marks each) as well as one final longer essay (50%).

Format: Lectures, group discussions. In addition, there will be one or two pre-recorded modules every week consisting of additional lectures, power points, films, or videos. They will be posted on myCourses.

Description: ‘Graphic narrative’ has been characterized by Monica Schmitz-Emans as “a literary genre that invents itself as using a global language in regionally different dialects.” In this course, we will use the dynamic relationship between North American comics and Japanese manga as a case study in our examination of the transnational and transcultural flows that dictate the importation, adaptation, and distribution of ‘graphic narratives.’ We will learn about the historical confluence of comics and manga. We will consider the formal and stylistic influences of each on the other.  We will consider the impact of context on content. And we will ask ourselves what happens to comics or manga when they are distributed outside their native context: How are they marketed for new readers? How do they achieve (or fail to achieve) positions of cultural and canonical status? How does their reception abroad affect their status and distribution at home? By answering some of these questions, we will achieve a better understanding of the institutional and cultural practices and discourses that regulate the distribution, consumption, and interpretation of ‘graphic narratives’ in a global world. 

Texts:

• Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics
• Oba Tsugumi and Obata Takeshi, Bakuman, Vol.2
• Tezuka Osamu. Astro Boy Omnibus Edition, Vol.1
• Kuwata Jiro, Batman: The Jiro Kuwata Batmanga, Vol. 3
• Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham, Batman Incorporated Vol.1: Demon Star
• Paul Pope, 100%; Bryan Lee O’ Malley Scott Pilgrim Vol. 5: Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe
• Fujimoto Tatsumi, Chainsaw Man Vol. 1
• Tatsumi Yoshihiro, A Drifting Life
• Hergé, Tintin in Tibet

Evaluation: First Paper, formal analysis (25%); in class workshop (10%); brainwriting exercise (10%); discussion board posts x3 (5% each); second paper, research paper (40% [5% proposal, 5% annotated bibliography, 30% paper])

Expected Preparation: Previous experience in film and/ or cultural studies.

Description: In 2021, shooting wrapped on David Cronenberg’s first film since 2014’s Maps to the Stars. Cronenberg is looping back to his roots, in a remake/ reimagining of his 1970 post-apocalyptic sci-fi horror, Crimes of the Future. In the 2022 version, "Accelerated Evolution Syndrome" names the radical capacity of humans to mutate their biology in adaptationvand experimentation with a synthetic environment challenges all social norms. Cronenberg’s fiction films are a long series of experiments with the porous boundaries between human, technologies and the wildness of the life of the flesh. His early efforts produced gleeful, shocking and wildly inventive first films (Shivers, Rabid, The Brood), prompting the invention of a new genre (body horror), a rash of Grand Guignol nicknames (the Baron of Blood, the King of Venereal Horror), and outraged debates in the Canadian House of Commons over public funding for popular horror films. Although today he has become the eminence grise of Canadian Cinema, the spectacular displays of his early films haven’t gone away, but have become a molecular kind of mutation in films like Eastern Promises and A History of Violence. Cronenberg’s body of work provides us with one of the best sets of texts for exploring the wild variations of our existence in an era of intensive technological change. We will work through Cronenberg’s films as engagement with questions around biotechnologies, media, memory, the body and the self, alongside key texts from contemporary cultural theory.

Required texts: Coursepack.

Evaluation: Group discussion sections; screening logs; final paper or project; participation.

Format: Lecture, screenings, discussion, collaborative projects.

Prerequisite: At least 12 prior credits in ENGL courses are expected, such as Survey (ENGL 202 and 203), Poetics (ENGL 311), or other courses at the 200 and 300 level.

Description: This course offers a selection of literary and mass-market novels about spies and traitors from different national origins. The course will pay particular attention to the political ambiguities of spy plots. The course will ask questions about the aesthetic uses of fear, as well as the narrative uses of codes, abduction, disguise, torture, defection, language, accent, and decoding. Narrative technique—narrators, implied narrators, coincidence, focalization—will be addressed during discussions. Distinctions between “high” and “popular” culture will be examined through styles of espionage, such as melodrama, realism, and adventure.

Texts: A selection of six or seven novels will be made from the following provisional list.

• John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps
• Graham Greene, The Third Man
• Ian Fleming, Casino Royale
• John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
• Joan Didion, Democracy
• John Banville, The Untouchable
• Tan Twan Eng, The Gift of Rain
• Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

Evaluation: Mid-term test, essay, take-home exam, participation.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

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-fulfilment; 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

• --Sir Philip Sidney, The New Arcadia, edited by Maurice Evans, Penguin paperback
• --Edmund Spenser, Books I and VI of The Faerie Queene; both Hackett paperbacks
• --William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest; all Oxford World Classics paperbacks
• --Course Reader for ENGL 400, provided as files for each text, on the ENGL 400 Mycourses website, such as Robert Greene’s Pandosto and Menaphon (both short)

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

Format: Lecture and class discussion.

Description: This course spotlights literature of the British 1890s—the Victorian “fin de siècle”—testing received ideas about the decade’s dominant moods, keynotes, and memes against a range of fiction, poetry, and drama. The years between 1890 and 1900 are those of Stoker’s Dracula, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, controversy about the “New Woman,” the “dandy,” Aestheticism and Decadence, concerns about what George Gissing called “sexual anarchy,” the late work of Thomas Hardy, the controversial journal The Yellow Book, Aubrey Beardsley and Art Nouveau, and both the meteoric success and the trials of Oscar Wilde.

Although the era to which the 1890s belong (called the “fin de siècle”) is often understood as a transitional stage between Victorianism and modernism, a brief phase registering defiance of the Victorian aesthetics and mores of previous decades, we consider the period as importantly distinct from both the Victorian and modernist eras—with a cultural environment, leading concerns, guiding anxieties, structures of feeling, and aesthetic commitments of its own.

The decade was widely understood as deriving character from its fin-de-siècle position. Public discourse of the time suggested that as the nineteenth century drew to a close, the moment was ripe for speculation about what the new century might bring: commentators such as Holbrook Jackson read the era’s emphasis on iconoclasm, artifice, style, and adventure as auguring promising new beginnings. Yet others construed the times as characterized by a foreboding “sense of an ending” suggesting a culture in decline: in Degeneration (1892), Max Nordau diagnosed what he read as a diseased society through the “symptoms” of aberrant behavior, bizarre art, and a taste for what Walter Pater called “strange” sensations. As we both explore the diversity and common threads among the literature we investigate, we will consider the nature of the decade’s rejoinders—often critical, mischievous, defiant, exploratory—to earlier Victorian literature, as well as ways in which its cultural work paves the way for the innovations of modernism.

Texts (provisional):

• Egerton, George (Mary Chavelita Dunne), Keynotes and Discords (1893-4)
• Gissing, George, The Odd Women (1893)
• Hardy, Thomas, Jude the Obscure (1896)
• James, Henry, stories (“Collaboration,” “The Real Thing”)
• Shaw, G.B., Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1894)
• Stoker, Bram, Dracula (1897)
• Wells, H.G. War of the Worlds (1898)
• Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
• Wilde, Oscar, plays: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), Salomé (1893)

We will also read short fiction (including the work of Henry James, as well as “New Women” writers such as Mona Caird and Sarah Grand); excerpts from Gilbert & Sullivan; and poetry by Ernest Dowson, Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Oscar Wilde, and W.B. Yeats. Contextual material will treat the work of Max Nordau, Aubrey Beardsley and The Yellow Book, Walter Pater, Charles Baudelaire, and Algernon Swinburne.

Evaluation: Wwo brief essays (4 pp.), Keywords project (3-4 pp.), longer essay (7-8 pp.), participation.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: Ecocriticism and the politics of climate change have renewed interest in the nature lyric. A genre with a rich history in Canadian literature, the nature lyric has become a key site of critical examinations of the self in relation to the environment. In this course we will study its recent and contemporary development through the work of one of its most accomplished practitioners – Don McKay. McKay, winner of the 2007 Griffin Prize, stands out as a model for emerging poets for a number of reasons: his expert combinations of experimental and traditional poetics, his signature avian imagery and variations on the familiar trope of poet as bird, his generosity as a mentor and editor, his founding of a small press and involvement in literary magazines, and perhaps above all his influential contributions to the theory of wilderness. McKay is at the forefront of a group of poets who have devised ways to write poetry that responds equally to romantic fascinations with the natural world and to new ethical restraints against exploring, using, or even knowing it. Through McKay’s approach to these and other issues, we will consider the broad shape of contemporary ecopoetics. What are the motives and goals of environmental poetry, and how are these developing and changing today? Readings in ecocritical theory by Lawrence Buell, Mark Tredinnick, and others will foreground this underlying question of the course. We will strive to answer it, principally, through the poetry of a major author – Don McKay – and of his cohort and successors, including Dennis Lee, Jan Zwicky, Ken Babstock, Phoebe Wang, Rita Wong, Michael Prior, and Stephen Collis. Interpreting the work of these prominent voices will yield an understanding of the evolution and diversity of ecopoetics in Canadian literature today.

Required Books (tentative):

• Don McKay, Camber: Selected Poems (McClelland & Stewart)
• Secondary readings will be available online through McGill Library

Evaluation: Oral presentations (20%); first essay (close reading) (30%); second essay (research and comparison) (40%); participation in every class (10%).

Format: Discussion.

Preparation: Ideally, students will have taken at least one 200-level and one 300-level course in English; and ideally, will have previous work in poetry.

Description: Until the 1980s, the canon associated with modern anglophone poetry, established by mid-twentieth-century critical work, was often assumed to consist of the work of major figures such as W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams. This mid-century consensus—now problematized but still influential—largely overlooked many women who had contributed vitally to the development of modern poetry. Yet between 1900 and 1960, many women engaged actively in the effort to revolutionize anglophone poetry: within early twentieth-century literary circles, their work was acclaimed, and they fulfilled pivotal cultural roles. This course focuses on the women that Bonnie Kime Scott has called the “forgotten and silenced makers” of modern poetry. We consider how women shaped the development of modern poetry not only as poets, but also as critics, patrons, publishers, and editors. We also engage how recent scholarship has sought to redress the historical record, return them to attention, and acknowledge their contributions.
In addition to reckoning closely with their poetry, often involving the many forms of “difficulty” associated with modern poetry, we also engage from a literary-historical angle their contributions to the “making of modern poetry.” We address, for example, H.D.’s crucial role in the formation of the poetic movement of “Imagism,” as well as her influential critical engagements with Ancient Greek literature; tensions between Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound over command of Imagism as a movement; Millay’s “it girl” celebrity; Mina Loy’s vexed alliance with Italian Futurism and her “Feminist Manifesto” of 1914; Marianne Moore’s editorship of The Dial; collaborative relationships between H.D. and Moore, and Moore and Bishop; and Gertrude Stein’s many connections with the visual arts. We also consider how these women poets engaged the feminisms of their time, often as mediated by the early twentieth-century concept of the “New Woman.”

Texts: Readings include poetry by Elizabeth Bishop, H.D., Dorothy Livesay, Amy Lowell, Mina Loy, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, P.K. Page, Muriel Rukeyser, Gertrude Stein, and Stevie Smith; we will also consider work by E.E. Cummings T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and W.B. Yeats.

Evaluation (subject to revision): brief critical analysis (5-6 pp., 20%), brief essay (4-5 pp., 25%), fictional autobiography (4 pp., 15%), final essay (8 pp., 30%), participation (10%)

Format: Lecture and discussion

Expected Preparation: At least twelve credits in English literature, such as Survey (ENGL 202 and 203), Poetics (ENGL 311), and courses at the 200 or 300 level.

Description: This course surveys Virginia Woolf’s major novels and critical prose. The course will focus on Woolf’s innovations in novelistic representation. Readings in her essays will be slated alongside the novels. Topics of discussion will include Woolf’s feminism; her relations with other modernist writers; her invigoration of biography as a genre; her responses to interwar and wartime politics; her evaluation of family and sexuality; her abiding sense of grief and bereavement; her antipathy to colonialism; her appreciation of modern technologies, such as the radio, gramophone, and motorcar; her understanding of the decorative arts; her appreciation of music; her metropolitan and country lives; and her suicide.

Texts: The following list of texts is provisional and a final list will be available in October 2022.

• Woolf, Jacob’s Room
• Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
• Woolf, To the Lighthouse
• Woolf, Common Reader (series one and two)
• Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
• Woolf, The Waves
• Woolf, The Years
• Woolf, Between the Acts

Evaluation: Essay one (30%), essay two (30%), participation (10%), final take-home exam (30%).

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Enrollment: 30 students.

Expected Preparation: Students who have taken ENGL 421 under a different course topic are free to take this version of the course. Although the course number is the same, the content is entirely different; therefore, these will count as two different courses toward university and program requirements. For English Literature majors, this course counts toward the “major author” requirement.

Description: Starting his writing career with the publication of Children of Iroko in 1973, a little over a decade after Nigeria’s independence and in a period when writers from across Africa truly started to “decolonize” their style, Tanure Ojaide is a writer whose works embody the decolonial temper in African writing. With over twenty poetry collections, four novels, four short story collections, two memoirs, and numerous anthologized works and other important academic essays and books, Ojaide is one of Africa’s most prolific and influential writers and thinkers and arguably the most important writer from the Niger Delta, an oil-rich minority region in Nigeria whose socio-political marginality and ecological devastation Ojaide constantly decries. Studying a writer like Ojaide would reveal not only the artistic development of a major author but also some of the significant currents in African writing since shortly after the post-independence period. Using Ojaide as a case study, this course will answer questions like: is there a canon of African literature, and what are its defining features? What are some of the main issues African writers have taken up since the 1970s? How do African writers respond to the postcolonial nation? What does it mean for an African writer to be exiled from home? What is identity to the African writer, and how is it constructed? How do African writers imagine the environment? What are the connections between oral literatures, folklore, and African writing?

We will read a selection of Ojaide’s poetry, prose fiction, memoirs, and essays together with important works by Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and others to explore the intersections between personal vision, the postcolonial condition, minority discourse, environmentalism, diasporic identity, gender, and the general human condition. This course will reveal how Ojaide’s works and critical responses to them provide important registers in postcolonial studies and in fields like exilic and new world African diasporic studies, among others.

Texts (tentative):

• *Selections from Children of Iroko & Other Poems (1973)
• Selections from Labyrinths of the Delta (1986)
• Selections from The Fate of Vultures (1990)
• Selections from Delta Blues and Home Songs (1998)
• Selections from When It No Longer Matters Where You Live (1999)
• Selections from In the Kingdom of Songs (2000)
• Selections from The Tale of the Harmattan (2007)
• Selections from Songs of Myself: A Quartet (2015)
• Selections from Narrow Escapes: A Poetic Diary of the Coronavirus Pandemic (2021)
• Selections from God’s Medicine Men and Other Stories (2004)
• Selections from The Old Man in a State House and Other Stories (2012)
• Stars of the Long Night (2012)
• Excerpts from Great Boys: An African Childhood (1998)
• Excerpts from Drawing the Map of Heaven: An African Writer in America (2012)
• Secondary readings on Ojaide, African literature, postcolonial studies, Niger Delta literature, and relevant media like short films and documentaries will be available through the McGill Library.
• *Selections will be between 4-8 poems or 3-5 short stories.

Recommended texts: Onookome Okome (ed.), Writing the Homeland: The Poetry and Politics of Tanure Ojaide; Onookome Okome and Obari Gomba (eds.), Tanure Ojaide: Life, Literature, and the Environment; Tanure Ojaide and Enajite Eseoghene Ojaruega (eds.), Literature and Arts of the Niger Delta.

Evaluation: 15% for group presentation on an assigned topic, 20% for midterm take-home exam, 20% for reading journal, 35% for final paper, and 10% for active class participation.

Format: Background lectures, seminar discussions, in-class close-reading and analytical exercises.

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

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

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

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

Format: Some framing lectures—but emphasis on multi-voiced seminar discussion.

Enrollment: Capped at about 30-35 students.

Description: British Romanticism is a literary movement often associated with a turn to the local and the mundane—from the portraits of rural life by Wordsworth, Clare, and Keats, to the domestic fiction of Austen—paralleled by an introspective appreciation of the significance of subjective feelings. At the same time, the Romantic period is also one of increasingly prominent global phenomena: ecological disturbances, transnational wars, the rise of industrial capitalism and the development of finance capital, along with the significant growth of the transatlantic slave trade and of British colonial expansion. This course will examine the interplay of those two tendencies. One part of the course will be dedicated to the way canonical Romantic authors registered the realities of an increasingly globalized world, even when not entirely conscious of it. We will investigate how transnational and transhistorical forces manifest themselves in scenes of the everyday, and the writing strategies employed to tackle global phenomena that resist direct representation. In the second half of the course, we will look at the way British Romantic literature was itself deployed, received, and engaged with abroad. The focus here will be on writers and traditions often considered “peripheral” to the project of Romanticism, such as British colonial subjects, Indigenous writers, and Black abolitionists. By looking at the way “global Romantics” drew inspiration from and entered in dialogue with their British counterparts, we will assess the affordances and limitations of Romantic preoccupations such as sympathy, freedom, and the revolutionary spirit.

Texts (tentative): Works by Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, John Clare, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jane Austen, Henry Derozio, Egbert Martin, George Copway, George Moses Horton, William Wells Brown, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and M. NourbeSe Philip, along with scholarly pieces by Mary Favret, Patricia A. Matthew, Ian Baucom, Manu Samriti Chander, Gauri Viswanathan, and Nikki Hessell.

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Classes will be mostly discussion-based, with occasional lecture components.

Description: Raymond Williams reminds us that the idea of “nature,” though typically contrasted from human activity, “contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history.” Williams’s statement underlines the fact that humans have intervened in nature from times immemorial to change it, and the way we live in nature. This course will focus on a range of literary texts to examine their environmental imagination. It will draw out how the texts imagine the environment and, just as crucially, the interaction between nature and human beings. It will also situate these texts in relation to theorizations of the production of nature and space as well as to the broad and uneven terrain of ecocriticism and environmental criticism.

Texts:

• Amitav Ghosh – Gun Island
• Peter Matthiessen – The Snow Leopard
• Jamaica Kincaid – A Small Place
• Indra Sinha – Animal’s People
• Selections from the poems of Rabindranath Tagore, Jibanananda Das, Arun Kolatkar.
• Selections from theoretical and critical texts.

This is an indicative list and course texts will be finalized later.

Evaluation: Papers.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: This course will focus on a main figure in Canadian Inuit literature: Alootook Ipellie. His work portrays many of the effects of colonialism and his own reactions in the contemporary world. Ipellie is introverted and spiritual but also radical and outspoken in his quest for meaning in a life where he lives in “two worlds” but with “one spirit”. His work reflects what was the reality for many Canadian Inuit, since 1950.

Ipellie’s work explores these themes in a variety of formats: cartoons, drawings, political articles, poetry and essays.

Texts:

• The Diary of Abraham Ulrikab. University of Ottawa, 2005
• Excerpts from Arctic Dreams and Nightmares. Alootook Ipellie. Theytus Books Ltd. 1993.
  Please note that all necessary excerpts will be posted online.
• Animation and films.

Evaluation: Five reviews of a text (10% marks each) as well as one final longer essay (50%).

Format: Lecture, group discussions. In addition, there will be one or two pre-recorded modules every week consisting of additional lectures, power points, films, or videos. They will be posted on My Courses.

Description: To read a book by an indigenous author is a step towards reconciliation.

Often times, Inuit literature is thought to be mainly legends or myths, recorded by outsiders. This course will focus on works actually written by Canadian Inuit, in a variety of formats: diary, poetry and essays, satirical and political cartoons, drawings, articles, animated films, autobiographies or short stories. It will examine some of the earliest work, but the course focuses mainly on contemporary times, after 1950.

The course will also include several films that are connected to the texts.

The course will begin by looking at the diary of the first Canadian Inuit writer, Abraham Ulrikab, from Nunatsiavut, that he wrote in 1880.

Saqiyuq is a collaborative life story told by three Inuit women, between 1930- 1995 in Nunavut. The three women lived the extraordinary changes that took place during these years.

Alootook Ipellie, 1951-2007, is also from Nunavut. He is an Inuit artist whose work portrays many of the effects of colonialism and his own reactions to that situation in the contemporary world. Ipellie is introverted and spiritual but also radical and outspoken in his quest for meaning in a life where he lives in “two worlds” but with “one spirit”. His work reflects what was and is the reality for many Canadian Inuit, since 1950.

Daisy Watt remembers her youth in Nunavik. Sheila Watt-Cloutier, her granddaughter, is also from Nunavik and writes a compelling story of the Inuit and climate change in the midst of cultural, social and political changes. Her book, The Right to be Cold portrays the contemporary world in which modern-day Inuit live. She was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize because of her work.

Texts:

• Excerpts from Arctic Dreams and Nightmares. Alootook Ipellie. Theytus Books Ltd. 1993. Please note that all necessary excerpts will be posted online.
• Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women. Nancy Wachowich. McGill-Queen's University Press. 2001.
• The Diary of Abraham Ulrikab. University of Ottawa. 2005.
• The Right to Be Cold: One Woman's Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic, and the Whole Planet. Sheila Watt-Cloutier. University of Penguin Canada. 2016. Paperback
• Excerpts from Voices and Images of Nunavimmiut volume 1. Edited by Stenbaek and Grey. The Daisy Watt story is in this volume. Posted.

Some other poems and articles may be distributed on myCourses.

Evaluation: Five reviews of a text (10% marks each) as well as one final longer essay (50%).

Format: Lectures, group discussions. In addition, there will be one or two pre-recorded modules every week consisting of additional lectures, power points, films, or videos. They will be posted on myCourses.

Description: A rich body of literature developed in the European Middle Ages that explored worlds or realities that stood somehow apart from the realm of everyday experience. Yet these other (or  under-) worlds were never entirely separable from what people regarded as the sphere of their day-to-day lives. By exploring these worlds, authors and readers simultaneously cultivated 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. The geographical focus will be the medieval north (Nordic regions, Britain, and Ireland, but also “Little Britain”, or Brittany), though course texts will sometimes draw on depictions of other regions of the known world (especially Asia). We will read dream visions, including visions of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory; we’ll encounter underworlds that are geographically contiguous with specific locations in Europe; we’ll study narratives of fairy otherworlds and read of encounters with the exotic or marvelous; and we’ll examine the value that was (or was not) placed on direct experience or evidence of travel. This course will introduce students to texts written in England, Ireland, Iceland, and on parts the European continent during the period ca. 800-1400. 
 
While the historical scope of the course will span much of the medieval millennium and take in literature from the outside of England, we will focus on the later Middle Ages, and especially the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Several of our primary texts will be read in the original Middle English, though no previous knowledge of the language is required. Portions of several classes will be spent developing proficiency in Middle English. For English Literature majors, this course counts toward the “medieval” or “Middle English” requirement. It also satisfies the MDST 400 requirement for Medieval Studies minors. 

Texts (provisional):

• Chaucer, selections from The Canterbury Tales 
• Geoffrey of Monmouth, The Life of Merlin 
• Gylfaginning 
• The Mabinogion 
• Marie de France, Lais 
• St. Patrick’s Purgatory (Sir Owain) 
• Pearl 
• Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales 
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 
• Sir Orfeo 
• The Voyage of St. Brendan 

Evaluation  (provisional): Research project, 45%; short analytical responses, 30%; presentation, 10%; participation, 15%.

Format: Seminar discussion.

Expected Preparation: This is a required capstone course for LACS majors; LACS students will be given preference. Knowledge of written Spanish is beneficial but not necessary. Students in the Department of English are expected to take at least one 300-level course prior to this seminar.

Description: Feminism and gender and sexuality activism are some of the most important contemporary social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean. In addition to gaining victories within and outside of political, juridical, and human rights institutions, these movements have created widespread grassroots support networks and have made gender politics into mainstream topics of conversation across the region. Moreover, these movements draw upon artistic, cultural, and digital methods to pursue their manifold aims.

This course will survey the recent history of gender and sexuality activism in Latin America and the Caribbean to theorize why and how these movements have made such inroads, even high rates of gender violence across the region mean that substantial work remains to be done.

Starting with the historic anti-dictatorship activism of the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the course moves to recent past and contemporary activist movements like #NiUnaMenos, Les Nietes, #WeAre2047, #MiPrimerAcoso, and the “Green Tide.” In understanding these movements, we must combine studies of history, politics, economics, social life, and culture. We will examine the following topics as related to gender and sexual activism:

• Past and present approaches to violence, including femicide, and intersections with a materialist approach to politics (e.g., research on links between neoliberal capitalism and gender violence)
• Gendered dimensions of modernity and the coloniality of power
• Intersectionality with race, specifically Indigeneity and African diasporic descendancy
• Labor movements, historical socialist movements in the region, and the idea of the “feminist strike”
• Transitional justice, and the activism of those within and outside of traditional structures of power in post-Cold War societies
• Uses of art, culture, and performance in the feminist movement – including film, video, visual art, literature, popular art, popular performances and theatre; “artivismo”
• Uses of the digital and “hashtag activism,” as well as “hacktivism”
• Intersections between environmental justice and feminist movements

We will ask how and why gender and sexual rights have expanded since the end of the Cold War and have, significantly, been adopted as central platforms by many on the contemporary Left. We will also examine the relationship between these movements and the so-called “Pink Tide,” a series of left-leaning governments that came into power beginning in the late 1990s and has appeared to lose potency of late, especially following the global economic crisis of 2008.

Texts: The instructor will provide a digital course reader via MyCourses. We will read texts by Rita Segato, Verónica Gago, Sayak Valencia, Cecilia Palmeiro, Héctor Perlongher, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Agustín Lao-Montes, Diana Taylor, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, María Pia López, and many others.

Evaluation: Participation 10%; short assignments due throughout the term: 20%; midterm essay 30%; final essay 40%

Format: In-class discussion, group work, and lecture.

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 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: All the books below contain required reading for the course. The books will be available at The Word Bookstore (469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640).

• Plato, The Apology and Related Dialogues (Broadview)
• Plato, Plato on Love (Hackett)
• Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations (Oxford, Penguin, or Hackett)
• Saint Augustine, Confessions (Hackett or Oxford)
• Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova (Oxford or Penguin)
• Benvenuto Cellini, My Life (Oxford)
• Michel de Montaigne, Essays (Hackett)
• Daniel Defoe, Roxana (Broadview or Oxford)
• Denis Diderot, The Nun (Oxford or Penguin)
• Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (Broadview)
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sufferings of Young Werther (Norton or Penguin)
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (Oxford or Penguin)
• Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (Broadview)

Evaluation: Presentations (40%), participation (10%), and a final term paper (50%). The "presentations" will consist of the submission of questions for seminar discussion. "Participation" refers to contributions to discussion and consultation about the paper topic. Insofar as possible, regular attendance is expected except when technical issues, medical problems, or other personal emergencies arise.

Format: Seminar.

Prerequisites: Registration for this class is by application only. Interested students should send me an email at ned.schantz [at] mcgill.ca with the subject heading “application to ENGL 472” stating their interest in the course and qualifications.

Expected Student Preparation and Commitment: 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 test Garrett Stewart’s recent claim that, in the past few decades, narrative has come to suffer from “plot exhaustion,” from an inability to render contemporary social forces and lived experience in the form of a coherent, forward-moving story with a satisfying resolution. Homing in on some of the more elaborate plot conceits of recent fiction, we will consider to what extent these narrative strategies confirm our worst dilemmas in the way Stewart suggests, and to what extent they offer new ways of conceptualizing the relations that make up our world. Possible films include Groundhog Day, Memento, and After Life. Possible novels include Kindred, Life After Life, and My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

Note: Students must have access to the Netflix series Russian Doll.

Texts: Coursepack of narrative theory.

Evaluation: Film journals, short assignments, term paper, participation.

Format: Seminar.

Expected Preparation: There are no official prerequisites for this course. However, since much of the reading material will be highly theoretical in nature, familiarity with literary theory and/or cultural studies will be very, very useful.

Description: This course will critically examine a series of 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? What role does the study of aesthetic form have in Marxist analysis? 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.”

Texts:

• Theory: Aesthetics & Politics, Theodor Adorno et al
• Essays by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Bertolt Brecht, Fredric Jameson, Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, Heidi Hartmann, Nancy Fraser, Judith Butler, Silvia Federici, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and others
• 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, season 1

Evaluation: Short response papers; longer final essay.

Format: Lecture, discussion, occasional screenings.

Description: This course examines the unique formal and aesthetic qualities of the North American graphic novel, with particular emphasis on visual analysis. Considerable attention will therefore be paid to close reading and to the analysis of formal and stylistic elements that distinguish comics as a unique artistic phenomenon. The course does not provide an historical survey of comics, nor does it evince interest in popular genres. The emphasis of the course leans towards recent graphic novels.

The texts will be chosen based not only on historical impact, verifiable influence or general popularity with readers but also with an eye to comics that experiment and expand the boundaries of the medium.

The course will be organized into approximately four thematic groupings: revisionist narratives within the mainstream, memoirs and confessionals, new journalism, and auteur comix.

Writers and artists to be chosen from may include: Thi Bui, Nick Drnaso, Adrian Tomine, Guy Delisle, David Mazzuchelli, Debbie Dreschler, James Sturm, Lynda Barry, Ivan Brunetti, Howard Cruse, Eddie Campbell, Art Spiegelman, Julie Doucet, Chester Brown, Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, Alison Bechdel, David Collier, Ben Katchor, Marjane Satrapi, Rutu Modan, Jason Lutes, Jeff Smith, Joe Sacco, Carla Speed McNeil, David B., Chris Ware, Los Bros. Hernandez, Nick Abadzis, Rick Veitch, Phoebe Gloeckner, Harvey Pekar, R. Crumb, Jack Jackson, Craig Thompson, James Kochalka, Tom Gauld, Ed Piskor, Jeff Lemire, Jillian Tamaki, Mariko Tamaki, Kate Beaton, Gene Luen Yang, Faryl Dalrymple, Matt Kindt, Stephen Collins, Sarah Glidden, Will Eisner, Alex Robinson, and Scott McCloud.

Texts: TBA

Evaluation:
One formal analysis: 25%
One mid-term essay: 30%
One final essay: 30%
Class Participation: 15%

Format: Group discussion.

Prerequisites: By arrangement with individual instructor. Permission must be obtained from the Department before registration.

Description:  

• This course is normally not available to students who are not Majors or Honours students in the Department.
• Intended for advanced and/or specialized work based on an extensive background in Departmental studies. 

Application Deadline: Fall 2022 Term: Monday, September 12, 2022 by 4:00 PM

engl495_496_application_2022_23.pdf

Prerequisites: By arrangement with individual instructor. Permission must be obtained from the Department before registration.

Description:  

• This course is normally not available to students who are not Majors or Honours students in the Department.
• Intended for advanced and/or specialized work based on an extensive background in Departmental studies. 

Application Deadline: Winter 2022 Term: Monday, January 16, 2022 by 4:00 PM

engl495_496_application_2022_23.pdf

Description: For internship details, eligibility requirements, approval procedures and methods of evaluation see the Faculty of Arts Internship Office.

Application Deadline: Monday, September 12, 2022 by 4:00 PM

Application Form: covid_version-faculty_of_arts_internship_for_academic_credit_form.pdf

Expected Student Preparation: Familiarity with concepts and terminology from cultural studies or a related discipline (Gender & Sexuality Studies, Communications, Literature, Film, Theatre) is beneficial.

Description: Moving chronologically through the 20th century, this course will be structured around core cultural texts from different periods, communities, and moments in queer history, including novels, poetry, film, theatre, and performance. We will explore the cultural texts themselves, as well as the communities, scenes and cultures that produced, received, and formed around these texts.

The course begins with the turn of the century, examining early 20th century touchstones by artists such as Raclyffe Hall, Jennie June, and Gladys Bentley. This section will draw on scholarship such as George Chauncey’s study of gay culture from 1890-1940 and Susan Stryker’s work on early 20th century transgender history.

The course will then develop through the era between 1940 and 1969. We will study poetry and literary communities, examining the works of Audre Lorde and James Baldwin. We will also explore publications from rising advocacy groups such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis.

The next section will focus on post-Stonewall queer culture (1969-1980), looking at performance acts such as the Cockettes and Sylvester, as well as drag performance. The course will then end with the period between 1980-1999, looking at cultural responses to the AIDS crisis (including AIDS theatre), New Queer Cinema, and other late 20th century cultural texts.

Avoiding a reliance on a settler-colonial notion of what constitutes “North American” history, the course will centre discussions of two-spirit identities and Indigenous art and theatre throughout the century, including readings by Qwo-Li Driskill, poetry by Billy-Ray Belcourt and performance by Waaawaate Fobister and Muriel Miguel.

Texts:

• Angels in America by Tony Kushner
• Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
• Two-Spirit Acts edited by Jean O’Hara.

All other readings available via myCourses.

Recommended Texts: Gay New York by George Chauncey and Transgender History by Susan Stryker.

Literature will include: Audre Lorde, W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Cameron Awkward Rich.

Films will include: Kenneth Anger, Cheryl Dunye (The Watermelon Woman), Barbara Hammer, Jack Smith, and others.

Performances will include: Waawaate Fobister, Kent Monkman, Muriel Miguel, Tony Kushner, and the Cockettes.

Evaluation: Short paper, longer paper (or creative alternative), quizzes, public engagement project

Format: Lecture, discussion, and optional community connection component.

Description: Over the next five weeks, we will analyze the graphic novel in terms of its unique poetics—the complex interplay of word and image—and the development of the form and its subgenres. Our central focus will be on the graphic novel as a medium rather than as a genre; that is, we will attend to how formal practices of comics can be deployed to tell a broad range of stories and speak to diverse audiences. We will take a multifaceted approach to analyzing this medium, from uncovering comics’ historical roots and examining genres developed across the globe to delving into the medium’s theoretical and formal elements, as well as considerations of comics in relation to other media such as film, poetry, fiction, visual art, and even architecture. Alongside our analysis of the (often tension-filled) relationship between graphic novels and literary fiction, traditionally perceived as lowbrow and highbrow art forms respectively, we will look at how comics have become a vehicle for autobiography, journalism, social justice, and cultural critique.

While we will be learning how to close read graphic novels (i.e., how to interpret and analyze a comics page), we will also investigate how the artists create stories and characters—firstly, so that we may identify the distinctive marriage of written word and visual image available to sequential art and, secondly, so that we may become the creators of our own comics. Note: while making comics will be a meaningful component of the course, prior drawing experience is not required.

Each week we will be exploring the progression of the related themes of adolescence, gender, sex, sexuality, and transformation across several distinct examples of the form. How does the treatment of love and lust in Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World differ from that in Craig Thompson’s Blankets? Which taboo subjects do Alison Bechdel, Adrien Tomine, and Charles Burns address in their respective comics, and in what manner do their depictions differ? What do the young female protagonists in Persepolis (Satrapi), and This One Summer (Mariko and Jillian Tamaki) share in common and how do they differ? How are race, class, gender, and trauma depicted in these stories? And how are the histories of these concepts portrayed and re-imagined through the graphic novel’s unique visual and textual medium? What is told, what is shown, and what is hidden between the panels?

Texts:

All of below texts can be acquired as print books via McGill’s bookstore: Le James.

• Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Mariner, 2007). Also available as an Ebook through the publisher.
• Burns, Charles. Black Hole (Pantheon, 2008). Available in Paperback or Hardcover only.
• Clowes, Daniel. Ghost World (comic book and screening of film)
• McGuire, Richard. Here (Hamish Hamilton, 2014)
• Satrapi, Marjane. The Complete Persepolis (Pantheon, 2007) Available in Paperback or Hardcover only.
• Tamaki, Mariko, drawn by Jillian Tamaki. This One Summer (Groundwood, 2014). Available in Paperback.
• Thompson, Craig. Blankets (Top Shelf Productions, 2003)
• Tomine, Adrian. Shortcomings (Drawn and Quarterly, 2007) Available in Paperback.

Students are also encouraged to obtain used/new copies of these text by whatever means possible —directly from the publisher, through second-hand sellers, or downloaded as PDFs from select websites.

Critical secondary readings will be provided on MyCourses. Please check MyCourses regularly for announcements during the term.

Evaluation: Short analytical paper, participation, group presentation, final project or final paper.

Grade distribution:

• Attendance and Participation: (15%)
  Students are expected to have completed all readings for the day assigned and to contribute to class discussions with enthusiastic engagement.
• Short Essay #1 (25%)
  Students are expected to write an analytical essay of three to four (3–4) double-spaced pages.
  Full assignment guidelines (including suggested topics) will be available on myCourses.
• Group Presentations #2 (20%)
  Full assignment guidelines will be available on myCourses
• Final Project (40%)
  Full assignment guidelines will be available on myCourses.
• Final Project Option A: Creative Project
  Students must embark on the creation of their own graphic novel. All creative projects must be accompanied a critical statement. The critical statement must include both: (1) a critical analysis of the visual and narrative aspects of the student’s graphic novel, and (2) a critical consideration of at least two texts from the syllabus that have served as inspiration. Full assignment guidelines will be available on myCourses.
• Final Project Option B: Final Essay
  Students must submit a final paper of seven to eight (7–8) double-spaced pages in length which takes as its focus at least one of the graphic novels from our course. Students must aim to discuss the graphic novel’s literary as well as visual aspects. Full assignment guidelines (including essay topics) will be available on myCourses.

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

Description: So why does anyone write literature? Even more importantly for us, why and how does anyone read it? Many people, some of whom you will know, will argue that studying literature, above all English literature, is irrelevant and useless today. Yet during the recent pandemic, many others found literary works of all kinds essential, not just as a form of escape into another world from a reduced reality but also as creative and imaginative stimuli that kept us active and engaged humans.

This course considers these questions by looking at the development of major non-dramatic works in English from the Anglo-Saxon period to the mid-18^th century. It introduces students to the early history of English literature, while reflecting upon the meaning of tradition, literary history, the idea of a “canon”, and especially the concept of “Englishness.” We will trace the development through time of specific literary forms and genres, including lyric, elegy, epic, satire, sonnet, romance, and pastoral. At the same time, we will explore the relation of literature to religion, politics, and culture broadly, to see why in different periods people read and write literature, and to follow the changing ideas of the writer and his/her role in society.

Foundational to further study of literature in the department of English, ENGL 202 prepares students for more advanced and specialized study in the department. Discussions in conferences and written assignments will help students develop skills of interpretation and communication.

Texts (texts are available at McGill Bookstore):

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

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

Format: Lecture and conferences.

Description: This is a survey of British literature from the late 18th century to the present. We will consider the main periods and literary directions—Romantic, Victorian, modern, postmodern and postcolonial—while simultaneously asking questions about the principles of periodization. As this timeframe covers a rich range of texts and authors from various backgrounds, we will discuss both established authors as well as writers who, until a few decades ago, were seldom considered to be part of the canon: women, writers of color, outsiders (Mary Wollstonecraft, Olaudah Equiano, Hanif Kureishi, Angela Carter, Linton Kwesi Johnson). In the case of the well-established writers (William Blake, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot) we will draw on texts that showcase the plight of the working classes, distant imaginary or real landscapes, gender and sexuality, and less explored themes. We will study the characteristics of various literary genres, identify the cultural concerns specific to each period, and read the themes and formal elements of poetry, fiction and essays against the social and political background of each era. Finally, the class will assess how authors view literary tradition as well as perceived breaks with tradition to understand how the literary canon comes to be formed and how it changes from one historical moment to another.

Required Texts:

• The Norton Anthology of Literature, Major Authors, Volume 2, 10th edition
• Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
• Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway
• Sam Selvon: The Lonely Londoners
• Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day

Electronic coursepack

Format: Lectures and conferences.

Description: A representative sampling of Shakespeare’s plays will provide an introduction to the scope and variety of his drama as it relates to his cultural context and to most of the main genres of his writing. Shakespeare began creating plays around 1589, and the plays addressed in this course represent the development of his art from somewhat after its beginnings, up to its final phase, around 1612. They will be dealt with in chronological order, as in the following list of the course readings. The course will thus provide a strong foundation for appreciating and understanding Shakespeare’s drama.

Texts will be available in paperback for purchase at the Word bookstore, 469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640.

Since this course will have conferences, one particular day of classes (TBA) will be cancelled after the first week or two of term, throughout the rest of the term, and conferences will instead be provided at various times on that particular day instead. You will choose the conference time that suits your other commitments.

Texts:

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• As You Like It
• Twelfth Night
• Hamlet
• King Lear
• The Winter’s Tale
• The Tempest

Evaluation: Term paper, 45%; take-home final exam, 35%; course attendance and participation, 20%.

Format: Lectures and weekly conferences.

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

Texts:

• Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings
• The Norton Anthology of American Literature: 9^th edition, Vol. B (1820-1865).

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

Format: Lectures and required discussion sections.

Description: This course will provide students with a broad survey of American fiction from the mid-twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first. Through the close study of a diverse group of American writers, we will work to identify the evolving aesthetics of several distinct literary periods: from social realism and late modernism at mid-century, to the postmodern play of the 1960s and 1970s, to the varieties of contemporary experience at century’s end. We will encounter outlaws, scoundrels, detectives, veterans, fugitive slaves, and municipal elevator inspectors. Moreover, we will consider the literary history of the twentieth century alongside cultural and historical phenomena such as World War II, the atom bomb, suburbia, the civil rights movement, and the rise of TV. The reading list includes works by Petry, Nabokov, O’Connor, Vonnegut, Silko, Robinson, Morrison, DeLillo, Whitehead, and Egan.

Texts:

• Ann Petry, selected short stories
• Vladimir Nabokov, TBA Lolita or Pale Fire
• Flannery O’Connor, selected short stories
• Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
• Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
• Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
• Don DeLillo, White Noise
• Toni Morrison, Beloved
• Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist
• Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

Final Text TBD by Student Vote

Evaluation: Lecture and Conference Participation (10%); Midterm (20%); Two Essays (45%); Final Exam (25%).

Format: Lecture and conferences.

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

Description: A survey of English Canadian poetry and prose from the Second World War to the present. We will read a range of poetry and short fiction by many of Canada’s most accomplished writers in order to explore ideas about the nature of Canada and the literary representation of race, identity, politics, and indigenous experience in Canada. In addition to looking at the work of major authors from 1945 to the present, the lectures will also cover such topics as Canadian literary nationalism, realism, postmodernism, and different forms of experimentation. We will also look at the idea of the north as a central metaphor in Canadian writing and will discuss the economic and cultural forces accounting for the construction of a national literature. Students will be introduced to a number of concepts related to literary analysis. Please note that in addition to weekly lectures there will be one conference meeting each week.

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

Evaluation: Two in-class essay exams, a final take-home exam, participation, contributions to discussion boards.

Format: Lecture and conference.

Description: Theatre studies is a tree with deep roots and many branches: not only does the history of world theatre stretch millennia long, but theatre studies encompasses both textual analysis and investigation of all the aspects of a staged production: lighting, sound, movement, vocalizations and uses of language, set design, and stage-audience interactions. Given the complexity and breadth of the field, this course provides a critical introduction to theatre studies, focusing on play texts, drama theory, and theatre history. We will cover both western and non-western theatrical events, examining a range of works from Ancient Greek tragedy through contemporary Canadian and postcolonial performance, and including the Department of English mainstage show. Through the plays, we will examine what “theatre” is and does in different periods and places. We will learn how theatre is constituted by the material and social conditions of performance, codified in dramatic genres, and conceptualised in dramatic theory.

Texts:

• Play texts and production videos where available will be provided through MyCourses; these may sinclude Oedipus Rex; Bharata Muni’s Natya Shastra; extracts of Kālidāsa’s works; Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Loa to Divine Narcissus; Zeami’s Astumori; Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or What You Will; Anton Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard; Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman; Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play; Carol Churchill’s Cloud Nine; Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview; David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly.
• An online assortment of contextualizing information and secondary readings comprising excerpts of Bruce McConachie et al, Theatre Histories: An Introduction; E.J. Westlake, World Theatre: The Basics; The “Theatre &” Series from Palgrave Macmillan Press; and short journal articles where appropriate.

Evaluation: Forum posts, 20%; short essays, 20%; midterm exam, 30%; final exam, 30%.

Format: Lecture, discussion, and group work.

Description: Learn about some of the most popular types of theatrical performance of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries; explore the different artistic roles of theatre production; experience live (and/or streamed) performance. By surveying a range of contemporary theatre forms that draw crowds across difference and connect with new audiences in Canada and the United States, the Art of Theatre aims to increase students’ understanding, appreciation, and critical perceptions of theatre. Units of study in Winter 2022 may include the following topics:

• musical theatre (e.g., Hamilton, Children of God, Wicked, Come from Away);
• immersive and site-specific theatre such as Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More (a mash-up of a Hitchcock film and Macbeth staged in a multi-floor fictional hotel)
• award-winning drama such as Twentysomething by Megs Calleja, Honour Beat by Tara Beagan, Sea Sick by Alanna Mitchell, A Brimful of Ashes by Ravi Jain, and Sweat by Lynn Nottage
• solo performance (e.g., Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, Taylor Mac’s 24-Hour History of Popular Music, John Leguizamo’s Latin History for Dummies, Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me,)
• new adaptations of classic plays (e.g., The Donkey Show, a queer disco adaptation of Midsummer Night’s Dream; The Gospel at Colonus – Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus set in a black, Pentecostal church; American Moor, an adaptation of Othello,)

Guest artists will take us behind the scenes to illuminate their roles in the creative process of play and production development: direction, acting, design, and production! Career opportunities for drama and theatre major and minors will also be presented.

Texts: A curated coursepack of readings and plays, largely made available electronically through the McGill library.

Evaluation: Participation; short paper; group project; final exam.

Format: Lectures, conference sections, performance attendance where / if possible, visiting artists.

Limited enrolment.

Open to declared Drama and Theatre Majors and Minors. Admission is by permission of the instructor.

Prerequisites: This class is restricted to declared Majors in Drama and Theatre who have completed or are completing ENGL 230 and ENGL 355. A waiting list will be kept for minors in Drama and Theatre. Admission is by permission of the instructor only: myrna.wyatt.selkirk [at] mcgill.ca

Description: The focus in this course is on the actor as communicator. Spontaneity and freedom from self-consciousness will be just two of the goals of the work. Students will test and explore ways to become more engaged, more open and more focused. Emphasis will be placed on exploration of the actor's resources - voice, body, imagination, emotion, intellect and the senses.

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: A combination of class participation (various exercises and presentations totaling approximately 60% of the evaluation) and various types of written assignments (approximately 40% of the evaluation).

Format: Improvisation; games; movement exercises; text interpretation; background research; scene work; warm-ups; discussion; class presentations.

Description: This course, a required course for Cultural Studies majors and minors, will introduce various critical efforts to theorize the aesthetics, semiotics, and politics of popular culture over the past century. Beginning with a few crucial theoretical touchstones (Barthes, Foucault, Barthes), we will survey such movements as the Frankfurt School, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, critical race studies, postmodernism, queer theory, and affect theory, as they each formulate critical frameworks to explain how popular culture works. Along the way, we will consider the following questions: What does the “popular” in “popular culture” mean? Does the distinction between “high” and “low” culture have a political dimension? Furthermore, when we do cultural studies, whose culture should be investigated? What is the role of the critic? Finally, how can we grasp the meanings of popular culture: by examining the texts themselves, or by studying the audiences’ interpretations and uses of these texts?

Texts:

• Stuart Hall, Representation
• Roland Barthes, Mythologies
• Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
• Edward Said, Orientalism
• Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lecture, weekly TA-led conferences.

Expected Preparation: This course is intended for students in the Cultural Studies and World Cinemas programs. It is to be taken in the fall term of U1 or in the first fall term after the student’s selection of the Cultural Studies or World Cinemas program.

Course Description: This course is designed to prepare students in the Cultural Studies and World Cinemas programs for future film courses at McGill. The course will introduce the student to central concepts in film form and aesthetics, as well as key theories of film production and reception. The main goal of the course is to familiarize the student with analytical tools to investigate and explain how a film generates its multiple effects—in short, to articulate how a film works.

Films (list is subject to change):

• Man with the Movie Camera (U.S.S.R., Dziga Vertov, 1929)
• Exotica (Canada, Atom Egoyan, 1994)
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Germany, Robert Wiene, 1920)
• Do the Right Thing (U.S.A., Spike Lee, 1989)
• Breathless (France, Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)
• The Conversation (U.S.A., Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
• The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (U.S.A., John Ford, 1962)
• The Hole (Taiwan, Tsai Ming-Liang, 1998)
• The Thin Blue Line (U.S.A., Errol Morris, 1988)
• Meshes of the Afternoon (U.S.A., Maya Deren, 1945)
• Scorpio Rising (U.S.A., Kenneth Anger, 1964)
• Dog Man Star: Prelude (1961), Mothlight (1963), The Wold Shadow (1972), Rage Net (1988), Black Ice (1994) (all U.S.A., Stan Brakhage)
• Vertigo (U.S.A., Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

Texts:

• David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction
• Course pack and essays posted on class myCourses page

Evaluation: Periodic quizzes, two short papers, conference participation, maybe a final exam.

Format: Lectures, weekly TA-led discussions, weekly screenings.

Description: Designed as one of the two core courses for World Cinemas Minors, this course introduces key historical moments, cinematic movements, formal styles, as well as historiographical and theoretical debates in the history of world cinema. The course maps out diverging trajectories and merging paths of exemplary filmmakers and filmmaking collectives in various nations and geo-political regions against the backdrop of the changing technological media environments. While we distinguish chronology from history, the course follows the transformation of cinema from its emergent era to the present. Students will read both historical and contemporary texts to gain a broad sense of the seminal debates in film studies, reception and criticism.  This course aims to foster a critical understanding of cinema as an international, distributed and polycentric phenomenon. Note: This course also counts toward the Historical Dimension requirement for the Cultural Studies programs. 

Films: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lecture + weekly screening.

Description: This course provides a critical introduction to one of the most dynamic fields of literary studies – postcolonial and world literature – by engaging with the rich corpus of literary and filmic texts from South Asia. At the same time, it provides a critical introduction to modern South Asia by drawing on a range of novels, poems, short stories, travelogues, and films produced in that region during the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The course examines how these texts conceive of, and represent, the lives and life-worlds of the South Asian region while situating them in relation to the critical and theoretical preoccupations of postcolonial and world literature studies. The course interrogates the (often contested) meanings of the term postcolonial and asks how it relates to categories such as anti-colonial and colonial besides familiarizing students with some of the key issues and contemporary debates in the field. In so doing, the course prepares students for further study in postcolonial and world literature.

Note 1: Attendance to TA conferences and film screenings is mandatory. No exceptions.

Note 2: This is one of the required courses for the South Asian Studies minor (Stream 1: Culture and Civilization).

Texts:

Novels:

• Mulk Raj Anand – Untouchable (1935)
• Anita Desai – In Custody (1984)
• Salman Rushdie – Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990)
• Mohammed Hanif – The Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008)

Travelogues:

• Vikram Seth – From Heaven Lake (1983)

Short Stories:

• Selections from Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain, Sadaat Hasan Manto, Manik Banerjee

Poetry:

• Selections from Rabindranath Tagore; Arun Kolatkar

Films:

• Shatranj ke Khiladi [The Chess Players] (Dir: Satyajit Ray, 1977)
• Peepli, Live! (Dir: Anusha Rizvi, 2010)

This is an indicative list and course texts will be finalized later.

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lectures and TA conferences.

Description: This course is designed to introduce students to Disability as an historical and social concept in literary history. We will begin by considering the history of the concept of disability, especially as it pertains to the medical and social models that developed in the 20th Century. Before heading into literary history we will also read and discuss David T. Mitchell and Susan L. Snyder’s broadly influential ideas on narrative prosthesis and the materiality of metaphor. We will then turn our attention to disability in a variety of literary contexts, beginning with Grimm’s fairy tales. The criticism and selections of literary works we read after this will be drawn from a wide range of periods, from the Classical era to the medieval and early modern periods, the 18C, Romanticism and the 19C, through the modernist period and into the present day. In the final third of the course we will turn our attention to Disability Studies’s many points of intersection with Feminist, Queer, Critical Race, and Postcolonial Studies.

Texts:

• The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability. eds. Clare Barker and Stuart Murray. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018.
• Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Anchor Canada, 2003.

The above texts are available at The Word bookstore on Milton.

Evaluation: Midterm essay 7-8 pages (30%); final essay 8-10 pages (30%); final exam (30%); class participation (10%).

Format: Lecture and class discussion.

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

Texts: The required reading for this course will include most or all of the following books, which will be available at The Word Bookstore (469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640). (The list of texts and editions below is tentative and incomplete, to be confirmed in January 2022.)

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

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

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Prerequisite: ENGL 202 and Poetics both strongly advised, as we’ll be discussing aspects of literary history as well as analyzing poetic forms.

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 is also marked by its vitality and its variety as writers experimented with new genres and forms to represent the shifting experiences of this turbulent time. In this course, we will read representative short works by writers including Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Herrick, Marvell, Cowley, Lanyer, Cavendish, Philips, Bacon, Burton, and Browne. Beginning with Jonson and Donne, poets whose careers were forged in the 1590s, we will trace the development of English verse through the period of Civil War up to the Restoration. Our primary focus will be formal and literary historical, as we consider this critical period in the shaping of English literature. At the same time, we will interpret formal innovations in the context of larger social, political, and philosophical changes: urbanization, developments in science and industry, the effects of deforestation and environmental change, debates over religion and the place of women, the agitation for political reform, and, most of all, the Civil War itself.

Texts: The Broadview Anthology of 17^th Century Verse & Prose (available at McGill Bookstore.)

Other supplementary materials will be posted on myCourses.

Evaluation: Midterm (20%); 8-page term paper (40%); final exam (30%); participation (10%).

Format: Lecture and discussion.

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

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

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

Format: Lecture and class discussion.

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

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

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

Texts: 

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

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

Format: Lecture and discussion, chiefly discussion.

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

Description: This course will offer a selective survey of drama in Quebec from the 1950s to the present. With a focus on French-language theatre (to be read in English translation), we will trace the changing aesthetics and politics of this dynamic tradition, contextualising them in performance and social contexts, and alert to figurations of insiders and outsiders in the dramatic corpus. A secondary focus will be minority-language dramatic output and theatrical production in Quebec in the same period, with a particular emphasis on that produced in English. This course also offers the opportunity to conduct primary-source research and analysis on under-documented, minority-language drama Quebec theatre. To this end, students will read and analyse largely unpublished plays by English-language Quebec playwrights. In addition, we will hear from theatre artists working in Montreal today in the form of guest-lectures and interviews.

Texts: Coursepack of critical and secondary readings Plays will be selected to capitalize on the theatrical offerings in Montreal in Fall 2021. However, significant texts such as the following may feature on the reading list.

• Claude Gauvreau, The Charge of the Expormidable Moose (La charge de l’orignal épormyable)
• Jovette Marchessault, Night Cows
• Michel Tremblay, Les belles-sœurs
• Collective, La nef des sorcières
• David Fennario – Balconville
• Larry Tremblay, The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi
• Omari Newton, Sal Capone, The Lamentable Tragedy of
• Wajdi Mouawad, Scorched
• Evelyne de la Chenelière, Bashir Lazar
• Annabel Soutar, Seeds
• Alexis Diamond and Hubert Lemire, Faux amis

Evaluation: Participation; Posted class notes; corpus analysis; Short paper.

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.

The Greeks called him “a poet” . . . It comes of this word poiein, which is, “to make”; wherein, I know not whether by luck or wisdom we Englishmen have met with the Greeks in calling him “a maker”: which name, how high and incomparable a title it is, I had rather were known by marking the scope of other sciences than by any partial allegation.

--Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesy

Description: Sidney called poets “makers” in order to affirm “how high and incomparable” they were, but the word “maker” also suggests an artisan who labours with his hands and with other artisans in the making of objects for sale. In this course, we study “Shakespeare the Maker” in both senses of the word—the poet whose critical and creative imagination was able to see the world anew and to teach thousands of playgoers new ways of seeing, speaking, and being in the world and also the playwright who worked shoulder to shoulder with the actors, musicians, carpenters, costume makers, and others and who crafted wonderfully entertaining plays for sale in the early modern playhouse.

In the course, we read plays from the beginning, middle, and end of Shakespeare’s career as a professional playwright. We study his work in the four key dramatic genres—comedy, tragedy, history, and romance. We consider how the playhouse and the practices of performance made Shakespeare the great theatrical artist that he became, how in his turn Shakespeare made the professional theatre a big-time popular and money-making success (and the founding institution of the modern entertainment industry), and how together Shakespeare and the theatre helped transform the world.

Texts:  Shakespeare texts will be available either at Paragraph books or online.

• Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate, Arden Shakespeare (Bloomsbury)
• Love’s Labor’s Lost, ed. Peter Holland, Pelican Shakespeare (Penguin Books)
• Richard II, ed. Anthony Dawson and Paul Yachnin (Oxford)
• As You Like It, ed. David Bevington (Broadview)
• Measure for Measure, ed. N. W. Bawcutt (Oxford)
• Othello, ed Michael Neill (Oxford)
• Cymbeline, ed. Peter Holland, Pelican Shakespeare (Penguin Books)
• Henry VIII, ed. Jay Halio (Oxford)

Evaluation: 

Journal: 40%
Group presentation: 15%
Participation: 15%
Course essay (10 pages double-spaced, 3,000 words approx.): 30%

Journal: Your journal is, first of all, for you to do some thinking by writing at each step of the course. But it is also something you do for marks, so you have to write at least a page (about 350 words) about each week’s readings (and our discussions of the readings). It certainly doesn’t have to be formal like an essay. After all, it mostly for you and about your thinking, questioning, arguing. But it’s also going to be read by me, so make it reader-friendly.

Group Presentation: Members of the class will join designated groups and develop and stage group presentations (either live or by video or with some combination of the two). The group presentations will focus usually on a single scene in one of the plays on the course. The members of the group will perform the scene assigned to them and will bring critical and creative commentary to the scene.

Participation: Participation requires your vital, active presence in class and in conference. You have to come to each class with questions, ideas, puzzlement (which you have to speak about), expressions of joy or grief. It is true. It’s really true: there is no such thing as a stupid question.

Course Essay: Toward the end of the course, I will bring forward a set of essay questions for you to choose from. What you write in your course essay does not have to be original work, in the sense that it does not have to be an idea or a view that no one has thought of before. But it does have to be work that you care about, have thought a good deal about, and are keen to share with others.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Expected Preparation: Limited to students in English programs.

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

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

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

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

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Expected Preparation: This course is one of the 300-level offerings that fulfills the theory and criticism requirement for students majoring in Literature, Drama and Theatre, or Cultural Studies. It is recommended that students take this course after they have completed the introductory required courses in their stream. Students not enrolled in an English program but who are interested in cultural theory may also take the course, if space is available.

Description: This course is a survey of some recent developments in cultural theory, especially as they apply to the study of literature; film, television, and other screen media; and theatre and other modes of performance. We will focus on theoretical interventions that seek to grasp new developments in the social and cultural field; in turn, we will consider how these interventions cause us to look at the literary and cultural past with new eyes. We will situate these theoretical approaches in relation to the wider traditions of Marxist, feminist, materialist, queer, affect, trans, Indigenous, and critical race theory. The course is organized in five thematically linked units: Theories of Reading, Then and Now; Identity Now; Capitalism Now; Colonialism and Empire Now; and Climate Now. The course aims not simply to instruct the student in recent theoretical approaches to these topics, but also to encourage the practice of theoretical reflection on one’s literary and cultural encounters more generally.

Texts: These will likely include essays by Sharon Marcus, Ted Underwood, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tavia Nyong’o, Cáel M. Keegan, Annie McClanahan, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Lauren Berlant, Sianne Ngai, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, Jasbir Puar, Rob Nixon, José Esteban Muñoz, and others.

Evaluation: Short responses papers and a longer final paper.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

**among the “Theory or Criticism” courses for the major in English

Description: Through an historical tour of the early years of the field of “English” (1920-1960), this course considers the genealogy of two practices long central to the field and receiving renewed cultural attention today – “close reading,” that set of practices crucial to both literary and cultural studies, and on the other, “criticism” or critical commentary (which poet T.S. Eliot once mischievously called “as inevitable as breathing”). In “English,” we still train in these two key practices, albeit in reframed versions: they are essential to the inheritance of the discipline and the “transferable skills” afforded by a degree in English. The course aims to foster greater awareness of how theorize and practice both close analysis and critical commentary.

Recently, the topic of “close reading” has been much in the cultural spotlight, as commentators in the digital humanities, neuroscience, and media theory have been reassessing our cultural reading practices, then and now. At the forefront for many commentators is the question of “how we read now.” We consider work from digital humanists such as Richard So and Hoyt Long, media theorist N. Katherine Hayles, and cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf. Hayles suggests a link between the ability to “close read” and our capacity for “deep attention” that some claim digital lives are “eroding,” even as important new approaches to reading and digital literacies are on the rise. Since 2005, close reading has also attracted considerable debate in the field of English: thinkers as diverse as Jonathan Culler, Terry Eagleton, Jane Gallop, John Guillory, and Camille Paglia all voice fears that the analytical skills it represents may be a vanishing art. Other commentators, meanwhile, ask if we are facing a comparable “death of criticism” in our social media-saturated age – at least a waning of the kind of commentary that belonged to the early twentieth century “Age of Criticism.” Others suggest that criticism has not disappeared; it’s just appearing in new forms.

This course engages such questions by revisiting the history of English as an academic field, which first emerged in the 1920s in the UK from experiments by critic I.A. Richards, whose pioneering explorations in close reading (then called “practical criticism”) provided the seedbed for the establishment of the field, in the UK and North America, the circle around the journal Scrutiny at Cambridge, by whom Marshall McLuhan was originally trained. We also consider the fabled “New Critics” in the U.S., whose association with “close reading” contributed to bringing the practice of close reading under a cloud of controversy. Through the history of what Terry Eagleton calls “the rise of English” as a field, we seek greater clarity about what it is we do when, as Eliot put it, “articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it.”

Texts: Contemporary commentary on reading practices; commentary on the history of English (e.g. Graff and Eagleton); contemporary voices on close reading (e.g. Guillory, Gallop, Paglia, Love); historical readings from Matthew Arnold, Henry James, Walter Pater, T.S. Eliot, Woolf, Cambridge critics such as I.A. Richards, F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, and William Empson; American “New Critics”; Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan).

Evaluation (subject to revision): Brief critical essays, quizzes, close reading exercises, final essay.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Prerequisites: At least two prior courses in English, such as an introductory course, survey, or poetics.

Description: This course surveys twentieth-century American novels and short stories. Although the syllabus is primarily about fiction, several non-fiction essays will also appear. We will question how American writers think of themselves and the republic, in terms of race, politics, individualism, and business. What makes an American novel? What myth sustains American identity? Why are American writers drawn to epic form and the problems of justice? In what ways do American writers critique the media and to what purpose? Writers on the left, writers on the right, writers at home and abroad will be discussed. Examples of material from nearly every decade in the twentieth century will be considered. Attention will also be paid to real estate, dating, virginity, inheritances, conspiracy theories, shopping and consumerism, language theory, romance, queerness, and other topics pertinent to the literature under discussion.

Texts:

• Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country
• Willa Cather, A Lost Lady
• Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
• Don DeLillo, Libra
• Toni Morrison, Jazz
• Stories by Ernest Hemingway, David Gates, Donald Barthelme, Walter Abish, Eudora Welty
• Essays by Rachel Carson, Joan Didion

Evaluation: Essays, attendance and participation, final exam.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

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

Description: A mid-level survey of later-19th-century prose fiction forms representing a wide range of literary movements and modes. The course will be organized to trace ever-widening geographical, literary, and cultural horizons. A first unit will explore “regionalist” or “local color” writings (by authors such as Irving, Harris, Harte, Twain, Chopin, Stowe, Jewett, Cable, Chestnutt, and Alcott) rooted in the specificity of a unique geographical place that is seen to define a unique cultural or psychological identity. The second course unit will survey classic writerly responses to the late-19th-century city—seen (in authors such as Dreiser, James, and Wharton) as a new sort of humanly-constructed, hybrid environment or economy in which diverse strangers from a variety of homes and backgrounds are brought together to work out forms of coexistence. The final unit will then follow another group of turn-of-the-century writers as they expand American horizons even further, reflecting the nation’s move into the international arena with new fictional treatments of the International Theme. Authors such as James and Wharton ground their writing in the ever-shifting experience of cross-cultural travel and meditate anxiously on the situation of the writer as “cosmopolite”--perfectly placed (or dis-placed) to explore the problems and possibilities of inter-national interchange in a modern, globalizing world.

Texts (Tentative; editions TBA): To be selected from authors noted in the description above. Readings will include not only short stories but also several longer novels; the amount of assigned reading will be fairly substantial—especially at the end of the semester.

• Coursepack—a collection of short stories.
• Alcott, Little Women;
• Dreiser, Sister Carrie;
• Wharton, The Age of Innocence;
• Baym, ed., The Norton Anthology of American Literature (8th ed., Vol. C).

Evaluation (tentative): 25% mid-term exam; 25% term paper; 10% class attendance and participation; 40% formal final exam. (NB: All forms of evaluation in this course—on exams as well as essays—test abilities in literary-critical writing and analysis; there will be no short-answer or multiple-choice exams graded by computer.)

Format: Lectures and discussion sections.

Expected student preparation: Because substantial attention will be paid to developments of poetic form and style, the material of this course is directed chiefly to English Literature majors who have completed the required Poetics course (ENGL 311) in the English department. Students in other English department programs who have completed their relevant Poetics course are also welcome but should be prepared for the literary focus and methods of this course. Students in other departments must have my permission to register. Please communicate with me at once if you are registered for this course but not in an English department program.

Description: A survey of the development of Canadian poetry from the nineteenth century to the Second World War. We will read more than a dozen poets in their period contexts and in relation to major themes and formal innovations that have particularly preoccupied Canadian writers. We will be attentive to developments of form, structure, and style in early and modern Canadian poetry, and we will situate Canadian poetic practice in the contexts of Anglo-American poetry within which it emerged. This means, though our readings will not be arranged strictly chronologically, that we will also study the periods of English-language writing—Romantic, Victorian, and modernist—in relation to which our authors envisioned their unique Canadian projects.

Texts:

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

Evaluation: Depending on class size, either 1 essay, 8 pp.,, 30%; mid-term, 20%; final examination, 40%; or 2 essays, 5 and 8 pp., 20% and 30%; final examination, 40%. In either case add: 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 and discussion.

Expected Student Preparation: Familiarity with literary analysis.

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

Texts: 

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

Evaluation:

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

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: At the end of the eighteenth century, London was the largest city in Europe with a population of one million. The urban heart of the rapidly expanding British Empire and the Industrial Revolution, London was an economic powerhouse connecting peoples of the globe. This era, known as the early Romantic period, was a turbulent one of revolution and social upheaval, and the writers of this time were deeply concerned with issues of wealth disparity, political corruption, gender inequality, and the ongoing slave trade. As they grappled with these complex issues, they experimented aggressively with form and style, mixing old genres and creating new ones. With a focus on women, BIPOC, and other marginalized writers, we will read and discuss a wide range of representative literature from the period including samples of poetry, plays, prose, novels, and short stories. The course will end with a discussion of modern imaginings of the era including Shonda Rhimes’ Netflix series Bridgerton (2020) and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton (2015). Students may choose to write about such pieces in their final essay.

Texts:

• Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects (1773)
• Elizabeth Inchbald, Lovers’ Vows (1798)
• Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764)
• Maria Edgeworth, “The Purple Jar” (1796)
• Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
• Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787)

Evaluation (tentative): Participation 10%; 18th c. journal assignment 20%; Midterm exam 30%; Final essay 40%.

Format: Lecture, discussion, group work.

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

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

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

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

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: The achievements of English poets in the second half of the nineteenth century were prodigious. In Aurora Leigh, the first epic by a woman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning recast the vocation of the poet in modern terms. Robert Browning developed the dramatic monologue to an extent that redefined the genre for subsequent writers. Alfred, Lord Tennyson analyzed despair and its corruption of the public sphere in his epic retelling of the legend of King Arthur. Pre-Raphaelitism, a new movement linking poetry and visual art, came to the fore in Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his sister, Christina, and their circle. The purpose of this course is to delve deeper into Victorian poetry than the samplings of the typical general anthology permit, in order to discover the tumultuous social issues with which British poets grappled between 1850 and 1900, as well as their influential decisions about the ancient art of poetry and its techniques. Emphasis will fall on the authors named above – on theme, metre, and form in their major works, as well as on their lives, careers, and experiences with the publishing industry. We will also have occasion to discuss their writing during the high tide of British imperialism, comparing them to Canadian writers of the same period, such as Charles Sangster. Through extensive first-hand engagement with the primary works, students will acquire a rich and complex knowledge of the excellent poetry that lies between romanticism and modernism.

Texts:

• Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh and Other Poems, ed. John Robert Glorney Bolton and Julia Bolton Holloway (Penguin Classics)
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King, ed. J.M. Gray (Penguin Classics)
• Robert Browning, Robert Browning’s Poetry, ed. James F. Loucks and Andrew M. Stauffer (Norton)
• Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems, ed. Candace Ward (Dover)
• Charles Sangster, The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay and Other Poems; Hesperus and Other Poems and Lyrics, ed. Gordon Johnston (University of Toronto Press)
• Shorter primary readings and secondary sources (TBA)

Evaluation: Quizzes; essays; participation.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Prerequisite: Students should have 2 or 3 prior courses in English literature, preferably survey and poetics.

Description: This course will focus on British fiction written between the Second World War and the end of the twentieth century. This survey of selected novels will focus on class, the Welfare State, responses to the war, housing, planning, conceptions of the future, the status of children and refugees, evil, women, gender, the decline of imperialism, sexuality, and fictional technique. Generic conventions of comedy and tragedy as they mix with novelistic representation will inform lectures, as will distinctions between mass-market and highbrow fiction.

Texts:

• Ivy Compton-Burnett, Manservant and Maidservant
• Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
• Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
• Muriel Spark, Memento Mori
• John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
• Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn
• Hilary Mantel Fludd

Evaluation: Essays, attendance and participation, final exam.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

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

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

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

Text: An Introduction to Old English, by Peter Baker. 3rd. edition. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Inc., 2003; 2011.

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

Format: Lecture, workshop, discussion.

Description: The course will study the rise of science fiction and the relationship between literature, science, and technology during the long nineteenth century. This period’s fictional experiments and scientific romances famously engage the invention of modern geology, the rise of evolutionary discourse, and the institution of new industrial technologies. Our diverse investigations of the changing relationship between literature and science during the age of empire will encompass mad doctors, reanimated bodies, lost worlds, two-dimensional universes, and artificial people. This course seeks to account for the historical relations between the era’s new scientific paradigms, technologies, and theories and laboring-class, feminized, and non-Western bodies.

Instead of understanding the scientific and the literary as separate spheres, however, we will trace their mutual construction in the face of increasing disciplinary differentiation. This course will necessarily reflect on the relationship between scientific and literary forms, interrogating the professionalization of science and rise of new universalizing discourses of subjectivity and objectivity. While our discussions will encompass the relationship between Victorian debates about vivisection, degeneration, taxonomy, and progress in an increasingly global world, they will also examine prior Romantic concepts of vitalism, suspended animation, monstrosity, and organic form.

Our discussions will trace and reevaluate the origins of science fiction and its generic relatives: utopian fiction, adventure fiction, gothic literature, the weird tale, and the scientific romance. We will also probe nineteenth-century anticipations of present-day insights and interventions in science and technology studies and feminist science studies. These early literary experiments offer visions of what Darko Suvin terms the simultaneous experience of “estrangement and cognition” and what Sherryl Vint calls the imagination of “possible future selves.” Early science fiction collectively redefines the borderlines between nature and culture, experimenter and experiment, body and machine, self and other, and here and elsewhere. Together, we will attempt to map the contested ground of the nineteenth century’s alternative visions of scientific community and practice, exploring what counts as science and who defines the role of the scientist.

Texts: TBA, but will include selections from Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others.

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: This course offers an introduction to literature written by Asians living in North America. We first cover canonical works of Asian American literature from the 1970 to 1990 period, including texts by Maxine Hong Kingston and Frank Chin. We then next cover examples of Asian American and Asian Canadian literature from before 1970 – widely regarded as the “early” period of this literature – to examine articulations of Asian-ness in North America before its codification as a formal social and cultural category. Then, we look at more contemporary expressions of this literature: in the 1990s “multicultural moment” (Native Speaker); its diasporic iteration, particularly for South Asian American authors; its Canadian iteration, looking at Joy Kogawa’s major novel Obasan; and finally, in our current moment of “post-race,” considering what does it mean to even “write” as an “Asian American” or “Asian Canadian.” Broadly, we will consider themes and issues of immigration, hyphenated identity, transnationalism, and cultural citizenship. The course focuses on fiction but will also cover examples of poetry, non-fiction and memoir, drama, and graphic novels.

Texts:

• Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior;
• Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker;
• Joy Kogawa, Obasan;
• Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies;
• Adrian Tomine, Shortcomings

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: The material forms and circumstances of texts fundamentally affect their meaning. This premise underlies the history of the book, a field of theoretical and historical scholarship aimed at understanding the material circulation of ideas in society, in connection with technology, economics, and culture. 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 is essential to literary interpretation. In this course we will survey defining contributions to book history by W.W. Greg, D.F. McKenzie, Pierre Bourdieu, and others, highlighting five theoretical approaches: (i) bibliography and scholarly editing, (ii) the history of copyright and publishing, (iii) studies of authors, authorship, and authority, (iv) sociology and cultural studies, and (v) studies of reception and censorship. We will apply these approaches to three case studies drawn from nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canadian literature (Susanna Moodie, Anne Marriott, and Margaret Laurence). What factors shaped their creativity? How did they become best-selling authors and figures of public significance? Readings from industry commentators, Roy MacSkimming and Elaine Dewar, will deepen our knowledge of Canadian publishing. Students will write critical responses to secondary readings and a research essay on the material and social forms of the Canadian novel. In sum, the goal of the course is to learn a major theoretical approach to literary scholarship, and the principal examples will be Canadian.

Texts:

• Michelle Levy and Tom Mole, eds. The Broadview Reader in Book History (Broadview)
• Susanna Moodie. Roughing It in the Bush (excerpts)
• Anne Marriott. The Wind Our Enemy
• Margaret Laurence.  The Diviners

Evaluation: Summaries of secondary readings; research essay; final exam; participation.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

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 enrolment.

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

Texts:

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

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

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: The Arthurian legends grew to become an extremely rich and diverse body of literature by the later Middle Ages, and the idea of Arthur continues to fascinate today. Having emerged in the fifth and sixth centuries, tales about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table have since spread across six continents and dozens of languages. They have inspired fictional stories, blockbuster movies, and historical study internationally. Further, they touch upon many fields of study including literature, history, and archaeology. Our goal in this course is to examine this phenomenon as it developed in the medieval period (to ca. 1500) and explore some of the reasons why the Arthurian legends have become so integral to multi-cultural and interdisciplinary pursuits.

Over the course of the semester, we will engage the Arthurian legends by investigating how their central themes, figures, and literary situations change across different linguistic and cultural traditions and periods. Where is the line between fact and fiction in Arthurian legends? What constitutes an Arthurian legend? Why do the legends occupy such an important place in the literary and cultural imaginations of medieval writers and readers? How and why are medieval notions of “courtly love” and “chivalry,” as exhibited in the Arthurian legends, important to readers in later social and historical contexts? How are Arthurian stories rewritten or adapted by various authors, and how do these different texts represent the concerns or preoccupations of different historical moments?

We will read most texts in modern English translation, though some will be read in the original Middle English. Prior experience with Middle English is not mandatory or expected, and regular practice with the language will be included in many class sessions.

Texts (provisional):

• Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain (selections)
• Wace, Roman de Brut
• Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances (incl. Chrétien’s influential Lancelot and grail romances)
• Marie de France, Lais
• Thomas of Britain, Tristan
• Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival
• Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur (selections)
• Contextual readings and short romances from other traditions

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

Format: Lecture and discussion.

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

Description: This course has three interrelated goals. First, it introduces students to the formal and stylistic elements of drama, theatre, and performance in a global context. How do drama (as a work of imaginative literature) and theatre (as a live, time-based performance) communicate to readers and audiences? By what technical, stylistic, and affective means do they make meaning? Second, the course offers instruction in a range of critical approaches to interpreting and analysing dramatic texts and live performance – that is, both text-based and image-based works of theatre. Finally, the Poetics of Performance explores issues and debates that have structured theatre and performance practice and scholarship from Ancient Egyptian processional performance and African ‘total theatre’ to the ‘new dramaturgy’ of post-dramatic theatre. Indigenous dramaturgy, Black acting methods, and major European artistic statements of the 20th century will anchor the second half of the course.

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. By collectively interpreting samples plays and performances in class, and in debating the readings of each unit, we will build a concrete, shared, discipline-specific vocabulary and sets of analytical practices for the interpretation of the dramatic text and the theatrical event. In this way, this required course for Drama and Theatre majors, prepares Drama and Theatre students for all other courses in the stream.

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

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

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

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

Description: England in the fifteenth century saw a flourishing of dramatic and theatrical production, though this activity—some of it only known from late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts—had a longer history in England and on the European continent. Productions ranged from court tableaux to elaborate communal pageants held in large cultural centers and even smaller communities, and in many cases people would gather seasonally from entire regions to witness these spectacles. Evidence survives of travelling companies of players, some of them attracting a significant following, though the identities of few of the playwrights have come down to us. Students in this class will read medieval “mystery” and Passion plays, liturgical dramas, political pageantry, court mummings and entertainments, and a number of contextual readings. The approach will be literary-historical, with attention to the circumstances of performance and reception, manuscript contexts of the surviving texts, and readings of the texts as literary works that provide social, political, and religious commentary. All texts will be read in the original Middle English. Prior experience with Middle English is not mandatory or expected, and regular practice with the language will be included in many class sessions.

Texts (provisional):

Selections from the following cycles/compilations: the Chester cycle; the N-Town plays; the York Corpus Christi play; the Towneley pageants

Other readings will include:

• Richard Maidstone, Concordia
• John Lydgate, Mummings and Entertainments
• The Somonyng of Everyman
• The Croxton Play of the Sacrament
• The Wycliffite “Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge”

Evaluation:

Mid-term exam: 25%
Final exam: 35%
Short essays: 30%
Participation and attendance: 10%

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Expected Preparation: This course is intended for students in the Cultural Studies stream. It is a required course for Cultural Studies majors, and should be ideally taken in the term after the student has taken Introduction to Film Studies and Introduction to Cultural Studies, although this timeline is not required. This course can also potentially count towards the World Cinema minor, provided that the student has not taken too many other courses in the English department.

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 with several classical texts by theorists such as John Berger, Roland Barthes, Andre Bazin, Sergei Eisenstein, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Stan Brakhage, and Maya Deren. Students must come to class having completed all of the assigned reading and will be expected to participate verbally in class on a weekly basis.

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

Art and films by:

• Andy Warhol
• Cindy Sherman
• Dorothea Lange
• Hollis Frampton
• Chris Marker
• Paul Mpagi Sepuya
• Jean-Luc Godard
• Sergei Eisenstein
• Ingmar Bergman
• Carl Theodor Dreyer
• Maya Deren
• Stan Brakhage
• Yoko Ono
• Barbara Hammer

Texts: A course pack of readings available on myCourses, as well as the following books: John Berger, Ways of Seeing; Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Older versions of these texts may be used.

Evaluation: Engaged in-class participation; one 2-page (diagnostic) essay; two 5-page sequence analyses.

Format: Two lectures/ discussions per week, one mandatory screening per week, and occasional writing workshops led in additional conference time with the Teaching Assistant.

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

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

Texts: Terry Eagleton – Literary Theory: An Introduction

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: Following the historical development of image technologies from proto-cinematic devices to the post-cinematic media constellation comprising video games, Virtual Reality etc., this course will map out the aesthetic tenets of speculations on cinema’s future. Diverse in their technological presumptions (e.g., immersive, interactive and polysensory) these projections ultimately converge in a utopian model: cinema as an autonomous and immediate interface configured according to the bodily conditions of the viewer. Therefore the recurrent topic of “future cinema” will serve as a conceptual framework to investigate the visual paradigm where the corporeal subjectivity of the observer becomes the active producer of optical experience. Each week will focus on a particular technology (stereoscopic 3D, VR, video games etc.) once posited to be the future cinema and redefine the position of the medium of cinema within the contemporary media landscape.

Screenings (list is subject to change):

• ORA (Canada, Philippe Baylaucq, 2011)
• Avatar (USA, James Cameron, 2010)
• Selected VR works from Felix and Paul Studios.
• Pina (Germany, Wim Wenders 2011)
• Film Before Film (Germany, Werner Nekes, 1986)

Texts:

• Crary, Jonathan. “Techniques of the Observer.” October 45 (1988): 3–35.
• Hansen, Mark B. N. “Between Body and Image: On the ‘Newness’ of New Media Art.” In New Philosophy for New Media
• McLuhan, Marshall, and W. Terrence Gordon. “The Medium Is the Message.” In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man : Critical Edition, Critical edition., 7–23. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2003.
• Wade, Nicholas J. “Capturing Motion and Depth Before Cinematography.” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 25, no. 1 (January 2, 2016): 3–22.
• Eisenstein, Sergei. “On Stereocinema.” In 3D CINEMA AND BEYOND. Public. Toronto; Bristol; Chicago: Intellect Ltd, 2014.
• Bazin, André. “CINERAMA AND 3D.” In Andre Bazin’s New Media, edited by Dudley Andrew, 215–67. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2014.
• Hayles, N. Katherine. “Boundary Disputes: Homeostasis, Reflexivity, and the Foundations of Cybernetics.” Configurations 2, no. 3 (September 1, 1994): 441–67.
• Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. “Virtual Reality.” In Remediation: Understanding New Media, Revised ed. edition., 160–68. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000.

Evaluation:

Future Cinema Prototype 30%
Synthesis Paper 15%
Final Assignment Proposal 10%
Final Assignment 45%

Expected Preparation: Permission of the instructor required for registration.
All applicants welcome, although priority will be given to Drama & Theatre Majors and Minors. It is possible to add a Drama & Theatre Minor to an existing Major or Minor in another Department.

Description: The course focuses on learning basic costuming skills, and does so in two ways.

1. Eco Fashion - Experiencing the design process from conception to confection through the lens of sustainability.
2. Costuming Practice - Learning the skills needed to costume the Department of English, Moyse Hall Production.

Eco Fashion: Costuming is part of the larger garment industry, which includes the fashion industry. The garment industry is understood to be one of the worst polluters in the world. Our class starts by analyzing current practices in the garment industry in order to assess their environmental and social impact. Through research, we begin by identifying the specific aspects of textile and garment production that cause the most harm to the environment. It is not enough to generalize about problematic practices – our aim is to understand specifics, and by understanding causes, we can then study best practices and propose positive actions.

To pair our research with practice, each student will design and produce eco friendly “zero waste” clothing. The class begins with research on best and worst practices, and then moves into the design and conceptualization phase. Sourcing of repurposed materials follows, and segues into the garment construction and fitting phase.

Eco Fashion Projects:

• projects may include making and/or transforming garments and accessories using eco friendly sources and methods. This includes styling, fittings, alterations, and confection of garments, accessories and other details.
• It is possible to include existing fashion basics (such as black leggings and plain t-shirts) to augment a constructed garment for the purpose of styling a complete outfit.
• Materials used must be responsibly sourced – the class will decide together upon the ethical parameters. No purchase of new materials is permitted.
• Garments made for this project are assessed in terms of long term viability – solid construction techniques, good fit and functionality. Fast fashion is discouraged.
• One of the goals of the course is sewing skills advancement; therefore, starting skill level has no impact on overall performance in the class. Each student is encouraged to leap forward from his or her own individual starting point.

Costuming Practice - Learning the skills needed to costume a production. At the time of writing this syllabus, the script and production style for the Department of English, Moyse Hall Production for Fall 2021 have not yet been finalized. Once these details are confirmed, the exact nature of this learning module will be elaborated upon. The production team at Moyse Hall is committed to maintaining a safe environment for students, staff, and audience members alike. Please feel free to email the instructor for updates on this evolving situation.

Texts: 

• (Recommended) Karpova, Elena, and Sara B. Marcketti. The Dangers of Fashion: towards Ethical and Sustainable Solutions. Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020.
• Play script TBD.

Evaluation: TBD, but will include hands-in projects, and a short oral presentation on the ecological impact of the fashion industry.

Format: Lectures (in person or through zoom, as appropriate), hands on projects, demonstrations, and practical work. Additional hours outside of class time are required in order to build skills demonstrated in class, and to complete the hands on projects. Depending on circumstances, these hours may take place in the costume atelier, or at home.

Class size: Ten students, by permission of the instructor. Priority given to D&T Majors and Minors.

Equipment:

• Required: Sewing kit consisting of thimble, fabric scissors, stitch ripper, one package of needles, one box of dressmaking pins, a pencil and notepad.
• Optional: Those who feel that they will benefit from a more complete sewing kit are welcome to add a measuring tape, pin cushion, a few metal pushpins, a tracing wheel, tailoring wax (white is most useful), needle nosed pliers, inexpensive paper scissors and a small sharp pair of fabric scissors for trimming and clipping.
• Optional: Depending on circumstances, it may be useful to have a sewing machine at home, but this is not a course requirement.

Description: TBA

Format: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Expected Student Preparation: Priority will be given to Drama and Theatre majors and minors; ideally students enrolled in this course will have already taken ENGL 230 Introduction to Theatre Studies.

Description: An overview of dramatic forms and theatrical practice in Britain from the Restoration through the eighteenth century to the Romantic period (c. 1660-1843). The course is divided into four chronological units encompassing the reopening of the professional theatre and the advent of the professional actress, the rise of morality and sentiment in drama, the age of Garrick and the professionalisation of theatre, and the development of stage spectacle. Each unit will cover the theatrical conditions of the period and will examine a representative play staged at the time. Emphasis is placed on the plays as theatrical works rather than literary texts. Students will be asked to conceptualise performances of the plays as they might have taken place in the long eighteenth century and to consider how these plays might have been performed and received at the time they were written. We will also analyse historical documents to explore themes such as genre, acting style, audience experience, theatre architecture, financial practices, regulation of the stage, and company management. We will visit McGill Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections (in person or virtually) to complete a series of hands-on workshops and assignments with a collection of playbills from the period. This will allow us to deepen our understanding of eighteenth-century theatre through the study of print culture.

Texts: Peter Thomson, The Cambridge Introduction to English Theatre, 1660-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); a selection of representative plays (tentative): Aphra Behn, The Rover (1677); Richard Steele, The Conscious Lovers (1722); David Garrick and George Colman the Elder, The Clandestine Marriage (1766); Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Pizarro (1799); historical documents to provide context.

Evaluation (tentative): Participation 10%; production proposal assignment 20%; series of playbill assignments 30%; take home final exam 40%.

Format: Lecture, discussion, group work, work with rare books and special collections.

Note: Students who have taken ENGL 371 previously, with a different topic, may take ENGL 371 again for credit with the signature of a Department of English advisor.

Description: This course explores representations and constructions of U.S. national identity in nineteenth and twentieth century popular theatre and entertainments. As the nation experienced industrialization, urbanization, immigration, changing sexual and gender norms, and violent cultural and racial encounters, popular entertainments attracted mass audiences and created spectacles of national inclusion and ‘othering.’ Units address the following themes and forms: racial and reform melodramas; antebellum and post-Emancipation stagings of race (including blackface minstrelsy and abolitionist performances); frontier spectacles (such as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West); freak shows and penny museums; popular dance and vaudeville; imperialism and world’s fairs; and the Jazz Age. Through discussions and lectures, we will consider the place of the “popular” – in its classed, ethnic, racial, gendered, erotic, commercial, and hegemonic valences – in forging styles of U.S. citizenship and belonging that persist to the current day, albeit often in camouflage.

Texts:

• Play texts (Metamora; The Octoroon; Uncle Tom’s Cabin)
• Films (The Jazz Singer)
• Online secondary sources including texts by W.E.B. Du Bois, Andrew Erdman, Susan Glenn, Saidiya Hartman, Julie Malnig, Andrea Most, Robert Rydell, David Savran, Kiara Vigil, and S.E. Wilmer, among others.

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

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: TBA

Format: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

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 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: Rebel Without a Cause, Johnny Guitar, Glen or Glenda?, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Shadows, and The Apartment.

Possible shows include: I Love Lucy, Gunsmoke, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and Perry Mason.

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

Texts: A coursepack.

Evaluation: Quizzes, posted course notes, short assignments, term project, participation.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Note: The course title in the calendar is “Interpretation of the Dramatic Text” but this doesn’t accurately express the course content. The course is heavily dependent on improvisation, not text. Please read below for clarification.

Description: This course is an opportunity for students to act in simulations for the Social Work, Couples and Family Therapy (CAFT) Program. You will be acting as clients coming to simulated therapy sessions either in a couple or as part of a family. This course offers you a great opportunity to do long form improvisation and to help therapists in training.

Requirements:

• Experience as an Actor.
• Experience with improvisation.
• Drama and Theatre Major or Minor and/or permission of instructor.

Activities and Evaluation:

• Class simulations, 1 hour per week: 65%
• Improvisations, rehearsals and planning, 2 hours per week: 25%
• Journals: 10%

Application Procedure: Written Application and participation in a Zoom Entrance Workshop in April. Information on the workshop will be sent to you after you submit your application, which you should do as soon as possible.

Submit answers to the following questions to myrna.wyatt.selkirk [at] mcgill.ca.
Subject Heading of your e-mail: ENGL 375 Application. In your application please use both the number and subject for each response:

1. Acting Experience:
2. Improvisation Experience:
3. Theatre courses taken at McGill or elsewhere:
4. Any other relevant experience:
5. Other things we should know about you:
6. Expected year of graduation and Major(s) and Minor(s):
7. Have you taken ENGL 230? ENGL 269?
8. What will you bring to this course? This can expand on numbers 4 and 5 above. Discuss special attributes and personality traits. Talk about your ability as a collaborator.
9. What do you hope to get out of this course? Why is it of special interest to you?

Expected Preparation: Permission of the instructor required for registration.
All applicants welcome, although priority will be given to Drama & Theatre Majors and Minors. It is possible to add a Drama & Theatre Minor to an existing Major or Minor in another Department.

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

Description: Emphasis is on costume design for the theatre, and the development of the various tools and tricks used to communicate design concepts. Weekly design modules focuses on tools such as script analysis, colour palette, developing a design concept, transformation of characters, design stylization - all focused on the creation of original costume designs.

The concepts covered in class will be practiced by students in weekly skill building exercises, culminating in individual final projects. Students will work from home on creative exercises using the supplies that they have on hand. The main communication tool is sketching, using each student’s medium of choice, such as water colour paints, design markers, coloured pencils, or digital tools. It is not critical to be proficient at sketching – it is more important to have creative ideas and the motivation to communicate visually, but also verbally, and in written form.

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

Learning outcomes – by the end of the class students will have the opportunity to:

• Interpret a director's vision to create a design concept
• Create original costume designs
• Use colour to portray character affiliations, mood, symbolism, plot points
• Envision the environmental, social, and hierarchical elements that inform costume design
• Plan costume flow, taking into account multiple roles, quick changes, and available resources
• Work in a collaborative team environment
• Understand theatrical practice in terms of interdepartmental collaboration
• Increase creative and visual communication skills
• Practice integrity as a designer by crediting sources
• Explore creative mediums

Texts:

1. Midsummer Night’s Dream, by William Shakespeare – any version
2. Free choice – sci-fi or fantasy novel or short story for Future & Fantasy Worlds project
3. Free choice – play script for Final Costume Design project

Evaluation:

Weekly at-home exercises - 50%.
Participation – 10%
Final project – Independent costume design which integrates all learning modules into one final creative endeavour. The assignment is based on a script of the student’s own choosing. The project is comprised of the following components: Script analysis, Scene breakdown, Design concept statement, Colour palette, Costume sketches. 30%

Format: Lectures, demonstrations, collaborative learning processes, and at-home artistic exercises.

Enrollment: 10 students, by permission of the Instructor.

Art Supplies:

Important note: any or all art supplies can be replaced by the use of a graphics program and stylus if you prefer to work digitally and have your own program. If not:

• One or more medium for applying the full spectrum of colour. Any of the following will work. More than one option can be fun, but is not required.
  • Fine tip black rollerball pen or other medium for making a thin black outline
  • Water colour paints + a small tube of white + brushes
  • Watercolour pencils + brushes
  • Design markers - optimally 24 colours
  • Pastels
  • Coloured pencils - better quality coloured pencils will produce more intense colours, but any will work
  • Glue stick - optional
• Paper or cardboard or art boards or other surface to apply colour to. The surface should be suitable to the medium that you intend to apply, for instance a watercolour block pad is useful if you intend to use watercolours. Any pads of paper and loose ends that you have access to will be fine.
• A sketch pad for jotting ideas - no specific quality requirement, dollar store will be fine.

*Please do not feel the need to invest a lot of money in art supplies if you do not plan to continue using them after the course is over.

Please note: this course description is subject to change.

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

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

The course will look at oral literature, storytelling and legends handed down through generations as well as contemporary “collaborative life stories”, novels, and essays. Examples of productions in television and film are included.

The common themes are survival, reconciliation and the effects of colonialism, in whatever form this may take, as well as a search for a renewed or continued identify in the contemporary world.

Texts:

Inuit:

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

Métis:

• Maria Campbell: Half-Breed

First Nations:

• Richard Wagamese: Indian Horse.

Some articles will be posted.

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

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: This course will introduce students to the film and television produced and distributed under the name of Alfred Hitchcock. Not content to rediscover the man’s genius, we will instead seek to understand his success in cultural terms, including his importance for feminist and queer film theory. The premise will be that Hitchcock’s cinema of suspense probes fault lines of modernity, testing for prospects of hospitality.

Texts: Tania Modleski The Women Who Knew Too Much

and a coursepack

Evaluation: Quizzes, posted class notes, short assignments, term project, participation.

Format: Lectures and conferences.

Description: Solitude is paradoxical: we are at once alone, capable of contemplation, and we are in the world of others. This course looks at the fictional treatment of characters who negotiate their solitude, their sense of self and their relation to other people and cultural and social markers. We will find metaphors of belonging – and its failures – and ask questions of what it means to know another and to know one’s self.

Texts (tentative): books or selections from –

• The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison
• Make it Scream, Make it Burn, Leslie Jamison
• Enigma Variations, André Aciman
• Knots, Gunnhild Øyehaug
• Seeking Rapture: Scenes from a Woman’s Life, Kathryn Harrison
• On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong
• How to Pronounce Knife, Souvankham Thammavongsa

Films (tentative):

• Arrival (dir. Denis Villeneuve)
• Hiroshima Mon Amour (dir. Alain Resnais)
• Paris Texas (dir. Wim Wenders)
• Moonlight (dir. Barry Jenkins)
• Cold War (dir. Pawel Pawlikowski)
• In Treatment (HBO)

Evaluation (tentative): 20% weekly short responses (250 words each; 10 @ 2% each); 80% two short essays (c. 2000 words each; 40% each)

Format: Lecture, discussion, screenings.

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

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

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Description: Monsters have always captured our imaginations—many of the earliest surviving writings are tales of epic battles between heroes and monstrous creatures. This course examines monster figures in English literature and culture from approximately 600AD-1666 and their modern adaptations. Surveying over 1000 years of werewolves, witches, giants, demons, and other fantastic beasts, we will read everything from Liber Monstrorum, the “Book of Monsters,” to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, to a piece of proto-science fiction, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World. Interspersing medical writing, demonological treatises, court documents, and pulp-press pamphlets with a variety of poetry, plays, and prose fiction, we will approach all of these diverse texts as cultural artifacts that offer us a window into the monsters of past worlds.

Through our course readings, we will discover how monsters personified and mediated anxiety over global travel, race, religious difference, gender performance and presentation, women, sexuality, disability and the body, magic and science, and the borders between the human and non-human. Working mostly chronologically, we will trace how attitudes toward monsters and monster-hunting shifted over time and pay attention to how moral interpretations of monstrosity operated alongside scientific and medical inquiry and taxonomy. In the final section of the course, we will watch and read recent film, television, and literary adaptations that reproduce these monsters for the modern age, including an episode of the current Netflix series The Witcher with its taciturn monster-hunter, the supernatural horror films The Conjuring (2013) and The Witch (2015), and the psychological and trippy quest narrative The Green Knight (2021). In our last week together, we will dip our toe into the ever-expanding and immensely lucrative market of paranormal romance, exploring humanity’s ongoing fascination with occult phenomena.

Texts (tentative): Texts provided as pdfs on myCourses.

• Liber Monstrorum
• Beowulf
• Wonders of the East
• The Travels of Sir John Mandeville
• Montaigne, “Of Cannibals”
• Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, excerpts
• Marie de France, Bisclavret and Yonec
• Anonymous, Melion
• Anonymous, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• Shakespeare, Macbeth
• Ford, Rowley, and Dekker, The Witch of Edmonton
• Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World
• Excerpts from demonological writing (assembled as a single pdf packet)
• Excerpts from witchcraft pamphlets (assembled as a single pdf packet)
• Excerpts from monstrous birth pamphlets (assembled as a single pdf packet)
• Excerpts from demonic possession and medical writing (assembled as a single pdf packet)
• Paranormal romance novel (TBD)

Evaluation: 10% participation; 60% two course essays (5-6pp); 30% take-home final exam.

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

Description: This course offers an introduction to the wide spectrum of works that fall under the general umbrella of “electronic literature,” ranging from more traditionally “literary” works experimenting with digital media to text-centric videogames. Our study will be divided in three units: adventure games and interactive fiction; hypertext fiction and digital poetry; and visual novels. Our aim will be in part to trace the history and development of these different genres and the ways in which they have been theorized, as well as to reflect on how they enrich and challenge traditional concepts and methodologies of literary and media studies. As such, we will explore questions surrounding interactivity, immersion, authorship, non-linear and branching narratives, media specificity, and the ludology/narratology debate, among others.

Texts: Primary works will include afternoon, a story (1987, Michael Joyce), Patchwork Girl (1995, Shelley Jackson), Galatea (2000, Emily Short), 80 Days (2014, Inkle), Kentucky Route Zero (2011-2020, Cardboard Computer), Butterfly Soup (2017, Brianna Lei) and If Found… (2020, Dreamfeel), along with secondary literature from N. Katherine Hayles, Janet Murray, Espen Aarseth, Henry Jenkins and others.

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lectures and discussions.

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

The course will also feature student presentations on all the plays and all the key issues in the course. You will sign up to create one three-minute presentation on a topic you will choose from a list of topics.

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

Texts: (Shakespeare texts will be available either at Paragraph books or online. All other readings will be provided on myCourses.)

• Shakespeare, Taming of the Shrew, ed. Frances E. Dolan (Bedford/St Martin’s)
• Anon, A Merry Jest of a Shrewd and Curst Wife http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/jest.html
• Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl, ed. Kelly Stage (Broadview Press)
• Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. Sylvan Barnet (Signet Classics)
• Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. J.F. Bernard and Paul Yachnin (Broadview Press)
• Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, ed. Jay Halio (Oxford)
• Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine (Folger Shakespeare Library)

Evaluation: 

Journal: 40%
Presentation (3 minutes, 1 slide): 15%
Participation: 10%
Course essay (mostly on King Lear)
(10 pages double-spaced, 3,000 words approx.): 35%

Journal: Your journal is, first of all, for you to do some thinking by writing at each step of the course. But it is also something you do for marks, so you have to write at least a page (about 350 words) about each week’s readings (and our discussions of the readings). It certainly doesn’t have to be formal like an essay. After all, it mostly for you and about your thinking, questioning, arguing. But it’s also going to be read by me, so make it reader-friendly.

Presentation: You will produce a three-minute presentation on the topic you sign up for. You are allowed one slide. This part of the course is based on the three-minute thesis program, where graduate students compete for prizes in recognition of the clarity, succinctness, value, and appeal of their research. We’ll take the competition out of what we do, but leave in the emphasis on clear, succinct, and engaging accounts of valuable research. We’ll do prep work in advance of the first set of presentations.

Participation: Participation requires your vital, active presence in class and in tutorial. You have to come to each class with questions, ideas, puzzlement (which you have to speak about), expressions of joy or grief. It is true. It’s really true: there is no such thing as a stupid question.

Description: Samuel Johnson (1709-84) is perhaps best known today as a literary critic, as the author of Rasselas, a seminal work in the oriental tradition, and as the compiler of the first major English dictionary: hence his sobriquet, Dictionary Johnson. He was also however, a major theoretician on the art of biography and among its most important practitioners in the eighteenth century. As he wrote to his own biographer, James Boswell (1740-95), shortly after they first met in 1763: “the biographical part of literature is what I love most.”

This course will begin with a study of Johnson’s writings about formal biography and life-writing in general, primarily in his periodical essays of the 1750s: The Rambler and The Idler. We shall then look at his earliest extended biography, The Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744), before turning to the first and most celebrated of Boswell’s many journals: his extraordinary London Journal (1762-63). Our next focus will be on Boswell’s depiction of Johnson in another of his journals, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, which was to some extent a trial run for the biography of Johnson then in progress. We shall then examine some of the remarkable critical biographies collected as Lives of the Poets that Johnson wrote in his final years. His lives of Milton, Dryden, Swift, Pope, and Gray will be among those studied. We shall consider some of the questions about life-writing that Johnson’s biographies raise and that he himself posed in his theoretical essays. How blunt, for example, should a writer of obituaries and epitaphs be about his or her subject? To what extant should a biographer draw on personal knowledge of the subject, and how tendentious should his treatment of the subject be? How large a place should critical analysis play in life writing about a literary figure?

Seven years after his death, in 1791, Johnson himself became the subject of what many consider the finest biography in English, or perhaps in any language: James Boswell’s Life of Johnson. We shall focus on specific sections of this massive work, considering the strategies that Boswell used to immortalize his close friend, and to what extent his own techniques of life-writing drew on, and differed from, those practised by Johnson.

Texts:

• James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R.W. Chapman, intro. Pat Rogers. Oxford World’s Classics, 1980.
• -----, London Journal 1762-1763, ed. Gordon Turnbull. Penguin Books, 2010.
• Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets, ed. John Mullan. Oxford World’s Classics, 2009.
• Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, ed. Jack Lynch and Celia Barnes. Oxford World’s Classics, 2020.

Evaluation: Short paper, 20%; seminar presentation, 20%; participation in class discussion, 20%; term paper, 40%.

Format: Seminar.

Description: The course will examine the novel as a literary form, exploring its emergence, development, and consolidation in South Asia. It will also consider the key formal, aesthetic, and political concerns of these novels, in particular examining how categories such as realism, modernism, and irrealism are signaled in the region. Since South Asia is a multilingual region with robust literary traditions in several of the local languages, we will read South Asian novels in translation in addition to English. The course, in addition, will also introduce students to intellectual concerns and theoretical debates of the field of World Literature.

Texts:

• Bankim Chatterjee – The Sacred Brotherhood (1882) [Library e-book available]
• Rabindranath Tagore – Home and the World (1915)
• RK Narayan – Guide (1958)
• Kiran Desai – Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998)
• Aravind Adiga – The White Tiger (2008)

This is an indicative list and course texts will be finalized later.

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lectures and TA conferences.

Prerequisite: No formal prerequisite. Because substantial attention will be paid to poetic and fictional form and style, however, this advanced course’s interests and discussions will be directed chiefly to English majors who have completed their required Poetics course. The professor’s training, approaches, and tastes are literary and will necessarily guide discussions, but the expertise of students in other disciplines will be needed as we also work to understand the literary Cohen as a cultural, historical, and musical phenomenon. This course is not open to U1 students. Students should consult the instructor at the email address above for permission to register.

All students wishing to take this course must attend the first class, even if they have not yet been able to register.

Description: Leonard Cohen’s death, announced to the public one day before the election of Donald Trump to the United States Presidency, and following closely on his acclaimed last album You Want It Darker, not to mention his published letter to former lover Marianne Ihlen after her death, which casually predicted the nearness of his own, struck many fans as the final act of consummate grace in a career full of exceptional showmanship and exceptional pursuits of authenticity. Many felt that an essential presence had gone from their lives upon hearing the news. While such emotions are not the stuff of criticism, they might well prompt it; and they are particularly compelling because they imply in each audience member, and in his audience as a whole, a certain reading of Cohen and his works that can be studied, discussed, and written about. If for instance you accepted without qualms my paralleling of the superficially opposite terms “showmanship” and “authenticity” above, you’re probably a Cohen fan, actual or potential. That’s a reading of Cohen on your part, one that we will find to be consonant with deep themes and concerns in his complete works.

In this course we will read and listen to as many of the works of Leonard Cohen as time permits, with an emphasis on the period up to and including The Future (1992) but also reaching for his last album in his lifetime, You Want It Darker (2016). From seductive song lyrics to the most scandalously hilarious novel, brutal poems, and moving prayers yet published in Canada, Cohen’s work demands and rewards scrupulous reading, and the bulk of course time will be given to our discussion of its developing vision and technique. This close reading work will help us to separate Cohen as a writer from the “Leonard Cohen” cultural phenomenon, an important critical task. At the same time, we will hope to chart some of the history of that phenomenon, from its emergence after 1961’s Spice Box of Earth, his attainment of international celebrity after he turned to performance and recording in 1967, its severe waning through the 1970s and early 1980s, its resurgence and reformation after I’m Your Man in 1988, and its global expansion after the tours of 2008. We will try to get at the phenomenon’s premises and machinery by looking at reviews, interviews, and documentaries, and we will read the biographies (Nadel or Simmons) for a glimpse of Cohen’s experience and manipulation of it. Lecture and discussion will attempt to situate the periods of Cohen’s work and of his fame in relation to relevant cultural contexts: Beat writing; the poetry of A.M. Klein, Irving Layton, and Michael Ondaatje; the Cold War; cultural representations of the Holocaust; the 1960s and their meanings and outcomes; modernism and post-modernism; the crisis of faith in modernity; neo-conservatism in the 1980s; celebrity and fandom. The professor is certainly not expert in all these areas, so students’ ideas, knowledge, and experience will be essential to the course’s success.

One trigger alert: there will be no further trigger alerts in this course. Cohen’s writing is often scandalous, sometimes deliberately so, sometimes unthinkingly. Images of violence and death, sometimes misogynistic, sometimes in a Holocaust context, are constant in the earlier works, and they can be treated by the author and his personae with an unremitting indifference, even hilarity. Students who “love Leonard Cohen” when they enter the course are often shocked to find some of his works deeply ethically disturbing. I am interested in the terrain between ethical questions and literary experience and always encourage their consideration in my classroom. I am aware that some students may have suffered trauma akin to those depicted by Cohen and will find such readings profoundly troubling. I do my best to respect their experience as readers, but I will not do so by trying to deflect in advance a given work’s content or the ethics of its treatment.

Texts:

• Cohen, Leonard. Beautiful Losers. 1966. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991.
• ---. The Favourite Game. 1964. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994.
• ---. Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994.

Evaluation (subject to change: these were the requirements in 2020):

• A short report on a field of cultural history relevant to Cohen’s career, to be distributed to your classmates, 3 pp. + 2 pp. bibliography. 20%;
• An assignment on the production of Cohen’s celebrity in various media, 5 pp. 20%;
• A major research paper (12-15 pp.). 50%;
• Participation in discussions. 10%. If you have not taken a course with Professor Trehearne before, please note the following: perfect attendance is expected, and absences will be noted, but this part of your mark assesses active, useful participation in discussion and not attendance. Full attendance through the semester without speaking will earn 0/10. Do not take this class if you are not a comfortable participant in class discussions.

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, realistic 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:

• Dance of the Happy Shades
• Lives of Girls and Women
• Who Do You Think You Are?
• The Progress of Love
• Friend of My Youth
• The Love of a Good Woman
• Runaway

Evaluation: Oral presentation; short essay; research paper; participation

Format: ​Lectures, oral presentations, discussion.

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

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. Atwood’s poetry, fiction, and literary criticism transformed the way Canadians understood their national literature. Her work introduced a new set of values 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 pouring 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 explore 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. 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 facilitate their inevitable self-transformation.

Texts:

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

Note: 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.

Evaluation (Tentative): A series of short, weekly online journal entries (40%); two short essays (40%); participation (10%); attendance (10%).

Format: Seminar.

Description: Located at an early twentieth-century moment of major innovation for anglophone poetry, this course engages the contributions of women poets to the making of what came to be known as “modern poetry,” whose literary and conceptual experiments would exert major impact on twentieth-century culture, and whose legacy is still felt today. The premise for the course is that these poets regarded poetry as a language for art, critique, and invention– a language in which to engage in literary experiment, comment on the conditions and challenges of their “modern” times, and imagine new futures for modern individuals and cultures.

Until the 1980s, the canon associated with modern poetry in English, established by mid-twentieth-century critical work, was assumed to consist of the work of major male figures such as W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams. Yet as this course addresses, between 1900 and 1960, many women were actively engaged in the effort to revolutionize anglophone poetry: within early twentieth-century literary circles, their work was recognized and respected, and they fulfilled pivotal cultural roles. This course focuses on the women that Bonnie Kime Scott calls in The Gender of Modernism the “forgotten and silenced makers” of modern poetry. The 1990s brought their work to attention, but recent commentary by Cassandra Laity and others suggests that we are again at a cultural moment of needing to renew awareness of their work.

Their work allows us into the world of experimental modern literature, which exerted a major influence on the subsequent development of anglophone literature, from the vantage of those women seeking to develop such vanguard art during a period when women still faced considerable resistance to their contributions as “makers” – when they were still more often regarded as muses than artists, when it was still often assumed that, as Virginia Woolf registers in To the Lighthouse, “women can’t paint, women can’t write.” We explore language and literature from the cultural archives for engaging the art, critical thought and experience of artists often marginalized and subordinated by the dominant culture of their contexts.

We engage work of pioneering “first-generation” modern poets such as H.D., Amy Lowell, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein; poets associated with the 1920s such as Anne Spencer and Edna St. Vincent Millay; and those emerging in the later years of modern poetry such as Muriel Rukeyser, P.K. Page, and Elizabeth Bishop. We consider cultural contexts for their work such as the Imagist movement in poetry, Italian Futurism, conditions of the First and Second World Wars, early 20C feminist and queer cultural work, the Harlem Renaissance, the Jazz Age, and Canadian modernism.

In addition to reckoning closely with their poetry, which often involves the many forms of “difficulty” associated with modern poetry, we also engage from a literary-historical angle these writers’ contributions—H.D.’s vital role in the formation of the poetic movement of “Imagism,” as well as her influential critical engagements with the literature of Ancient Greece; Mina Loy’s groundbreaking work with page-space and the genre of the manifesto; Marianne Moore’s syllabic verse; and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s pathfinding modern revisions of the sonnet.

Their poetry often critiques both literary and cultural phenomena of their time and “thinks in verse” about how to move beyond received gender roles of their time toward new possibilities and opportunities. We will also consider how these poets engaged the feminist thought of their time, often as mediated by the early twentieth-century concept of the “New Woman.”

Texts: Poetry will include work by Elizabeth Bishop, H.D., Dorothy Livesay, Amy Lowell, Mina Loy, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, P.K. Page, Muriel Rukeyser, Stevie Smith, Anne Spencer, and Gertrude Stein; we will also consider work by E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and W.B. Yeats.

Evaluation: Brief essay (5 pp.) (30%); longer essay (7-8 pp.) (35%); fictional auto/biography (4 pp.) (20%); attendance and participation (includes journal entries) (15%).

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: Since the publication of his first novel more than twenty years ago, Colson Whitehead has become one of the most lauded, prized, taught, and studied American novelists writing today. Winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” grant and the nearly-as-lucrative honor of Oprah’s Book Club, and the most contemporary novelist included in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Whitehead stands at the very center of the contemporary canon. According to critics and scholars alike, part of what makes Whitehead so singular is his ability to write across a vast array of literary and mass-cultural forms: detective and encyclopedic fiction (The Intuitionist [1999], John Henry Days [2001]), contemporary satire and the bildungsroman (Apex Hides the Hurt [2006], Sag Harbor [2009]), and more recently, zombie fiction and the meta-slave narrative (Zone One [2011], The Underground Railroad [2016]).

While Whitehead’s career represents a veritable catalog of genres, it also chronicles nearly two hundred years of American history. If we rearrange his novels not by publication date but loosely by their historical settings, we end up following Whitehead from the slave narrative and folklore of the nineteenth century, to the hard-boiled, civil-rights noir and ethnic bildungsroman of the mid- and late twentieth century, to a kind of postapocalyptic history of the early twenty-first. From this vantage, it seems clear that Whitehead is not only a writer of genre fiction but a prolific writer of one genre in particular: historical fiction.

Students in this course will investigate the trajectory of Whitehead’s body of work as well as how his oeuvre indexes contemporary issues of Black literary production, historical memory, and canon formation. Over the course of the semester, we will study all of Whitehead’s published novels, including Harlem Shuffle, which we will read “hot off the presses” when it is released in September.

Texts:

• The Intuitionist (1999)
• John Henry Days (2001)
• Apex Hides the Hurt (2006)
• Sag Harbor (2009)
• Zone One (2011)
• The Underground Railroad (2016)
• The Nickel Boys (2019)
• Harlem Shuffle (2021)

Evaluation (tentative): Participation (10%); Research Presentation (20%); Conference Paper (30%); Final Paper (40%).

Format: Seminar.

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 will develop a taxonomy of transformation (e.g., metamorphosis, conversion, metanoia, translation, transversion, kenosis, revolution); we’ll read a number of Western transformational artists and/or thinkers about transformation, including Plato, Paul, Ovid, Augustine, John Donne, and John Lyly. From start to finish, our main focus is on six plays by Shakespeare.

The course will feature student presentations on all the plays and all the key issues in the course. You will sign up to create one five-minute powerpoint presentation on a topic you will choose from a list of topics.

Texts: (Shakespeare texts will be available either at Paragraph books or online. Lyly’s play is available online. All other readings will be provided on myCourses.)

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Peter Holland
• Henry IV, Part One, ed. David Bevington
• Much Ado about Nothing, ed. Sheldon Zitner
• Twelfth Night, ed. Roger Warren and Stanley Wells
• Anthony and Cleopatra, ed. Michael Neill
• The Winter’s Tale, ed. Stephen Orgel
• John Lyly, Galatea

https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Gal_M/complete/index.html

Evaluation:

• Journal: 35%
• Presentation: 15%
• Participation: 15%
• Course paper: 35%

Journal: Your journal is, first of all, for you to do some thinking by writing at each step of the course. But it is also something you do for marks, so you have to write at least a page (about 350 words) about each week’s readings (and our discussions of the readings). It certainly doesn’t have to be formal like an essay. After all, it mostly for you and about your thinking, questioning, arguing. But it’s also going to be read by me, so make it reader-friendly.

Presentation: You will produce a five-minute presentation on the topic you sign up for. You are allowed three slides. This part of the course is based on the three-minute thesis program, where graduate students compete for prizes in recognition of the clarity, succinctness, value, and appeal of their research. We’ll take the competition out of what we do, but leave in the emphasis on clear, succinct, and engaging accounts of valuable research. We’ll do prep work in advance of the first set of presentations.

Course Paper: If you want, you can develop your course paper from the work you will have done for your five-minute presentation. Or, if you prefer, you can choose one of the paper topics I will prepare. In either case, your work will need to take account of some of the most important research on the question or argument you’re developing. What you write does not have to be original work, in the sense that it does not have to be an idea or a view that no one has thought of before. But it does have to be work that you care about, have thought a good deal about, and are keen to share with others. So you could write about, say, Antony and Cleopatra as a rethinking of the sexuality of the self, which is not a new idea, but you could do that with new evidence, with thinking that takes previous work further than it was willing or able to go, and with a conclusion that might shift the perspective from which we see the relationship among theatrical art, sexuality and selfhood in Shakespeare’s time.

Participation: Participation requires your vital, active presence in class and in tutorial. You have to come to each class with questions, ideas, puzzlement (which you have to speak about), expressions of joy or grief. It is true. It’s really true: there is no such thing as a stupid question.

Description: Spenser’s richly imaginative Faerie Queene is one of the single most widely influential texts in English literature, and constitutes a literary education in itself, since it critically surveys the resources of western culture–including literature, mythology, iconography, philosophy, and theology--up to its point. While having major socio-political investments, this romantic epic is nonetheless a central exemplar of literary fantasy, romance, and allegory. This course would especially complement study of early modern literature and culture, and particular writers of the period such as Shakespeare and Milton, but would also facilitate study of any literary periods in which Spenser strongly influenced writers, readers, and critics, as he did from around 1580 to 1900. Knowledge of The Faerie Queene thus provides a highly valuable basis for any literary studies within that broad expanse of time. Yet allusions to and borrowings from this poet quite widely appear in twentieth-century literature too. He is one of the great fantasists, and would appeal much to anyone interested in such writings and their development. His poetry is also important for the history of epic, for the history of the sublime in literature in the English language, and for the so-called “line of vision” therein: writers who claim some powers of special insight, such as Milton, Blake, Yeats, Eliot, and Wallace Stevens.

Texts:

• The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, 2nd Longmans edition, paperback
• Course Reader

(Hamilton edition available at the Word bookstore, 469 Milton Street.)

Evaluation: 4 brief in-class quizzes of 10% each; term paper 50%; class attendance and participation 10%.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Suggested preparation: At least one 300-level course in English; and some previous work with poetry.

Description: This course re-reads the movement of “Modernism”—designating the wave of experimental literary and artistic work in English of 1900-1950—through the work of two prominent writers of the time, poets Marianne Moore and Hilda Doolittle (“H.D.”) Although the “major modernist authors” of modernism who come to mind first are still often figures such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and W.B. Yeats, this course shifts the viewfinder to spotlight the avant-garde work of two female writers equally acclaimed in their time as their male counterparts, respected by Pound, Eliot, Williams, and others; yet then downplayed in critical “canons” of modernism by the mid-twentieth century: as Kime Scott notes in The Gender of Modernism, Moore and H.D. are among the forgotten “makers of modernism.” Engaging and re-thinking “Modernism” through the work of Moore, H.D., and their extensive network of contemporaries affords new perspectives on the nature of the literary and cultural work generated by modernism. We focus especially on Moore’s and H.D.’s critical work (and play) with the concept of “culture”—much contested during the modernist period.

In an era when women were still often positioned as muses for male artists, H.D. and Marianne Moore sought to write and live as “New Women”: their work provides a window on feminist cultural work of their time. At an early 20C moment when women were battling for the vote, access to higher education, and entry into professional life, H.D. and Moore sought, to adapt Sara Ahmed’s concepts, to pursue feminist lives and rethink gender. They were also radical innovators in literature. Toward her pioneering work of Imagism in poetry, H.D. engaged and translated the literature of ancient Greece, from Sappho and Homer to Euripides, toward developing meditations on gender, queer desire and cultural trauma. Working with Freud, H.D. later re-made the concepts of psychoanalysis toward the visionary work of her late career. As part of a circle of avant-garde filmmakers, she contributed to the making of experimental films such as Borderline, with Paul Robeson. Moore, meanwhile, drew upon scientific, historical, and religious thinkers, a host of popular magazines and cultural “finds” from museums, zoos, and bazaars, curating intricately allusive poems that circumvented traditional meter in favour of her own invented syllabic metrics. Like H.D., she dialogued with other contemporaries such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Elizabeth Bishop with her own experiments in art. Some of Moore’s verse reads as the work of a collector-poet using cultural “finds” to comment on her time; some turns to the natural world with an appreciative, even ecocritical eye. She often conceptualized poetry as criticism—involving acts of attention, appreciation, wit, and critique.

Adapting an idea from Cristanne Miller, this course pursues how H.D. and Moore as thinkers grappled with and commented on “questions of authority,” seeking to interrogate and move beyond expectations for female artists, and women, of their time; and developing feminist strategies by way of their engagements with “culture.” We follow their commentary on dominant cultural issues of their early twentieth-century moment: how to navigate conditions of “modernity”; how to engage issues of gender, queerness, and race; how to survive and think about war; how to think about intimacy, marriage, and family; how to find a “room of one’s own”; how to rethink the divide between human and non-human; and how to access and engage the “cultural archives” of the past toward new forms of knowledge.

Texts: Poetry and prose by Moore and H.D., including H.D., Collected Poems, Moore, New Collected Poems (Cass White); H.D., HERmione and Bid Me to Live, Moore, Collected Essays; film essays by H.D., readings by modernist colleagues such as Elizabeth Bishop, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Amy Lowell, Mina Loy, Muriel Rukeyser, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats.

Evaluation: Brief critical essays; final essay; fictional (auto)biography; participation.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Expected Student Preparation: Previous coursework in American Literature before 1900, or in 19th-century British fiction, or permission of instructor. (This course is designed as a participatory seminar for advanced students of literature—often for English majors in their final year.)

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 class 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: Seminar discussion.

Description: This seminar analyzes a range of English, French, and Irish writings from the long nineteenth century to provide insight into a number of major literary developments across the period’s prose fiction. This particular syllabus allows us to intensively explore literatures of revolution, innovations in feminist and queer literature, the origins of gothic and science fiction, the rise of nineteenth-century children’s literature, the persistence of the ghost story, the emergence of the modern fantastic tale, the return to romance, aspects of literary Darwinism, and the aesthetic and decadent turns of the fin de siècle.

Our study of nineteenth-century British literature and culture will focus on several literal and figurative forms of reproduction (and its discontents): maternity, paternity, doubles/mirrors, and doppelgängers; self-production, parthenogenesis, hauntings, and forgeries; industrialism, evolution, eugenics, and monstrosity.

This syllabus therefore neither follows a strict chronological nor historical narrative; we will not proceed from beginning to middle to end. Instead, we will examine related clusters of development within long nineteenth-century literature and culture. As a result of this seminar’s emphasis on important constellations of forms and thought, certain historical, formal, and cultural topics will recur in our reading: representations of war and imperial violence; transformations of genres and narrative styles; transnational migrations; representations of natural selection and alternative ecologies; vacillations between faith and doubt; romantic representations of exploration and adventure; authorial negotiations of posterity; meditations on mechanism and machine; critiques of tradition and innovation; and depictions of emotional and sexual intimacy.

Texts:

• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) and selected short stories
• Jane Webb (Loudon), selections from The Mummy!: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century
• Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth
• Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
• Sheridan Le Fanu, selections from In a Glass Darkly
• Bram Stoker, Dracula
• Vernon Lee, selections from Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales
• H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

Evaluation: TBA, but will include a major research essay.

Format: Seminar.

Prerequisite: This course is for advanced students. Expected preparation is 3 or 4 prior courses in English literature.

Description: Without by any means attempting to exhaust its subject, this course surveys twentieth-century Irish literature: poetry, drama, and fiction. Discussion will focus to some extent on the correlation between Irish political history and Irish literature; the two domains cannot be kept separate. To that end, we will consider the relation of the Irish Republic to Northern Ireland, as well as the relation between Britain and Ireland. “Modernity” and “postcolonial” theory will be applied, as will discussions of the “Celtic Tiger” in the 1990s and early 2000s. We will discuss form (lyric, sonnet, long poem, short story, drama, novel) and the utility that different modes of literary expression have. Works by some, if not most, of the following writers will appear on the syllabus: W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Faolain, Seamus Heaney, Brendan Behan, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett, Eavan Boland, Patrick Kavanagh, Edna O’Brien, Colm Toibin.

Texts: This list of texts is provisional and subject to change. A final selection will be made in October 2021.

• James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September
• Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls
• Colm Toibin, Blackwater Lightship
• Relevant materials posted on myCourses

Evaluation: Essays, attendance and participation, final exam.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: This course introduces students to the roles, responsibilities, and procedures of the three key management positions on a live performance’s production team: Production Manager, Stage Manager, and Technical Director. There will be a required practical component for PM, SM and TD with the Festival of Staged Readings in Moyse Hall, Department of English Director’s Projects, Arts Undergraduate Theatre Society, Tuesday Night Café theatre or another approved theatre company. Placements for the practical component will be the responsibility of each student to secure. The composition of the class will vary depending on student emphasis.

The course is organised according to a standard production schedule: from pre-production (e.g,. auditions, securing rights, professional attitude) through rehearsals (e.g., calls and postings, production agreements, dress rehearsal) to public performance (e.g., show reports, backstage supervision, front of house). Skills which may be covered include creating schedules and adapting them as necessary. We will look at overall production schedules, rehearsal schedules and production week schedules. We will take an in-depth look at each day within a production week, exploring what to expect, prepare for and who is responsible for what. We will discuss production meetings and why they are important and how to lead them productively. We will explore navigating conflict situations and how to handle these situations with respect. We will look at the industry standard organizational charts (theatre hierarchy) and each position within this structure. We will touch briefly on different agreements within the theatre industry, such as Equity, and their impact on a production.

Each student will create a production binder specific to their role (as PM, SM, or TD) in their practical component placement, which will be evaluated periodically throughout the semester. To support your theatre management work, the class will:

• create tools for this binder, such as production sections, scene breakdowns and character breakdowns;
• create templates for effective team communication such as agendas, production notes, schedules and using online applications;
• have practical sessions on blocking notation for a scene as well as how to prepare a stage management binder for calling the cues for a production;
• look at the industry protocols and standards for creating a clear and concise record of cues.

Each class will also provide an opportunity to discuss how each student’s production is progressing in a safe and non-judgemental environment in which support and collaborative solutions to any challenges being experienced can be provided.

Evaluation: Attendance and participation (15%); production binder (30%); production team assignment (20%); in class projects (15%); journal (20%).

Description: In this course, we will explore the rich and dynamic history of Black theatre and drama in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries across the United States and Canada. While we investigate what constitutes a “Black play,” we will also track the many movements, changes, and intersections that Black theatre has sustained over this period. We will transit from a Du Boisian call to make theatre “by us, for us, about us, and near us,” in the early twentieth century, to the Federal Theatre Project’s Black theatre initiatives and the pre-war movements, to historical milestones like A Raisin in the Sun’s Broadway run and the radical theatre of the Black Arts Movement; and into the contemporary moment, with African American playwrights and artists including August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Lynn Nottage, Robert O’Hara, Jeremy O. Harris, Anna Deavere Smith, and Marcus Gardley. In Canada, we will examine the works of Djanet Sears, Lorena Gale, Trey Anthony, and many others, including playwrights whose works have been staged by Montreal’s Black Theatre Workshop. Along the way, we will examine the intersections of Blackness and sexuality, gender, and class, centering the works of women and queer playwrights as well as those– like Sonia Sanchez and Adrienne Kennedy – who have in the past been excluded from Black movements but whose works deserve copious study. We will supplement our readings with embodied exercises and, where possible, trips to the theatre to see Black plays onstage.

Texts:

Plays (many available digitally through the Black Drama Database), including:

• Amiri Baraka, Dutchman; Slave Ship
• W.E.B. Du Bois, The Star of Ethiopia
• Jackie Sibblies Drury, Fairview
• Lorena Gale, Angelique
• Jeremy O. Harris, Slave Play
• Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon
• Adrienne Kennedy, Funnyhouse of a Negro
• Tarell Alvin McCraney, The Brother/Sister Plays
• Lynn Nottage, Sweat
• Robert O’Hara, Insurrection: Holding History
• Suzan-Lori Parks, The America Play; Topdog/Underdog
• Djanet Sears, Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God
• August Wilson, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone; Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom; Fences

We will supplement our readings with online secondary sources by: Sandra L. Richards; Renee Alexander Craft, Kathy Perkins; LaDonna Forsgren; Rashida Shaw McMahon; E. Patrick Johnson; Soyica Colbert; and Douglas Jones.

Evaluation: 30% short response essays; 10% theatre review; 20% presentation; 10% participation and attendance; 30% final essay.

Description: In this course we will read some contemporary memoirs – essays and books – which are structured around trauma or rupture and in particular suggest a narrative of “before and after.” These narratives inevitably stress the relationships among people and which inform that trauma. But, also, we’ll look at how the narrator creates and shapes a story or stories in relation to cultural events and life, memories, emotions, the use of theory, food, the past, metaphor, objects, images, photos, language, conceptions of the truth, story-telling, trauma itself, time, among others.

Texts (tentative): books or selections from --

• Hunger, Roxane Gay
• The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson
• Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
• Heart Berries, Terese Marie Mailhot
• A History of My Brief Body, Billy-Ray Belcourt
• The Kiss, Kathryn Harrison
• How We Fight For Our Lives, Saeed Jones
• We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir, Samra Habib
• My Meteorite or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing, Harry Dodge

Personal essays (tentative): Cyrus Grace Dunham, Junot Diaz, YiYun Li, Zadie Smith, Claudia Rankine, James Baldwin.

Films: Stories We Tell (dir. Sarah Polley); I Am Not Your Negro (dir. Raoul Peck); Waban-Aki: People From Where the Sun Rises (dir. Alanis Obomsawin)

Theoretical essays by: Roland Barthes, Ben Yagoda, Sven Birkerts, Nancy K Miller, Michel Foucault, Sidonie Smith, Blake Morrison, Julia Watson

Evaluation (tentative): 20% short weekly responses (250 words each; 10 @ 2% each); 80% two short essays (c. 2000 words each; 40% each).

Format: Lecture, discussion, screenings.

Description: This course will focus on a main figure in Canadian Inuit literature: Alootook Ipellie. His work portrays many of the effects of colonialism and his own reactions in the contemporary world. Ipellie is introverted and spiritual but also radical and outspoken in his quest for meaning in a life where he lives in “two worlds” but with “one spirit”. His work reflects what was the reality for many Canadian Inuit, since 1950.

Ipellie’s work explores these themes in a variety of formats: cartoons, drawings, political articles, poetry and essays.

Texts:

• The Diary of Abraham Ulrikab. University of Ottawa, 2005
• Arctic Dreams and Nightmares. Alootook Ipellie. Theytus Books Ltd. 1993. Available as a course pack.
  
  Diary is available at Paragraphe bookstore; Arctic Dreams will be available at the James bookstore as a course pack. Poems and articles will be distributed in class and/or on myCourses.

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: 

To read a book by an indigenous author is a step towards reconciliation.

Often times, Inuit literature is thought to be mainly legends or myths, recorded by outsiders. This course will focus on works actually written by Canadian Inuit, in a variety of formats: diary, poetry and essays, satirical and political cartoons, drawings, articles, animated films, autobiographies or short stories. It will examine some of the earliest work, but the course focuses mainly on contemporary times.

The course will also include several films that are connected to the texts.

The course will begin by looking at the diary of the first Canadian Inuit writer, Abraham Ulrikab, from Nunatsiavut. He wrote in 1880.

Saqiyuq is a collaborative life story told by three Inuit women, between 1930- 1995 in Nunavut. The three women lived the extraordinary changes that took place during these years.

Alootook Ipellie, 1951-2007, is also from Nunavut. He is an Inuit artist whose work portrays many of the effects of colonialism and his own reactions to that situation in the contemporary world. Ipellie, who is from Nunavut, is introverted and spiritual but also radical and outspoken in his quest for meaning in a life where he lives in “two worlds” but with “one spirit”. His work reflects what was and is the reality for many Canadian Inuit, since 1950. Some of his stories and cartoons will be included in the modules.

Daisy Watt remembers her youth in Nunavik in a story that will be posted on My Courses. Sheila Watt-Cloutier, her granddaughter, is also from Nunavik and writes a compelling story of the Inuit and climate change in the midst of cultural, social and political changes. Her book, The Right to be Cold portrays the contemporary world in which modern-day Inuit live. She was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize because of her work.

Evaluation: TBA

Description: In her book Woman, Native, Other, Trinh Minh-Ha criticizes the essentialism with which women from the “Third World” are treated by the West: with special readings, seminars, and workshops dedicated to the “native woman,” it is as if “everywhere we go, we become Someone’s private zoo.” Trinh’s outburst highlights the uneasy yet attractive alliances between feminists in the West and those in the rest of the world and between postcolonial studies and gender scholarship. Starting from these convergences, in this course we will discuss the differences between Western and African forms of feminism and womanism and we will trace the evolution of forms of femininity and masculinity in various colonial and neocolonial contexts in Africa. We will talk about the relationship between women and their bodies, ideas of beauty, rebellion and conformity. We will equally explore normative and subversive forms of masculinity, and the role of states in creating willing soldiers. Theoretical readings by bell hooks, Sara Suleri, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Frantz Fanon, Chimamanda Adichie and others will help us think about relations between mothers and daughters, love in a time of war, sexuality, violence inscribed on the female body, and representations of women.

Texts (preliminary list):

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Americanah
• Ama Ata Aidoo: Our Sister Killjoy
• Mark Behr: The Smell of Apples
• Tsitsi Dangarembga: Nervous Conditions
• Akwaeke Emezi: The Death of Vivek Oji
• Lewis Nkosi Mating Birds 
• Nnedi Okorafor: Binti 

Films:

• The Battle of Algiers. Dir. Gillo Pontecorvo 
• Faat Kine. Dir. Ousmane Sembene (e-video)
• Reassamblage. Dir. Trinh T. Minh-ha
• U-Carmen eKhayelitsha. Dir. Mark Dornford-May

Assessment: Essay, presentation and article review, class discussion.

Description: Sustained representations of Jews and Muslims appear frequently in Middle English drama, romance, travel writing, and other genres after 1350, though few Jews or Muslims could be found living in England in the later Middle Ages (ca. 1350-1500). In fact, the Jews had been expelled from England in 1290. Later literary representations would seem, then, to stem from knowledge of continued international religious politics or textual influences that included older characterizations from England, the European continent, Asia, and Africa. English chivalric romances often ranged geographically over the regions like the Iberian Peninsula, with its sizeable Muslim population, or took place in an imagined Roman Empire that aligned pre-Christian Roman rulers with “Saracen” (Muslim) forces, pitting them both against Christians and drawing on the fraught memory of the medieval crusades. Muslim soldiers, leaders, and women (who sometimes fight) seem to participate with Christians in a shared chivalric value system and are often praised. In these contexts, the language of what we might call “race” is bound up with questions of religious belief and conversion. Christianity in late-medieval England was also a strange beast. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries we witness the rise of a vibrant lay piety, the first complete translation of the Bible into English, and an academic heresy that spilled over the walls of the university and into the streets. Some of these developments were in turn met by a severe response that was not always consistent with attitudes on the continent. Accusations of heresy sometimes employed the language of interfaith polemic, and the lines that were drawn between heresy and non-Christian religions were not always clear.

Students in this course will study English literary representations of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity from the later Middle Ages (approximately 1350-1500). Some sessions will be spent working with original medieval manuscripts in McGill’s Rare Books and Special Collections. Most texts will be read in the original Middle English. Prior experience with Middle English is not mandatory or expected, and regular practice with the language will be included in many seminar sessions.

Texts (provisional):

• The Chester Passion Play (excerpts)
• Miracles of the Virgin
• Geoffrey Chaucer, Prioress’ Tale, Man of Law’s Tale
• The Croxton Play of the Sacrament
• The Siege of Jerusalem
• The Book of John Mandeville
• The Sultan of Babylon
• The King of Tars
• Floris and Blancheflour
• John Gower, Tale of Constance (from Confessio amantis)

Evaluation:

Analytical reading journal: 30%
Research proposal: 5%
Final research project: 35%
Translation exercises: 10%
Participation: 20%

Format: Seminar.

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. Henri Bergson’s Essay on Laughter and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice are available at The Word bookstore at 469 rue Milton.

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: All the books below contain required reading for the course. The books will be available at The Word Bookstore (469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640).

• Plato, The Apology and Related Dialogues (Broadview)
• Plato, Plato on Love (Hackett)
• Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations (Oxford, Penguin, or Hackett)
• Saint Augustine, Confessions (Hackett or Oxford)
• Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova (Oxford or Penguin)
• Benvenuto Cellini, My Life (Oxford)
• Michel de Montaigne, Essays (Hackett)
• Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (Broadview)
• Denis Diderot, The Nun (Oxford or Penguin)
• Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (Broadview)
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sufferings of Young Werther (Norton or Penguin)
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (Oxford or Penguin)
• Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (Broadview)

Evaluation: Presentations (40%), participation (10%), and a final term paper (50%). The "presentations" will consist of the submission of questions for seminar discussion. "Participation" refers to contributions to discussion and consultation about the paper topic. Insofar as possible, regular attendance is expected except when technical issues, medical problems, or other personal emergencies arise.

Format: Seminar.

Prerequisite: ENGL 230 and ENGL 269 and/or permission of the instructor.

Application procedures: Limited enrollment. Permission of instructor required. Admission to the course will be by application and interview. Please submit your written application to myrna.wyatt.selkirk [at] mcgill.ca. See below for the full description of the written application.* You will be contacted about an interview after your application is received. If your application is delayed please express your interest by e-mail.

Description: Preparation of the dramatic text for production:
1) script analysis, research, planning, 2) auditions and casting, 3) the rehearsal process (with a strong focus on the actor/director relationship and actor/actor relationship), 4)technical elements, 5) performance in a festival of short plays.

Evaluation: Class participation and attendance; Scene rehearsal and performance; Metaphor/Action Board; Research; Production Book (script analysis, and annotated script) and a journal of the entire process (including final reflections); Workshop Production

Texts:

• The Directors Eye by John Ahart (Meriwether Publishing, 2001).
• The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition by Anne Bogart and Tina Landau (Theatre Communications Group, 2005).
• Actions: The Actors' Thesaurus by Marina Caldarone (Maggie Lloyd-Williams, 2004).

*Written Application: Submit answers to the following questions to myrna.wyatt.selkirk [at] mcgill.ca.
Subject Heading of your e-mail: Directing for the Theatre Class Application. In your application please use both the number and subject for each response:

1. Directing Experience (include scenes and relevant leadership roles):
2. Acting Experience:
3. Improvisation Experience (use your imagination on this, as it may not have been named improvisation, but when have you improvised in a situation or theatrical endeavor):
4. Theatre courses taken at McGill or elsewhere:
5. Any other relevant experience:
6. What will you bring to this course? Discuss special attributes and personality traits. Talk about your ability as a collaborator.
7. What do you hope to get out of this course?
8. Expected year of graduation and Major(s) and Minor(s):
9. Have you taken ENGL 230? ENGL 269?

Prerequisites: Registration for this class is by application only. Interested students should email me at ned.schantz [at] mcgill.ca with the subject heading “application to ENGL 472” stating their interest in the course and qualifications.

Expected Student Preparation and Commitment: In most cases, students will be expected to have earned a solid “B” or better in a 300-level 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 (having said that, it will count toward the 400-level theory requirement as well as the Major Author requirement). 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: Drawing substantially upon Narrative Theory and Queer Theory, this film and lit course will attempt to chart an important cultural problematic associated with the work of Henry James, where a view of the social world as an unwelcoming and barely penetrable murk solicits a corresponding formal investment in restricted narration and the “scenic” treatment of narrative events (showing rather than telling). Pursuing this complex in the work of prominent novelists such as Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, and Kazuo Ishiguro, as well as in several films, we will consistently encounter sensitive and often underaged protagonists struggling to master situations that are saturated with the plans and desires of others. Faced with the problem of other minds in many acute forms, these characters will help us learn how to read in the fullest possible sense.

Texts: Coursepack and several novels.

Evaluation: Journals, short assignments, term paper, participation.

Format: Seminar.