400-level / Advanced Courses

Description: Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941) was one of the most important public intellectuals of British India. He produced a vast canon comprising poems, songs, novels, plays, short stories, dance dramas as well as paintings and sketches in addition to critical essays on colonialism, nationalism, aesthetics, education, and culture inspiring the label of – as one of his biographies suggest – the “myriad-minded man.” In this course we will examine a selection from Tagore’s diverse and extensive corpus of poetry, novels, plays, and essays, reading them in relation to his historical context of colonial India. By examining how Tagore works with, and brings together, Indian and European literary forms, philosophies, and conceptions of art and aesthetics in his works, we will ask how Tagore’s works embody the socio-cultural processes underlying the Indo-British colonial encounter of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will also engage with some of the central concerns in his works, namely, women’s equality, the critique of caste and religious fundamentalism, anti-colonialism, nationalism and the role of education and literature in a (post)colonial society. Finally, we will also explore how Tagore was viewed by his Indian and European contemporaries and his legacy in contemporary South Asia.

Texts: 

• Novels: Home and the World, Farewell Song
• Plays: The Post Office, The Red Oleanders
• Essays: “The Religion of Man”, “The Crisis of Civilization”
• Selections from his poems, short stories, letters.
• Satyajit Ray (dir): Home and the World

Evaluation: Attendance and participation: 15%; short essay: 15%; midterm: 30%; final paper: 40%

Format: Lectures and discussion

Description: In the early 1860s, a new genre of fiction captivated and shocked Victorian readers. Termed “the Sensation genre” in response to the physiological responses it stirred (palpitating hearts, chills down the spine) as well as its engagement with cultural controversies, this genre features bigamous wives, secret twins, illegitimate children, and criminal plots in that most unlikely setting, the private and overtly peaceful family home.

In this course we’ll read a number of sensation novels from the 1860s and 1870s, as well as some later novels that sustain or recover sensational plots and narrative techniques. We will also study the critical and popular reception of the genre in an investigation of fiction’s contentious and focal place in culture. 

Texts: 

• Collins, The Woman in White
• Wood, East Lynne
• Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife
• Trollope, Cousin Henry
• Moore, Esther Waters
• Du Maurier, Rebecca

Evaluation: Attendance and participation: 20%; cumulative web postings : 25%; essay: 25%; final exam: 30%

Format: Lectures and weekly conferences

Expected Student Preparation: previous university courses in English literature.

Description: Alice Munro deserves her reputation as one of Canada’s great writers. Through ordinary settings and characters and an accessible prose style, she nevertheless conveys insights that arrive with the force of shock. Her chosen genre, the short story, is now connected to her name perhaps as indissolubly 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, gender studies, and the postmodern mingling of fact, memory, and fiction. 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 (Penguin)
• Lives of Girls and Women (Penguin)
• Who Do You Think You Are? (Penguin)
• The Progress of Love (Penguin)
• Friend of My Youth (Penguin)
• Open Secrets (Penguin)
• The View from Castle Rock (Penguin)
• Too Much Happiness (Penguin)

Evaluation: short essay (3 pp.): 20%; medium essay (5 pp.): 30%; long essay (10 pp.): 40%; participation: 10%

Format: lecture and discussion

Description: Canadian modernist writing has been read through successive critical and theoretical paradigms: at first for its major themes, which were chiefly of interest at the time if they supported a nationalist cultural agenda; later for its emulation and development of a number of Anglo-American and European modernist aesthetics, forms, and styles (such work has preoccupied the present instructor); and, most recently, for the special textual and editorial problems underpinning its canonical decline.  As a period and body of Canadian writing, our modernism has never been taken to articulate a significant strand of Canadian ethical consciousness, nor, indeed, to have significant philosophical content of any kind.  This course will constitute an effort to re-direct Canadian modernist literary studies towards philosophical questions and to clarify the complexity of the writers’ intellectual heritage and gravity.

In discussion we will seek to articulate the often conflicting notions of “the good,” of “human excellence,” and of “the well-lived life” that Canadian modernist writers take for granted, suppose, represent, critique, and urge in their poetic and fictional works.  We will take our methodological cues primarily from readings in the work of Wayne Booth, Martha Nussbaum, and Marshall Gregory, not only to familiarize ourselves with such key concepts as “moral luck” but also to respond to their common demand for and defence of ethical approaches to the study of literature.  None of the three attends extensively to poetry, but we will address Canadian modernist poetry on an equal footing in the course, on the hypothesis that a typically non-narrative, impersonal, fragmented poetics may speak with particular acuteness to the author’s philosophical concerns.  While this cannot be a course per se in modernist poetics, we will work continually to understand the ways in which poetic and novelistic form can further, and/or can call into question, the apparent ethical interests of given personae, characters, narrators, and authors.  It will be our constant challenge to disentangle the ethical notions we explicate in our discussions of poetry and fiction from the notion of authorial intention, but in the process we will hope to arrive at a more complex model of authorial intention that is not reducible to a single conscious impulse moving each literary work to hermeneutic closure.

Because substantial attention will be paid to poetic and fictional form and style, this advanced course’s discussions will be directed chiefly to U2 and U3 English Literature majors who have completed the required Poetics course (ENGL 311).  Students in all other programs must have my permission to register; registration on Minerva alone does not guarantee you a place in this course.  This course is not open to U1 students.  A prior course in modernism and/or in Canadian modern literature would be helpful background preparation.

Texts: TBA, but drawing six to eight authors from:

• Buckler, Ernest.  The Mountain and the Valley. (1952)
• Cohen, Leonard.  Beautiful Losers. (1966)
• Dudek, Louis.  Infinite Worlds: Selected Poems.
• Glassco, John.  Selected Poems.
• Grove, Frederick Philip.  Fruits of the Earth. (1933)
• ---. The Master of the Mill. (1944)
• Klein, A.M.  The Second Scroll. (1951)
• ---.  Selected Poems.
• Layton, Irving.  Selected Poems 1945-1989: A Wild Peculiar Joy.
• Livesay, Dorothy.  The Self-Completing Tree: Selected Poems.
• Page, P.K.  Kaleidoscope [Selected Poems].
• Pratt, E.J.  Selected Poems.
• Scott, F.R.  Collected Poems.
• Smart, Elizabeth.  By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. (1945)
• Smith, A.J.M.  The Complete Poems of A.J.M. Smith.
• Watson, Sheila.  The Double Hook. (1959)
• Webb, Phyllis.  Selected Poems: The Vision Tree.
• Wilson, Ethel.  The Equations of Love. (1952)

Evaluation: Essay, 8 pages, 25%; essay, 12 pages, 35%; formal or take-home final examination, 30%; participation in class discussions, 10%.  Please note before registering for this course: I assess active participation in discussion and not attendance.  Full attendance through the semester without speaking will earn 0/10 in this category and substantially affect your final grade). Evaluation may alter ac­cording to class size.

Format: Lecture and substantial discussion

Average Enrolment: 32 students

Description: A detailed consideration of the works of six major Canadian poets whose work came to prominence after 1975: Anne Carson, Lynn Crosbie, Robert Kroetsch, Michael Ondaatje, Patrick Lane, and Karen Solie. This course is designed for students who are interested in contemporary poetry, Canadian literature, and the making of Canadian culture. The poems under study allow us to explore ideas about gender, genre, race, agency, and differing concepts of poetic form. They also allow us to look into the beautifully warped minds of criminals, eccentrics, artists, punkers, hangmen, homicide victims, mythological artists, and “those  / who sail to that perfect edge / where there is no social fuel,” to quote Ondaatje. We will examine the career of each poet in detail and read selections from the poet’s entire body of work. Students are encouraged to explore multi-media material related to each poet in question. The writing component of the course (frequent short essays but no term papers or exams) is designed to improve interpretive abilities and to encourage creative forms of critical expression. Students enrolling in this course should be prepared to write short essays on a weekly basis, and to participate actively in class discussion.

Texts: 

• Carson, Anne. Autobiography of Red (Vintage)
• Crosbie, Lynn. Queen Rat (Anansi)
• Kroetsch, Robert. Completed Field Notes (U of Alberta Press)
• Lane, Patrick. Witness (Harbour)
• Ondaatje, Michael. The Cinnamon Peeler (M & S)
• Solie, Karen. Modern and Normal (Anansi)

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

Format: Lectures and discussions

Average Enrolment: 25 students

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

Description: This course will offer a selective survey of Quebecois drama, theatre, and performance from the 1960s 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 dramatic tradition, being careful to read them in light of the shifting performance and social contexts.  The class will be framed by an opening consideration the role institutionalization, professionalization, and nationalism played on Quebecois theatre’s efflorescence in the 1960s and 70s and by a closing unit on Quebec performance’s place on the international stage.  In between we will read (and view, where possible) plays by established as well as up-and-coming playwrights, some of whom will be invited to discuss their work with us.  Units of study may include some of the following:  the language question on the Quebec stage; the theatre of images; corporeal dramaturgies; feminist theatrics; queer drama; representations of the self and the other; popular performance.  Wherever possible, and depending on the theatrical season’s offerings, we will go to see contemporary Quebec theatre together. 

Texts: In addition to a course-pack available at the McGill Bookstore, other texts may include:

• Louise H. Forsyth, Anthology of Quebec Women’s Plays in English Translation. Vol 3, 2004-8
• Larry Tremblay, The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi
• Michel Tremblay, Les belles-soeurs
• Nathalie Claude, The Salon automaton
• Marianne Ackerman, L’Affaire Tartuffe
• Wajdi Mouawad, Incendies
• Abla Farhoud, When I Was Grown Up, or The Girls from the 5-and-10
• Michel-Marc Bouchard, Lilies
• Normand Chaurette, Provincetown Playhouse 1919
• Louisette Dussault, Mummy
• Broue / Brew

Evaluation: Participation (15%); Group Presentation (25%); Short paper (20%); Final Research paper (40%)

Format: Lectures and discusssions

Enrollment Cap: 30

Expected Preparation: Students are expected to have the background provided by Survey of English Literature 1 (English 202) or 2 (English 203), Poetics (English 311), or previous work with poetry.

Description: Until the 1980s, the canon associated with modern anglophone poetry, established by mid-twentieth-century critical work, was 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 critical consensus, now problematized but still influential, largely overlooked many women who had contributed crucially to the development of modern poetry. Between 1900 and 1960, however, many women were actively engaged in the effort to revolutionize anglophone poetry: within early twentieth-century literary circles, their work was esteemed, and they fulfilled pivotal cultural roles. This course offers extensive consideration of the women that Bonnie Kime Scott has called the “forgotten and silenced makers” of modern poetry. We will examine how women shaped the development of modern poetry not only as poets, but also as critics, patrons, publishers, and editors. And as we engage their work, we will also consider how recent scholarship and criticism has sought to redress the historical record, return them to attention, and acknowledge their achievements.

We begin by reviewing a range of examples of how women are figured in well-known modern poetry—to discern some of the roles for and assumptions about women inscribed in poetic work of this period. We then move to the work of poets such as H.D., Gertrude Stein, Amy Lowell, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Stevie Smith, Muriel Rukeyser, Dorothy Livesay, P.K. Page, and Elizabeth Bishop. We will also consider the work of women editors of little avant-garde magazines, such as Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson of Poetry, and Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap of The Little Review: these were editors who published the work of aspiring, experimental modern poetry when mainstream magazines were refusing it, often thereby helping to launch the careers of many poets now considered dominant among the moderns.

As we focus on women poets, in addition to reckoning closely with their poetry, which often involves the many forms of “difficulty” associated with modern poetry, we will also engage from a literary-historical angle their contributions to the “making of modern poetry”: we will address, for example, H.D.’s vital (and hitherto unacknowledged) 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 fraught 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.

Texts: Readings will 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: Brief critical analysis (5-6 pp., 20%), Book review (3 pp., 20%), fictional autobiography (4 pp., 15%), final essay (8-9 pp., 30%), participation (15%)

Format: Lectures and discussions

Description: The 20^th century saw an outpouring of fiction about the Christian or Jewish messiah. This work variously imagines the contemporary arrival of a messiah, retells the story of Jesus Christ or of false Jewish Messiah Sabbatai Zevi, studies the messianic differences between Judaism and Christianity, and expresses an impatience for the Messiah’s arrival. What accounts for this abundant fiction? For the answer, we will consider the theological underpinnings of Jewish and Christian messianism and study major 20^th-century concerns such as the World Wars, the Holocaust, immigration, assimilation, political movements (Zionism, Socialism, Communism, Fascism), race relations, and the conflict or compatibility between Christianity and Judaism. Some poetry and film will complement the fiction.

Texts: 

• Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
• Shalom Asch, The Nazarene
• Jacob Kastein, The Messiah of Ismir
• Arthur A. Cohen, In the Days of Simon Stern
• Cynthia Ozick, The Messiah of Stockholm
• A.M. Klein, The Second Scroll
• Paul Beatty, The White Boy Shuffle
• Coursepack

Evaluation: 

• Participation in class discussion: 15%
• 5 500-word responses to course reading, posted at MyCourses in discussion forum: 20%
• Paper 1 (4-5 page close reading): 25%
• Paper 2 (10-12 page research paper): 40%

Format: Lectures and discussions 

Description: Shakespeare’s time saw an efflorescence of historical writing, including works on classical and modern history, global histories such as Walter Ralegh’s History of the World (1614), translations of the historical writings of Antiquity and modern Italy and France, local histories and “chorographies,” and studies of historical method. History played a central role in the polemical struggles of the English Reformation, with a work such as John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of the English Church (1563), arguing for the apostolic primacy of the England itself. Perhaps most important were the many histories of England, like those by Raphael Holinshed, Edward Hall, and Samuel Daniel, which inculcated national pride, aroused a sense of civic belonging, and cultivated habits of critical, political analysis of the past and the present.

The theatre played a vital role in telling the story of England to the English. Shakespeare’s history plays and the historical dramas of many of this fellow playwrights shaped the historical consciousness of very many English men and women (many of them commoners and many illiterate), sharpened their political intelligence, and contributed to the formation of the political culture of modernity. In the course we will focus on Shakespeare’s English histories and also read and think about a number of other history plays by writers such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Dekker.  We will consider history writing in other forms including prose, poetry, and visual image. We will work toward an understanding of how dramatic history helped write the nation and also how it helped create a new public culture in early modern England.

Texts: Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s plays are available at Paragraphe Bookstore. All other texts will be in electronic form.

• Richard II, ed. Anthony Dawson and Paul Yachnin (Oxford, 2011)
• Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Oxford, 2008)
• King John, ed. Claire McEachren (Pelican, 2000)
• Henry IV, Part I, ed. David Bevington  (Oxford, 2008)
• Henry IV, Part 2, ed. Rene Weis (Oxford, 2008)
• Henry VI, Part Two, ed. Roger Warren (Oxford, 2003)
• Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford, 1982; rpt. 2008)
• Henry VIII, ed. Jay L. Halio (Oxford, 1999; rpt 2008)
• Cymbeline, ed. Roger Warren (Oxford, 2008)
• John Bale, King Johan
• Anon, Sir John Oldcastle
• Thomas Middleton, Hengist, King of Kent
• Short readings: Samuel Daniel, Raphael Holinshed, Mirror for Magistrates, John Foxe

Evaluation: 

• Four reading responses (1 page double-spaced each) 20
• Participation 15
• Final paper 45
• Presentation (3 pages) 20

Format: Lectures, presentations, discussion

Expected Student Preparation: ENGL 311 Poetics and previous university courses in English, ideally in American literature

Description: This course considers a selection of twentieth-century prose texts (novels, short stories, and essays) written by and/or about Americans abroad. Expatriates and tourists, adventurers and wanderers, journalists and soldiers, ambassadors and exiles, these travellers look back at customs of their own country with the perspective afforded by distance. Travel can both stabilize and destabilize personal and national identity. What do Americans learn about themselves from their travels abroad? How do American writers expose the flaws or promote the virtues of America in their narratives? How do representations of Americans abroad change over the course of a century in which America’s economic, military, and cultural power increased dramatically? With our writers and their characters, we will explore the globe, visiting countries such as France, Italy, Belgium, Romania, Spain, Greece, Morocco, Nigeria, Vietnam, Japan, Indonesia, India, Cuba, and Mexico. As well as considering the historical and ideological realities of the twentieth century that have influenced international perspectives on America and shaped Americans’ own self-image, we will study the cultural movements and trends that inspired the tone and form of the novels.

Texts: 

• Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country (1913)
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night (1934)
• James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room (1956)
• Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)
• Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers (1974)
• Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted (1996)
• Bharati Mukherjee, The Middleman and Other Stories (1988)
• Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011)

Additional short stories and critical readings to be posted on myCourses.

Evaluation: 

• Critical Article Review (15%)
• Short Creative Assignment (10%)
• Short Essay, 6-8 pages (25%)
• Final Essay, 8-10 pages (35%)
• Participation in class (15%)

Format: Lectures and discussion

Average Enrolment: 30 students

Description: In early 1987, the police in Kenya were searching for an activist called Matigari, who was stirring the peasantry and the workers with his demands for truth and justice. Matigari, however, existed only as the protagonist of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novel of the same title—an embarrassing discovery for the police that turned them against the book and its author.  This anecdote attests to the transformative powers of literature within the social and political realms, especially in a postcolonial context.

One of the giants of African literature, author of numerous novels, plays, collections of essays, a prison diary, and children’s literature, Ngugi has influenced contemporary debates on postcolonial literature and globalization, the role of leftist esthetics, decolonization and neo-colonialism, the language(s) of African literature, nationalism and literary production, oral literature and its audience in the era of the internet and, more recently, the concept of “poor theory.” The questions he raises in his works resonate with those posed by other postcolonial intellectuals so that to read them is to discuss cultural dilemmas representative of the past 50 years around the world. We will read a selection of his works in tandem with essays by Chinua Achebe, Kwame Nkrumah, Molara Ogundipe Leslie, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Gayatri Spivak, Karl Marx, Georg Lukacs, Raymond Williams, Simon Gikandi and others.

Texts: N.B. The final list of readings will be available by the end of October 1014. You are encouraged to start reading before the beginning of classes in January 2015.

• Coursepack
• Novels: A Grain of Wheat, Petals of Blood, Devil of the Cross, Matigari, Wizard of the Crow 
• Essay collections: Decolonizing the Mind, Writers in Politics, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing

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

Format: Lectures and discussions

This course will allow students to undertake special projects, frequently involving background readings, performances, and essays. 

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.
• Permission must be obtained from the Department before registration.

Application Deadlines:

Application Form (Also available in the Students Affairs Office, Arts Building, Room 155)

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. Against this background the readings will include not only “real” autobiographies but also contributions of first-person narrative to philosophy as well as fiction in the “long” eighteenth century (1650-1850). Reference to classic models such as Plato’s Apology, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, and Saint Augustine’s Confessions should help us appreciate intellectual developments and problems in the motivation and methods of later writing in autobiographical form. In particular, we will relate these models to the emergence of the novel, which, insofar as it represents and reflects on inner experience, cannot be understood without taking into account the conventions of spiritual autobiography and the presuppositions of the construction of selfhood in other forms of first-person storytelling such as dramatic monologue, letter writing, and the diary. Although much work in this seminar will concentrate on the interpretation of particular autobiographical narratives, we will thus constantly be concerned with general theoretical issues. The historical range of our primary readings should provide a meaningful basis for addressing such issues while the written work for the course will invite careful thinking about critical concepts through focused analysis of the texts that we will study and discuss.

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, 845-5640). (The list of texts below is tentative and incomplete, to be confirmed in January 2015.)

• St. Augustine, Confessions (Hackett or Oxford)
• Benvenuto Cellini, My Life (Oxford)
• John Bunyan, Grace Abounding (Oxford)
• Daniel Defoe, Roxana (Broadview or Oxford)
• Denis Diderot, The Nun (Oxford)
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sufferings of Young Werther (Norton)
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (Oxford)
• Benjamin Constant, Adolphe (Oxford or Penguin)

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

Format: Seminar discussions

Prerequisite: No formal prerequisite; however, familiarity with classical and/or Renaissance literature, the mythological tradition, is an asset. 

Description: One of the most famous of all mythological heroes, Hercules is also the most complex: the legendary worker who saves the world from monsters and even harrows hells is also a cross-dresser, mad man, and murderer, who kills his own family and himself meets a tortured and fiery end.  While political rulers have often used Hercules as an icon for authority, law and order, many artists have been interested in exposing the anti-social nature of this figure. In this course we will consider broadly the cultural and social uses of myth by looking at some of the conflicting treatments of this contradictory hero, first in classical works, and then in the later verbal and visual art of the Renaissance.

Texts: (some of these, as well as supplemental readings, will be available on Mycourses):

• Sophocles, Women of Trachis
• Euripides, Herakles
• Apollonius of Rhodes, Voyage of the Argos
• Virgil, Aeneid (Book 8)
• Ovid, Metamorphoses (9,12)
• Spenser, Faerie Queene 5
• Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra
• Jonson, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue
• Milton, Samson Agonistes
• John Dryden, All for Love

Evaluation: 2 papers; 2 class presentations; final take-home exam; participation

Format: Lectures

Description: Attending to the material culture of the Middle Ages allows us to think of literature not just in terms of style (and the hierarchies of aesthetics that accompany such an approach), but also in terms of the materials that mediate texts to us and that conditioned the circumstances in which medieval texts were produced, read, and circulated in the first place. At the same time, we can study the ways that medieval people “read” the material world around them and expressed themselves in terms of the material. What happens when we read The Book of John Mandeville alongside medieval maps? How was medieval documentary culture taken up for poetic purposes? And how do print and digital editions condition our own interactions with medieval texts in different ways? The course will be organized around several general categories including: “Travel and Collecting”; “Geography and Landscape”; “Piety and Material Culture”; “Literature and Documentary Culture”; “Working with Medieval Manuscripts”; “Medieval Materials in Early Modern and Modern Hands”; and “Antiquarianism and the Modern Archive”. A primary aim of this course will be to introduce students to the study of original materials from the Middle Ages.

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: 

a) Mid-term essay: 25%
b) Final research essay with transcription project: 50% (transcription worth 10% of total)
c) Rare books session response papers (x2): 10% (5% each)
d) in-class translation: 5%
e) Participation: 10%

Format: Lectures and discussions

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

Description: We will read the major dramatic theories concerned with the production, management, or solicitation of feeling and a play to which we might connect those theories in each unit of study.  Students will conduct research into topics of special interest and present their findings to the class. During each unit, we will devote a session to putting the theory into practice through focussed scene-work, dramaturgical exercises, and/or acting exercises. 

 Units may include:

• Sturm und drang (Schiller’s The Robbers)
• Romanticism (Joanna Baillie’s Plays on the Passions)
• Melodrama
• Musical theatre
• Stanislavski technique: feeling and identification
• Cognitive science approaches to feeling and acting

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

Evaluation: Reading Journal (30%); Praxis session (30%); Discussion Prompts (10%); Research Paper (30%)

Format: lecture, discussion, and practical work

Enrollment Cap: 30 

Description: An in depth analysis and investigation of dramatic text(s) as well as study of the playwright(s) and their context. This course will involve a very physical approach to acting.  The course will culminate in a production in March of 2015. Actors and Actor/Directors will be admitted.  This course is an extremely large time commitment with a great deal of rehearsal and preparation outside of class time.

Texts: 

• The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition. Anne Bogart and Tina Landau. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2005.
• Playscript(s): TBA

Evaluation: Class participation and attendance (attendance is mandatory) 15%; Compositions 10%; November Presentation 10%; Research Paper 15%; March Production: Compositions, Engagement. Development, Rehearsals, Performances 30%; Journals, Reflections, Critiques 20%

Format: Warm-ups; discussion; improvisation; movement and voice exercises; text interpretation; viewpoints; presentation of research; scene work; oral presentations and rehearsals for a March Production.

Expected Student Preparation: Previous university-level courses in drama and theatre, literature, or cultural studies of the kind that have taught you how to undertake original research and disseminate your interpretations of that research by various means.

Description: This line from the distinguished American stage and screen actress, Ethel Barrymore, sums up in a witty fashion the complex subject who is at the front and centre of this research seminar: "For an actress to be a success, she must have the face of Venus, the brains of Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of Macaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros."

There are literally hundreds of biographies of and autobiographies by actresses. There is a large body of scholarly and non-scholarly literature on the history of the actress, on the lives, times, and careers of individual actresses, and on how the actress has been re/ presented in diverse ways, some of which are contradictory, paradoxical, and bogus.

There are plays and films in which actresses are traduced, celebrated, venerated, and demonized.

There are novels in which actresses (or their surrogates) are major and minor characters, frequently involved not only in acting but in acts of theatrical self-fashioning.

In so many of these works, the actress is mimesis-in-action, portrayed as a whore or as an angel or as somebody in-between, a hybrid, liminal, protean, threatening and / or comforting figure, often a Jungian archetype, a bewitching figure haunting, and haunted by, a dream grotto, someone 'made up' rather than 'real.'

There remains, however, so much more to learn about the actress: not only about her ever-shifting complexly gendered "iconic" status—and why, how, and to what ends it is constructed / has been constructed to create sexuality, identity, image, and re/ presentation--but also about the material conditions which she has faced and continues to face as she has sought to create or been forced to assume that iconic status.

These conditions include training (both in formal acting programs and as tyros on the stage), actually getting work and being properly paid, being chosen and not chosen for particular (ideally star) roles, experimenting with innovative interpretations and sometimes subversive, sometimes conventional styles of performance, working within an ensemble, recognizing her perhaps ascendant position within a long genealogy of performance traditions, making or not making the transition from silent film to sound film, developing a repertoire defining the singularity of her persona both on and off the stage, wooing her fans, becoming and not becoming a sex symbol, dealing with both popular and specialist criticism, going into management as a practical act of agency, touring both at home and abroad, contesting social, family, and social stigmas, challenging racism and white-only casting and anti-theatrical hostility, struggling through the difficulties of aging, including the devastating impact of memory loss, and problematically achieving iconic autonomy and emancipation in a theatrical world often dominated by men exercising patriarchal principles and practices. And this is just a short list of some of those material conditions.

This is an advanced research seminar which will allow you the opportunity to engage in research into primary and secondary sources—memoirs and biographies, photographs and drawings, indeed all types of iconographic material, performance reviews, histories of the theatre, plays, films, and novels, the growing catalogue of scholarly work about the figure of the actress, etc.—with the following interrelated objectives, among others:

• To interpret the multiple significances of these different kinds of sources
• To rethink the functions, forms, and limitations of extant scholarship about the actress
• To reconsider the functions, forms, and, in some cases, the ideological and perhaps hidden agendas of the signifying codes in artistic representations of the actress
• To expand our collective understanding of why, how, and to what effects the actress has functioned, continues to function, in society as both a complex, mobile heterogeneous sign system and as a working woman
• To enable all members of the seminar to undertake original research and to develop original scholarly analysis
• To learn about the careers of individual actresses and about movements of actresses
• To learn about performance genealogies; the stage history of a given role and how actresses have situated themselves in relation to that stage history, both in interpreting it and in executing it
• To come to an understanding, in a preliminary way, of the material conditions of actresses' performances
• To develop effective ways by which to analyze the work of actresses within socio-political, historical, aesthetic, geographic, broadly cultural, and gendered contexts

Texts: 

• The Cambridge Companion to the Actress, ed. Maggie B. Gale and John Stokes (Cambridge UP, 2007)

Films: 

• Stage Beauty (2004), written by Jeffrey Hatcher, directed by Richard Eyre
• The Lives of Others / Das Leben der Anderen  (2006),  written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Evaluation (tentative): Continuing full participation in the intellectual life of the seminar 15%; an annotated and / or written-out 'bibliographic / methodologies' report: 15%; a presentation on an actress or group of actresses, analytical and issue-related: 30%; a scholarly essay on an individually-negotiated topic in connection with our subject in the order of 15 to 20 pages: 40%.

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

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

Description: This course enhances skills already acquired by addressing the demands of public performance.  Units of work will be based on diverse theatrical periods before 1900 and will involve study of some of the major European and North American acting theories and practices.  Scenes and poems will be analyzed and explored in a variety of ways in an effort to understand and own the text.  The needs of individual students will be addressed in terms of acting and interpretive skills.  Students will be introduced to the skills needed to speak verse and other heightened language.

Texts: 

• Five Approaches to Acting by David Kaplan (West Broadway Press, 2001).
• Actions: The Actors' Thesaurus by Marina Caldarone, Maggie Lloyd-Williams, 2004.
• Play texts TBA.

Evaluation (tentative): Attendance and Participation; Scenes and Presentations; Written Analysis, Journals and Research. 

Format: Text interpretation; voice and movement exercises; background research; scene and sonnet work; warm-ups; discussion; presentations.

Limited enrollment: Password required. See Professor Selkirk for permission. Sign-up sheets for interviews will be on the door of Arts 240 in early April.

Prerequisite: None. This is an upper-level seminar intended for an audience of advanced undergraduates with a high degree of interest in cinema studies.

Description: This seminar will focus on a selection of topics central to the philosophical study of cinema.  Those first and foremost among these pertain to the nature of cinema.  Here we encounter deep and, for the most part, intractable puzzles about the definitions of such key concepts as "cinema," "film," and "medium."  We also tangle with perennial questions about what, if anything, makes movies different from works in all other art forms and whether cinema has a distinct nature or essence.  The standard descriptions of cinema's nature--as representation of reality, as the production of illusion, or as signifying system--shall be surveyed and evaluated in light of more recent statements about cinema's ontology.  Another of our focal concerns will be cinematic narration.  We'll examine in detail the arguments over what differentiates cinematic from literary narration, how unreliable cinematic narration is possible, whether cinematic narrators per se exist, and what or who is the executive source of the narration. Against various theories evoking the shadowy being of a grand imagier, I will make a case for believing that only certain movies have something analogous to a literary narrator and that only an actual "cinematic agent" can be the presenter, the proximal source, of the story.  Throughout our seminar, we'll also take heed of some recent and provocative statements about what sorts of contributions cinema might itself make to philosophical thought.

Texts: A selection of recent readings drawn from the area of philosophy of film, including essays from Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga, eds., The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (2009); Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi, eds., Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures (2006); Richard Allen and Murray Smith, eds., Film Theory and Philosophy (1997).  These articles will be available in a photocopied course pack.

Evaluation: A term paper; seminar participation

Format: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisites: Students taking this course should be proficient in film analysis, and should have taken Introduction to Film Studies, and either Introduction to Cultural Studies, Poetics of the Image, or another Film elective course.

 Description: This course takes an in-depth look at the brief, furiously prolific career of German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982).  The enfant terrible of New German Cinema, Fassbinder was also its most innovative practitioner. Working at breakneck speed, Fassbinder made forty-four films in fourteen years, all of which ruthlessly attack German bourgeois norms and values. Exploring the political and social contradictions of a society recently emerged from the devastation of the second world war, Fassbinder’s films interrogate his own, and the nation’s, attempt to come to terms with fascism.

This course looks at more than a dozen of Fassbinder’s most important films, including The Marriage of Maria Braun, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Lola, Veronika Voss, Lili Marleen, and In the Year of Thirteen Moons.

In addition to copious reading in critical theory, Germany history, Fassbinder’s cinema, and queer & gender theory, there is a required screening every week. Students who cannot attend the screening should not take the course.

Texts include readings by:

• Antonin Artaud
• Bertolt Brecht
• Gilles Deleuze
• Julia Kristeva
• Peter Brooks
• Thomas Elsaesser
• Kaja Silverman
• Douglas Crimp
• Judith Butler
• Richard Dyer
• Joyce Rheuban
• Judith Mayne

Films To Be Screened:

• The Marriage of Maria Braun
• The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
• Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
• Katzelmacher
• Fox and His Friends
• The American Soldier
• The Merchant of Four Seasons
• Martha
• Lola
• Veronika Voss
• Effi Briest
• Lili Marleen
• In the Year of Thirteen Moons
• Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven
• The Third Generation

Evaluation: Attendance and Participation: 15%; midterm: 20%; Final Exam: 25%; Final Paper: 40%

Format: Lecture, discussion, and mandatory screening

 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 three of the more striking tendencies in recent fiction—the time-manipulation narrative, the multi-plot melodrama, and the inward turning meta-narrative—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 The Double Life of Veronique, Memento, Primer, Before the Rain. Possible novels include First Light, Life After Life, The Intuitionist.

Text: coursepack of narrative theory

Evaluation: 

• film journals 35%
• paper proposal 5%                
• term paper 40%
• participation 20%

Format: Seminar

Average Enrollment: 30 students

Prerequisite: None, but students should have completed at least one introductory theatre course such as ENGL 230.

Description:  This course will explore scenographic practices and theatrical architecture from the opening of the Patent theatres in 1660 until the turn of the 20thC.  While looking at the evolution of stage design over two centuries students will learn how to read theatrical scenery, how to discuss it, and how to write about it.  What is the linkage between scenery and narrative? How does stage scenery convey information? What is the relationship between ludic space and scenic space?

Topics will include:

• The advent of moveable scenery and the English Baroque stage
• Understanding perspective elevations
• The importance of stage lighting
• Italian innovations
• Neo-classicism
• The Gothic and Romantic pictorial stages
• Sensation scenery
• Realism and Expressionism
• Adolph Appia, Edward Gordon Craig and the New Theatre
• Stage machinery

Texts: Course pack available at the McGill Bookstore

Evaluation: Attendance and participation 15%; Two short class presentations 10% each; Short paper 15%; Final paper 50%

Format: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisite: None.

Description: Costumes do not exist in a vacuum.  They are a response to social and political factors specific to the era in which they were created.  They are inextricably linked to the art and architecture of their day as they are to the current political and moral beliefs.  A micro mini skirt comments on the sexual mores of the 1960’s as succinctly as any treatise on sexual liberation.  The structure of this course will alternate between instructor information and student response.  In the first half of the three hour block, the instructor will present the costume history of each specific era through slide format, example pieces, and embodied learning.  In the second half of the class, students will present their oral projects which respond to the specific era.  They will answer questions such as:  What is the common aesthetic between furniture and clothing design of the Victorian era (or “How the heck did they sit down in that”?).  How does the music of the 1920’s effect dance, and in turn, clothing styles? How do the political and economic realities of the day impact upon the clothing of the 1930’s?  

Texts: None required.  All course materials on mycourses.

Evaluation: Attendance and participation: 10%, short written analysis: 10%, two presentations: 20% each, two quizzes: 10% each,  final paper or project: 20%

Format:  One three hour block weekly, divided equally into

1. Instructor led slides, demonstrations, information, and discussion of the clothing of each era.
2. Student led oral presentations contextualizing clothing through the impact of art, architecture, music, dance, historical context and more.

Average Enrollment: 25 students maximum

Description: Janet Malcolm is a contemporary author and essayist who has written on a number of topics, from photography to psychoanalysis to journalism, among others. In this course will place her non-fiction in the context of considerations of what it means to be a public intellectual, i.e., one who writes for an educated public on questions inflected by ideological concerns. The public intellectual writes without the constraints of academic prose and argumentation yet there is scholarly emphasis on processes of reading and writing; the role of the author and authority; writing as a public activity; the role of the critic and self-criticism; matters of principle and matters of judgement, among others. Our focus is on what Malcom isolates for discussion and how she does this. 

Texts: from the following (with brief descriptions)

• In the Freud Archives (1985): covers the intellectual and administrative changes at the Freud archives in London, and the take-over by Jeffrey Masson.  Malcolm’s comments about Masson’s were challenged by Masson in a court of law.  That court case spurred Malcolm’s interest in another legal dispute in which a convicted murderer sued the journalist who had written a ‘true-crime’ account of the case. 
• The Journalist and the Murderer (1990): Malcolm’s concerns are the inevitable (as she sees it) lack of ethics in the journalistic enterprise and the delicate, intimate, vexed and sometimes fraught relationship between writer and subject (human or otherwise).
• Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1982): psychoanalysis – particularly Freudian – is offered as the companion and antidote to the “instability of human knowledge.”    Questions of truth and the vanity of authenticity were posed in Malcolm’s New Yorker essays, assembled in her first book,
• Diana and Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography (1980): Questions of truth and the vanity of authenticity--  Malcolm investigates the relationship between art and the visual medium of photography and one of the binding themes is the contradiction between display, concealment and disavowal, as well as the provenance of value.
• Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007): her project is the writing of the self, the self-as-other, and the unknowns at the center of the “koan of autobiography.”  Malcolm begins by writing about Gertrude Stein and her sketch morphs into a consideration of Alice B. Toklas, Stein’s partner (in various senses).
• Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial (2011): Malcolm herself covers the trial of a woman accused of murdering her husband in the presence of their young child and has to arrive at conclusions based on the evidence offered, evidence conjectured and evidence concealed: what constitutes evidence in the presentation of an autobiographical and legal narrative?   Malcolm places the accused ‘on the couch’ and listens: with an ear for cadence, motive, deception, fear, denial and possibly innocence.
• The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1994): Malcolm attempts a biography of Plath’s life that is attentive to the tropes of biographical writing. 
• Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (2001), the biographical subject is read through the writer’s re-tracing of Chekhov’s life in Yalta and recognition of the ‘local’ focus of his stories: Malcolm is acutely attentive to Chekhov’s own writing of, and from, states of emotional exile.  

Evaluation (tentative): attendance and participation: 20%; précis of books: 50%; discussion paper 30%

Format:  Lectures and discussions

Prerequisites: None
Expected Student Preparation: Familiarity with the basic concepts of literary and/or cultural theory will be very useful.

Description:  This course will review and critically examine the efforts within the Marxist tradition to theorize literary and cultural production. We will survey several critical movements within this tradition, such as the Frankfurt School (and its descendents), structuralist Marxism, British cultural studies, postcolonialist inquiry, and the development of various post-Marxisms. In doing so, we will engage the writings of such literary and cultural theorists as Theodor Adorno, Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Fredric Jameson, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Aijaz Ahmad and of course Marx himself. We will also examine some primary works of literary and cultural production to test out many of 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? What is the role of culture in capitalism? How are we to understand the political and cultural value of the aesthetic strategies put on offer by realism, modernism, and postmodernism? What place does the avant-garde have within struggles against capitalism?

Format: Lecture, discussion

Evaluation: TBA

Required Texts:                                   

• Ruis, Marx for Beginners
• Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne, eds., Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader
• Ronald Taylor, trans. and ed., Aesthetics and Politics 
• Course pack                                           

Average enrollment: 30 students

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 Deadlines:

Fall 2014 Term: Wednesday, September 10, 2014 by 4:00 PM

Application Form (Also available in the Department of English General Office, Arts 155)

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 Deadlines:

Winter 2015 Term: Wednesday, January 14, 2015 by 4:00 PM

Application Form (Also available in the Students Affairs Office, Arts Building, Room 155)