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500-level Courses / Seminars

Please note that each course, besides the ENGL which identifies an English Department course, carries a three digit number, the first digit of which describes the general level of the course, as follows:

5 - MA students and U3 undergraduates
6 - MA and PhD students only
7 - MA and PhD students only


Note: 500-level courses with an enrollment of fewer than 7 students, and graduate courses with an enrollment of fewer than 4 students will not be given unless warranted by special circumstances.

500-level courses are restricted to an enrollment of 15 students and are open to Master's and advanced undergraduate students. M.A. students are permitted to take two courses at the 500-level. Ph.D. students may not register for 500-level courses.

Permission of instructor required.

Please click on any of the following to read the course description, the reading list, and the evaluation.


ENGL 500 Middle English

Medieval Literature and Law

Professor Michael Van Dussen
Winter Term 2015
Monday 11:35-14:25

Full course description

Description: Literary and legal discourses in the later Middle Ages are fruitfully studied in conjunction. Literature may be analysed for its engagement with legal themes; and literary methodologies may be employed to analyse explicitly legal texts and documents. These categories are rarely distinct, however, and literature and law frequently operate (in the words of Richard Firth Green) as “parallel forms of discourse.” In coming to understand how lawyers and lawmen characterize and analyse medieval mentalities, modes of proof, and concepts of evidence, we may come to understand how texts that are less explicit about human morality and psychology are operating.

This course takes as its starting point an analysis of competing and intersecting legal systems in late-medieval England (e.g., canon law, customary law, etc.) in order to understand how law and concepts of evidence and proof developed in conjunction with text-based, documentary culture. This analysis will also equip us to study the relation between what we might be tempted to divide into “secular” and “moral” spheres of human life and conduct. We will then proceed to analyse late-medieval literary texts that specifically engage with legal forms and issues, as well as legal texts that are invested in what might be called “legal drama”. Topics to be studied include: outlaw narratives, documentary culture, legal allegory, heresy trials, legal fictions, parliamentary and courtroom drama, and much more. The class will occasionally meet for workshops in McGill’s rare books and special collections, where we will work with original manuscript materials from the Middle Ages. While the historical scope of the course will begin with the early Middle Ages and extend to the start of the sixteenth century, we will focus on the later Middle Ages, especially the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Most 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 refining our proficiency in Middle English.   

Evaluation: 

  • Short paper 25%
  • Long paper 50%
  • Presentation 10%
  • Translation 5%
  • Participation 10%

Texts:  

  • Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales
  • Langland, Piers Plowman
  • Chaucer, Parliament of Fowls
  • Lydgate, The Temple of Glass
  • Hoccleve, “My Compleinte” and Other Poems
  • Middle English charters of Christ
  • Selected heresy trials
  • Selected mystery plays
  • Readings in legal history and theory

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students maximum


ENGL 501 Sixteenth Century

Elizabethan Ovidianism

Professor Maggie Kilgour
Winter Term 2015
Tuesday 11:35-14:25

Full course description

Prerequisite: No formal prerequisite; however, all students must have read the entire Metamorphoses before the first class. Knowledge of Ovid’s other works and some background in Renaissance literature is also useful.

Description: As the recent flurry of translations and adaptations suggests, the Roman poet Ovid has been a continuous source of inspiration for later artists and writers who have metamorphosed his tales of love and metamorphoses. While it may seem extravagant to claim that English literature begins with Ovid, it is clear that the burst of creative energy in the 16th century that we call the English Renaissance was fuelled by translations and adaptations of this Protean poet. In this course we will try to understand how and why Ovid spoke to the Elizabethan situation in particular. We will examine how Ovid was taught in school and popularized through allegorical readings and English translations, and then see how his stories and verbal ingenuity in general inspired and influenced the development of epyllia, drama, and love poetry. Does the poet associated with change help Elizabethans understand the changes taking place in their own time – as he may help us in ours? 

Evaluation: Seminar presentation (25%); final 20 page paper (50%); participation (25%)

Texts:  

  • On Web CT: selections from Elizabethan epyllia, poetry, translations, commentaries, and emblems
  • Marlowe: Hero and Leander
  • Spenser: “Muiopotmos”; Faerie Queene 3; Mutabilitie Cantos
  • Shakespeare: Venus and Adonis, Rape of Lucrece, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titus Andronicus
  • Ben Jonson: Chloridia; Poetaster
  • Milton: Comus

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students maximum


ENGL 503 Eighteenth Century

Nineteenth-Century Austen 

Professor Peter Sabor
Winter Term 2015
Wednesday 11:35-14:25

Full course description

Expected Student Preparation:  Previous university-level course work offering some training in relevant areas: 18th- and 19th-century British Literature.

Description: This advanced seminar will undertake a close study of the novels of Jane Austen (1775-1817), concentrating on those that she wrote in the second decade of the nineteenth century.  Austen wrote drafts of her first three novels – Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey – in the late 1790s, and they respond, often satirically, to Richardsonian, sentimental, and Gothic fiction. Numerous critics have focused on Austen in her eighteenth-century context. This course, in contrast, will begin with the first of the works that she began writing in the 1800s: her aborted novel, “The Watsons” (c. 1805). We will compare it with the novella “Lady Susan,” probably written in the 1790s but copied by Austen in c. 1804. We will then study her last three published novels, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, as well as the novel, “Sanditon,” that she was writing but could not complete at the end of her life. We will also study her little-known manuscript “Plan of a Novel.”  Particular attention will be paid to Austen’s own commentary on the art of fiction, both within her novels and in her letters. For this reason the course will also include a study of Northanger Abbey, in which Austen’s most celebrated remarks on novel-writing are to be found.

Evaluation: participation (20%); seminar presentation (30%); term paper (50%)

Texts: 

  • Jane Austen, Emma, ed. George Justice, Norton
  • Mansfield Park, ed. Claudia Johnson, Norton
  • Manuscript Works, ed. Linda Bree, Peter Sabor and Janet Todd, Broadview
  • Northanger Abbey, ed. Claire Grogan, Broadview
  • Persuasion, ed. Linda Bree, Broadview
  • Selected Letters, ed. Vivien Jones, Oxford World’s Classics

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students maximum


ENGL 504 Nineteenth Century

Nationalism & the 19th-Century English Novel

Professor Yael Halevi-Wise
Fall Term 2014
Monday 11:35-14:25

Full course description

Expected Student Preparation:  Previous university-level course work in 19th-century British literature, particularly the genre of the novel.

Description: This seminar explores constructions of national identity in canonical Nineteenth-Century English novels. Our close analysis of various national and religious rivalries portrayed in these novels will be supplemented by a spirited discussion of leading scholarly works that have attempted to explain the phenomenon of national identity in Europe and beyond. Supported by these critical readings, we will contextualize the representation of national identity in Nineteenth-Century England in relation to key historical events such as the French Revolution; the emancipation of Catholics and Jews; the Oxford Movement; colonialism; and continuing challenges to the stereotypical image of “an English gentleman” (or lady) at the end of the Victorian era.  

Evaluation:Participation (15%); three short critical essays (10% each); two brief oral reports (5% each); final oral presentation (15%); 15pp final essay (30%)

Texts: Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe; Grace Aguilar’s The Vale of Cedars; Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities; Burke and Carlyle on the French Revolution; Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and selections from Villette; Conrad’s Lord Jim; critical readings by Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha, Asa Briggs, Liah Greenfeld, Michael Ragussis, Doris Sommer, Kate Trumpener and others.

Format: Seminar

Average Enrollment: 15 students maximum


ENGL 505 Twentieth Century

The Global Cold War

Professor Monica Popescu
Fall Term 2014
Tuesday 8:35–11:25

Full course description

Description: In 1989 the Berlin Wall came down, marking the end of a period that involved not only the USA and the USSR, but engulfed the entire world. Following the most recent research in the field, we will discuss literary works and films from Britain, the USA, and Anglophone (post)colonial nations that present the Cold War as a world-wide conflagration, which involved both superpowers from the Northern hemisphere and nations from the global South. What scientific and technological developments fueled the arms race and how were they represented in fiction? What literary genres emerged as a result of the competition between East and West? What forms of masculinity and femininity were forged by Cold War cultures? How does the East that constitutes the object of Cold War studies compare to the East discussed in postcolonial criticism? These questions will constitute the starting point for our exploration of literary representations of espionage and intrigue, the nuclear threat, the space race, new forms of imperialism, the Bandung Conference and the Non-Aligned Movement, African socialism, utopian and dystopian societies. Along with films and literary works, we will read essays by Jacques Derrida, Jean Franco, Timothy Brennan, Ann Douglas, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, etc.

Evaluation (tentative): Presentation, 20%; Short paper on theoretical text, 20%, Final essay, 45%; Participation, 15%.

Course pack: (available from the McGill bookstore)
Includes: Richard Wright, The Color Curtain and critical essays. 

Books:

  • Graham Greene, The Quiet American
  • Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross
  • Mark Behr, The Smell of Apples
  • Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban
  • Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown

 Films:

  • Dr. Strangelove, Dir. Stanley Kubrik
  • The Manchurian Candidate, Dir. John Frankenheimer
  • Apocalypse Now Redux, Dir. Francis Ford Coppola
  • The Hero, Dir. Zeze Gamboa
  • Double Take, Dir. Johan Grimonprez 

Format: Seminar

Average Enrollment: 15 students 


ENGL 516   Shakespeare

In Search of the Natural Fool in Shakespeare

Professor Wes Folkerth
Winter Term 2015
Monday 8:35–11:25 

Full course description

Description: Scholarly attention to the figure of the fool in Shakespeare has tended to focus on the festive licence the fool enjoys in his interactions with other characters. Shakespeare’s “artificial” or “wise” fools derive this licence from their mimicry of “natural” fools—individuals of limited mental capacity who were known in the period by a variety of names such as idiotimbecilemomemoron, and numerous similar epithets still in use today. Broader studies of the fool as a literary and historical type also highlight the figure’s ambivalence, an ambivalence that seems to originate in medieval and early modern attitudes toward individuals with intellectual disabilities. The fool’s very lack of cognitive ability was also considered a positive trait, for such individuals remained impervious to and unaffected by the corruptive effects of social life and manners. What rendered the natural fool special in terms of his relationship to the social environment was his aloofness from it. This positive quality was frequently construed in a religious sense as sacred.

Shakespeare’s fools are a class of character that audiences, readers, and even scholars of today typically have enormous difficulty understanding. In this seminar we will study works by Shakespeare that represent some of the natural fool’s many guises as a familiar social type in early modernity, including The Two Gentlemen of VeronaThe Merchant of VeniceAs You Like ItMuch Ado About NothingTwelfth NightAll’s Well That Ends WellA Midsummer Night’s DreamHenry the Fourth Part OneHamletKing LearThe Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Along the way we will also consider the enduring cultural influence of the humanistic “cult of folly” in the works of Erasmus and Thomas More, as well as early modern accounts of natural fools in the writings of Robert Armin, Tomaso Garzoni, Roger Sharpe, and Timothy Granger. Recent work on the history of intellectual disability by scholars such as C.F. Goodey and Tim Stainton will provide important context for our efforts as we trace the fool’s connections to other closely-related figures such as clowns, fairy changelings, melancholics, and madmen.

Texts: Specific texts TBA.

Evaluation: 

  • Seminar presentation 35%
  • Long paper 50%
  • Participation 15%

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students


ENGL 527  Canadian Literature

Michael Ondaatje

Professor Robert Lecker
Winter Term 2015
Tuesday 14:35-17:25

Full course description

Expected Student Preparation: Previous university-level course work offering some training in relevant areas: critical analysis of poetry and fiction; 20th-century Canadian Literature. 

Description: An in-depth look at the poetry and fiction of Michael Ondaatje, with an emphasis on his evolving sense of the contemporary artist's responsibilities in terms of history, aesthetics, and culture. The first half of the course will focus on Ondaatje's poetry and will consider many of the defining features of his work: an emphasis on the outlaw figure, madness, ex-centricity, eroticism, and the temptations offered by silence. In this context we will be reading both short and long poems, including The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. The second half of the course will be devoted to Ondaatje's fiction and its postmodern preoccupation with centre, margin, historical reconstruction, modes of representation, and the political role of the writer. The course will also cover two of Ondaatje's semi-autobiographical works, including Running in the Family and The Cat's Table.

Texts:

  • The Cat's Table
  • Cinnamon Peeler
  • The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
  • Coming through Slaughter
  • Divisadero
  • The English Patient
  • In the Skin of a Lion
  • Running in the Family

Evaluation (Tentative): participation (10%); 1 oral presentation (20%); short essay (30%); final essay (40%)

Format: Seminar

Average Enrollment: 15 students maximum


ENGL 545 Four Media of the American Uncanny

Professor Ned Schantz
Fall Term 2014
Wednesday 8:35-11:25

Full course description

Description: This course is designed to bring together the Literature and Cultural Studies streams of the English Department around the concept of the uncanny—a concept that cuts straight to the troubled heart of literature, film, and other media in their definition and practice. The course may also appeal to theoretically minded Drama and Theatre students, since the uncanny cannot be fully conceived without the notion of theatricality. Together, we will attempt to track over 150 years of American Culture in some of its most unsettling manifestations in literature, film, radio, and television; it is the tradition in which “things are not what they seem,” in which tidy complacencies give way to vast unknown forces, where time is out of joint and the individual character/reader/viewer/listener radically lost. We will provisionally expect the uncanny in three overlapping domains: in social worlds that resist navigation, in natural environments that defy mastery, and in technology that creates its own imperatives.  If these domains house respectively the American Dreams of equality, frontier, and progress, it may be only to show that there is nothing more uncanny than the idea of America itself.

Note: for the first class meeting all students will read the first three items in the coursepack: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” Freud’s “The Uncanny,” and Samuel Weber’s “Uncanny Thinking.”

Evaluation: Journals 50%, participation 40%, presentations 10%

Texts: Possible authors include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Frank Norris, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, James Baldwin, Shirley Jackson, Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, and Colson Whitehead.

Possible films include Vertigo, Seconds, Chinatown, The Stepford Wives, Daughter Rite, Blue Velvet, Safe, and Meek’s Cutoff. 

Radio and TV will include Orson Welles’ “panic broadcast” of The War of the Worlds and episodes of The Twilight Zone.

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students


ENGL 566 Special Studies in Drama 1

Nineteenth-Century Melodrama: Theory / Practice

Professor Denis Salter
Fall Term 2014
Friday 11:35—14:25

Full course description

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 scholarly means.

Description: This seminar will take much of its theoretical orientation and its conceptual preoccupations from arguments developed by Peter Brooks in The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (1976; republished with a “new Preface’ in 1995) and in various book chapters and articles, in which he postulates that “melodrama is a form for a post-sacred era, in which polarization and hyperdramatization of forces in conflict represent a need to locate and make evident, legible, and operative those large choices of ways of being which we hold to be of overwhelming importance, even though we cannot derive them from any transcendental system of belief.” To advance his case, Brooks examines recurrent terms and concepts, including the confluence of verbal and non-verbal sign systems; hysteria as an exercise in “bodily writing;” repressed affects and effects; psychoanalysis as a melodramatic heuristic device; the aesthetic values and ethical preoccupations of the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque; the literal and figurative journey, from which no return might be possible, into a kind of Conradian ‘heart of darkness;’ “somatic form” and somatic psychology; ‘expressionism’ avant la lettre as inherently a mode of excess; guilt and what is often figured, somewhat paradoxically, as  its antinomy, purgation; “’demonic dread;’” “manichaeistic demonology;” “the Gothic castle [as] an architectural approximation of the Freudian model of the mind;” “an epistemology of the depths;” the “’moral occult;’” the “romance” conventions that govern and are articulated by the triad of “fall-explusion-redemption;” the “’Naturalization of the dream life;’” “the melodrama of psychology;” the functions and forms of “rhetorical excess;” the poetics of torture and terror; the phenomenon of “self-nomination;” “the topos of the voix du sang;” “’the text of muteness;’” the appetite for wonder; the pleasures of virtuosic performance; magical transformations of quotidian life into the realm of the extraordinary;  the locked-room paradigm; “the language of presence used for the expression of absences;” the “anaphoric” and “desemanticized” nature of the vocabulary and syntax of the language of gesture;  seeking to speak “the unspeakable” and to transcend the limits of representation; and the pervasive presence of doppelgängers. 

Although Brooks includes the study of fiction by Balzac and James, this seminar will instead concentrate on plays for the stage, with perhaps some excursions into the examination of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century melodramatic films. In addition to Brooks, for the purposes of their essays and presentations, students will be expected to draw from the large body of theoretical / historical work on melodrama, much of it referenced by Brooks, much of it be suggested in discussions with me, including  books, chapters, and articles by Michael R. Booth, Eric Bentley, Laura Mulvey, Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, Christine Gledhill, Elaine Hadley, Michael Hays, Anastasia Nikolopoulou, Maurice Willson Disher, Jeffrey N. Cox, Thomas Postlewait, Jane Moody, David Mayer, Marvin Carlson, Gary Richardson, Bruce McConachie, Simon Shepherd, Nina Auerbach, E. Ann Kaplan, T. S. Eliot, Richard Altick, Louis James, Martha Vicinus, Robert Heilman, and Denis Salter.  A magisterial work that serves as a kind of meta-text for Brooks’s study is Martin Meisel’s Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth Century England, which reflects on a wide range of melodramas in relation to a study of painting and fiction. The study of these works will introduce preoccupations found in Brooks, but will also introduce another complementary cluster of interrelated themes, subjects, structures, and modes of articulation, including seeing the melodramatic tableau as an exercise in affective pictorial anagnorisis engendered by both movement and stasis; the gentrification of melodrama; Christian mytho-poesis; the policing and normalization of traditional gender roles, along with incipient interrogations of those roles; fears of industrialization;  the exploitation of workers, along with resistance from workers, together with rebellions, and continuing anxieties about the potential for a large-scale political revolution; the baleful consequences of land enclosures and the predatory actions of absentee landlords; the human suffering caused by unchecked urbanisation; inter-racial strife and the creation and legitimation of racialized discourse; what Jacky Bratton has described as “the important ironizing influence of the comic dimension of Victorian melodrama, which was in many ways the element which added complexity to the high drama of right and wrong;” the juxtaposition of radical and conservative values and value-systems, in some instances in the same play; the project to give expression to ‘voices from below’ and in doing so to question the rigid divisions of the class system; what Emily Allen has referred to, in glossing the work of Elaine Hadley, as the ways in which “the melodramatic mode provided a public and theatricalized paradigm for resistance to the hierarchies of market capitalism;” the phenomenon of making a woman into the villain in at least one melodrama, a move that asked questions about female agency and identity; and the use of melodrama as an instrument to advance and legitimate the jingoistic project of world-wide imperialism.

The plays to be studied not as dramatic literature but as performance texts will be selected from Charles Robert Maturin’s Bertram; or the Castle of St. Aldobrand, Thomas Holcroft’s A Tale of Mystery, Isaac Pocock’s The Miller and His Men, Tom Taylor’s The Ticket-of-Leave Man, Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne, Henry Irving and Leopold Lewis’s The Bells, Henry Arthur Jones and Henry Herman’s The Silver King, Dion Boucicault’s The Corsican Brothers, The Octoroon, and  The Poor of New York, David Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West, James Robinson Planche’s  The Vampire, C. H. Hazlewood’s Lady Audley’s Secret,  Douglas Jerrold’s Black-Ey’d Susan and The Rent-Day, Henry M. Milner’s Mazeppa; or the Wild Horse of Tartary, . . .  Dramatised  from Lord Byron’s poem,  John William Buckstone’s  Luke the Labourer; or, The Lost Son, John Walker’s The Factory Lad,  Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins’s No Thoroughfare. Although some of these plays did not fall exclusively within the generic category of melodrama, they nonetheless are the offspring of melodrama, a generative, copious, multi-, inter-, and intra-textual mode of literary and theatrical expression.

Texts:

  • Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976, rpt. with a New Preface, 1995.
  • With the exception of East Lynne the play, The Silver King, The Moonstone the play, The Ticket-of-Leave Man, The Factory Lad, Lady Audley’s Secret the play, Black Ey’d Susan, and The Rent Day—all of which will be in a Course Pack—all of the plays are available for downloading from LION (Literature Online).
  • The Melodramatic Imagination and Realizations will be available on library reserve.

Evaluation (tentative): Fully engaged and continual participation in the intellectual life of the seminar: 15%; a presentation on a play and / or theoretical-historical text: 15%; an 8-page essay arising from that presentation in the form of a distilled critical argument: 20%; a scholarly paper 50%, with an analytical through-line, all themes / topics to be individually-negotiated, in the order of 15 to 20 pages.

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

Average Enrollment: 10-15 students


ENGL 585 Cultural Studies: Film

The Sexual Revolution in Cinema

Professor Ara Osterweil
Fall Term 2014
Wednesday 11:35-14:25

Full course description

Special Note to Prospective Students: Many of the images we will study may be offensive, difficult, and/or arousing.  To sign on to this course is to agree to treat this material with the same scrutiny and seriousness you would any other topic.

Description: This course investigates the sexual revolution that occurred in American cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. Pausing to consider a few examples from the demise of the stag film era, this course moves from the explosion of a sexually explicit Underground in the early sixties, through parallel developments in sexploitation cinema, to the demise of the Production Code, followed by the development of legal, feature-length hard core pornography in the early 1970s, and the emergence of a sexually explicit international art cinema.  While the historical axis of the course situates these revolutionary sexual cinemas alongside other historical developments in their era, including the civil rights movement, the "sexual revolution," second wave feminism, body art, gay liberation, and the legal history of film censorship and regulation, we shall also be guided on our journey by insights from critical sex, gender, and queer theory, as well as film and art history.

By approaching a variety of examples of avant-garde, sexploitation, hard core, and art cinema that feature the explicit representation of sexual acts, this course foregrounds the difficulty of representing sexuality and corporeality in a predominantly visual and aural medium.  Several key questions animate the theoretical axes of this course: How can a predominantly visual medium create conditions for embodied perception?  How does the filmic investigation of sexuality contribute to the power/ knowledge/ pleasure nexus?  What are the politics--sexual and otherwise--of the films under consideration? How do the various cinemas under consideration address us as both embodied spectators and socially constructed subjects? How do these film movements help to explore and articulate emerging identities and counter-publics? How do historical discourses of racial, sexual, and gender difference contribute to the development of sexually explicit cinema and complicate our reception of it?

The course is an advanced seminar in which students will be expected to make a major contribution to discussion during each class meeting. In addition to copious readings and a mandatory weekly screening, oral presentations and a substantial research paper are required.  Students who fail to participate regularly and meaningfully in class discussion will simply not succeed in the course.  Regarding the mandatory screenings: as many of the avant-garde films be will be shown on 16mm, students who are not able to attend the screening every week should not register for the course.  As the seminar only meets once a week, attendance at every seminar meeting must be a serious priority. 

Evaluation: 

  • Oral presentation (15 minutes): 20%
  • Short write up of oral presentation: 15%
  • Long paper 50% (20 pages)
  • Participation 15%

Selection of Possible Films (subject to change):

  • Fireworks (Kenneth Anger, 1947)
  • Un Chant d'Amour (Jean Genet, France, 1950)
  • Flesh of Morning (Stan Brakhage, 1956)
  • Window Water Baby Moving (Stan Brakhage, 1959)
  • Kiss (Andy Warhol, 1963)
  • Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1963)
  • Christmas on Earth (Barbara Rubin, 1963)
  • Blow Job (Andy Warhol, 1964)
  • Couch (Andy Warhol, 1964)
  • My Hustler (Andy Warhol, 1965)
  • Fuses (Carolee Schneemann, 1964-1967)
  • Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith, 1963)
  • Blonde Cobra (Ken Jacobs, 1963)
  • Sins of the Fleshapoids (Mike Kuchar, 1965)
  • Piece Mandala End War (Paul Sharits, 1966)
  • Hold Me While I’m Naked (George Kuchar, 1967)
  • T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (Paul Sharits, 1968)
  • Fly (Yoko Ono, 1970)
  • Deep Throat (Gerard Damiano, 1972)
  • Behind the Green Door (The Mitchell Brothers, 1972)
  • Boys in the Sand (Wakefield Poole, 1971)
  • Pink Narcissus (James Bidgood, 1971)
  • Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)
  • Dyketactics (Barbara Hammer, 1974)
  • Double Agent 73 or Satan Was a Lady (Doris Wishman, 1973, 1975)
  • The Opening of Misty Beethoven (Radley Metzger, 1975)

Partial Bibliography: This course will include selections from

  • David Allyn, Make Love Not War: The Sexual Revolution, An Unfettered History
  • Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963
  • Jennifer Barker, The Tactile Eye
  • Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays
  • Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer
  • Douglas Crimp, "Our Kind of Movie" The Films of Andy Warhol
  • Jeffrey Escoffier, Bigger than Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema
  • Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1.
  • Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
  • David James, Allegories of Cinema
  • Amelia Jones, Body Art/ Performing the Subject
  • Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One
  • Jon Lewis, Hollywood v. Hard Core
  • Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization
  • Laura Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media and The Skin of the Film
  • Maurice Merleau Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible
  • Jose Esteban Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
  • Yoko Ono, Grapefruit
  • Ara Osterweil, Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Cinema
  • Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm
  • Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
  • Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible"
  • Linda Williams, Screening Sex

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students


ENGL 587 Theoretical Issues in the Study of Communications and Culture

The Silent Figure in Film and Literature

Professor Berkeley Kaite
Winter Term 2014
Tuesday 11:35-14:25

Full course description

Description: The course problematizes silence and the mute figure in film and literature. The focus is not on silence as a sign of repression or oppression but silence as a productive site which has the effect of amplifying voices, anxieties, and forces around it. That is to say, we will ask what interests are filled in to replace the silence of the mute. One could say this is a course about cultural ventriloquism.  We will of necessity discuss the fetishization of truth, identity and voice. The theoretical framework is drawn from some of the ideas of Michel Foucault on the productivity of power via silence; as well there are a few short readings on silence and voice which adopt a Foucauldian perspective. In this light, we will read a range of fictional works and analyze films in which there is a mute character.  

Evaluation (tentative): Attendance and participation, 10%; oral presentation, 20%; précis of films and books, 70%

Texts (provisional):

  • Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, volume 1, An Introduction, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith,  selections, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979)
  • Chloe Taylor, “Confession and Modern Subjectivity,” The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault: A Genealogy of the ‘Confessing Animal (Routledge, 2008)
  • Michael Chion, “The Mute Character’s Final Words,” The Voice in Cinema, ed. and trans by Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia UP, 1999
  • Valerie Hazel, “Disjointed Articulations: The Politics of Voice and Jane Campion’s The Piano,” Women’s Studies Journal, 10:2 (September 1994)
  • Kathryn Harrison, The Seal Wife (New York, Random House, 2002)
  • Barbara Gowdy, Mister Sandman (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2007 [1995])
  • Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum, trans. Brion Mitchell (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2009 [1959])
  • Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005) 

Films:

  • The Piano (dir. Jane Campion, 1993)
  • Persona (dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
  • Johnny Belinda  (dir. Jean Negulesco, 1948)
  • Talk to Her (dir. Pedro Almodovar, 2002)
  • Sweet and Lowdown (dir. Woody Allen, 1999)
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest  (dir. Milos Forman, 1975)

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

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