2016 Summer Courses

Description: This course surveys Canadian fiction, poetry, and drama from the 1950s to the present. From Irving Layton’s “Whatever Else Poetry is Freedom” (1958) to Phil Hall’s “Becoming a Poet” (2011), from Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel (1964) to Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road (2005), the readings show off the extraordinary diversity of Canadian writing, while at the same time revealing how many Canadian writers of this period shared common concerns and parallel approaches. We will consider the thematic preoccupations of later twentieth-century and twenty-first-century Canadian writers, including memory, identity, creativity, nation, region, race, gender, class, modernity, technology, immigration, history, environment, language, and the role and potential of the Canadian writer in the postwar and contemporary worlds. Likewise, we will study the genres, forms, and modes that Canadian authors have adopted to pursue their commercial, social, nationalist, and artistic aims. Lectures will illuminate the historical and institutional contexts of this period of remarkable growth in Canadian culture. A strong emphasis on active class participation and the development of effective critical writing skills will complement readings and lectures.

Texts: [available from the McGill University Bookstore]

• Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel (1964)
• Linda Griffiths, Maggie and Pierre and The Duchess (1980)
• Joseph Boyden, Three Day Road (2005)
• Robert Lecker, ed., Open Country: Canadian Literature in English (2008)

Evaluation: (tentative)

“Literary Montreal” assignment, 10%
Reading quizzes, 10%
Midterm test, 20%
Final essay, 5-6pp., 20%
Final exam, 25%
​Participation, 15%

Format: Lectures and discussion

Description: Among other events, the coming of World War I and its aftermath had profound effects on twentieth-century British literature. Authors began to experiment with the form of the novel, moving away – in various ways – from traditionally structured, seemingly objective realist narratives and into ambiguity, stream of consciousness, and a deferral of resolution. Furthermore, this experimentation with accepted forms of the novel also led to an interest in alternative subjects and protagonists: liminal experiences, alienated outsiders, and racialized others among them. These outsiders and others make up the focus of the course, which will investigate not only how and why twentieth-century British authors viewed the outsider as a privileged position and perspective, but also the ways other marginalized figures specifically did not and could not benefit at times from this outsider status. We will thus pay attention to both the advantages and the oppressions of outsiders and others. To do so, this course must also explore the systems and historical contexts these figures felt alienated from, rejected by, and perhaps yearned to belong to. Consequently, information on the literary and historical movements of the period (Modernism, spiritualism, etc.) as well more general historical contexts (The World Wars, colonialism and post-colonialism, etc.), will supplement frequent close reading of our chosen texts, along with an occasional look at American literature for a broader context. Although the beginnings of twentieth-century literary movements such as modernism are now more than a century behind us, our work in this course will ideally make evident the ways in which this literature is still living and immediate in its negotiation of the boundaries of the self, other, and society. 

Texts: 

• Henry James, Daisy Miller (1879)
• James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
• E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924)
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
• Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (1934)
• Shorter Online Readings (MyCourses)

Evaluation: 

• Participation: 15%
• Précis of Work-in-Progress paper (2-3 pages): 20% - This assignment asks you to write a 1-2 paragraph introduction to a potential essay on a class text, as well as a 1-2 paragraph abstract outlining the argument of the essay. This assignment is intended to spur critical engagement with your chosen text while allowing for ample feedback and improvement in essay planning and writing. The assignment can then be built into the final larger paper, or not, as you decide.
• Final paper (6-7 pages): 35%
• Final Exam: 30%

Format: Lectures and discussion

Description: This course will ask how the gothic, a literary genre that originated in the 18th century as a response to modernity, has itself adapted to the past two centuries of modernization, and how its ghostly traces appear in the 20th century. We will examine sub-genres of gothic fiction, including Southern Gothic and Suburban Gothic, with a particular focus on adaptations of the Female Gothic, which is characterized by woman's entrapment within domestic space, subjection to patriarchal authority, and the transgressive and dangerous attempts to subvert and escape such restriction.  Using texts from a variety of popular media throughout the 20th century, we will ask: how does the genre change as gender roles do? When is the woman the victim, and when is she the monster? As conceptions of domestic space shift, how is the gothic plot extended beyond the home? How are twentieth-century movements like feminism and the struggle for civil rights reflected in the gothic? How has the genre has been adapted in various media, and how do new media technologies reveal modern houses to be already haunted? 
   

By the end of the course, students will be able to relate developments in the genre’s narrative and form to their wider social and historical contexts.  

Texts: 

• I Am Legend (Matheson, 1954)
• Course pack with critical readings and short stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, Flannery O’Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, and Angela Carter

Film and Media:

• The Fall of the House of Usher (Webber and Watson, 1928)
• Rebecca (Hitchcock, 1940)
• Selected radio plays (1949-1956)
• Selected TV episodes from The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1959-1964)
• The Night of the Hunter (Laughton, 1955)
• The Last Man on Earth (Ragona and Salkow, 1964)
• Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968)
• Les bons débarras (Mankiewicz, 1980)
• Wake (Newsome, 2010)
• The Babadook (Kent, 2014)
• Ex Machina (Garland, 2015)

Evaluation: Participation (20%), weekly quizzes (25%), weekly response posts on the course blog (25%), final paper (30%)​

Format: Lecture with discussion, screenings