This version of the McGill Department of English, Undergraduate Studies site is deprecated but has been preserved for archival reasons. The information on this site is not up to date and should not be consulted. Students, faculty, and staff should consult the new site using the link below.

300-level / Intermediate Courses

All 500-level courses and a certain number of 200-, 300- and 400-level courses have limited enrolment and require instructors' permission. Students hoping to enroll in these courses should consult the course descriptions on the Department of English website for the procedures for applying for admission. 


ENGL 301 Earlier 18th Century Novel

Professor David Hensley​
Fall Term 2016
Tuesday and Thursday 11:35 - 12:55 

Full course description

Prerequisite:  none.

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

Texts: The required reading for this course will include most or all of the following books, which will be available at The Word Bookstore (469 rue Milton, 514-845-5640). (The list of texts below is provisional, to be confirmed in September 2016.)

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

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

Format: Lecture


ENGL 305 Renaissance English Literature

Elizabethan Romance:  Prose Fiction, Narrative Poetry, and Drama

Professor Kenneth Borris
Winter 2017
Monday and Wednesday 8:35-9:55 am

Full course description

Prerequisite:  none.

Description: One of the centrally fashionable literary genres of early modern Europe, romance was the most important precursor of the novel, though in many ways different.  It was characterized by much narrative variety, multiple plots, open-ended structures, digression, coincidence, fantasy, wonder, and wish-fulfillment; in its uniquely serendipitous version of the world, few social conventions or expectations can be taken for granted. Its great exponents include Ariosto, Tasso, Cervantes, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare. From around 1575 to 1610, the writing of romance became particularly vibrant in England. Focusing on the diverse expressions of this literary form at this time there, in prose fiction, narrative poetry, and drama, this course should especially interest those attracted to early modern studies, or to the history and development of the novel, or to the theory and history of literary forms. Proceeding chronologically, the course will address texts that epitomize romance’s scope in this period, including the qualitatively best and most influential exemplars, as well as those most popular in sales, such as Robert Greene’s, which illustrate the genre’s cultural topicality. So as best to define romance and its interactions with other genres in particular texts that engineer complex generic mixtures, such as Sidney’s and Spenser’s, attention will be given to the theory of literary genres. The Course Reader and other texts will be available in paperback for purchase at the Word bookstore, 469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640.

Texts: 

Course Reader
ŸRobert Greene, Pandosto, Menaphon (both short)
Sir Philip Sidney, The New Arcadia
Edmund Spenser, Books I and VI of The Faerie Queene
William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest

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

Format: Lecture and discussion


ENGL 306 Theatre History

Medieval/Early Modern

Professor Fiona Ritchie
Fall Term 2016
Monday and Wednesday, 9.35 am – 10.55 am

Full course description

Prerequisite: none

Expected student preparation: students enrolled in this course will ideally have already taken ENGL 230 Introduction to Theatre Studies

Description: This course provides an overview of dramatic forms and theatrical practice in Britain from the medieval to the early modern period (c. 1300-1642).  We will move from the earliest recorded vernacular play texts to the closure of the professional theatre in 1642, encompassing medieval religious drama and the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.  Rather than taking a chronological approach, we will examine early theatre in a way that highlights continuities as well as divisions between the medieval and the early modern stage.  We will analyse the conditions of performance (playing spaces, actors, audience, technology, etc) as well as studying a selection of representative plays (looking at their form, function, aesthetic features, etc). Emphasis is placed on the plays as theatrical works rather than literary texts.  The bulk of our time will be devoted to analysing historical evidence of early performance.  In addition to reading and discussing theatre history documents and play texts, students will also participate in practical workshops in which they will direct their peers in performing scenes from the plays studied in light of their knowledge of the playing conditions of the period.

Texts: Janette Dillon, The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); coursepack containing a selection of plays (in modern English)

Evaluation (tentative): participation 10%; midterm assignment 20%; practical assignment 30%; final take-home exam 40%

Format: lecture, discussion, group work, practical work


ENGL 311 Poetics

Section 001 (CRN 1596): Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursday 11:35–12:25. Instructor: Professor Eli MacLaren
Section 002 (CRN 1597): Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 15:35-16:25. Instructor: TBA
Section 003 (CRN 1598): Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 14:35-15:25. Instructor: TBA
Section 004 (CRN 1599): Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 16:35-17:25. Instructor: TBA
Section 005 (CRN 1600): Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday 13:35-14:25. Instructor: TBA

Full course description

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

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

Texts: 

Abrams, M.H. and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 11th ed. Boston: Wadsworth, 2015.
Bausch, Richard, and R. V. Cassill, eds. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Shorter 8th ed. New York: Norton, 2015.
Ferguson, Margaret, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy, eds. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Shorter 5th ed. New York: Norton, 2005.
Messenger, William E. et. al. The Canadian Writer’s Handbook. 6th ed. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford UP, 2014.  

Note: The total cost of textbooks in this course is high. They are required purchases and will be used throughout your English degree.

Evaluation: essay 1 (10%); mid-term exam (10%); essay 2 (15%); essay 3 (15%); final exam (30%); class participation (10%); short assignments (10%)

Format: Lecture and discussion


ENGL 312 Victorian and Edwardian Drama 1 

Professor Denis Salter
Winter Term 2017
Tuesday and Thursday 11:35-12:55

Full course description

Prerequisite: None

Expected Student Preparation: Previous university-level courses in drama and theatre, literature, or cultural studies. Or my permission of the instructor.

Description: This course will engage in a study of a wide range of performance texts, examined not simply as dramatic literature but as works in their original manuscript form, and thence transformed by the nature of theatrical performance, and by the meanings generated for them by their popular and critical responses.  The course will also attend to the material conditions of performance, the work of actors and actresses, actor-managers and actress-managers, designers, musicians, et al, and to the semiotic and sociopolitical significances of the venues and cities, London pre-eminently, in which the productions were first performed, along with a consideration of their theatrical afterlives and the ways in which they served to create a performance repertoire. Some of the playwrights do not often appear in anthologies, if only because their works do not readily lend themselves to the dead hand of canonization or being fitted for the Procrustean bed of generic classification. The playwrights to be studied will come from a selection of works by George Colman, the Younger, Col. Ralph Hamilton, James Smith, R. B. Peake, George Henry Lewes, Dion Boucicault, T. W. Robertson, B.C. Stephenson, Alfred Cellier, Joseph Addison, Netta Syrett, with a nod to a comical satire by J.M. Barrie and the inclusion of the ‘original’ text of Paul Potter’s Trilby, based on the novel of that name by George du Maurier and two texts performed by Christy’s Minstrels / Christy Minstrels. The word “British” in the anthology of plays we shall be studying draws attention to the ways in which theatre formed--and was formed by--the constructions of nation(s) and empires, both real and imaginary. We shall also study Henry Irving’s / Leopold Lewis’s The Bells (a text in LION).

Recurrent themes and topics will include racialization / racism, ‘The Other,’ ‘Othering,’ stereotyping, classism, ethnicity, religion, blackface, ‘the scramble for Africa,’ slavery and anti-slavery movements and practices, asymmetrical power relations, the politics of "difference," white supremacy, foundational ethnography, ethnocentrism, Orientalism and Occidentalism, the exploitation of minorities, diasporas, colonialized abjection, imperialistic machinations, performances as acts of historically-, politically-, and ideologically engagements with resistance against oppression, demonization, and depredation, the trauma of guilt and remorse, hypnosis and mesmerism, gender oppression, cross-dressing, juridical practices, the carnivalesqe, the charivari,  the “Angel in the House” and similar tropes, along with their mystifying principles and practices, the “woman question,” programmatic patriotism and its cognate, jingoism, the geopolitical construction of nineteenth-century London, the semiotics of place, engagements with cultural recuperation in the face of loss and mourning, the construction of repertoires, inter- and intra-culturalism, the phenomenon of theatrical ghosting, the discourse of cultural literacy, and the poetics of realism / naturalism.

Passages from the plays will be regularly read out loud to get a visceral and palpable sense of their affective properties and to develop, as the whole course will do, a detailed understanding of the vocabulary and syntax of nineteenth-century performance practices.

Texts: 

Davis, Tracy C., ed., The Broadview Anthology of Nineteenth-Century British Performance (Broadview Press, 2012)

Evaluation (tentative): Active ongoing participation in the intellectual and creative life of the seminar: 15%; one seminar presentation on a theoretical, critical, or historical text or on a case-study: 15%; a distilled critical argument arising from the seminar presentation advanced in a 8-page long essay: 20%; a 16-page original scholarly essay on an individually-negotiated topic: 50%

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

Average enrollment: 22 students 


ENGL 313 Canadian Drama and Theatre

The Case of Quebec 

Professor Erin Hurley
Fall 2016
Monday and Wednesday 8:35-9:55

Full course description

Expected Preparation: Previous university 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; English-language theatre in Quebec.  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
Gauvreau, Claude. The Charge of the Expormidable Moose
Berthiaume, Sarah. The Flood Thereafter (Le déluge après)
Laberge, Marie. Aurelie, my sister (Aurélie, ma sœur)
Lorena Gale, Je me souviens
Stephen Orlov and Rahul Varma, Isolated Incident

Evaluation: Participation (15%); Posted class notes (10%); Group Presentation (25%); Short paper (20%); Final Research paper (30%)

Format: Lecture and discussion


ENGL 314 Twentieth Century Drama

Realism and its Discontents

Professor Sean Carney​
Winter 2017
Tuesday and Thursday from 13:05-14:25 

Full course description

Description: This course examines European and North American drama of the twentieth century.  We will begin by studying the great realists of the late nineteenth century and the philosophy underlying their dramaturgy.  This will lead us into a consideration of various positive and negative responses to the realist tradition. We will examine these plays in their original theatrical contexts, while at the same time positioning these dramas in relation to their individual social and political moments.  We will interrogate the specificity of drama as an art form, the implications raised by repetition, performance, the theatre as a collective activity, and the role of the audience in the determination of meaning on the stage.  The overall goal of the course is to impart to students a foundational understanding of the dominant trend in modern drama in the west.

Texts: 

Ibsen, Henrik. Hedda Gabler in Four Major Plays (Signet)
Pollock, Sharon.  Blood Relations (Newest)
Chekhov, Anton: Three Sisters, in Eight Modern Plays (Norton)
Pirandello, Luigi.  Six Characters in Search of an Author in Eight Modern Plays (Norton)
Brecht, Bertolt.  Mother Courage and her Children in Eight Modern Plays (Norton)
Williams, Tennessee.  A Streetcar Named Desire (New Directions)
O’Neill, Eugene.  Long Day’s Journey into Night, in Eight Modern Plays (Norton)
Beckett, Samuel.  Happy Days, in Eight Modern Plays (Norton)
Hansberry, Lorraine.  A Raisin in the Sun (Vintage)
Pinter, Harold.  The Caretaker (Dramatists Play Service)
Ryga, George.  The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (Talonbooks)
Tremblay, Michel.  Forever Yours, Marie-Lou (Talonbooks)

Evaluation: Class Participation: 15%; First essay: 25%; Major Essay: 30%; Final Exam: 30%

Format: Lecture and discussion


ENGL 315 Shakespeare

Professor Wes Folkerth​
Winter 2017
Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 13:35-14:25 

Full course description

Description: In this course we will focus only on the first half of Shakespeare’s career, the Elizabethan portion, which coincided with the rise of the professional theatre as the centerpiece of an emerging entertainment industry. We will begin with a number of very early plays, including Henry VI, part 1, The Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus, Love’s Labor’s Lost, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, before following Shakespeare out of the theatre and into print with the narrative poem “Venus and Adonis.” We will then join him back at the theatre, where he will write Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (world classics of history, tragedy, and comedy) all within the space of about a single year. The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV, part one, and As You Like It round out the decade of the 1590s, and our course. The plan is to cover approximately one play per week. Are you Shakespearienced? After this course you will be. The pace will be fast and unrelenting, with a view to giving students in the English major and minor programs a fuller appreciation of the scope of Shakespeare’s accomplishment in the first half of his career.

Texts: The Norton Shakespeare Volume I: Early Plays and Poems. 2nd edition. Available at The Word Bookstore, rue Milton.

Evaluation: midterm exam (30%); final essay (30%); final exam (30%); conference participation (10%)

Format: Lecture and discussion


ENGL 317 Theory of English Studies 1

Philosophical Approaches

Professor David Hensley
Winter 2017
Tuesday and Thursday 16:05 pm - 17:25 pm

Full course description

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

Texts: The books for this course will be available at The Word Bookstore (469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640). The following texts will be among those required (please note that Pluhar's translation of Kant is the only acceptable edition!):

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

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

Format: Lectures


ENGL 318 Theory of English Studies 2

Socio-Historical Approaches to English Studies

Professor Tabitha Sparks
Fall Term 2016
Wednesday, Friday 1:35-2:25
Conference sessions: TBD

Full course description

Description: From a socio-historical approach that begins in the 19th century and moves to the ‘culture wars’ fought inside English departments in recent decades, this class examines theories about what art does.  The writers and intellectual movements we will analyze variously argue that art sustains or dismantles social hegemony, or that art ennobles and empowers society.  The common thread of critical readings will be a Marxist orientation towards the social structure and material conditions that produce works of art and command their reception.  Two dominant strains of Marxist theory, the means of historical materialism to analyze history, and the alienation of labor in modern capitalism, will organize the class texts, which broadly move between “high” and “low” culture.  As a critical study of art’s efficacy in modern society, this course accommodates the student’s choice of close textual readings for the final assignment, to be drawn from a variety of artistic mediums including literature, performance, film and television.  

Texts: (subject to change)

  • 318 Course Reader
  • Life in the Iron Mills – Rebecca Harding Davis (1861)
  • The Magnificent Ambersons – Booth Tarkington (1918)
  • Fun Home – Alison Bechdel (2006)

Evaluation: Attendance and participation (in conference section): 20%, midterm: 20%, short essay: 20%, take-home final: 40%

Format: Lectures and weekly conferences


ENGL 320 Postcolonial Encounters 

Professor Sandeep Banerjee
Fall 2016
Tuesday and Thursday 16:05 pm - 17:25 pm

Full course description

Description: This course engages with the literature of postcolonial societies, specifically, South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, in English and in translation. It will also introduce students to key aspects of postcolonial theory, and the field of postcolonial literary and cultural studies. We will read the texts from the course to understand how the various legacies of European imperialism and decolonization mold the authors’ perspective on the present. We will interrogate how postcolonial authors and theorists conceptualize and represent ideas of the colony, the postcolony, the nation, and the world, in addition to examining their delineation of community, history, space, gender, race, and class in their works. Further, we will ask what is meant by the term “postcolonial,” and how it relates to categories such as “anti-colonial” and “colonial.” While developing a clear understanding of some of the influential concepts developed by postcolonial critics and theorists, we will also look at the development, and the current status, of the field of postcolonial studies in the Anglo-American academy and its engagement with today’s world. Finally, we will consider the relationship of postcolonialism to globalization and developing field of world literature.  

Texts (tentative): 

 Aime Cesaire – Discourse on Colonialism
Chinhua Achebe – Things Fall Apart
Khushwant Singh – Train to Pakistan
Buchi Emecheta – Second-Class Citizen
Salman Rushdie – Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Jamaica Kincaid – A Small Place
Aravind Adiga – The White Tiger

Evaluation: TBA 

Format: Lectures and discussions


ENGL 324 20th Century American Prose

Professor Merve Emre
Winter 2017
Wednesday and Friday 10:05-11:25

Full course description

Description: In this course, we will work our way through a series of rich literary texts that challenge our understanding of American literature as a unified canon of work. Through our class discussions and your writing assignments, we will formulate arguments about how American writers from Henry James to Edith Wharton, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Chester Himes articulate the themes and forms commonly identified as “American.” Broadly speaking, I want to give you a sense of how scholarly communities—a community that you, as an avid reader and college student, are a part of—think and talk about national literature. More importantly, I want this class to offer an argument for why you should care deeply about reading literary texts as a producer and consumer of knowledge.

Texts: 

Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
Jean Toomer, Cane
Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Nella Larsen, Quicksand
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go

Evaluation: participation (30%), first paper (30%), second paper (30%), quizzes (10%)

Format: Lecture and discussion


ENGL 327 Canadian Prose Fiction 1

Professor Eli MacLaren
Fall 2016
Tuesday and Thursday 14:35–15:55

Full course description

Description: This course will survey major authors of English-Canadian fiction up to 1950. Beginning with “Canada’s first novel,” The History of Emily Montague, we will study the diversity of early Canadian literary history by considering influential works in several genres of prose fiction: novel of manners, historical romance, allegorical sketch, nature story, nineteenth-century realist novel, modernist novel, humour. The course will trace the evolution of fictional definitions of the nation as well as such themes as the nature of good government, aboriginality, colonization, biculturalism, religion, and modernization. Emphasis will be placed on literary history and publishing history: what different concepts of literature have dominated the writing of Canadian fiction, and how have the circumstances of literary culture and the market for books influenced them? The role of Montreal in the making of Canadian literature will receive particular attention. Through two essays – one thematic, one historical – and an oral presentation, students will develop their knowledge of the wealth of Canadian fiction that preceded Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro.    

Texts: 

Frances Brooke, The History of Emily Montague (1769)
John Richardson, Wacousta (1832)
Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush (1852) (excerpts)
Charles G.D. Roberts, Earth’s Enigmas (1895) (selected stories)
Sara Jeannette Duncan, The Imperialist (1904)
Stephen Leacock, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912)
Callaghan, Such is My Beloved (1934)
Hugh MacLennan, Two Solitudes (1945)

Evaluation: two essays (45%); oral presentation (15%); participation (10%); exam (30%)

Format: Lecture and discussion


ENGL 330 English Novel of the 19th Century II

Minor Characters and the Multi-plot Novel

Professor Yael Halevi-Wise
Winter 2017
Monday and Wednesday 11:05-12:25

Full course description

Description: This course will acquaint students with nineteenth-century English fiction by paying special attention to the role of minor characters in the multi-plot novel. To better appreciate the complex architectonics of these novels, we will search for minor characters who seem to play a superfluous role in the plot, or whose characteristics appear to be irrelevant, but whose “minor” points of view will nevertheless help us assess the novel’s “major” social concerns and structural patters. Although the course will have an exploratory atmosphere, it demands intensive reading and participation. 

Texts: 

Jane Austen, Emma
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield  
Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now
George Eliot, Middlemarch 
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Evaluation: 15% attendance and participation; 50% ongoing exploratory papers focusing on the roles of minor characters in each of our novels; 35% final essay.

Format: Lecture and discussion.


ENGL 333 Development of Canadian Poetry 2

Professor Robert Lecker 
Winter Term 2017
Monday and Wednesday 4:05 – 5:25

Full course description

Prerequisite:  None.    

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

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

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

Format: Lecture and discussion.


ENGL 336 Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature 2

Postwar British Fiction

Professor Allan Hepburn
Winter 2017
Monday and Wednesday 14:35 - 15:55 

Full course description

Prerequisite:  Prerequisites: Students should have 2 or 3 prior university courses in literature 

Description: This course will focus on British novels written after the Second World War and before the end of the century. This survey of novels will focus on class, the Welfare State, responses to the war, housing, conceptions of the future, the status of children and refugees, evil, women, gender, the decline of imperialism, Thatcherism, and fictional technique. Generic conventions of comedy and tragedy as they get mixed with novelistic representation will inform some lectures. The turn to history in the 1970s and 1980s will also be addressed.

Texts: 

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

Evaluation: short paper 30%: long paper 40%; final exam 30%

Format: Lecture and discussion


ENGL 342 Introduction to Old English

Professor Dorothy Bray
Fall Term 2016
Tuesday and Thursday 11:35-12:55

Full course description

Prerequisite:  None.    

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

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

Throughout the term, we will engage in translation exercises and tests. Many exercises will be pursued in class, so attendance is important. We will ‘workshop’ translations through an analysis of the grammar and vocabulary, and we will discuss possible interpretations of the texts. The course culminates in a reading of one of the finest poems in the English language, The Wanderer.

Texts: An Introduction to Old English, by Peter Baker. 3rd. edition. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Inc., 2003; 2011. Also available as e-book.

Evaluation: Class tests 40%; homework and exercises 40%; attendance 10% and participation 10%.

Format: lecture, workshop, discussion.


ENGL 345 Literature and Society

Is Shakespeare Modern? (and just what do we mean by modern?)

Professor Paul Yachnin
Fall 2016
Tuesday and Thursday, 13:05-14:25

Full course description

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

Texts: 

Taming of the Shrew, ed. Frances E. Dolan (Bedford / St. Martin’s)
The Roaring Girl and other City Comedies,  ​ed. James Knowles (Oxford)
Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed Sylvan Barnett (Signet Classics)
Tempest, ​ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford)
Merchant of Venice, ​ed. Jay Halio (Oxford)
King Lear, ed. Russell Fraser (Signet)
Other readings will be provided in electronic form.

Evaluation: 

Reading responses, 5% each - 20%

Short essays, 15% each - 30%

Participation 15%

Final Exam 35%

Format: Lecture and Discussion 


ENGL 347 Great Writings of Europe I

Foundations of Western Epic and Mythology: Homer, Virgil, Ovid

Professor Ken Borris
Winter Term 2017
Monday and Wednesday 10:05-11:25

Full course description

Prerequisite: None

Description:  While concentrating on the major texts of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid in attractive modern translations, we will consider their role in the literary history of western Europe, especially England, up to and including the eighteenth century.  The course will thus survey the development of classical myth, mythography, allegory, epic, and literary theory from Homer to Addison.  It will provide an effective base of knowledge for reading literature that draws on such contexts, and for appreciating corresponding shifts in literary history and in the roles of myth in western culture.

If you have already taken ENGL 347 (Great Writings of Europe I) as a different course under that number, you may still take this course, but will need to see me in the first or second week of classes so I can arrange your enrolment.

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

Texts: 

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

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

Format: Lecture and Discussion 


ENGL 348 Great Writings of Europe 2

Professor Allan Hepburn​
Fall 2016
Monday and Wednesday 13:05 - 14:25 

Full course description

Prerequisites: Students should have 2 or 3 prior university courses in literature 

Description: This course provides a survey of European novels published between 1900 and 1960. For reasons of equitable distribution, only one novel per country will be considered. In lectures and discussion, we will discuss the generic principles of the novel (historical, realist, fabulist), as well as the intersection between the novel and other genres (saga, chronicle, aphorism, parable, drama). Attention will be paid to technical matters, such as chronotopes, dialogue, focalization, diegesis, reliability, temporality, and narrative disposition. Emphasis will fall on the content of novels. Themes to be approached in this course will include friendship, war, justice, jokes, genealogy, mobility, childhood, religion, innocence, mysticism, and maturity. This course has an extremely demanding reading load; if you do not have time to read approximately 2000 pages of material during the fall semester, you should not enroll in this course.

Texts: 

Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris
Sándor Márai, Embers
Albert Camus, The Outsider
Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa, The Leopard

Evaluation: mid-term (30%); paper (40%);  take-home exam (30%)

Format: lectures and discussions


ENGL 355 Poetics of Performance

Professor Katherine Zien
Winter 2017
Monday and Wednesday, 9:35-10:55

Full course description

Prerequisite: None

Description: This course engages meaningful issues and debates that have structured theatre and performance practice and scholarship from ancient Greece to the present. Beginning with an analysis of mimesis and representation in Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Poetics, we will examine a chronological progression of scholarship on theatrical performance, supplementing course lectures with readings in theatre theory, artists’ manifestos, historiography, plays, and performance footage.

We will address the following topics:

  • Historical debates about the dangers, pleasures, and purposes of theatrical representation
  • Changing acting theories and methods
  • Approaches to the construction and study of theatrical space
  • Theories of reception
  • The body onstage: materiality and semiotics
  • ‘Positioning performance:’ disciplinary relationships between theatre and performance studies

Texts: 

  • Daniel Gerould, Theatre/Theory/Theatre: The Major Critical Texts from Aristotle and Zeami to Soyinka and Havel. NY: Applause, 2000
  • Samuel Beckett, Act Without Words I
  • A course packet of primary texts (possibly including Marina Abramović, Antonin Artaud, Augusto Boal, Anne Bogart, Bertolt Brecht, Peter Brook, Edward Gordon Craig, Denis Diderot, Jerzy Grotowski, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Femi Osofisan, Sophocles, Wole Soyinka, Konstantin Stanislavski, Zeami) and secondary sources (Rhonda Blair, Dwight Conquergood, Colin Counsell, Mark Fortier, Helen Gilbert, Gay McAuley, Joseph Roach, Richard Schechner, Diana Taylor, Philip Zarilli)

Evaluation: In-class participation: 10%; critical theatre review: 10%; short response essay: 20%; midterm: 30%; final take-home exam: 30%

Format: Lectures and group discussions


ENGL 357 The Canterbury Tales

Instructor Dr. Michael Raby
Winter 2017

Full course description

Prerequisite: None, but some familiarity with pre-1800 literature would be useful.  

Description: Two chickens debate the meaning of dreams; a lord and a lady wrack their brains about how to divide a fart into twelve equal portions; a pair of knights fight to the death for the love of a woman who does not even know they exist; a university student concocts an elaborate prank to sleep with his landlord’s wife; a tyrannical husband tests how far he can push his wife before she says “enough.” The Canterbury Tales is a collection of narratives that range from the pious to the blasphemous, from the solemn to the absurd; it functions both to instruct and amuse, to unsettle and reaffirm, to provoke and console. The genres of the tales are similarly various, including courtly romance, comic fabliau, saint’s life, and beast fable. Unfinished at the time of Chaucer’s death, The Canterbury Tales has developed a vibrant afterlife, spurring numerous translations, additions, and adaptations. This course is devoted to a close reading of Chaucer’s experimental masterpiece. We will situate The Canterbury Tales in the turmoil and unrest of late fourteenth-century England in order to examine how Chaucer responds to pressing contemporary debates about the cultural status of the English language, the threat of religious heresy, the emergence of capitalism, and the social position of women. By looking at sources and analogues of the tales, we will observe how Chaucer follows and departs from generic conventions, as well as how he works to position himself in the literary canon of Western Europe. The course will pay special attention to Chaucer’s engagement with the rhetorical tradition.

Note: We will be reading The Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English. No previous experience with Middle English is required or expected. There will be language instruction provided. 

Texts: The Canterbury Tales: Fifteen Tales and the General Prologue, 2nd ed., ed. V. A. Kolve and Glending Olson (New York: Norton, 2005).   

Evaluation (tentative): Participation (15%); mini-edition (10%); short essay (20%); mid-term test (20%); research essay (35%).

Format: lectures and discussions


ENGL 359 Poetics of The Image

Professor Ara Osterweil
Winter 2017                                                   
Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday: 14:35-15:25
Mandatory Weekly Screening: TBA

Full course description

Prerequisites: Students should have 2 or 3 prior university courses in literature 

Description: This course is designed to teach students how meaningfully to close read image-based cultural texts. Using multiple strategies of visual analysis, students will learn how to perform perceptive, informed, and medium-specific interpretations of both still and moving images. Focusing our critical lens on some of the most innovative photography and film texts of the last century, we will study the nuances of composition, color, mise-en-scène, framing, camera movement, editing and sound. Paying close attention to the ways in which visual style creates meaning, students will learn to look beyond narrative and dialogue in order to understand both the semiotics and poetics of the image. In addition to numerous close-reading exercises, we will be supplementing our investigation of images with several classical texts on photography and film, by theorists such as John Berger, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, Laura Mulvey, Andre Bazin, Kaja Silverman, and Mary Ann Doane.  Students must come to class prepared with all of the assigned reading, and will be expected to participate verbally in class on a weekly basis.

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

Texts: Roland Barthes, Andre Bazin, John Berger, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Mary Ann Doane, Sergei Eisenstein, Sigmund Freud, Siegfried Kracauer. Jacques Lacan, Christian Metz, Craig Owens, Kaja Silverman, Susan Sontag

Art and films by: Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Dorothea Lange

Evaluation: TBD

Format: lectures and screenings


ENGL 360 Literary Criticism

Professor Sandeep Banerjee
Fall 2016                                                   
Tuesday and Thursday: 11:35–12:55

Full course description

Description: This course explores several topics that are central to modern and contemporary literary criticism and critical theory in addition to introducing students to the development of the discipline of literary studies. These include among others: interpretation; culture; ideology; hegemony; class, race, and gender; signification; discourse; postcolonialism; postmodernism. While we engage with these complex and contested issues of interpretation and criticism, we will read key texts from a range of critical schools and practices, including Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, and Marxism. We will also read selections from, among others, the writings of Matthew Arnold, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Karl Marx, Judith Butler, and Edward Said. These texts will help us articulate and interrogate some of the most fundamental questions pertaining to the practice of literary studies: What constitutes literature? Who determines what texts mean, and how? How do texts relate to broader social structures? Considering these questions and texts will necessitate careful and patient reading as well as sustained engagement with lecture and discussion during class. Some of the readings for this course will be difficult and dense. Thorough preparation for each class meeting is essential. The course is required for – but not restricted to – honours students in the English department’s Literature stream.

Texts (tentative): 

Selections from the texts by critics and theorists
Terry Eagleton – Literary Theory: An Introduction

Evaluation: TBD

Format: lectures and discussions


ENGL 364 Creative Writing

Instructor: Alix Ohlin
Winter 2017                                                   
TBA

Full course description

Description: Students in this weekly workshop will read, write, and think broadly and imaginatively about short fiction.  What makes fiction work?  What does it mean to find your voice, and why does it matter? These and other questions will be explored through our class discussions and the production of original creative work.  Students will read a range of fiction that will provide models for the many ways in which short stories can surprise us, delight us, and break our hearts.  Together with essays on the craft of writing, the stories we read will give us a lens through which to study the techniques of fiction, including characterization, structure, point of view, and the handling of time.  The heart of the class will be workshop discussions in which we read and offer constructive, rigorous feedback of student writing.  Students will also be asked to keep a daily writing journal and to attend two literary events.  Grades will be assessed based on attendance, participation in the activities of the course, and a final portfolio of polished work.

To apply, please submit the following items no later than Sunday, October 23rd, at 4:30 pm via e-mail attachment (PDF preferred), to dus.english [at] mcgill.ca:

  • The first 3-5 pages (double-spaced) of a short story or novel
  • A 3-5 page (double-spaced) letter of introduction.  I’d like to know why you are drawn to studying fiction; what your ambitions are for your work; and the writers (in any genre or form) you are currently reading. I’d like you also to make mention of a passage from a work of fiction that you love—a particular scene from a novel, for example, or a line from a short story—and tell me why this passage has, for you, remained so striking and memorable.

Texts: assigned readings compiled by the instructor

Evaluation: 

  • Participation in class discussions and commitment to the workshop process: 25%
  • Short Writing Assignments and Exercises: 25%
  • Attendance at outside literary events and maintenance of a writing journal: 20%
  • Final Portfolio: 30%

Format: Lectures and discussions


ENGL 365 Costuming for the Theatre I

Instructor Catherine Bradley 
Fall Term 2016
Tuesday and Thursday, 10:05 - 11:25

Full course description

Prerequisite:  None.  Permission of the instructor required for registration.  

Description: Costuming I focuses on skills acquisition. The process of designing and coordinating costumes for a main stage theatre production is the practical project that fuels this class.  Skills that will be covered include use of industrial sewing machines, hand sewing techniques, taking actor measurements, alterations, and garment fittings with the actors.

Before working on the costumes for the production, we will practice the skills needed to do alterations with a practical project. This will provide an opportunity to become comfortable with industrial machinery, while gaining skills and confidence needed for fittings.

Costume design is rooted in the play script, which is where the production work begins. Reading the script is the first order of business, followed by charting the characters.

Character analysis and research inform our design choices. The director will provide students with an initial directorial concept and vision for the show, emphasizing clear character delineation. Our discussion will focus on color palette, mood and the individual characters. Later, the director will assess the students’ rough sketches and /or inspiration images, and decide which images will carry forward into the production design. Students will then produce final renderings for directorial approval. The design for the production will be chosen using the students’ sketches. 

The English Department Main Stage theatre production provides an opportunity for students to practice their costuming skills in the atelier and backstage.  The class will be in charge of the costumes for each actor from head to toe, and will be in charge of the costumes backstage. Each student will have a specific production duty as well as a hands-on production project. Once we are in full production mode, the atelier will be open on specific days for hands-on projects and production hours.

From dress rehearsals through to the final night of the production, two to three members of the costume team will be working backstage each night as costume crew. The dressing shifts will be divided among the class, along with daytime maintenance of the costumes. The final night of the production, all students will be required to attend strike, which is dismantling of the show. Expect a very late night, with strike lasting until 2:00am.  Students will be expected to strike the set as well as the costumes. 

Texts: play script TBD

Required tools:

  • Sewing kit in the costume shop at all times. The minimum sewing kit consists of thimble, fabric scissors, stitch ripper, one package of needles, one box of dressmaking pins, a pencil and small notepad. Each item must be labeled with the student’s name, stored in a container.
  • Those who feel that they will benefit from a more complete sewing kit are welcome to add a measuring tape, pin cushion, a few metal pushpins, a tracing wheel, tailoring wax (white is most useful), needle nosed pliers, and a small sharp pair of fabric scissors for trimming and clipping.

Evaluation: Hand Sewing Sample 5%, Alterations Project 10%, Charts 10%, Measurements 5%, Rough Sketches 5%, Final Illustrations 10%, Production Project 20%, Production Duty 15%, back stage crew and strike 10%.  Attendance 10% (1 mark lost for lateness of 5 minutes or more.  2 marks lost for absence without illness.  Students MUST inform the instructor of illness before class starts).

Format: Lectures, hands on projects, demonstrations, and practical work.  Additional production hours outside of class time are required, and are often substantial. Production Hours: Expect a minimum of 9 hours per week in the costume shop. There is no maximum.

Production Hours: Expect a minimum of 9 hours per week in the costume shop.  There is no maximum.

Average enrollment: 10 students, by permission of the instructor. Selection process is by interview with the instructor.


ENGL 367 Acting 2

Professor Myrna Wyatt Selkirk
Fall 2016
Monday and Wednesday 11:05 - 12:55

Full course description

Limited enrollment. Permission of instructor required. Admission to the course will be by application. See format below. If you have never worked with me, please sign up for an interview. Sign-up sheets will be on the door of Arts 240 by April 1, 2016.

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

Description: As in ENGL 269 the focus of this course will be on the actor as communicator. Students will explore ways to become more engaged, more open and more focused.  Emphasis will be placed on exploration of the actor's resources - voice, body, imagination, emotions, intellect and the senses.  Development of skills will be channeled mostly through the analysis, interpretation and performance of written texts. 

Texts: Five Approaches to Acting by David Kaplan (West Broadway Press, 2001) and 3 playscripts (TBA

Evaluation: Attendance and Participation 20%, Project #1: 25%, Project #2: 25%, Project #3: 30%. All presentations have an oral and a written component. 

Format: Warm-ups; discussion; improvisation; movement and voice exercises; scene work; oral presentations.

Application: Submit answers to the following questions to myrna.wyatt.selkirk [at] mcgill.ca. (In your application please use both the number and subject for each response):

  • Acting Experience:
  • Improvisation Experience (not required for this course):
  • Theatre courses taken at McGill or elsewhere:
  • Any other relevant experience:
  • Other things I should know about you:
  • Expected year of graduation and Major(s) and Minor(s):
  • Have you taken ENGL 230?  ENGL 269?
  • What will you bring to this course?  This can expand on numbers 4 and 5 above.  Discuss special attributes and personality traits.  Talk about your ability as a collaborator.​
  • What do you hope to get out of this course?

ENGL 368 Stage Scenery and Lighting 1

Staff
Fall Term 2016
Tuesday, Thursday 10:05-11:25

Full course description

Prerequisite: None. Limited enrolment. Permission of instructor required. Not open to students enrolled in ENGL 365.

Description: An introduction to Basic Technical Theatre skills e.g. safety procedures, knots, climbing ladders, rigging, etc. Students will be part of the Production Team for the English Department’s Production.

  • Basics of operating and maintaining a Fly system
  • Basics of focusing and maintaining various types of lighting instruments
  • Dimmers and Circuits
  • Architecture of different theatres and their properties
  • Basics of designing a lighting plot including assessing a scene and its needs, elements of drafting and reading a lighting plot, hanging and focusing lighting instruments, evaluation of the final product.
  • Basic carpentry. Learning to read and draft technical drawings for a set design
  • Definitions of theatre job positions and the structure of a production team. Basics of each position.

Format: Workshop demonstrations, practical assignments, lectures and up to 100 hours of production work.

Evaluation: 20% Class participation (2% deducted for each missed class and 1% for lateness of 5 min. or more) 20% In-class tests and projects, 45% Production Assignments, 15% Final Project


ENGL 371 19th-Century US Popular Entertainments

Professor Katherine Zien
Fall 2016
Tuesday and Thursday, 10:05-11:25

Full course description

Prerequisites: None

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

Description: This course explores representations and constructions of U.S. national identity in nineteenth and twentieth century popular theatre and entertainments. As the nation experienced industrialization, urbanization, immigration, changing sexual and gender norms, and fraught cultural and racial contact, popular entertainments attracted mass audiences and created spectacles of national inclusion and ‘othering.’ Units address the following themes and forms: racial and reform melodramas; antebellum and post-Emancipation stagings of race (including blackface minstrelsy and abolitionist performances); frontier spectacles (such as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West); freak shows and “proprietary museums;” popular dance, vaudeville, and gendered displays; imperialism and world’s fairs; and the Jazz Age. We will culminate by investigating the Federal Theatre Project as a moment in which popular entertainments were institutionalized to create new contexts merging labor and leisure. In readings supplemented by contextualizing lectures, we will consider the place of the “popular” – in its classed, ethnic, racial, gendered, erotic, commercial, and hegemonic valences – in forging styles of U.S. citizenship and belonging that persist to the current day, often in camouflage.

Texts:

  • Play texts (Metamora; The Octoroon; Uncle Tom’s Cabin)
  • Films (The Jazz Singer)
  • A course packet comprising secondary sources by Annemarie Bean, Daphne Brooks, Jayna Brown, Jon Cruz, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jane Desmond, Andrew Erdman, Susan Glenn, Saidiya Hartman, Bruce McConachie, Lisa Merrill, Andrea Most, Ronald Radano, Joseph Roach, David Roediger, Michael Rogin, Robert Rydell, David Savran, Alexander Saxton, and S.E. Wilmer, among others.

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

Format: Lecture and discussion


ENGL 372 Stage Scenery and Lighting 2

Staff
Winter Term 2017
Tuesday, Thursday 10:05-11:25

Full course description

Prerequisite: None- due to the exigencies of theatrical production, students should be prepared to devote considerable amounts of time to this course. Limited enrolment. Permission of instructor required. Not open to students enrolled in ENGL 377. Students interested in taking this course are instructed to contact Mr. Roche by email.

Description: Students will be involved in the production process through individual projects. A continuation and building upon skills and knowledge learned in SSL1 with the possibility of taking on a Designer role.

Format: Lectures, production demonstrations and up to 100 hours of production work.

Evaluation: 20% Class participation (2% deducted for each missed class and 1% for lateness of 5 min. or more), 20% In-class tests and projects, 45% Production Assignments, 15% Final Project


ENGL 375 Interpretation of the Dramatic Text

Acting Simulations for Couples and Family Therapy (CAFT) 

NB: The first part of the course title doesn’t accurately express the course content.  The course is heavily dependent on improvisation, not text.  Please read below for clarification

Professor Myrna Wyatt Selkirk
Fall 2016 AND Winter 2017
NB: This is a 3 credit course that spans the two terms.
Fall 2016 Thursday 16:05-17:25
Winter 2017 Tuesday 16:05-17:25

Full course description

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

Requirements: 

  • Experience as an Actor.
  • Experience with improvisation.
  • Drama and Theatre Major or Minor and/or permission of instructor.
  • Students must be available during the CAFT class time.  For both Fall and Winter Terms the class will either be on a Tuesday or Thursday.  Each weekly session is about an hour long.  Course times will be posted once timetabling is complete.  

Activities and Evalutation: 

Class simulations: 1 hour per week (within CAFT class times): 70%
Meetings: 1/2 to 3/4 hour every other week (scheduled around your availability)
​Planning and Rehearsals (scheduled around your availability)
Background Readings and Reading Journals. 10%
Journals: 20%

Application: Submit answers to the following questions to myrna.wyatt.selkirk [at] mcgill.ca. (In your application please use both the number and subject for each response):

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

Average Enrollment: 8 students


ENGL 377 Costuming for the Theatre II

Instructor Catherine Bradley 
Winter Term 2017
Tuesday and Thursday, 10:05 - 11:25

Full course description

Prerequisite:  Costuming for the Theatre I or extensive experience.  Permission of the instructor required for registration.  

Description: Learning modules in advanced costuming may include continuation of draping techniques on full scale mannequins, millinery techniques, and costume breakdown.  Sewing skills that were gained in the first semester will be built upon in the second semester, by costuming the English Department Mainstage production.  This semester, emphasis is on perfecting skills, developing efficient production techniques, and concentrated time use.

The English Department production of Theatre Lab, is directed by Professor Myrna Wyatt Selkirk. The costume class will see the production through from inception to closing night. Each student will have a specific production duty as well as a hands on production project. Costuming II differs from Costuming I in the level of independence expected from the students.

Students are expected to take an active part in defining and outlining their specific production duties by formulating a contract with mile stone dates and deadlines, in collaboration with their classmates and instructor.  This will give students an opportunity to manage all aspects of their production duties independently. Students are expected to refer back to their contract throughout the semester in order to maintain the schedule that they formulated.  A master production calender is available for this purpose.

At the end of term Theatre Lab will be presented, with the costume team as backstage crew. Dress rehearsals and show nights will divided equally among the costume team.  The final night of the production, all students will be required to attend strike, which is the dismantling of the show.  Strike takes place on the final night of the run, from approximately 10:00pm until 2:00am.  All students will be expected to strike the set as well as the costumes. Strike is mandatory.

Texts: Script, TBD.

Evaluation: TBD

Format: Lectures, hands on projects, demonstrations, and practical work. Production hours outside of class time are required.

Average enrollment: 10 students, by permission of the instructor.


ENGL 381 A Film-Maker 1

French Feminist Filmmakers

Professor Alanna Thain
Winter Term 2016
Monday and Wednesday 14:35 pm – 15:55 pm
Weekly Screening Wednesday 16:05-18:30

Full course description

Description: This class explores the work, over fifty years of French art cinema, of three exceptional filmmakers.  Agnes Varda was one of the most significant artists, and the only woman director working in the French New Wave, and a member of the Left Bank Group; her work has continued to the present day, rewriting conventional distinctions between documentary and fiction.  From the brilliant Cléo de 5 à 7, with the main character’s real time dérive through streets of Paris, to her recent series of experimental and autobiographical documentaries, Varda remains a powerful and original voice well into her 80s.  Claire Denis, born in France and raised in Africa, has produced one of the most significant sets of films on the body of the last three decades, since her film debut in the late 1980s.  Especially notable for her complicated intersections of race, masculinity and desire, Denis’ highly formalist style is shockingly affective, in works such as her updating of Billy Budd, Beau Travail, set amidst the French Foreign Legion, to the modern bio-horror of Trouble Every Day. The audacious works of Catherine Breillat are relentless explorations of questions of gender, sexuality, social convention and fantasy. From her feminist re-imaginings of fairy tales, to her controversial and explicit portrayals of sexuality, through the body politics of fat and feminism, Breillat extends the legacy of a French feminist filmmaking through the contemporary moment. Through exploring the works of these three filmmakers, this course will consider how questions of the body and sexuality, film form and aesthetics, politics, power and subversion have played out on screen in French cinema of the last fifty years. 

Texts: Coursepack available at the McGill Bookstore

Evaluation: TBD

Format: Lectures, screenings, discussions Please note: Screenings attendance is mandatory


ENGL 382 International Cinema 1

American Film of the 1960s

Professor Ara Osterweil
Fall 2016
Monday and Wednesday, 16:05 pm - 17:25 pm
Mandatory Screening: Tuesday, 5:30-8:30

Full course description

Description: This course examines the development of cinema during the most radical decade of political resistance and artistic innovation in American history.  Juxtaposing an analysis of mainstream films alongside the study of experimental and independent cinema, this course situates the revolution in cinema in the social and political context of the 1960s. By putting Hollywood into dialogue with its alternatives, this course examines how cinema of this period approached complex issues such as: the decline of the Hollywood studio system and the Production Code Administration, the escalating Cold War, political paranoia and assassination, the student protest movement, racial politics and the struggle for civil rights, the sexual revolution, the emergence of gay rights, the Vietnam war, the legacy of earlier progressive movements such as the Popular Front, hippie culture, and the increasing role of the media or what theorist Guy Debord has called “the society of the spectacle.” We will study some of the most important films of the decade, including works by Hollywood directors such as John Huston, Robert Aldrich, John Schlesinger, Stanley Kubrick, and Arthur Penn, independent mavericks such as John Cassavetes, and experimental filmmakers such as Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, Carolee Schneemann, Jack Smith, and Stan Brakhage. Attendance at weekly screenings is mandatory; readings from historical texts are copious and intensive. Do not enroll in this course if you cannot make the mandatory screening time each week.  

Texts: 

J. Hoberman, The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties
Richard Dyer, Stars
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture
David James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties
Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope: Days of Rage
Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

Films:

Shadows (John Cassavetes, 1960)
The Misfits (John Huston, 1960)
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962)
The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962)
Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1963)
Nothing But a Man (Michael Roemer and Robert Young, 1964)
Sins of the Fleshapoids (Mike Kuchar, 1965)
My Hustler (Andy Warhol, 1965)
Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967)
Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968)
Flesh (Paul Morrissey, 1968)
Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969)
Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler, 1969)
Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969)

Evaluation: Attendance and class Participation: 15%; midterm exam: 20%; final exam: 25%; final research paper: 40% 

Format: Lecture, discussion, and mandatory weekly screenings.


ENGL 383 Studies in Communications 1

The Kennedys in Literature, Media and Film

Professor Berkeley Kaite
Winter 2017
Monday and Wednesday 16:05-17:25

Full course description

Description: In this course we will examine the (mostly) North American pre-occupation with the Kennedy family. Much of the attention to President Kennedy's family occurred following his assassination in Dallas, Texas in November of 1963. We will examine the reasons for this intense media fascination. Kennedy was the 4th US president to be assassinated, so how can we interpret the enduring fascination with him (and his wife, Jacqueline)? Among other things, thus, we will focus on the peculiar nature of his death and the cultural contexts for what can be referred to as the “Kennedy industries.” These will include enhanced visibility of the presidential office and family, charisma and the photogenics of power, the culture of the “cold war” and the transition from the late 50s to the early 60s. But, we will also look at some related issues and questions, among them: the role of trauma and the body in the maintenance of national identities; the investment in secrets, conspiracy theories and gossip in the mass media age; the function of popular memory; and the central figures to the Kennedy narratives, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Lee Harvey Oswald. Key questions here will be, among others, what do we need to remember of them and what do we insist on forgetting? Note: this course will be less concerned with getting at any truths about the Kennedys; rather it seeks to address the circulation of stories, the proliferation of statements, “facts,” images which go into the “cultural screen saver”* called JFK (*Thomas Mallon, Mrs. Paine's Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy, 2002).  

Texts: 

Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images, David M Lubin
Libra, Don DeLillo

Films:

Smash His Camera
JFK
The House of Yes
JFK: 3 Shots That Changed the World

Evaluation: (provisional) 27% 9 in-class quizzes based on Shooting Kennedy; 63% 3 short essays on 2 films and Libra; 10% participation

Format: lecture, screenings, presentation of visual material, discussion


ENGL 390 Political and Cultural Theory

The Private and the Public

Professor Paul Yachnin
Winter 2017
Tuesday and Thursday, 13:05-14:25

Full course description

Description:  In this course, we study key literary works that have been central to the creation of our ideas about the private and the public. These include three plays by Shakespeare, readings from the two influential “confessions” of St. Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the great nineteenth-century novel Jane Eyre. Our literary reading will be supplemented by a number of important political philosophers, including Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and (literary historian) Michael Warner.

Texts: 

Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. A. R. Braunmuller (Pelican)
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, ed. Roger Warren and Stanley Wells (Oxford)
Shakespeare, Othello, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford
St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford)
Rousseau, Confessions, trans. Angela Scholar (Oxford)
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, ed. Margaret Smith (Oxford)
Other readings will be provided in electronic form.

Evaluation: 

Reading responses, 5% each - 20%

Short essays, 15% each - 30%

Participation 15%

Final Exam 35%

Format: Lecture and discussion

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