300-level / Intermediate Courses

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 Milton Street, 514-845-5640). (The list of texts below is tentative and incomplete, to be confirmed in September 2017.)

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

Expected Student Preparation: Previous university-level course work in literature or cultural studies.

Description: This course will study developments in the English novel from the mid-eighteenth century until the early 1800s. Attention will be paid to gender issues, as well as to genre, style, and thematic concerns. The course will focus on six novels. We shall begin in the 1750s with Samuel Johnson’s remarkable oriental tale, Rasselas (1759). From the 1760s, we shall explore the first Gothic novel: Horace Walpole’s pioneering The Castle of Otranto (1764). We shall then study an example of epistolary fiction: Frances Burney’s bestselling comic novel, Evelina (1778). We next turn to Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), the most sensational of the many Gothic novels of the Revolutionary decade. We shall conclude with two of Jane Austen’s novels. Sense and Sensibility (1811), first drafted in the 1790s, responds to many eighteenth-century issues, as its title suggests. Northanger Abbey (1817), also drafted in the 1790s, is a witty parody and reworking of Gothic fiction.

Texts:

Samuel Johnson, Rasselas (Broadview)
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (Broadview)
Frances Burney, Evelina (Broadview)
M.G. Lewis, The Monk (Broadview)
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (Broadview)
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Broadview)

Evaluation: 25% mid-term test; 25% final test; 50% term paper (2,000-2,500 words)

Format: Lectures and discussion

Prerequisite:  none.

Description: A tour through the English literary Renaissance from around 1500 to 1600, apart from drama, emphasizing literary authors and texts of particularly high quality and influence, and relating them to significant or interesting cultural contexts and nonliterary discourses, including the visual arts. Further readings sample those contexts and discourses.  Featured texts and authors will include Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, Edmund Spenser, including his Shepheardes Calender and the iconography of its twelve illustrations, Mary Stuart (Queen of Scots), and William Shakespeare’s nondramatic poetry. Other parts of the course will address various particular topics through study of relevant English and translated continental texts, including the gender debate enhancing the status of women; the beginnings of female authorship in English; contemporary erotica; the advent of printing and controls upon print; sixteenth-century literary theory; the relation of visual iconography and emblematics to literature; Neoplatonic love theory and its literary and social impacts;  and mythography. The Course Reader and other texts will be available in paperback for purchase at the Word bookstore, 469 Milton Street, 514-.845-.5640.

Texts: Sir Thomas More, Utopia; Shakespeare, Sonnets and Narrative Poems; Baldesar Castiglione, The Courtier; Spenser, Book VIone book of The Faerie Queene; Course Reader, providing the various other texts.

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

Format: Lecture and discussion

Prerequisite or co-requisite: ENGL 202. This course is open only to English majors in the literature stream.  This course is to be taken in the Fall semester of U1 or in the first Fall semester after the student’s selection of the Literature Major program.

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

Although many critical methods can be applied to the works in this course, Poetics focuses on teaching students how to talk and write precisely about a wide range of formal and stylistic techniques in relation to literary meaning in poetry and prose fiction. All the critical methodologies you will learn in your other English courses will benefit from your knowledge of the material of ENGL 311. You will read some works in Poetics that are also required in other courses, such as ENGL 202 and 203, the Departmental Surveys of English Literature. In Poetics, we study such works not primarily in historical context, or as engagements with literary, cultural or social history, but for the techniques of literary art with which they communicate 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. 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.  10^th edn.  Thomson-Wadsworth, 2009.
• Bausch, Richard, and R.V. Cassill, eds.  The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.  Shorter 7^th edn.  New York: Norton, 2006.
• Ferguson, Margaret, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy, eds.  The Norton Anthology of Poetry.  Shorter 5^th edn.  New York: Norton, 2005.
• Messenger, William E., et al., eds.  The Canadian Writer’s Handbook.  5^th edn.  Toronto: Oxford, 2010.

Evaluation: TBA, but usually: essay 1 (4 pp.), 10%; essay 2 (4-5 pp.), 15%; essay 3 (6-7 pp.), 15%; mid-term examination 10%; formal final examination 30%; short assignments, such as quizzes, writing exercises, and recitations 10%; class participation 10%

Format: Lecture and discussion

Prerequisite: None

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

Description: The objective of our seminar is to examine a selection of nineteenth-century British plays in performance.  While we shall be engaged in a close reading of these plays by means of various interpretative strategies, in doing so, we shall give detailed analytical attention to how they were originally performed, taking into consideration the “material conditions of performance.” Some of these include licensing regulations; actresses, actors, and acting styles; costuming practices; scenography;  approaches to the creation of the mise-en-scène; lighting practices; theatre architecture; demographics; the nature of audiences’ affective responses to productions; sociology; art history; music history and musicology; directors and directing styles (directors in this period were normally called “actor-managers” or “actress-managers” as they not only directed their productions but customarily played in their leading roles); technological developments; critics and criticism; the composition of audiences, considered in relation to the holy trinity of race, class, and gender (among other ‘categories’); international influences; plays and playwrights (and editing practices and genres); experiments in dramaturgy and theatricalization; the archive of the repertoire; studies of the novel; and the impress of “foreign” influences on all of the subjects listed above. (Note that this is not an exhaustive list.)   Information about these matters is contained within the set-text for the course, whose title is a lucid articulation of exactly what we shall be covering and doing: The Broadview Anthology of Nineteenth-Century British Performance, ed. Tracy C. Davis (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, c. 2012) and whose overall critical introduction, critical introductions to the plays, and meticulous end-notes are indispensable. A corollary objective is to read / imagine / conjure the plays in a doubled perspective: why, how, and to what ends they existed in their own time, partly as a function of how their audiences engaged in serving as their co-creators of ‘meaning’; and doing likewise for their existence in  our own time, an objective which will be accomplished in part by a good deal of reading texts out-loud, in round-the-table fashion, or by means of each students taking on a specific parts. [Acting experience is not required!]

We shall also be considering the ideological, geo-political, and historical contexts in which these plays were performed, and how the plays were not only in part a consequence of these contexts, shaped by them in various ways, but also how the plays themselves, particularly  in performance, but also in reading, intervened in the social order, often contributing to the discourses around key issues, such as empire and colonization, race, gender demarcations of identities and exercises in power, social classes, constructions of the Other, and both explicit and covert understandings of what the vexed term “British” meant or could mean or should mean. (Think the debates about “Brexit.” What goes around comes around.)

The plays will be chosen from a selection of George Colman, the Younger’s The Africans; or, War, Love, and Duty, Col. Ralph Hamilton,s Elphi Bey; or, The Arab’s Faith, James Smith and R. B. Peake’s, Trip to America, Dion Boucicault’s, The Relief of Lucknow, T. W. Robertson’s Ours, B. C. Stephenson and Alfred Cellier’s Dorothy, J. M. Barrie, Ibsen’s Ghost; or, Toole Up-to-Date, Paul Potter’s Trilby (along with reading George du Maurier’s novel, Trilby, on which the play was based),  Nina Syrett’s The Finding of Nancy, Leopold Lewis and Henry Irving’s The Bells, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance Of Being Earnest and Salome, and possibly a work by Gilbert and Sullivan, depending of which play The Savoy Society produces in Moyse Hall, a production we would see together.

Evaluation: Consistent and consequential participation in the ongoing intellectual and cultural life of the seminar: 15%; One seminar presentation on a play. This will lead to writing a distilled critical argument advanced in an 8-page (maximum) double-spaced essay. The presentation and the paper will be worth 35%; 16--page long (maximum) double-spaced major scholarly essay (choice of individually-negotiated essay topics): 50%.

Format: Lectures, long, medium, and mini; PPPs; led-discussions on salient issues; student presentations with the possibility of engaging in exercises in Praxis.

Average enrollment: 22 students 

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

Description: In addition to reading plays by means of various interpretative strategies, along with  critical, theoretical, historical essays, exercises in life-writing, and watching selected productions on Vimeo, YouTube, et al, and, ideally, a stage production if one is produced in the Montreal fall theatre season, or nearby, we shall be examining recurrent themes and subjects in the study of Contemporary Canadian Aboriginal Theatre, among them: critical vocabulary and fraught terminology, insightful and occluding; mythologies, original and imposed by the Imperium; colonization and de-colonization; (spiritual) journeys; embodiments, embodied knowledge;  epistemologies of the body; living libraries; (sacred) rituals;  the dis/ease(s) of memory; death and alienation by institutions; homelessness;  sexuality, gender, two-spiritedness, Queer Indigenous Studies; humour for survival and resistance; disparaged and misunderstood aesthetics; imperial rule(s); constructing the Other; the enduring problematic of the West and all the Rest; resisting / resistant audiences and critics; ‘native’ theatre principles, practices, and experiments; traditions and innovations; orality and ocularity and the relationship between them; story telling / story weaving modalities along with story work; indigeneity and the academy; Tricksters and their progeny and variations;, the phenomenon of what Jill Carter has described as “repairing the web;” what Monique Mojica describes as “blood memory” and “ethnostress,”; critical race theory; destructive and “healing” modes of mourning; traumas; absence; (ethically-informed) witnessing; the politics of disappearance, investigating how aesthetic practices of representing absence and materialising presence engage with the embodied experience of those facing the trauma of disappearance; both historical and current acts of erasure, together with exercises in officially-sanctioned narratives of nation, nations, and nationhood, as have occurred during this, the Sesquicentennial of “Canada”; Turtle Island in the cultural imaginary; treaties, kept and broken; the politics of the “contact zone”  . . .  Instructive are Yvette Nolan's chapter titles in Medicine Shows: Poison Exposed, Survivance, Remembrance, Ceremony, The Drum, Making Community, Trickster, Rougarou, Mahigan, and the Weeping Forest, Bad Medicine, The Eighth Fire, and This Is How We Go Forward.  

An Invitation:

No matter the final size of the seminar, it will be possible to ensure that your particular interests are made an integral part of our learning. I am your professor; I am also a student, in the Paulo Freirean sense of the word; the seminar is based, as are most of my seminars, on Freirean principles and practices (with links to the theatre work, writings, and talks of Augusto Boal). This means, among many things, that each of us is here not so much to acquire—and ‘bank’  information--but rather to experience the acquisition of (embodied) knowledge, with which we have a vested interest borne of curiosity and the desire to free ourselves from the shackles of received ideas, seeking--sometimes achieving--(sovereign) agency. We bring our politics and our ideologies with us, 'self-consciously' in the good sense of that word, not to impose them upon one another, but to understand them as our determinants of meanings, with the possibility always in mind of changing them as we enhance our critical awareness, thinking, and feelings and recognize that we--students, professors, in our case--are (perhaps? definitely? oppressed), acceding authority to cultures of silence, rather than working hard to figure out how to interrogate  them and to liberate our voices. We are an interdependent community of scholars / artists / seekers working individually and collectively for the 'greater good.'  We have what in oral history is known as "shared authority." For more on Freire, I recommend his Wikipedia entry, which can make for ideal reading before our first meeting:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire. Time permitting, I also recommend the man himself, particularly his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970).

"McGill is situated on land which has long served as a site of meeting and exchange amongst Indigenous peoples, including the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabeg nations. McGill honours and respects the diverse Indigenous peoples connected to this territory on which we gather today."

Texts: 

Appleford, Rob. Ed. Aboriginal Drama and Theatre. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2005.
Highway, Tomson. Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005.
Loring, Kevin. Where The Blood Mixes. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2009.
Mojica, Monique and Ric Knowles. Eds. Staging Coyote's Dream: An Anthology of First Nations Drama In English, 2 vols. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2003 and 2008. Selected plays will be chosen from these two volumes.
Nolan, Yvette and Ric Knowles. Eds. Performing Indigeneity. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2016. (A newly published book, and a very fine one, it contains a rich array of seminal chapters.)
Selected articles from alt. theatre: cultural diversity and the stage http://alttheatre.ca/
A substantial body of critical essays and historical documents etc. that will be made available to you either in a Course Pack (CP) or by means of a shared Dropbox folder. The latter is preferable for it allows for a high standard in providing you with iconographic material of various productions and, as you undertake your projects and presentations, will make it possible for you to contribute significant material, as, individually and collectively, we build up a very significant source of primary and secondary materials, which can be used not only by us but in other courses. PPPs can also be uploaded, though with copyright inscriptions by those of you who prepared them. In doing so, you will have to ensure that you have the right granted to you from your sources--e.g. the National Library and Archives Canada, theatre companies, the V + A Collections, the British Museum, the British Library, the latter three having striking iconographic material that relates to or serves to contextualise "Canadian" (complex word!) "aboriginal" (another complex word; we shall discuss the connotations and denotations and historical uses of both words as well as others in our first meeting of our seminar) principles, practices, and performances, including para-theatrical performances, dance-dramas and the like.

Further Reading:

King. Thomas. The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2013. 9th edn.
Nolan. Yvette. Medicine Shows: Indigenous Performance Culture. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2015.

Evaluation:

• One seminar presentation followed by an eight-page paper, drawing from the presentation and developing a distilled critical argument: 35%. I strongly encourage praxis, in whole or in part, as part of a presentation or as an autonomous event.  
• 16-page long scholarly essay; all topics individually negotiated, requiring meeting  with me as soon as two weeks into the term to get the initial thinking and research well underway, followed by regular meetings with me throughout the term: 50%
• Consistent participation in the intellectual and creative life of the seminar: 15%

Format: Discussions, discussions, discussions; lectures, small, medium-sized, long; presentations / performances and other pedagogical means which can be arrived at through an exchange about possibilities.

Description: This course will examine 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: TBA

Evaluation:

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

Format: Lectures and conferences

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

Prerequisite: None.

Expected Student Preparation: Previous university courses in English literature, especially ENGL 202; some knowledge of Renaissance literature or culture is desirable.

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

Texts: (required texts are available at McGill Bookstore)

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

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

Format: Lecture and discussion

Note: Limited to students in English programs.

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

Texts: 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

Preparation: Students are expected to have taken at least one 200- or 300-level course in any option in the Department of English.

Description: Focused on early twentieth century literary theory and criticism, this course spotlights the concept of “close reading,” developed 1920-1960 in anglophone contexts, which has achieved legendary (and sometimes controversial) status in literary studies and adjacent disciplines.  We trace a genealogy of the concept of “close reading,” following how understandings of it have evolved over time.  We will often reckon with the question of what exactly it means to read texts “closely”—in what ways, for what, to what ends?

Some see close reading as crucial to the formation of the field of “English” as we now know it; and it’s sometimes regarded as a practice fundamental to the work of the discipline. In fact, as emphasized in a 2008 issue of the interdisciplinary journal Representations, techniques of “close reading” first cultivated in the field of English literary studies have often been taken up and adapted by practitioners in neighbouring disciplines such as history, law, and anthropology. Yet the concept remains mysterious, even mystified. As media theorist Katherine Hayles notes, “Literary scholars generally think they know what is meant by close reading, but, looked at more closely, it proves not so easy to define or exemplify. Jonathan Culler, quoting Peter Middleton, observes that ‘close reading is our contemporary term for a heterogeneous and largely unorganized set of practices and assumptions.” John Guillory observes that “close reading is a modern academic practice with an inaugural moment, a period of development, and now perhaps a period of decline.”

Yet many contemporary commentators do not agree that close reading is in “decline”: instead they see it as changing shape. The design of our course takes a cue from a wave of renewed interest in close reading from contemporary commentators as diverse as Katherine Hayles, Terry Eagleton, Gerald Graff, Camille Paglia, Jane Gallop, John Guillory, and N. Katherine Hayles, who have all raised questions in recent years about how techniques of close reading—often considered “old-fashioned”—might be reinvigorated and adapted for today’s climate and needs.

A major question guiding our work will thus be how we might draw upon the assumptions and approaches associated with “close reading” today for work in different branches of what falls within the capacious arena of work in “English,” represented in our department by the “streams” of Literature, Drama and Theatre, and Cultural Studies.

Although we will not focus on texts post-1960, we will also consider how forms of close reading have informed approaches such as Deconstruction and New Historicism, as pursued by theorists such as Derrida, Paul De Man, Stephen Greenblatt, Terry Eagleton, and N. Katherine Hayles.

Texts: Our reading accents primary texts of  early- to mid-twentieth century theorists/ critics, so that we can make up our own minds about how their work looks (and might or might not be valuable to us) today. We consider work by critics integral to the rise of close reading such as I.A. Richards, William Empson, Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, René Wellek and Austin Warren. Framing reading will be from contemporary commentators on these early twentieth-century theorists such as Gerald Graff, Katherine Hayles, Terry Eagleton, and John Guillory.

We also engage leading critics contemporary to those focusing on close reading such as F.R. Leavis, Q.D. Leavis, Kenneth Burke, Lionel Trilling, Erich Auerbach and Northrop Frye; we consider British predecessors such as Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, and Walter Pater. We will query how methods of close reading developed in anglophone contexts stand in dialogue with the work of the early-twentieth century Russian Formalists; as well as with that of British critic Q.D. Leavis, whose pioneering work in sociological literary criticism has been linked to the beginnings of Cultural Studies; and that of leftist critics of the Partisan Review circle such as Philip Rahv. We will also engage the literary essays and literary-critical manifestoes of such early twentieth-century modernist writers such as T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and Ezra Pound, whose work often significantly informed theory and practice of much of this early- to mid-twentieth century criticism. 

Evaluation: 2 critical essays (4-5 pp.), biweekly brief responses (2 pp), final examination, participation

Format: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisite: None.

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

Description: This course will survey, and also critically interrogate, a long line of foundational works in American literature and thought that develop the conception of an “American innocence” and introduce a new literary character: the “innocent American.” Where does this widely shared notion come from? What does this national self-image imply? What possibilities does it open up? What are its limitations and dangers? A challenging reading list—including selected Emerson essays, Whitman poems, Harte and Twain short stories, Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, James’ “Daisy Miller” and The Bostonians (or “What Maisie Knew”), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Melville’s “Benito Cereno” and “Billy Budd,” Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American—will ground analysis of a variety of distinct versions of this national myth. After first tracing the development of paradigmatic plots, images, and characters associated with this complex of ideas, we will conclude with close readings of several classic literary works that are structured as tests or trials of this “American innocence.”

Texts (Tentative; editions TBA):

• Coursepack—including critical essays and short works such as: Emerson, selected essays; Whitman, “Song of Myself”; Harte, “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and "The Outcasts of Poker Flats"; Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daughter”; James, “Daisy Miller”;
• Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn;
• Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin;
• Melville, Billy Budd and Other Stories;
• Wharton, The Age of Innocence;
• Greene, The Quiet American.

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

Format: Lecture and discussion

Expected student preparation: No formal pre-requisite, but students will be expected to have the skills of close reading and command of critical terms developed in ENGL 311 (Poetics).  ENGL 228 (Introduction to Canadian Literature 1) provides appropriate background knowledge for this course

Description: A survey of the development of Canadian poetry from the nineteenth century through the Second World War.  Our discussion of substantial selections from major authors will explicate the historical and cultural contexts of their works and consider their relation to competing poetic traditions in England and America.  We will attempt to articulate each poet’s idea of the Canadian poet’s special task: among them, skilful imitation; mimesis; cultural nationalism and autonomy; originality; psychological realism; and contemporaneity.  We will also, necessar­ily, clarify such period concepts as “Romanticism,” “Victorianism,” “Aestheticism” and “Modern­ism,” and their distinctive Canadian manifesta­tions, as we proceed.

Texts:

• Gerson, Carole, and Gwendolyn Davies, eds.  Canadian Poetry: From the Beginnings through the First World War.  Toronto: McClelland and Stewart [New Canadian Library], 1994.
• Trehearne, Brian, ed.  Canadian Poetry 1920 to 1960.  Toronto: McClelland and Stewart [New Canadian Library], 2010.

Evaluation: 2 essays, 5 and 8 pp., 20% and 30%; final examination, 40%; Partici­pation in class discussion, 10% (Please note before registering for this course: I assess active participation in discussion and not attendance.  Full attendance through the semester without speaking will earn 0/10 in this category and substantially affect your final grade.)  Evaluation may change depending on class size; if necessary, changes will be announced before the end of the course change period.

Format: Lecture and discussion

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:

• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Mary Reilly
• Emma by Jane Austen 
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
• David Copperfield  by Charles Dickens​
• The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

Evaluation: 15% attendance and participation; 4x15% assignments on the role of minor characters in each of our major novels; 25% final essay.

Format: Lecture and discussion

Description: This seminar analyzes a range of English writings from the later Romantic period to provide insight into a number of major literary developments across the prose fiction, poetry, and critical prose of the second generation Romantics. This particular syllabus allows us to explore literatures of revolution and utopia, innovations in feminist poetics and theory, the rise of domestic and gothic fiction, new emphases on satire and free indirect discourse, the appearance of the Romantic lyric and the closet drama, aspects of Romantic love, sensibility, and incest, the emergence of cosmopolitanism and tourism, developments in literary and aesthetic theory, and poetic flights of fancy and imagination.

Our syllabus neither follows a strict chronological nor historical narrative. Instead, we will look at several related clusters of development within Romantic writing during the Regency period. As a result of this survey’s emphasis on important constellations of early nineteenth-century literature and culture, certain formal and historical topics will recur throughout the syllabus: representations of war, revolution, and imperial conflict; attempts to define genius and the solitary self; depictions of emotional and sexual intimacy; vacillations between idealism, irony, and skepticism; critiques of science, technology, and industry; representations of the child, the original, and the juvenile; haunting invocations of the dead, the dying, and the elegiac; engagements of ecological and nonhuman rhythms; and anachronistic returns to the medieval, the classics, and the gothic. 

Texts:

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound
Essay on Love
Defence of Poetry
The Cenci
Alastor
Queen Mab
Adonais
“Ode to the West Wind”
“Mont Blanc”
Lucy Aikin, Epistles on Women
Lord Byron, "Darkness"
"Prometheus"
“Manfred”
Don Juan
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (selections)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Mathilda 
Jane Austen, Persuasion
Thomas DeQuincey, “The English Mail-Coach”
“On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”
John Keats, Letters (to Fanny Brawne, 25 July 1819, to Reynolds, to G & G Keats: “TheVale of Soul-Making,” etc.)
"Ode to Psyche"
"Ode to a Nightingale"
"Ode on a Grecian Urn"
"Ode on Melancholy"
"To Autumn"
"Bright Star"
"La Belle Dame Sans Mercy"
"The Eve of St. Agnes”
Lamia
Hyperion
The Fall of Hyperion (1819)  
Letitia Landon, “Sappho’s Song”
“Erinna”
“The Proud Ladye”
“The Lost Pleiad”
“Love’s Last Lesson”
“Revenge”
Felicia Hemans, "Homes of England"
"The Graves of a Household" 
Letters and Journal
"Indian Woman's Death-Song"
"Casabianca"
The Siege of Valencia
John Clare, The Shepherd's Calendar and selected lyrics

Evaluation: 
10% participation
20% first paper
30% exam
40% second paper

Format: Lecture and discussion.

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.

Prerequisite: students should have 2 prior courses in English literature, preferably survey and poetics

Description: This course provides a survey of twentieth-century British novels. In addition to a discussion of modernist innovations of time and consciousness, we will take into consideration ethical stances of twentieth-century British writers, whether those stances are specifically political or, more generally, moral. Recurring novelistic tropes—first love, country houses, the Great War, the place of the avant-garde, snobbery, class consciousness, labour, industrialization, money—will be investigated. We will also consider generic conventions of comedy and tragedy as they get mixed into novelistic representation. Gender and its permutations in terms of sexuality will inform discussions of novels by men and women. 

Texts: Approximately six novels will be chosen from the list below. The final decision about texts will be made in July 2017

• Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
• Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
• E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
• Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart
• Muriel Spark, The ComfortersHilary Mantel, The Giant, O’Brien
• Jim Crace, Being Dead

Evaluation: participation, essays, midterms, final exams

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Prerequisite:  None.    

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

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

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

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

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

Format: lecture, workshop, discussion.

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.

We also will spend time developing effective written and oral presentation skills—how to gather, organize, and analyze evidence, how to develop an idea/argument, how to engage and persuade your readers or auditors.

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. Look for the asterisked items on the schedule.

Evaluation:

Short essays (2 pages, 650 words approx.), 5 x 8% each 40%; Presentation (3 minutes) 15%; Participation 15%; Take-home Exam (on King Lear) 30%

Format: Lecture and Discussion 

Description: This course examines the material circumstances and human mediations which condition the ways in which texts are produced and used. In addition to examining the materiality of print and digital texts, students will gain first-hand experience working with manuscripts in McGill’s rare book collections. We will attend to the production, circulation, and use of texts broadly conceived—as objects that are crafted, transacted, read, seen, and so on. One primary concern of the course will be to come to a nuanced understanding of the transition from manuscript to print, and from print to digital media. In what ways are manuscripts and printed texts produced, circulated and read differently? How does the physicality of a text condition interpretation and the making of meaning? How does regard for the material circumstances of textual production complicate notions of authorship and intentionality? Readings will include modern theories of bibliography and editing, as well as theories of the book modern and pre-modern commentators.

Texts: course pack

Evaluation (provisional): Mid-term exam, 20%; Rare books workshops and responses, 10%; Final research project, 30%; Final exam, 30%; Participation and attendance, 10%

Format: Lecture and Discussion 

Prerequisite: None.

Expected Student Preparation:  Previous university courses in English or classical literature. A basic knowledge of Homeric epic will be assumed in lectures. Students therefore should read the Iliad and the Odyssey before taking this course. Previous work on poetry is also strongly advised.

Description:  This course will focus on the writings of Virgil and Ovid, their relationship to the Augustan period, and their enormous influence on later Western literature. The two Roman poets seem to present contrasting models for the poet’s relation to society broadly and to political power specifically. For Virgil, poetry appears to be a means of binding society together; for Ovid, it is a means of taking it apart critically.  While we will spend most time looking at their epics, The Aeneid and Metamorphoses, we will also study the development of both authors through their different works, and discuss the significance of their decisions to use the specific genres of pastoral, georgic, elegy, and epic, in relation to larger questions of Roman culture and society.  The writers’ antithetical career paths leading to distinct epic visions offer alternative images for later writers of what it means to be a poet. By looking at the two writers together, however, we will also consider the complex intertextual dynamics between their two positions, noting especially how Ovid intensifies as well as rewrites Virgil’s exploration of desire, exile and alienation, and of the function of poetry itself.   

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

Virgil, Eclogues (Penguin); Georgics (Penguin); Aeneid (Vintage)
Ovid, The Erotic Poems (Penguin); Heroides (selections); Metamorphoses (Harcourt and Brace)
Augustus, Res Gestae, and other secondary materials will be posted on MyCourses

Evaluation: Mid-term, 20%; term paper, 40%; final exam, 30%; class participation, 10%.

Format: Lecture and Discussion 

Description: This course will survey a range of critical theoretical approaches to race, class, gender, and sexuality. As a means of attending to the ways these categories have been used historically to define and confine given populations, we will question the material effects that binaries such as white/Black, civilized/savage, male/female, rich/poor, straight/gay, cis/trans, mind/body have on lived human experience. How have oppressive regimes naturalized some forms of difference while forcefully eradicating others under the banner of assimilation? How might personal and communal approaches to identity-formation circumvent hegemonic notions of belonging? What might allegiances across constructed categories of difference do to enable their reconfiguration? Or, conversely, how might these allegiances reproduce the categories they intended to dismantle? Using theoretical texts and conversations as framework, we will investigate the way literary and cultural productions have responded to and challenged imposed categories of identity. 

Texts: Possible theoretical readings include authors such as: Karl Marx, Franz Fanon, W.E.B. DuBois, Gayatri Spivak, Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, Judith Butler, Gloria Andaldúa, Richard Dyer, Rinaldo Walcott, Sara Ahmed, Lee Edelman, and Gerald Vizenor. Possible creative media includes: Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach, James Baldwin's Going to Meet the Man, Jennie Livingston's Paris is Burning, Barry Jenkins' Moonlight, and singles by Zebra Katz, Le1f, and Mykki Blanco.

Evaluation: one critical essay (6-8pgs), a midterm exam, final take-home exam, and participation.

Format: Lectures and discussions

Description: "Queer Screens" will be largely focused on cinema (film and video) but with some consideration of television, new media, installation and media performance, with works drawn from LGBTQ2IA perspectives. We will explore topics such as the links between sexualities and representation, subversive and clandestine portrayals of queer sexualities, the emergence of gay and lesbian cinema in the 1970s alongside civil rights movements, the ongoing AIDS epidemic and the media, the New Queer cinema of the 1990s, experimental film and video, pornography, the new "Queer prestige" films, activist documentary, queer aesthetics and the social, political and cultural contexts of production, exhibition and reception.  What is queer cinema today and how it is in dialogue with historical and contemporary conditions of production, reception and analysis alongside the changing status of the idea of “queer”? Screenings will include films from multiple world cinema contexts, and will include features, documentaries and experimental/ underground cinema.  We will also engage Montreal based festival, production and queer media communities. Students should be prepared to regularly participate in all screenings, and prepared, informed discussion is key to the course.  

Texts: Coursepack

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lecture, screenings, discussion and participation. 

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

Description: 

Texts: 

Evaluation: 

Format: 

Description: This course explores several topics that are central to modern and contemporary literary criticism and critical theory such as (but not limited to): 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: 

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

Evaluation: TBD

Format: lectures and discussions

Expected student preparation: Previous course work with poetry preferred.

Description: 

From Wallace Stevens, “Of Modern Poetry”

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time.  It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice.

This course surveys the major poetry of the first half of the past century—an era hailed by poets and critics alike as having witnessed a remarkable revolution in poetry.   Between 1900 and 1950 there emerged the concept we now think of as “modern poetry”—one whose legacy continues to shape how poetry is written and understood today. Work selected for the course is designed to provide an overview of the chief trends of this watershed period.

Poets of the early twentieth century produced a rich, innovative body of work—too diverse and wide-ranging to summarize simply. One of the principal goals of this course is to help you negotiate through the work of the period: as we address a great deal of poetry, we will also consider strategies for remembering and making sense of that poetry.  In part, we will do so via literary history: we will consider the primary conflicts, goals, preoccupations, and principles guiding their work—what compelled them to create as they did?—as well as the keynote events and trends associated with different decades.

Many poets of the twentieth century committed themselves to making a modern poetry suitable for a modern age. Poet Ezra Pound was especially committed to this task. In 1914, Pound wrote admiringly of fellow poet T. S. Eliot, “He has actually … modernized himself on his own…. It is such a comfort to meet a man and not have to tell him to … remember the date … on the calendar.” We will consider how different poets met this challenge of remembering “the date on the calendar”—of responding, as Pound said elsewhere, to what “the age demanded.”

To support our work with the poetry, we will also engage a range of critical essays developed by the modern poets themselves—such as Eliot, Pound, and Marianne Moore— as they commented on their theory and practice and sought to set new standards for modern poetry. Through the work of early twentieth-century commentators such as Laura Riding and Robert Graves, Virginia Woolf, and I.A. Richards, we will also consider how their work, often read as “difficult,” was received in their time. And we will try out the work of contemporary commentators such as Charles Altieri, Helen Vendler, Marjorie Perloff, and Terry Eagleton, who seek to renew our acquaintance with what the so-called “difficulty” of modern poetry has to offer.

As we consider the history of early twentieth-century poetry, we will also pose more general theoretical questions about poetry. These questions echo the ones that the poets of the early twentieth century themselves accented as, dissatisfied with what previous generations had suggested about poetry, they sought to discover for themselves what it was and what it could do. What qualifies as poetry? Of what does it consist?  In what ways might we describe the parts of a poem and how a poem works? Might we say that, as poet W.H. Auden suggested, “Poetry makes nothing happen”? How might we find in poetry what Marianne Moore calls “a place for the genuine”?  

Texts: Readings will include work by W.H. Auden, E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, H.D., Langston Hughes, A.M. Klein, Dorothy Livesay, Marianne Moore, P.K. Page, Ezra Pound, Muriel Rukeyser, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas, and W.B. Yeats.

Evaluation: 2 critical essays (5-6 pp), monthly journal responses; final exam; participation 

Format: Lectures and discussions

Description: This workshop will emphasize the way we, and other poets, use ideas, thought patterns, and thinking processes to play with language. We’ll discuss a wide variety of 20th and 21st century poetry in order to tap into what’s possible, discovering along the way what is to our taste or not, and why these preferences might matter when crafting our own poetry. While we will spend limited time examining formal characteristics (e.g., rhyme, meter, stanzas, enjambment) and forms of poems (e.g., sonnets, villanelles, odes), all poems we read and discuss will be mined for examples of creative possibility.

Because this is a workshop, drafted work brought to class will be critiqued constructively, with a view to helping us uncover the limitless ways in which language can be arranged and expressed in desirable ways. Some exercises take place during our meetings while others will be assigned.

In addition to reading poems in class and outside class, on occasion we’ll take a look at contemporary poetry criticism. Before the end of the term, students will assemble a portfolio of 6 to 8 poems as stand-alone pieces, or written with a theme in mind.

 To apply, please send the following items no later than Friday 24 November to dus.english [at] mcgill.ca:

• 3 poems or up to 5 pages of poetry
• A 2-4 page (double-spaced) letter of introduction.  I’d like to know why you are drawn to poetry, what your ambitions are for your work, and the poets you are currently reading. Please include one poem or an excerpt of a poem you love—and tell me why this poem attracts you.

Evaluation: 

• Participation in class discussions and commitment to the workshop process: 25%
• Assignments and Exercises: 25%
• Attendance at 2 outside literary events and maintenance of a journal: 20%
• Final Portfolio: 30%

Texts: assigned poetry and readings compiled by the instructor

Format: Short lecture, workshop exercises/reading out loud, group discussion of students’ poetry and assigned reading

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

Description: Costuming I focuses on skills acquisition. Skills that will be covered include industrial sewing machine use, hand sewing techniques, and introduction to costume making.

We will build skills by working through technical exercises. This will provide an opportunity to become comfortable with industrial machinery, while gaining skills and confidence needed for costume making. 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.

Production Duty:  Costuming students may be involved in the Fall semester English Department production on Moyse Hall stage.  Each student is required to contribute time and energy to the production, whether it is making costumes from scratch, doing alterations, shopping, assisting with hair and make-up, working backstage, or doing costume maintenance during the run. Students may assist in different areas or take full responsibility for only one.  It is each student’s responsibility to organize and document their own production duties by keeping a written record on a time sheet provided by the instructor.  

Texts: TBD.  Script will be provided on mycourses. 

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.

Optional tools: 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 (subject to change):  Skill Binder 10%, charts 10%, Measurements 10%, Design Project (Main stage production) 10%, Production Project 20%, Production Duty 20%, 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.  Expect a minimum of 9 hours per week.  There is no maximum.

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

Permission of instructor required.  Admission to the course will be by written application and interview. See format below*. Sign-up sheets for interviews will be posted on the door of Arts 240 the first week of April.

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):

1.   Acting Experience:
2.   Improvisation Experience (not essential for this course):
3.   Theatre courses taken at McGill or elsewhere:
4.   Any other relevant experience:
5.   What will you bring to this course? Discuss special attributes and personality traits.  Talk about your ability as a collaborator.
6.   What do you hope to get out of this course?
7.   Expected year of graduation and Major(s) and Minor(s):
8.   Have you taken ENGL 230?  ENGL 269?

Avg. enrollment: 14 students

Description: 

Format: 

Evaluation: 

Prerequisite: none

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

Description: An overview of dramatic forms and theatrical practice in Britain from the Restoration through the eighteenth century to the Romantic period (c. 1660-1843).  The course is divided into four chronological units encompassing the reopening of the professional theatre, the rise of morality and sentiment, the age of Garrick, and the development of stage spectacle. Each unit will cover the theatrical conditions of the period and will examine a representative play staged at the time. Emphasis is placed on the plays as theatrical works rather than literary texts. We will also analyse historical documents to explore themes such as genre, acting style, audience experience, theatre architecture, financial practices, regulation of the stage, and company management. 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: Peter Thomson, The Cambridge Introduction to English Theatre, 1660-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); coursepack containing a selection of contextual documents and the following plays (tentative): Aphra Behn, The Rover (1677); Richard Steele, The Conscious Lovers (1722); David Garrick and George Colman the Elder, The Clandestine Marriage (1766); Joanna Baillie, Orra (1812), Thomas John Dibdin, Harlequin and Humpo (1812)

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

Format: lecture, discussion, group work, practical work

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

Description: 

Format:

Evaluation: 

Expected Student Preparation: prior film or television studies is advantageous but not required. Students are asked to see Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, 1950) before the first class.

Description: No decade in American history attracts a stranger combination of nostalgia and disgust. Indeed, no decade in American history is more peculiarly American—more attached to the prevailing stereotypes of naive affluence, cynical arrogance, and reckless enthusiasm, not to say bobby socks, hula hoops, malted milks, and Elvis Presley. In this course we will dive headlong into the maw of the fifties beast, with all the suburbs, commercialism, and Cold War paranoia that entails. But our method of comparative media and genre studies will also seek out gaps in that old fifties picture. As an aging and blacklist-ravaged film industry confronts an upstart television culture in search of definition—as film noir rots, the Western peaks, and science fiction surges—we will increasingly seek not just the sleek surfaces of the fifties cliché, but the churning history of our own present.

Possible films include: No Way Out, Johnny Guitar, Glen or Glenda?, Rebel Without a Cause, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, A Face in the Crowd, and Shadows.

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

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

Texts: coursepack

Format: Lecture with discussion

Evaluation: assignments 30%, quizzes 15%, posted class notes 5%, participation 15%, term projects 35%

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

Limited enrollment.  Permission of instructor required.  Admission to the course will be by application and interview. See application format below*. Sign-up sheets for interviews will be posted on the door of Arts 240 the first week of April.

Description: This course is intended to expand and challenge students physically, creatively and imaginatively through the exploration of clown and mask. 

Evaluation: Class Participation and Attendance; Scene rehearsal and performance; Research Presentation; Journals and Written Reflections.=

Texts: Why is that so Funny? A Practical Exploration of Physical Comedy by John Wright (New York: Limelight Editions, 2006).

*Written Application: Submit answers to the following questions to myrna.wyatt.selkirk [at] mcgill.ca two days before your interview. Subject Heading: Clown and Mask Class Application.  In your application please use both the number and subject for each response:

1.   Acting Experience:
2.   Improvisation Experience
3.   Physical theatre or other relevant experience:
4.   Theatre courses taken at McGill or elsewhere:
5.   What will you bring to this course? Discuss special attributes and personality traits.  Talk about your ability as a collaborator.
6.   What do you hope to get out of this course?
7.   Expected year of graduation and Major(s) and Minor(s):
8.   Have you taken ENGL 230?  ENGL 269?

Average Enrolment: 14 students

Description: Learning modules in advanced costuming may include designing by draping fabric on the mannequins, and millinery techniques.  Sewing skills that were gained in the first semester will be built upon in the second semester, through costuming the English Department theatre production.  This semester, emphasis is on gaining or perfecting skills, as well as working more independently.

The costume class will see the production through from design 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 and leadership expected from each student.  Production projects will be initiated by the students under the guidance of the instructor.  Students will take an active part in defining and outlining their specific production duties by formulating a contract with deadlines, in collaboration with their classmates and instructor.  This will give students an opportunity to manage all aspects of costume production independently.   The various aspects of production will take a substantial amount of time throughout the semester. It is important to note that there are costume production hours outside of class time. 

Texts: None required.  Script will be provided on mycoses. 

Evaluation (subject to change):  Alterations Project 10%, charts 10%, Measurements 10%, Design Project (Main stage production) 10%, Production Project 20%, Production Duty 20%, 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.  Expect a minimum of 9 hours per week.  There is no maximum.

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

Description: Filmmaker Djibril Djop Mambety once said “It is good for the future of cinema that African exists”. In their book Theory from the South, Jean and John Comaroff ask “what if it is the global south that affords privileged insight into the workings of the world at large?” What if African cinema (and not Western cinematic traditions) intimate future aesthetic, cultural and political developments? Home to the third largest film industry in the world, in so-called “Nollywood” in Nigeria, as well as a spectrum of cinematic practices from micropolitical engagements of mobile cinema, to experimental docu-fiction hybrids to dreamy works of Afrofuturistic sci-fi, African cinema offers a unique opportunity to explore the heterogeneity of cinematic practices in a world of global media.  

This course is not a survey of African cinema, but rather takes up key themes through critical cinematic practices and innovative film and media texts. We will explore questions about local conditions of production, consumption and ethico-aesthetical interventions, as well as considerations of cinema as a globalized phenomenon. Our focus this term will be on several thematic areas, including: Popular cinema and the politics of mass audiences; Speculation, Futurity and Afro-Futurism; History and Memory as Animatic Forces; and Microcinematic Practices. The course will involve screenings, lectures, discussions as well as field trips, festival participation and guest speakers. 

Screenings may include works by Abderrahmane Sissako, Sarah Maldoror, Ousmane Sembene, Safi Faye, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Souleymane Cissé, Dani Kouyaté, Mark Dornford-May, William Kentridge, Joseph Gaï Ramaka, Wanuri Kahiu, Raja Amari, Niell Blomkamp, Sarah Blecher, Moumen Smihi, Miguel Llanso. We also be participating in the Massimadi International Festival of LGBT Afro-Caribbean Films. 

Texts: Online coursepack

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lectures, discussion, screening and field trips.

Prerequisite: In order to do well in this class, students should have taken a university-level English course (in an English department) in which the textual analysis of literature and/or film was part of the methods of evaluation.

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 fusion of celebrity and politics; 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 is not concerned with getting at any truths about the Kennedys; therefore, we will not try to compare media images against some perceived or even real truth. We only know the Kennedys in mediated form. The course thus 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 (California: 2003)​
• Libra, Don DeLillo (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1988)

Films:

• 3 Shots that Changed America; The House of Yes; JFK; Smash His Camera, among others ​

Evaluation: In-class quizzes (30%); short essays on 2 films (40%); short essay on Libra (20%); participation (10%)

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

Prerequisite: In order to do well in this class, students should have taken a university-level English course (in an English department) in which the textual analysis of literature and/or film was part of the methods of evaluation.

Description: This course confronts a central modern ambiguity: to be fully human – i.e., social – is to be alone. We live among others and according to shared assumptions and norms and yet are capable of, and equipped for, self-contemplation, even self-absorption. This courses addresses the literary and cinematic/televisual manifestation of solitude in a short story, novels, films, non-fiction essays and a TV show. We will examine how it is imagined, elaborated and, if not exalted, presented as inescapable: the experience of being one in a world.  Our characters negotiate “the self” in relation to, among others: their environments; geographic location; nature; their history; official history; their location or dislocation within culture; the central ambiguities of modern life; memories and official memory, or memory as solitude; others; their emotions, desires and fears; their intellect and intellectual apprehension; intuitive and authoritative knowledge; the family; narrative, “truth,” and, perhaps foremost, language itself. A central human paradox is that we have words to describe the indescribable. Solitude may be indescribable but it still seeks expression in language, metaphor and images.  All our characters are marginal in some way or another and that means they foreground questions about what constitutes a center. Our works depict hope, longing and creative imaginings of understanding and existing. N.B.: This is not a course about loneliness nor will we be content to argue simply that the characters in our texts are lonely and in search of a relationship or friend. Rather, a central theme is the peculiar nature of human “confinement,” “the existential situations of people as they struggle to come to terms with who they are and how they are in a world in which they feel they are more or less alone” (Thomas Dumm, Loneliness as a Way of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). 

Texts: 

• Nicole Krauss, The History of Love (New York: Norton, 2005)
• Hjalmar Söderberg, Doctor Glas, trans. Paul Britten Austin (New York: Anchor Books, 2002 [1905])
• Thomas Pletzinger, Funeral for a Dog, trans. Ross Benjamin (New York: Norton, 2011 [2008])
• Kathryn Harrison, Seeking Rapture (New York: Random House, 2004)
• D. M. Thomas, The White Hotel (Viking, 1981)

Short Story:

• Lorrie Moore, “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk,” Birds of America (Picador, 1998)

Films:

• ​Hiroshima, Mon Amour (dir. Alain Resnais, 1959)
• Last Tango in Paris (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)
• Paris Texas (dir. Wim Wenders, 1984)
• The Straight Story (dir. David Lynch, 1999)
• In Treatment (HBO, 2009)

Evaluation: Short essays on the short story, books and films (90%); participation (10%)

Format: Lecture, discussion, screenings

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 the work of a number of important thinkers, including Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and Michael Warner.

The course is about the history of the ideas and practices that have created the shifting zones of private and public life. We’ll move toward a deeper understanding of how our world has been shaped by the history of privacy and publicity (i.e., the condition of being public). We will also work on critical writing skills—how to select evidence from a literary or philosophical text, how to analyze that evidence creatively and critically, how to build on evidence, and how to develop a coherent, persuasive, and moving argument. Students in the course will write five one-page argumentative, evidence-based essays (on Hamlet, Augustine, Othello, Rousseau, and Twelfth Night). Students will also write two four-page essays—more reflective but still evidence-based and argumentative—on pairs of works: Hamlet and Arendt and Warner and Rousseau. The take-home exam will include a short essay question on Habermas but will focus on Jane Eyre.

Participation counts a lot in the course. That means being there and it also means bringing your ideas and questions to class. It is really true: there is no such thing as a stupid question. Questions of all kinds will drive the intellectual work of the course forward.

Texts: (available at Paragraph Books):

• 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: 

One-page papers 25%
I will calculate this grade based on the best four out of five one-page papers—provided that you write all five papers.
Four-page papers 35%
Participation 15%
​Take-Home Exam 25%

Format: Lecture and discussion

Description: This course will combine the reading of plays, essays, articles and chapters with the creation of an original play / staged performance put on by groups of students working in Ateliers. The essays and articles will come from two anthologies edited by Julie Salverson and from online journals. Authors will include Salverson, Sherene H. Razack, Honor-Ford Smith, Catherine Graham, Ingrid Mündel, Jennifer H. Capraru, Jan Selman, Alan Filewod, Savannah Walling, Denis Salter, Nandi Bhatia, Aparna Dharwadker, and Edward Little. The plays will include Eight Men Speak by Oscar Ryan et al, Waiting For Lefty by Clifford Odets, The Monument by Colleen Wagner, Bhopal by Rahul Varma, and Palace Of The End by Judith Thompson.  All of these readings will be contextualized in relationship to the work of various theatre companies, together with an examination of a range of historical, political, community, social, racial, ideological, and gendered subject-positions and the kinds of theatre that they have enabled, now enable, and will continue to enable.

The course is unusual in the (intense) degree to which it will engage with close readings of texts along with the creation of original plays / performances.

As with any performance-based course, especially one that is based on the principles and practices of collective creation (to choose but one term for this way of working) all students will need to make an unconditional, disciplined, highly focused, and co-operative engagement with the work of conceptualizing, developing, researching, writing, rehearsal, and performance of their (new) play, always practising the discourse of “respectful dialogue.” Similarly, the close readings, by various interpretative means, of the plays, essays, and articles will be demanding. All activities will be time-consuming.

There are four “mantras” that I shall be urging you to practise to guide you and your ensemble on what will indeed become a journey:

• Teesri Duniya Theatre’s motto: “Change the world, one play at a time.”
• Some sage words often ascribed to Hippocrates, though the attribution is in doubt: “Do no harm.”
• Two pithy statements by Mahatma Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win”; and “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”

Participation counts a lot in the course. That means being there and it also means bringing your ideas and questions to class. It is really true: there is no such thing as a stupid question. Questions of all kinds will drive the intellectual work of the course forward.

Texts: 

Salverson, Julie. Ed Community Engaged Theatre and  Performance. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2011.
---. Ed. Popular Political Theatre and Performance. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2010.
Filewod, Alan. Committing Theatre: Theatre Radicalism and Political Intervention in Canada. Toronto: Between The Lines, 2011.
Ryan, Oscar et al. Eight Men Speak: A Play by Oscar Ryan et al.  Ed. Alan Filewod.  Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2013.
Odets, Clifford. Waiting for Lefty. New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc. [1935], 1962.
Wagner, Colleen. The Monument. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 1996.
Varma, Rahul. Bhopal. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2004.
Thompson, Judith. Palace of the End. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2007.
Diamond, David. Theatre for Living. Foreword by Fritjof Capra. Victoria: Trafford Publishing, 2007.

There are also two online articles by Julie Salverson to read:
“Change on Whose Terms? Testimony and an Erotics of Inquiry,” Theater 31.3 (Fall 2001):  [118]-125.
“Performing Emergency: Witnessing, Popular Theatre, and the Lie of the Literal,” Theatre Topics 6.2 (1996): 181-191.

Instructive articles in relation to Rahul Varma, Bhopal, and Teesri Duniya Theatre include:
Bhatia, Nandi, “Diasporic Activism and the Mediations of ‘Home’: South Asian Voices in Canadian Drama,” Studies in Social Justice 7.1 (2013): 125-41. (Open Source.) http://goo.gl/WRkwm0
​Dharwadker, Aparna. “Diaspora and the Theatre of the Nation” Theatre Research International 28.3 (October 2003): 303-325. The section on Teesri and Varma is on pp. 309-317. (e-journal)
Little. Edward. “Intercultural Mediation: Inter-, Intra-, and Crosscultural Approaches to Cultural Democracy.” In Culture pour tous. Actes du Colloque international sur la médiation culturelle. Montréal – Décembre 2008. 7 Pp. [un-numbered].

Open source: http://goo.gl/gQt7mf
Or use:
http://www.culturepourtous.ca/forum/2008/PDF/07_Little.pdf
This article by Professor Little is very instructive in relation to the contexts in which Teesri’s work, and that of similar activist theatre groups, has taken place. There is an excellent set of photos in colour.
Salter, Denis.  “Change the World, One Play at a Time: Teesri Duniya Theatre and the Aesthetics of Social Action: Denis Salter talks with Rahul Varma, Ted Little and Jazwant Guzder.” Canadian Theatre Review 125 (Winter 2006): [69]-74. (Print)

I shall be inviting Rahul Varma to visit our class.

Evaluation: The creation of the performance, the performance itself, the post-performance discussion and the rehearsal “diary”—to which everyone in a given Atelier will contribute--will be worth 60 %.  (The grade is for all members of a given Atelier.); A presentation on a play, essay, chapter, or article, along with an 8-page paper in the form of a distilled critical argument: 30%; Continuing and full participation in the intellectual and creative life of the seminar, adding substantially to discussions: 10%

Format: Lecture and discussion