300-level / Intermediate Courses

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 January 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)
• Michael Alpert, ed., Two Spanish Picaresque Novels (Penguin)
• 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: Lectures

Description: The focus of this course will be the Enlightenment, a philosophical and intellectual movement that emerged in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the heart of the Enlightenment project was a fundamental belief that reason, self-critique and empirical observation were the true foundations of knowledge, rather than religion, authority or dogma. This course in particular will trace the intersections between Enlightenment thought and the development of literary culture from the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 to the close of the eighteenth century. Our readings will draw on a range of generic forms and will be organized around a series of eighteenth-century keywords and themes, including utile et dulce (instruct and delight), satire, the public sphere, epic and mock-epic, sentimentality and politeness, empiricism, empire and slavery, the novel, the gothic, the woman question, and preromanticism. These keywords will serve as a rubric for our discussions, but they will also be categories that we’ll challenge—like the term Enlightenment itself—as we probe them for their limitations and inconsistencies. Above all, we’ll try to find links across these keywords and the texts we study. We will focus especially on questions of genre and generic development, and how those in the eighteenth-century made sense of their historical, emerging and experimental literary forms.

Texts: The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume C: The Restoration and Eighteenth Century, 8^th OR 9^th ed., ed. Lawrence Lipking and James Noggle (Norton, 2006 OR 2012)

- Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed. W.S. Lewis and E.J. Clery (Oxford: 9780199537211)

- Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey and Other Writings, ed. Tim Parnell and Ian Jack (Oxford: 9780199537181)

Evaluation: Attendance and Participation (15%); Discussion Moderation (10%); Short Essay (20%); Peer Review (5%); Final Essay (30%); Oral Exam (20%)

Format: Lecture and Conference Sections (or Seminar, depending on enrollment)

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, 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; 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.

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

Format: Lectures and discussions

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: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisite: None

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

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, white supremacy, foundational ethnography, 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 exploitation, 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, the construction of repertoires, inter-culturalism, the phenomenon of theatrical ghosting, cultural literacy, the poetics of realism, naturalism, melodrama, and virtuosic acting, and the antinomies of “civilization,” on the one hand, and “barbarism,” on the other.

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)
• Indispensable for our studies are the primary source documents put together for this anthology at http://drama.at.northwestern.edu/performances

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 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: 10 students

Prerequisite: 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; popular performance.  Wherever possible, and depending on the theatrical season’s offerings, we will go to see contemporary Quebec theatre together.

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

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

Enrollment Cap: 45

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 (tentative):

• Ibsen, Henrik. Hedda Gabler in Four Major Plays vol 1  (Signet)
• Pollock, Sharon.  Blood Relations (Newest)
• Strindberg, August.  Miss Julie (Dover)
• 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.  The Good Person of Setzuan (Minnesota)
• 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 (Faber)
• Ryga, George.  The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (Talonbooks)
• Tremblay, Michel.  Forever Yours, Marie-Lou (Talonbooks)

Evaluation: 

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

Format: Lectures and conferences

Description: 

The early modern period in which Shakespeare lived and worked was an era of conversions, and no playwright was then, or is now, more adaptable and powerfully conversional than Shakespeare himself. In this course, we examine how Shakespeare engages with the aesthetic, social, political, and confessional conversions of his world. From internal and personal conversions of faith (e.g., Catholicism to Protestantism), to political conversions in a quickly-changing society (shifting from feudalism to capitalism), to conversions of ancient artistic forms (myth, tragedy, epic, etc.) into newly conceived forms (e.g., Elizabethan Romance), Shakespeare’s world was—and consequently his works are—full of change, evolution, and conversions. We will investigate what constitutes a conversion and what happens when individuals fail to convert in Shakespeare’s plays. We will study Shakespeare’s plays and narrative poems first in their historical and cultural contexts, and more broadly, we will consider how modern performances of his art, on film, stage, and even in the classroom, offer living opportunities for new forms of conversion.

The course aims to give students a grasp of the range and depth of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. To this end, we will begin with Shakespeare’s two Ovidian epyllia, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, considering early modern conceptions of the conversional powers of poetry and language before turning to examine six plays, organized into three units—Ovidian, Political, and Religious Conversions—in the genres of comedy, tragedy, history, and romance from the very start through to the end of Shakespeare’s career: Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The First Part of Henry IV, Anthony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, and The Tempest. 

Texts (available at the Word bookstore, 469 Milton Street, 514 845-5640):

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Peter Holland (Oxford Shakespeare, 2008).
• Anthony and Cleopatra, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford Shakespeare, 2008).
• Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Oxford Shakespeare, 2008).
• Henry IV, Part I, ed. David Bevington, (Oxford Shakespeare, 2008).
• The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford Shakespeare, 2008).
• Titus Andronicus, ed. Eugene M. Waith (Oxford Shakespeare, 2008).
• Shakespeare: The Sonnets and Narrative Poems: The Complete Nondramatic Poetry, ed. William Burto (Signet Classics, 2008).

Evaluation (tentative): creative assignment (5%), term paper (40%), final exam (45%), conference participation (10%)

Format: Lectures and conferences

Prerequisite: : None, though some knowledge of Renaissance literature or culture is highly useful.

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, and advocate of regicide and divorce. His writing is complex and challenging, asking 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; conference (depending on enrollment)

Average Enrollment: 45 students

Prerequisite: : 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

Prerequisite: None. Limited to U2 and U3 students in English programmes

Description: This course will introduce students to a pair of concepts absolutely fundamental to the study of literature, cinema, theatre, and artistic culture in general.  The two concepts are, of course, authorship and interpretation.  We’ll survey the on-going debates over what an author is, and what unique contribution, if any, this agent makes to the artwork’s meaning as well as other culturally relevant features and effects.  Likewise, we will inquire into what one is doing when one interprets a work of art.  In trying to answer this question, the first step shall be to say what an interpretation is, i.e., what differentiates interpretive from other kinds of statements about art.  Subsequently, we’ll revisit several long-standing puzzles about interpretation: Is a good interpretation necessarily one that tries to grasp the author’s intentions?  Can an interpretation ever be true or false?  When two interpretations of the same artwork conflict, is there ever any good reason to prefer one to the other?  Does interpretation itself in some sense produce the work’s meaning?  Is there any possible justification for blurring the distinction between the author’s achievements in making an artwork and the interpreter’s achievements in engaging with that work?  Throughout our discussions, attention will be paid to the relation of authorship to interpretation within performing arts, such as theatrical and musical presentations, where performers’ interpretive activities might arguably be said to bring new works into existence.

Texts: A representative selection of recent essays within the fields of aesthetic philosophy, literary theory, and cinema studies.

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lectures and discussions

Description: This course will introduce students to a range of postcolonial, diaspora, and migrant literatures from the 1970s to the present, in conversation with contemporary theories of the state. We will examine literary work from India, Nigeria, South Africa, Palestine, and Canada, among others. Joseph Slaughter has claimed that human rights are always already a matter of narrative. In this course, we will follow the logic of this claim further: as the guarantor (or, as often happens, the executioner) of human rights, the state too is always already connected to storytelling. The nature of that connection will be a primary focus of this course. Concentrating especially on state narratives (or, narratives of the state) as figured in literary texts, we will focus especially on how relationships are drawn in literature between citizens and states in postcolonial spaces. This course will bring together contemporary criticism and theory on literature and the state by critics such as Sara Suleri, John Marx, Rita Barnard, and Rebecca Walkowitz, with postcolonial texts written primarily by women and people of colour – in other words, by figures that the state always has difficulty recognizing. The course will address women’s issues, human rights, nationalisms, and state formation and failure in literature from the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. This is not just a course on postcolonialism or human rights; by focusing on citizens’ relations with the state as they surface in literature, we will investigate the usually concealed maneuvers of the state underlying human rights violations and protections.

Texts: 

• Emile Habibi, The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist (1974)
• Anton Shammas, Arabesques (1986)
• Bapsi Sidhwa, Cracking India (1991)
• Nadine Gordimer, Jump and Other Stories (1991)    
• Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost (2000)
• Caryl Phillips, Foreigners (2007)
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck (2009)
• Leanne Simpson, Islands of Decolonial Love (2013)
• Ivan Vladislavić, Double Negative (2013)

Evaluation:

• Attendance and Participation: 20%
• Short Writing Assignment: 10%
• Midterm: 30%
• Final Paper: 40%

Format: Lectures and discussions

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

Description: In a 1919 letter, written from Oxford, American poet T.S. Eliot refers to himself as a “metic.” As Jean-Michel Rabaté glosses this word, referring to Eliot’s “in-between” status, “designates not a total foreigner, but a stranger who is admitted to the city (originally Athens) because of his utility: he pays certain taxes … and is granted rights and franchises although rarely admitted fully into the communal mysteries.” Eliot, like many of the modern poets of the pathfinding early 20C, would come to inhabit this liminal identity long term: like expatriate American poets Ezra Pound, H.D., Gertrude Stein, and even British-born poet often regarded as an American poet, Mina Loy, Eliot would spend most of his adult life deliberately away from home in a form of intentional exile. This course will suggest that many American poets of this generation, even those who resided in the U.S. for their careers such as Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens, occupied such a “metic” status, an in between condition of being neither strangers nor quite at home where they were, and sometimes cultivated such on principle, out of disenchantment with the norms of their surrounding cultures—and moreover, that this status importantly informed their thought, poetic projects, aesthetic choices, and the avant-gardist commentary and critiques they conveyed by way of their verse. Cued by Helen Vendler’s work, we will consider how this status importantly shaped their responses to received coming-of-age narratives, forms of initiation, ideas about citizenship and kinship, received gender roles, and forms of “admission” into the “communal mysteries”: these in turn importantly shaped work such as Eliot’s The Waste Land, H.D.’s  Sea Garden and Trilogy, Pound’s Cathay and The Cantos, Loy’s Lunar Baedeker, Moore’s Observations, and Stevens’s Harmonium. The standpoint of the American metic, in other words, would prove importantly generative of the watershed experimental modern poetry that significantly influenced generations of poets in years afterward. Through this topic, we will explore the work of range of poets associated with what is now thought of as “modern” poetry of the first half of the twentieth century. 

Texts: Readings will include both poetry and some prose by T.S. Eliot, H.D., Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Wallace Stevens, E.E. Cummings, Langston Hughes, Louis Zukofsky, Hart Crane, Muriel Rukeyser, and Elizabeth Bishop. 

Evaluation: Two brief response papers, brief essay (5 pp.), final essay (7-8 pp.)

Format: Lectures and discussions

Description: This course presents a survey of seminal works of twentieth-century American fiction, with equal attention to disruptive formal innovations and vectors of continuing influence. The approach is loosely chronological, occasionally flashing forward to track the handling of this or that technique, aesthetic insight, or advance in subject matter by subsequent literary generations. Topics to be covered include modernism and its after-effects; the pressure of lyric poetry and the short story (as well as other media such as film, radio, television, and the internet) on the forms and idioms of the novel; the formal tension between novels of culture and novels of consciousness; and the ideological tension between universal claims and particular identities.

Texts: 

• Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
• Edith Wharton, House of Mirth
• Ernest Hemingway, Farewell to Arms
• William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
• Eudora Welty, A Curtain of Green
• Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
• Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
• Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift
• Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
• Don DeLillo, White Noise

These books, along with the coursepack, will be available at the McGill bookstore.

Evaluation: 

• In-class participation: 10%
• Response paper (1 p. single-spaced): 5%
• Essay 1 (4 pp. double-spaced): 20%
• Essay 2 (8 pp.double-spaced): 35%
• Final Exam: 30%

Format: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisite: None

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

Description: A mid-level survey of later-19^th-century prose fiction forms representing a wide range of literary movements and modes. The course will be organized to trace ever-widening geographical, literary, and cultural horizons. A first unit will explore “regionalist” or “local color” writings (by authors such as Harris, Harte, Twain, Chopin, Stowe, Jewett, Cable, Chestnutt, and Alcott) rooted in the specificity of a unique geographical place that is seen to define a unique cultural or psychological identity. The second course unit will survey classic writerly responses to the late-19^th-century city—seen (in authors such as Crane, Dreiser, James, and Wharton) as a new sort of hybrid place in which diverse strangers from a variety of homes and backgrounds are brought together to work out forms of coexistence. The final unit will then follow another group of turn-of-the-century writers as they expand American horizons even further, reflecting the nation’s move into the international arena with new fictional treatments of the International Theme. Authors such as James and Wharton (and, in a different way, Du Bois) ground their writing in the ever-shifting experience of cross-cultural travel and meditate anxiously on the situation of the writer as “cosmopolite”--perfectly placed (or dis-placed) to explore the problems and possibilities of inter-national interchange in a modern, globalizing world.

Texts (Tentative; editions TBA):  To be selected from authors noted in description above. Readings will include not only short stories but also several longer novels; the amount of assigned reading will be fairly intensive. Editions TBA. 

• Coursepack of photocopied short stories.
• Alcott, Little Women
• Dreiser, Sister Carrie
• Wharton, The Age of Innocence
• James, The Portrait of a Lady
• Baym, ed., The Norton Anthology of American Literature (8^th ed., Vol. C).

Evaluation (Tentative): 20% mid-term exam; 25% essay; 15% conference participation; 40% formal, 3-hour final exam. (NB: All forms of evaluation in this course—on exams as well as essays—test abilities in literary-critical writing and analysis; there will be no short-answer or multiple-choice exams graded by computer.)

Format: Lectures and discussions

Expected student preparation: There is 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 emergence and development of Canadian prose fiction in English from the later nineteenth century to the centennial of Confeder¬ation in 1967.  We will seek to grasp the developing poetics and shifting generic boundaries of the Canadian novel to 1967, including but not limited to works of political romance, prairie pastoral, modern prairie and urban realism, and experimental modernism.  A substantial portion of our studies will involve the situation of Canadian fiction within the context of the novel’s development from realism to modernism.

This course satisfies Literature program requirements in: Canadian literature; Modernism; additional credits in the Literature option

Texts:

TBA, including 6-8 of the following:

• Richardson, Wacousta (1832)
• Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush (1852)
• DeMille, Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888)
• Duncan, The Imperialist (1904)
• Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (1908)
• Leacock, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912)
• Ostenso, Wild Geese (1925)
• Knister, White Narcissus (1929)
• Grove, Fruits of the Earth (1933)
• ---,  Settlers of the Marsh (1925)
• Callaghan, They Shall Inherit the Earth (1935)
• Ross, As For Me and My House (1941)
• MacLennan, Two Solitudes (1945)
• ---,  The Watch that Ends the Night (1956)
• Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1956)
• Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945)
• Klein, The Second Scroll (1951)
• Buckler, The Mountain and the Valley (1952)
• Wilson, The Equations of Love (1952)
• ---, Swamp Angel (1956)
• Watson, The Double Hook (1959)
• Laurence, The Stone Angel (1964)
• Cohen, Beautiful Losers (1966)

Evaluation: 50% term paper, 12 pages; 40% formal final examination; 10% par¬tic¬ipa¬t¬ion in class dis¬cussions. Students  may choose to complete any or all of three preliminary assignments in preparation for the term paper (two-page sample of writing, outline, draft first paragraph); each completed assignment reduces the weight of the term paper by 5%.

Format: Lectures and discussions

Description: This course uses five wide-ranging British novels to study a foundational relationship in nineteenth-century fiction: the romantic relationship as a synecdoche of social organization.  Perhaps more precisely, the relationships we will analyze in the course novels reveal anxieties and realities of social disorganization – with broken engagements, and failed or fractured marriages operating as signs of the century’s disruptive transformations in class structure and geopolitical identity.   With this topic in mind, we will better understand how the dominantly private settings in the nineteenth-century British novel and intimate plots yield commentary on industrial, economic, and political change.  

Texts:

• Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility 1811
• Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist 1838
• Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 1848
• George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss 1859
• Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady 1875
• 329 Course pack

Evaluation:

• Participation: 25% (includes attendance and conf section assignments)
• Midterm: 25%
• Reading quizzes (2): 10%
• Final paper: 40% 

Format: Lectures and weekly conferences

Description: This course expands upon and enriches students’ knowledge of literature from the earlier Romantic period. This class will engage not only with poetry and fiction of this era, but also grapple with the reactions and reception that Romantic literature provoked. These reactions will include contemporary responses, subsequent critical interpretations, and the cultural legacy of Romanticism. Questions animating the course will include the following: what does it mean to call a text or an author Romantic? How has the Romantic canon shifted over time and how has it shaped or been shaped by critical and theoretical practices? To what extent does a Romantic perspective still inform cultural and artistic production today? Students enrolled in this class should expect to be exposed to close reading and formal analysis, consideration of cultural and historical context, and engagement with critical sources. Previous study of literature at the university level will be an asset.

Texts: 

• Coursepack containing poems, excerpts and selected primary and secondary material
• Matthew Lewis, The Monk (Broadview Edition)
• Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Broadview Edition)

Evaluation: 

• 10% In-Class Participation
• 20% In-Class Essay  
• 25% Take Home Essay    
• 20% Oral Presentation   
• 25% Final Exam

Format: Lectures and discussions

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, 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 resonance of particular poems and the way they create meaning. At the same time, it will consider the ways in which these poets (and we, 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. 

The writing component of the course (frequent short essays but no term papers or exams) is designed to improve interpretive abilities and 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

Also one full-length poetry collection (likely Anne Carson's Short Talks, Brick Books)

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

Format: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisite: Students should have 2 or 3 prior courses in English literature, preferably Departmental Survey 1 and 2 (ENGL 202 and 203) and Poetics (ENGL 311).

Description: This course provides a survey of twentieth-century British fiction. 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, money, industrialization, money—will be investigated. We will also consider generic conventions of comedy and tragedy as they get mixed with 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 Autumn 2015.

• Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
  E. M. Forster, Howards End
  Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart
  Lawrence Durrell, Justine
  Barbara Pym, A Glass of Blessings
  Jim Crace, Being Dead
  Muriel Spark, Symposium
  Zadie Smith, White Teeth

Evaluation: essays, midterms, final exams

Format: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisite: None

Description: This course aims to be an intensive introduction to the study of Old English, beginning with the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the language (necessary but not necessarily painful), and advancing to the reading of selected texts in prose and poetry. The aim is to give students a basic 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 will offer several 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 reading and translating the texts. Throughout the course, we will be doing translation exercises and tests. The course culminates in a translation project, which will be a translation and analytical commentary of a selected text.

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 project 20%; attendance and participation 10%.

Format: Lectures, workshops, discussions

Prerequisite: None. Limited to English Majors.

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 by medieval and early 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, discussion and workshop

Prerequisite: Previous university courses in English or classical literature, or permission of the instructor. A basic knowledge of Homeric epic will be assumed in lectures. Students therefore should read the Iliad and the Odyssey before taking this course. 

Description: This course will focus on the writings of Virgil and Ovid, two of the most important and influential writers in the Western literary tradition. While near contemporaries, living in Augustan Rome, they appear to be very different kinds of writers: Virgil the poet of nationalism, duty, and self-sacrifice, Ovid the poet of individualism, love and personal gratification. Their contrasting poetics and career paths leading to distinct epic visions offer alternative models for later writers.  Yet the two writers need to be read together as part of a dialogue on the purpose of poetry and the place of the poet in society. 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 various works, and discuss the significance of their decisions to use different poetic genres. Focusing primarily on the works themselves and the significance of literary forms, we will necessarily relate them to larger cultural questions, considering the choice of genre, and in particular the use of epic, as a comment on Roman culture and society.

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 WebCT

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

Format: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisite: preferably students should have 2 or 3 prior university courses in literature.

Description: This course provides a survey of twentieth-century European novels. For reasons of equitable distribution, only one novel per country will be considered. Through lectures and discussion, we will discuss the generic principles of the novel: historical, contemporary, realist, fabulist, and so forth. Attention will be paid to technical matters, such as chronotopes, dialogue, focalization, diegesis, parable, reliability, temporality, and narrative disposition. Emphasis, however, 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.

Texts: Approximately six novels will be chosen from the list below. The final decision about texts will be made in July 2015.

• Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (Germany, 1900)
• Franz Kafka, The Trial (Czechoslovakia, 1925)
• Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris (Ireland & Britain, 1935)
• Sándor Márai, Embers (Hungary, 1942)
• Albert Camus, The Outsider (France, 1942)
• Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa, The Leopard (Italy, 1958)
• Witold Gombrowicz, Pornografia (Poland, 1960)
• José Saramago, Blindness (Portugal, 1995)

Evaluation: essays, midterm, final exam

Format: Lectures and discussions

Description: This course will examine selected texts from the medieval and early modern literature of Britain (English, Scottish, and Welsh) and of Ireland (mostly in translation), which embody the folklore and popular traditions of the British Isles, including Arthurian tradition and the Robin Hood legends. The main topic will be the study of the folktale in narrative, but we will also consider heroic tradition and the types of the hero, folk motifs, fairy lore, oral tradition, mythology, witchcraft, superstitions and folk beliefs. The aim of the course is to explore what ‘folklore’ means, how folk tradition was incorporated into written narratives, and how to interpret such narratives. The goal is not the study of folklore per se, nor of international folktales. Rather, we will look at what is considered ‘folk tradition’ in British and Irish literature, how certain authors drew upon traditional material in their invention, and how that affects both the composition and the reading of these works.

Texts:

• The Táin. Trans. Thomas Kinsella. Oxford UP, 1969: Selected tales and chapters. 
• The Mabinogion. Trans. Sioned Davies. Oxford UP, 2007 (also available as an e-book): the Four Branches, ‘How Culhwch Won Olwen.’
• Beowulf, trans. R.M. Liuzza. Broadview, 2000, or other translation.
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, edition TBA
• King Horn. www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/hornfrm.htm
• A Gest of Robyn Hode. www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/gest.htm
• Sir Orfeo. www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/orfeofrm.htm
• Geoffrey Chaucer. ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/teachslf/wbt-par.htm
• Robert Henryson, ‘The Cock and the Fox’
• William Shakespeare, Macbeth

These selections may change. Other works may be made available on MyCourses.

Evaluation: Essays and other to be determined 60%; term paper 30%; attendance and participation 10%.

Format: Lectures and discussions

Description: 

The nineteenth century juxtaposition of industrialization, urbanization, and colonial expansion has invited numerous theoretical questions. How did the process of industrialization relate to European expansionism? What differences were set up by colonial regimes and how did they operate? How did these differences multiply themselves into other dichotomies structured in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, class, location, or age group? What lingering legacies do we encounter today? We will use critical theory as a springboard for questions that arise from contemporary literature and current socio-political debates. Each theoretical module will be accompanied by a text—be it a short story, a film, or a group of paintings—that will offer the grounding for overarching questions raised by the articles. Starting from nineteenth-century authors like Hegel and Marx, we will work our way into the latter half of the twentieth century to engage with Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, Benedict Anderson, Aimé Césaire, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gloria Anzaldua, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. 

Texts:

• Course pack
• Frantz Fanon. Black Skin, White Masks
• Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities
• Jamaica Kincaid. A Small Place
• Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin: Post-colonial Studies—The Key Concepts

Evaluation (tentative): Participation and myCourses discussion (15%); Short paper (20%); Term Paper (30%); Final Exam (35%).

Format: Lectures and group discussions

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

Note: Students who have taken ENGL 356 under a different course topic are free to take this version of the course. Although the course number is the same, the content is entirely different; therefore, these will count as two different courses toward university and program requirements. Course texts are all written in the original Middle English, but no prior experience with Middle English is required. Some introduction to the language will be provided and a portion of several classes will be devoted to reading, translating, and transcribing.

Description: The fifteenth century in England was a dynamic time during which concepts of authorship, communication, textual production and literate activity were undergoing tremendous change. English was developing quickly as England’s official language, overtaking French and Latin. Heresy and its suppression met with a burgeoning humanist movement, and mainstream religious practice was enormously vibrant and varied. Further, at the end of the fifteenth century, print technology coexisted with a lively manuscript culture in England. Yet despite all of these developments, literature of the fifteenth century has often been characterized as derivative and cautious, with far more scholarly emphasis being placed on the poets of previous generations like Chaucer, Langland, Gower, and the Gawain-poet. This course situates fifteenth-century English literature in its dynamic cultural contexts, examining how late-medieval literature in England intersected with developments in politics, religious controversy, historiography, literacy and technology.

Texts:

• Henryson, Orpheus and Euridice
• Hoccleve, My Compleinte and Other Poems
• Lydgate, The Temple of Glass
• Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur
• The Book of Margery Kempe
• The Paston Letters
• Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales
• Selections from the Towneley Plays, the N-Town Plays, and the Chester Mystery Cycle

Evaluation (provisional): Mid-term exam, 25%; Final exam, 35%; Final essay, 30%; Participation and attendance, 10%

Format: Lectures and discussions

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. In the Middle Ages, “rhetoric” meant more than the art of persuasion; it was a systematic way to train memory and thought. By the end of the course, students will be able to identify and analyze a number of formal techniques and rhetorical patterns in Chaucer’s work.

Please 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 (edition TBA)

Evaluation (subject to revision): close reading exercises (15%); midterm test (15%); short essay (15%); long essay (30%); final exam (25%)

Format: Lectures and discussions

Description: This course is a required component of the concentration in cultural studies, designed to provide students with multiple analytical strategies for critically engaging audio-visual images from a variety of still and moving image media. Students will read widely in the history of approaches to analyzing the components of audio-visual images and will be asked to engage with these approaches on a regular basis, through class discussion and assignments. We will also explore examples drawn from world cinema and media, as well as experimental, avant-garde, non-fiction and narrative media, through in-class examples and a weekly required screening.

Texts: Coursepack

Evaluation: TBD

Format: Lecture and discussion

Description: This course will explore several topics that are central to modern and contemporary literary criticism and critical theory. These include among others: interpretation; culture; ideology; class, race, and gender; discourse; hegemony; signification; and performativity. 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 New Criticism, Marxism, Structuralism, and Post-Structuralism. We will also read selections from, among others, the writings of Karl Marx, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler. 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 and sustained engagement with lecture and discussion during class. The reading for this course will be at times difficult and dense. Thorough preparation for each class meeting is essential. This course is required for, but not restricted to, Honours students in English.

Texts: Terry Eagleton: Literary Theory: An Introduction. All other texts will be available on MyCourses.

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor required. Enrolment is limited to 15 students.

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

• A work of original prose fiction or creative non-fiction or a fragment of a longer piece. (1500-2000 words.)
• A different work of original prose fiction or creative non-fiction or a fragment of a longer piece. (500-2000 words.)
• A completed copy of the application questionnaire ( Download as Word Document)

Description: This weekly workshop offers an intensive look at the art and craft of writing fiction in 2016, primarily through the lens of the short story. Students will read assigned stories by published authors, essays by writers on writing, as well as original work by classmates. Discussions will form an important part of the class: conversations about language, plot, sentence structure, style, and what goes into the practice of being a working writer. There will also be an important emphasis on workshopping student work: all students will submit stories for constructive feedback and participate in respectful, thoughtful examination of their peers' work. Participants will be challenged to consider their own unique voice, to cultivate their writing on a line-by-line level, and to produce new work on deadline. Over the course of the semester you will be expected to attend every class plus two additional literary readings outside of workshop hours. Grades will be assessed based on attendance, participation in the course, assignments, and a final portfolio of edited work.

Texts: 

• John Gardner, The Art of Fiction (Vintage)
• Assigned readings compiled by the instructor

Evaluation:

• Participation and engagement in class discussions and editing work of self and others: 30%
• Assignments: 35%
• Attendance at outside literary events: 10%
• Final Portfolio: 25%

Format: Lectures and discussions

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

Expected student preparation: Sewing kit in the costume shop at all times.  Minimum sewing kits consists of thimble, fabric scissors, a stitch ripper, one package of needles, one box of dressmaking pins, and a pencil.  Each item must be labeled with the student’s name, stored in a container.

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, and an introduction to costume design and construction.

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.

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 for hands on projects and production hours.  Students will commit to a production schedule that works with their class schedules and general availability.

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. The students each present rough sketches and finished renderings to the director.  The design for the production will be chosen using the students’ sketches.

Opening night of the production will find some of the costume team working backstage as costume crew. The dressing shifts will be divided among the class, along with day time 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: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: lectures, hands on projects, demonstrations, team work 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

Prerequisites: None.

Description: Divided into a range of concerns and subgenres (the question of sound, the slasher film, the gothic) that ultimately converge on the problem of vulnerable bodies in space, this course will introduce students to the versatility of horror and pose the question of its ongoing adaptability. Central to our approach will be the complication of affect. In other words, no longer will we be content to judge simply whether a horror film is “scary;” instead, we will explore the genre’s production of a broad palette of feeling, including key cousins of fear such as disgust, humour, and shame. Indeed, even fear itself might be usefully divided into slow dread and fast panic (which is one reason why the speed of zombies matters). It is ultimately this rich interplay of response that will help us articulate the genre’s corresponding socio-political work, including its special importance for feminism and queer theory. Possible films include Halloween, Suspiria, The Haunting, Freaks, Funny Games, and Cure.

Texts: Coursepack

Evaluation:

• two short assignments 25%
• posted class notes 5%
• term paper 40%
• participation 20%
• quiz 10%

Format: lecture/discussions and weekly conferences.

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

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): William Wycherley, The Country Wife (1675); Richard Steele, The Conscious Lovers (1722); David Garrick and George Colman the Elder, The Clandestine Marriage (1766); Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Remorse (1813), Thomas John Dibdin, Harlequin and Humpo (1812)

Evaluation (tentative): participation 10%; midterm exam 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.

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

Format: Lectures and discussions

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

Prerequisite: ENGL 230 and ENGL 269 and/or permission of the instructor (myrna.wyatt.selkirk [at] mcgill.ca).  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.

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

Evaluation: Class Participation and Attendance; Scene rehearsal and performance; Research Presentation; Journal and Reflection.

Format:

Avg. enrolment: 14 students

Prerequisite: Costuming for the Theatre 1

Expected student preparation: Sewing kit in the costume shop at all times.  Minimum sewing kits consists of thimble, fabric scissors, a stitch ripper, one package of needles, one box of dressmaking pins, and a pencil.  Each item must be labeled with the student’s name, stored in a container.

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 Mainstage 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 mycourses.

Evaluation: 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

Prerequisites: None.

Expected Student Preparation: Familiarity with concepts and terminology from film studies and cultural studies will be very useful.

Description: First emerging as one of the key filmmakers of what B. Ruby Rich called the New Queer Cinema of the early 1990s, Todd Haynes has produced a body of work that interrogates gender, sexuality, illness, stardom, and the notion of authorship itself. We will explore Haynes’s films through the category of pastiche: his films critically deploy the visual and narrative tropes of various cinematic genres and modes (from melodrama to documentary) as part of their inquiry into the constructed nature of experience in postmodern life. And while Fredric Jameson has denounced the postmodern use of pastiche as apolitical “blank parody,” we will examine how Haynes’s films deploy their cinematic devices so as to de-familiarize and de-nature them, encouraging a mode of spectatorship that we might characterize, following Laura Mulvey, as “passionate detachment.” This course will survey Haynes’s oeuvre, from his initial student shorts (including the famously banned film The Karen Carpenter Story) to his most recent film, 2015’s Carol. We will also screen a number of films and other media materials that his films rework and re-imagine, in order to examine critically the category of authorship, cinematic and otherwise.

Texts: 

• The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven Allows, ed. James Morrison
• Course pack

Required Films:

• Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud (Todd Haynes, 1985)
• The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes, 1988)
• Poison (Todd Haynes, 1991)
• Dottie Gets Spanked (Todd Haynes, 1993)
• Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995)
• Velvet Goldmine (Todd Haynes, 1998)
• All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955)
• Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974)
• Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002)
• Dont Look Back (D.A. Pennebaker, 1967)
• I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007)
• Mildred Pierce (Todd Haynes, 2011)
• Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015)

Evaluation: TBA

Format: lecture, discussion, weekly screenings, weekly TA-led conferences

Description: In this course we examine the (mostly) North American pre-occupation with the Kennedy family. President Kennedy and his family were featured in the news before his assassination but following it – and continuing to this day – there was a plethora of attention to him and them. We will examine the reasons for this intense media fascination: after all, Kennedy wasn’t the first US president to be assassinated but his name resonates like few others. Some of the media scrutiny is due to his being President while television was taking hold in American homes. Among other things, thus, we will focus on 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 some other central figures to the Kennedy narratives, among them, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Lee Harvey Oswald and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and John Kennedy jr. 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,” and images which go into the “cultural screen saver”* called JFK (*Thomas Mallon, Mrs. Paine's Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy, 2002). Using David M. Lubin’s Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images as our guide, we will look at the media treatment of JFK and others, from the late 50s to the present.

NOTE: to do well in this class students should have taken a university-level course in which literature and/or film were the focus and whose textual analysis was the basis for evaluation.

Texts: (tentative)

• David M. Lubin, Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images (2003)
• Don DeLillo, Libra (1988)

Selections from:

• American Adulterer by Jed Mercurio (2009)
• Jackie Under My Skin by Wayne Koestenbaum (1995)
• November 22, 1963 by Adam Braver (2008)
• The Report of the Warren Commission into the Assassination of President John F Kennedy (1964)

Films: (tentative)

•  JFK (dir. Oliver Stone, 1991)
• The House of Yes (dir. Mark Waters, 1997)
• Smash His Camera (dir. Leon Gast, 2010)
• The Kennedy Assassination 24 Hours After (The History Channel, 2009)
• Selections from other documentaries, television shows, & films

Evaluation: (tentative) attendance and participation: 10%; précis of book chapters (from Shooting Kennedy): 40%; précis of films: 30%; précis of Libra: 20%

Format: Lectures, discussion, presentation of visual materials, film screenings.

Description: E. M. Forster  says, “Only connect.”  Janet Malcolm replies, “Only we can’t.”  In Loneliness as a Way of Life Thomas Dumm puts these thoughts into relief when he notes : “… our most important understandings about the shape of our present communal existence – the division between public and private, our inability to live with each other honestly and in comity, the estranged and isolating forms that our relationships with our most intimate acquaintances sometimes assume, the weaknesses of our attachments to each other and hence to our lives in common – are all manifestations of the loneliness that has permeated the modern world.”  In this course we will look at some literary and cinematic manifestations of this issue of solitude, how it is imagined, played out and, if not exalted, presented as inescapable: the experience of being one in a world.  Solitude may be indescribable but it does find its expression in words and images.  Do not despair!  The works we will examine should not lead to responses of forlornness.  Rather, they depict hope, longing and creative imaginings of ways to “connect.”

Texts:

• Nicole Krauss, The History of Love (2005)
• Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses, trans. Anne Born   (2005 [2003])
• Kathryn Harrison, Seeking Rapture (2004)
• Hjalmar Soderberg, Doctor Glas, trans. Paul Britten Austin (2002 [1905])
• Lorrie Moore, “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk,” Birds of America (Picador, 1998)
• Selections from Thomas Dumm’s Loneliness as a Way of Life (2008)

Films & one TV show:

• 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, 2008-2010)

Evaluation: (tentative) attendance and participation: 10%; précis of books and films: 90%

Format: Lectures, discussions, and screenings

Expected student preparation: ENGL 285: Introduction to Cultural Studies

Description: Course Description: This course takes “convergence culture” as a starting point for understanding how consumers navigate our contemporary media landscape. We will use Netflix as a locus for tracing a variety of media histories, including: TV and film industry structures, genre and aesthetics, viewing technologies, and audience behaviors. While a wide range of new media services and devices populate the consumer marketplace, Netflix holds a unique position—no other company has been credited (or condemned) for changing the face of both film and television so drastically. In this course, we will compare Netflix to other media models in order to understand the history of convergence culture. We will perform a series of experiments with the Netflix service to investigate how new media interpellate audiences. Through close analysis of Netflix’s programming and marketing strategies, as well as examination of how people talk about Netflix, this course will provide students with a dynamic perspective on the historical factors that have contributed to our current mediascape. By the end of the semester, students will have learned to situate media texts in relation to their past, present, and future histories.

Texts:

• Digital Coursepack
• Netflix subscription (may be shared with classmates)
• Other readings to be distributed via class wiki / myCourses

Evaluation: 

• Social Media Artifacts: 20%
• Midterm: 15%
• Final Exam: 25%
• Final Project: 25%
• Participation: 15%

Format: Lecture with discussion, screenings with discussion.

Description: Balancing critical readings from the Canadian context with broader theoretical approaches, this course considers the preoccupations, anxieties, and eccentricities of Canadian cinema with a particular emphasis on the way it reflects the complex and unstable notion of Canada as nation. We will seek to answer both cultural and aesthetic questions about Canadian cinema: How do Canada’s regions borrow from one another cinematically? How do transnational and transcultural flows contribute to and alleviate problems of distribution and exhibition? What are the relationships of diasporic and queer cinemas to Canadian cinema? To what extent does cinema in Canada embody the “three-pillar” approach (indigenous, francophone, anglophone)? Is there in fact a variety of Canadian cinemas?

The course includes films from a variety of Canada’s regions (specifically the prairies, Quebec, and the east coast), with a particular focus on Québécois cinema. We will use close reading/analysis and critical frameworks to examine how regional filmmaking, multiculturalism, and post-national discourse are re-shaping the production and reception contexts of cinema in Canada. Throughout the course, we will attempt to map out key moments in the development and transformation of the Canadian film industry, including the realist tradition (which stemmed from its documentary origins), the growth of independent film culture, and the increasing influence of digital technology on the creation and reception of films in the twenty-first century. By the end of the course, students will be equipped with the vocabulary and skills necessary to analyze films formally and thematically, and to situate them in their wider social and historical contexts.

Texts: essays by such critics/theorists as André Loiselle, Thomas Waugh, Jim Leach, Lee Edelman, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Mark Seltzer, Houston Wood, André Bazin, Mary Anne Doane, Scott Mackenzie, Noreen Golfman, Andrew Higson, Peter Morris

Possible Films (shorts and features):

• Nanook of the North (1922), dir. Robert J. Flaherty
• Neighbours (1952), dir. Norman McLaren
• Les raquetteurs (1958), dir. Gilles Groulx and Michel Brault
• Nobody Waved Goodbye (1964), dir. Don Owen
• Goin’ Down the Road (1970), dir. Donald Shebib
• Mon oncle Antoine (1971), dir. Claude Jutra
• Les ordres (1974), dir. Michel Brault
• Les bons débarras (1979), dir. Francis Mankiewicz
• I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987), dir. Patricia Rozema
• Dead Ringers (1988), dir. David Cronenberg
• Exotica (1994), dir. Atom Egoyan
• Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner (2001), dir. Zacharias Kunuk
• La grande séduction (2003), dir. Jean-François Pouliot
• Ryan (2004), dir. Chris Landreth
• Bon Cop, Bad Cop (2006), dir. Eric Canuel
• My Winnipeg (2007), dir. Guy Maddin
• Incendies (2010), dir. Denis Villeneuve
• Bear 71 (2012), dir. Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes
• Laurence Anyways (2012), dir. Xavier Dolan
• Stories We Tell (2012), dir. Sarah Polley
• The Grand Seduction (2013), dir. Don Mckellar

Evaluation: Participation (10%); Panel Presentation (20%); Screening Logs (30%); Final Paper/ Project Proposal (10%); Final Paper/Project (30%)

Format: Lectures; mandatory screenings; panel presentations; discussions; in-class activities

Prerequisite: None

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

Description: The object of our seminar is to define, at a theoretical level and through applied case-studies, the epistemologically fraught terms 'theatricality' and 'performativity' (and their cognates) to determine not only why, how, and to what ends each term can / might be used, but also to arrive at an understanding of to what extent they are sovereign and / or complementary. As Josette Féral proposes: "I would argue […] that there is no contradiction whatsoever between these two perspectives, which seem widely divergent. Rather, they complement each other, allowing us to better understand the phenomenon of representation, underscoring that performativity, far from contradicting theatricality, is one of its elements. In integrating performativity within itself, theatricality sees it as one of its fundamental modalities, giving theatricality its power and meaning. In fact, such an approach allows us to better understand any spectacle, which is an interplay of both performativity and theatricality."

In defining and using our evolving critical vocabulary, we shall be examining drama, theatre, and performance fields and sub-fields, including theatre and anthropology, gender studies, musicology, philosophy, linguistics, and critical theory. Key topics will include not only ‘theatricality’ and ‘performativity (performance)’, but also presence and representation, embodiment and subjectivity / subject-positions, the archive and the repertoire, and the performance of the trinity of race, class, and gender / sexuality.

Our seminar will first devote itself to a close reading of a selection of mostly theoretical essays, several of which come from a special online issue of SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 31.2 & 3 (2002), ed. Josette Féral. These will include two essays by Féral, and one essay by Freddie Rokem and perhaps some others. Other theoretical readings to be found in the Course Pack and online are by Philip Auslander, J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, David Savran, Dwight Conquergood, Diana Taylor, Rebecca Schneider, Jacques Derrida, W. B. Worthen, Peggy Phelan, Richard Schechner, Marvin Carlson, Victor Turner, Frantz Fanon, Homi K. Bhabha, Andrew Parker, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Michel de Certeau.

Our seminar will then examine some dramatic / film texts as case-studies, exploring, (re)interpreting, and applying the critical vocabulary that we have acquired and created to see what its use-value might be.

Texts: 

• Course Pack
• Michel Tremblay, Albertine In FiveTimes, trans. Linda Gaboriau (Talonbooks)
• Georg Bϋchner, Woyzeck (Nick Hern Books)
• Federico García Lorca, The House of Bernarda Alba, trans. Rona Munro (Nick Hern Books)
• Lorena Gale, Angélique (Playwrights Canada Press)
• Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters, trans. Paul Schmidt, in The Plays of Anton Chekhov (HarperCollins)

Films:

• Baz Luhrmann, Romeo + Juliet (Bazmark Films), Baz Luhrmann, director, written by Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce  (Bazmark Films, 1996 ; Beverley Hills: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, ca. 2002)
• The Wooster Group, director, Elizabeth LeCompte, narrator Kate Valk, Brace Up! (The Wooster Group, 2009)
• Werner Herzog, director, Woyzeck (Anchor Bay Entertainment,  ([2000])
• Mario Camus, director, written by Mario Camus and Antonio Larreta, The House of Bernarda Alba (1987; [Chicago]: Cińemateca, ca. 2005])
• Film Script: Craig Pearce and Baz Luhrmann, Romeo + Juliet - www.script-o-rama.com/snazzy/dircut.html

Evaluation (tentative): Active participation in the intellectual life of the seminar: 15%; one seminar presentation on a theoretical text or case-study: 15%; a distilled critical argument arising from the seminar presentation advanced in a 8-page long essay: 20%; a 20-page long scholarly essay from a choice of individually-negotiated topics: 50%

Format: Brief, mid-sized, and longer lectures; led-discussions; presentations including interrogative Qs & As.