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

200-level / Introductory Courses

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


ENGL 202 Departmental Survey of English Literature I

Professor Ken Borris
Fall 2016
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 8:35-9:25 am

Full course description

Prerequisite: None

Not open to students who have taken ENGL 200.  Open only to students in English Major and Minor programs.

 Description: English 202 is a historical survey of nondramatic English literature from Old English up to and including the eighteenth-century writer Swift, highlighting major texts, authors, and shifts in literary thought, with attention to relevant cultural factors.

This necessarily fast-moving course provides fundamental grounding for understanding the cross-currents, influences, and intertextual relationships involved in the development of nondramatic English literature. Accordingly, English 202 focuses on premodern English nondramatic authors, texts, and genres that have had a major literary and cultural impact: Beowulf, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, a range of Renaissance sonnets, lyrics by Donne and Marvell, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Pope’s Rape of the Lock, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The course thus provides knowledge of English epic, the formerly major narrative genre; its parodic inversion mock-epic; early modern lyric; satire; and other literary forms. It further deals with a wide range of cultural, social, and intellectual contexts relevant to these texts, from philosophy, theology, and iconography to former notions of amorous desire.  By examining two representative expressions of Renaissance and Enlightenment esthetics, Sidney’s Defence of Poesy and Pope’s Essay on Criticism, it defines prior concepts of literature, how they differed, and how they contrast with our own. Using Mary Wroth and Aphra Behn as exemplars, it further addresses the origins and development of English female literary authorship. This course combines with English 203 to survey English literary history up the present, and these surveys much facilitate later specialized study of English literature in the Minor, Major, and Honours programs.

The genres, authors, and longer texts covered in this course–such as Beowulf, the Canterbury Tales and its particular sections studied (the General Prologue, the Wife’s and Miller’s Prologues and Tales), a portion of The Faerie Queene, Sidney’s Defence, Books I to IV of Paradise Lost, Pope’s Essay on Criticism and Rape of the Lock, and parts I and IV of Gulliver’s Travels--are thus quite standard for such surveys throughout the English-speaking world.

Texts: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1, 7th or later editions (available at the Word bookstore, 469 Milton Street); Colin Norman, Writing Essays (pamphlet, available at the McGill bookstore); Course Reader (available at the Word bookstore)

Evaluation: Final exam, 40%; term paper, 50%; 10% conference attendance and participation.

Format: Lectures, conferences, discussion


ENGL 203 Departmental Survey of English Literature 2

Professor Miranda Hickman
Winter 2017

Full course description

NB: This course is intended for Faculty of Arts or Faculty of Science Students in a Major or Minor Program in literature in the Department of English.  Not open to students in other Faculties.

Prerequisite: English 202. Not open to students who have taken English 201, the non-Departmental Survey of English Literature.

 Description: This course offers a survey of English Literature from the years following the French Revolution to the early twentieth century, with particular emphasis on poetry.  We will attend critically to the constructs of Romanticism, Victorianism, and Modernism that have traditionally governed the periodization and study of literature covered by this course. 

This survey of British literature, which spans the years between approximately 1785 and 1950, divides into three major units. We open with what has come to be known as the Romantic period in British literature, falling during the final decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth. David Perkins once suggested that we are still living in the “comet’s tail” of the Romantics’ fiery trajectory: we still feel the influence of their ideas about the role of the artist, creative process, the power of the imagination, Nature, and the relationship between the individual and society. Especially salient in our Romantic inheritance is a conception of the poet—as hero, rebel, solitary genius, and visionary—that continues to compel readers today. We then address the Victorian period, whose writers often critiqued the Romantic emphasis on introspection, feeling, and individual visionary experience, and frequently shaped their work according to values emerging from commitments to social responsibility. We close with the “Fin de Siècle,” usually read as a late-nineteenth century revolt against Victorianism from within, and with the movement that the Fin de Siècle is often read as ushering in: twentieth-century literary modernism, associated with significant aesthetic, social, and philosophical innovation. 

Texts: 

The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2

Will include selections from Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, S.T. Coleridge, William Blake, John Keats, P.B. Shelley, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, Shaw, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Charles Dickens, Hard Times

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Evaluation: 2 essays (5-6 pp.), final examination, conference participation.

Format: Lecture and conference


ENGL 204 English Literature and the Bible

Professor Wes Folkerth​
Fall 2016
Monday, Wednesday and Friday 12:35-13:25

Full course description

 Description: This course has a dual focus. First, we will study the Bible – the “book of books” composed by multiple authors in multiple languages – in terms of its overall structure, the varied poetic and narrative genres it contains, and its prominent themes and characters. Our text will be the King James Version, a masterpiece of English literature in its own right. We will pay close attention to individual books from the New and Old Testaments. Secondly, we will examine the Bible’s connections with the work of English authors from the medieval to the postmodern periods. This is a very large topic to pursue in a single semester; bear in mind this will be an introductory course on the subject.

Texts: 

The English Bible: King James Version. The Old Testament. A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Marks, Herbert. New York: WW Norton, 2012.
The English Bible: King James Version. The New Testament and The Apocrypha. A Norton Critical Edition. Eds Hammond, Gerald and Austin Busch. New York: WW Norton, 2012.
Other texts TBD.

Evaluation: midterm essay (30%); final essay (40%); final exam (30%)

Format: Lecture and class discussion


ENGL 215 Introduction to Shakespeare

Professor Fiona Ritchie​
Winter 2016
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 13:05 – 14:25 

Full course description

 Prerequisite: none; this course is designed for students outside the English Department – those pursuing a major or minor in English should take ENGL 315

Description: This course provides an introduction to the drama of William Shakespeare by covering a selection of plays chosen from the various genres represented in his canon (comedy, history, tragedy, romance). The plays will be examined from a variety of critical perspectives. As well as the themes of the works, we will study issues such as Shakespeare’s language, his use of sources, and the historical, cultural and political context in which he wrote. Since Shakespeare’s drama was written to be performed, we will explore early modern stage practices and will also examine the subsequent performance history of the plays up to the present day on both stage and screen.

Texts: (to be confirmed): The Necessary Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 4th edition.

Evaluation (tentative): conference participation 20%; midterm exam (short essay) 30%; final exam 50%

Format: Lecture, conferences, discussion


ENGL 227 American Literature 3

The American Novel Since 1945

Professor Merve Emre
Fall 2017
Monday, Wednesday and Friday 9:35-10:25

Full course description

 Description: This course traces the formal and thematic developments in the American novel from 1945 to the present. We will pay special attention to the relationship between writers and readers, the conditions of publishing, the rise of popular genres, minority voices, and fiction’s engagement with politics. The reading list includes works by Richard Wright, Patricia Highsmith, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin, Thomas Pynchon, Jack Kerouac, Erica Jong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Junot Diaz, and a final novel selected by student vote. 

Texts: 

Richard Wright, Black Boy
Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Evaluation: Quizzes: 10%; Section participation: 15%; Mid-Term: 20%; Essay: 25%; Final Exam: 30%

Format: Lecture and conferences


ENGL 229 Introduction to Canadian Literature 2

Professor Robert Lecker
Winter Term 2017
Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 11:35 – 12:25

Full course description

Prerequisite: None

 Description: A survey of English Canadian poetry and prose from the Second World War to the present. We will read poetry and short fiction to explore the development of Canadian literature. In addition to looking at the work of specific authors from 1945 to the present, the lectures will cover such topics as Canadian literary nationalism, realism, postmodernism, and different forms of experimentation. We will also look at the idea of nordicity as a central metaphor in Canadian writing and discuss the economic and cultural forces accounting for the construction of a national literature. 

Texts: Lecker, Robert, ed. Open Country: Canadian Literature in English. Toronto: Nelson, 2007.​

Evaluation: TBA.

Format: Lecture.


ENGL 230 Introduction to Theatre Studies 

Professor Erin Hurley
Fall 2016
Monday, Wednesday and Friday 13:35-14:25

Full course description

Prerequisite: None

 Description: This course provides a critical introduction to Theatre Studies, in its branches of dramatic literature, dramatic theory, and theatre history.  Our point of departure for this introduction to the field will be plays drawn from the major episodes of world theatre history, beginning with Ancient Greek drama through contemporary Canadian and postcolonial performance, and including the Department of English mainstage show. Through the plays, we will examine what “theatre” is in different periods and places, how it is constituted by the material conditions of performance, codified in dramatic genres, and conceptualized in dramatic theory. NB: This course is introductory in the sense of ‘foundational’; it offers the fundaments to the study of theatre and prepares students for further study in Drama and Theatre.

Introduction to Theatre Studies is divided into units and ordered according to chronology. Each unit is built around a representative play or performance and explores a particular question or issue in theatre studies, for instance, the actor’s body, theories of genre, or women on stage. 

Texts: Gainor, J. Ellen, Stanton B. Garner, Jr. and Martin Puchner, ed. The Norton Anthology of Drama, Shorter Second Edition.

Required Event: Department of English mainstage play – Moyse Hall Theatre, end of November 

Evaluation: Midterm exam (25%); final exam (35%); participation (10%); close-reading assignment (15%); theatre production analysis (15%)

Format: Lecture (2 hours/week) plus discussion sections (1 hour/week)


ENGL 269 Introduction to Performance

Professor Sean Carney
Winter Term  2017
Thursday and Friday 9:35-11:25 am

Full course description

Prerequisite: This class is restricted to declared Majors in Drama and Theatre who have completed or are completing ENGL 230 and ENGL 355.  Admission is by permission of the instructor only: sean.carney [at] mcgill.ca

 Description: This course will introduce you to basic tools and techniques used in acting, improvisation, and dramatic analysis.  You will develop vocal and physical warm-ups, learn about breath support and a free and placed voice, explore the performance of Shakespeare monologues, participate in improvisation exercises, explore spontaneity, imagination and creativity, learn about the analysis of a contemporary dramatic script and the use of that analysis in the actor’s work. Throughout the course you will be asked to commit fully to the class, the group and the process, and you will be expected to work on your own, outside of class, rehearsing your monologues and scenes.

Texts: TBD

Evaluation: A combination of class participation (various exercises and presentations totalling approximately 50% of the evaluation) and various types of written assignments (approximately 50% of the evaluation).

Format: Group discussions, practical exercises, class presentations


ENGL 275 Introduction to Cultural Studies 

Professor Derek Nystrom
Winter Term  2017
​Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 10:35-11:25

Full course description

 Description: This course, a required course for Cultural Studies majors and minors, will introduce various critical efforts to theorize the aesthetics, semiotics, and politics of popular culture over the past century. Beginning with a few crucial theoretical touchstones (Marx, Freud, structuralism), we will survey such movements as the Frankfurt School, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, critical race studies, queer theory, affect theory, and various feminisms, as they each formulate critical frameworks to explain how popular culture works. Along the way, we will consider the following questions: What does the “popular” in “popular culture” mean? Does the distinction between “high” and “low” culture have a political dimension? Furthermore, when we do cultural studies, whose culture should be investigated? What is the role of the critic? Finally, how can we grasp the meanings of popular culture: by examining the texts themselves, or by studying the audiences’ interpretations and uses of these texts?

Texts:

Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Course pack with essays by Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Andreas Huyssen, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige, Louis Althusser, John Fiske, Janice Radway, Laura Kipnis, Constance Penley, and others.

Evaluation: short papers, midterm quiz, conference participation, final exam

Format: lecture, weekly TA-led conferences


ENGL 280 Cinema as Mass Medium

Adaptation

Professor Trevor Ponech
Winter 2017
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 13:35–14:25
Screening: TBA 

Full course description

Prerequisite: None

 Description: Adaptation--roughly speaking, the practice of basing a movie on a literary or other source-work--is a remarkably common, perhaps the historically dominant, strategy movie makers employ in the course of inventing and shaping their works.  This year, ENGL 280 Cinema as Mass Medium surveys some theories of adaptation.  Our first order of business will be to look at ways in which the artistic genre of adaptation has been conceptualized.  Here we'll pay special attention to puzzles and problems surrounding the notion that movies are texts and that adaptations are "intertexts" or "palimpsestic texts."  Textualist definitions of adaptation will be compared with alternative approproaches grounded in the idea that cinema is an essentially nontextual medium.  To explore this alternative, we will need to clarify what it is that we are talking about when we use the terms 'text" and "medium."  This discussion will give onto an examination of whether adaptation essentially involves a medium shift, that is, a change from one mode or vehicle of expression (the literary text, for instance) to another (the cinematic display).  At the same time, we'll survey some varieties of adaptation.  Cinematic adaptations can be intelligently described as versions of their source works.  For one thing to be a version of another necessarily means that features of one be markedly informed or shaped by features of the other.  But not all versions are, for instance, faithful to the original.  Hence we'll link adaptation to the concepts of "fidelity," "artistic nesting," and "transgression."  This discussion will, in turn, lead us to consider how best to go about critically appreciating an adaptation as an adaptation, that is, as a certain kind of artistic achievement.  What, if anything, makes an adaptation good?  Do they ever betoken originality?  And what functions might adaptations possess as a mode of cultural transmission of narratives, values, and beliefs?   

Texts: A selection of readings drawn from contemporary film theory and aesthetic philosophy; Linda Hutcheons, A Theory of Adaptation; a selection of novels and short fictional works.

Films:

  • The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)
  •  Orlando (Sally Potter, 1992)
  • Le Mépris/Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
  • The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
  • Kumonosu jô/Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957)
  • The Talented Mr. Ripley (Anthony Minghella, 1999)
  • Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (Zacharias Kunuk, 2001)

Evaluation (tentative): conference participation 20%; midterm exam (short essay) 30%; final exam 50%

Format: Lectures, discussions, conferences, and screenings


ENGL 297 Introduction to Inuit, Métis and First Nations Literature, Video and Film

Professor Marianne Stenbaek
Fall Term 2016
Tuesday, Thursday 10:05-11:25

Full course description

Prerequisite: None

Description: This course offers an introduction to Canadian Inuit, Métis and First Nations literature, video and film. It should be stressed that this is only an introduction: Canada is a vast and varied country with over 600 different First Nations tribes, four distinct Inuit regions and several Métis groups who all have different traditions, often different languages, and quite different histories.

We will address works either originally written in English or translated into English.

The course will consider oral literature, story-telling and legends handed down through generations as well as contemporary “collaborative life stories,” novels, essays and one play. The common themes are a “revolt” against colonialism, in whatever form this may take, and a search for a renewed or continued identity in the contemporary world. Creations in modern media such as television and film have been both forceful and successful: some are included in the course.

Required Texts:

Inuit:

  • Wachovich: Saquiaq
  • Excerpts from Voices and Images of Nunavimmiut volume 1. Edited By Stenbaek and Grey
  • Legends, to be distributed in class.

Métis:

  • Maria Campbell: Half-Breed

First Nations:

  • Tomson Highway: The Rez Sister.
  • Richard Wagamese: Indian Horse.

Other articles will be distributed in class.
Most books have been used in other courses, so you may be able to find them second-hand, but they will also available at Paragraphe Bookstore, southwest corner of McGill College and Sherbrooke.
Excerpts from films and videos will be shown in class and are considered an integral part of the class material for which you are responsible.  You should have access to watching APTN (Aboriginal Peoples Television Network) either on line or on television.

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lecture and duscussion

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