Undergraduate and graduate 500-level courses / Seminars

Description: Despite his historical obscurity, the Gawain-poet (a.k.a. the Pearl-poet) is counted among the most accomplished of fourteenth-century English poets, comparable in literary sophistication to Chaucer, Langland, Gower, and other major poets of the period. This course will consist of close and intensive study of the four major works of this anonymous late-medieval poet whose writings survive in a single manuscript (British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x, Art. 3): Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We will read these four poems in the original Middle English and pay attention to the material context of the manuscript in which they are preserved (which we will look at in facsimile). We will also consider the regionality of the poems’ dialect and the literary context of the Alliterative Revival; connections to London politics and contemporary trends in Middle English writing; transmission of the manuscript and its critical reception; and theoretical issues of authorship impacting an anonymous body of work. For students new to the study of medieval literature, the works of the Gawain-poet offer an excellent introduction to the range of medieval literary tastes and conventions, encompassing allegorical dream-vision, Biblical adaptation, and Arthurian romance. For those with already developed interests in medieval studies, this course facilitates intensive study of a rich body of Middle English writing rarely taught as a unified corpus in the original language, with ample opportunity for advanced pursuit of individual research interests relating to Middle English poetics, vernacular theology, manuscript study, and other topics. 

N.B. All readings will be in the original Middle English, with ample glosses and annotations supplied by the student-friendly Everyman edition of the Gawain-poet’s works that we will be using. Prior experience with Middle English is encouraged but not essential; there is no prerequisite for this course. We will learn/review the fundamentals of Middle English language and comprehension together as a class at the beginning of the semester. Learning to read and pronounce Middle English is a formal expectation of the course. 

Evaluation (provisional): 10% Middle English recitation; 15% seminar presentation; 60% essay (15-20 pages for undergraduates; 20-25 pages for graduate students); 15% participation

Texts (provisional):

1. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, ed. J. J. Anderson (Everyman Paperbacks, 1996)
2. Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson, eds., A Companion to the Gawain-Poet (Boydell and Brewer, 2007)

Format: seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

Description: As the recent flurry of translations and adaptations suggests, the Roman poet Ovid has been a continuous source of inspiration for later artists and writers who have metamorphosed his tales of love and metamorphoses. While it may seem extravagant to claim that English literature begins with Ovid, it is clear that the burst of creative energy in the 16^th century that we call the English Renaissance was fuelled by translations and adaptations of this Protean poet. In this course we will try to understand how and why Ovid spoke to the Elizabethan situation in particular. We will examine how Ovid was taught in school and popularized through allegorical readings and English translations, and then see how his stories and verbal ingenuity in general inspired and influenced the development of epyllia, drama, and love poetry. Does the poet associated with change help Elizabethans understand the changes taking place in their own time – as he may help us in ours?

Prerequisite: No formal prerequisite; however, all students must have read the entire Metamorphoses before the first class. Knowledge of Ovid’s other works and some  background in Renaissance literature is also useful.

Evaluation: seminar presentation; final 20 page paper; participation

Texts:

• On Web CT: selections from Elizabethan epyllia, poetry, translations, commentaries, and emblems
• Marlowe: Hero and Leander
• Spenser: “Muiopotmos”; Faerie Queene 3; Mutabilitie Cantos
• Shakespeare: Venus and Adonis; Rape of Lucrece; Midsummer Night’s Dream; Titus Andronicus
• Ben Jonson: Chloridia; Poetaster
• Milton: Comus

Format: Seminar discussion and student presentations

Average enrollment: 15 students

Description: this course approaches a massive and neglected body of Victorian fiction.  With the decreasing costs of print in the mid-to-late nineteenth-century, thousands of novels flooded the marketplace between approximately 1840 and 1900.  Most of these novels had an ephemeral lifespan in print, which has relegated them to near-invisibility in literary scholarship. As literary historian John Sutherland writes, “the academic study of Victorian fiction has signally failed to engage with the mass of works produced in the field.” 

This course considers that failure, examining it through critical studies of canonization, the mass reading public, and concepts of high and low culture.  We will read a variety of popular novels in digital form, and some in print form, and work together to compile an annotated database of the novels we read.  Among our points of focus will be these novels’  preoccupation with transgressive behaviour and shattered relationships (especially marital ones), which challenges the conventional status of marriage as closure and reward in the Victorian novel.  We will also seek constructive ways to analyze and criticize novels that may, at first, seem formulaic and melodramatic.  Students will have considerable freedom in choosing the novels they read as well as considerable responsibility in directing their own research, as, almost without exception, none of the novels on our list will have been the subject of previous criticism.

Evaluation: Oral Presentation (15%); Annotation Assignments (40%); Participation (15%); Final Essay (30%)

Texts: Class reader. Novels to be determined. In addition to reading three novels as a class, all students will read an two novels of their choice from a list I provide, to be determined once the semester starts.

Format: seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

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,  is 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.” 

Tentative Evaluation:  Précis of all films and texts ( 80%); attendance and participation (20%)

Format: seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

Texts from:

• Nicole Krauss, The History of Love (2005)
• Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses   (2005 [2003])
• Kathryn Harrison, Seeking Rapture (2004)
• Hjalmar Soderberg, Doctor Glas (2002 [1963])
• Paris Texas (dir. Wim Wenders, 1984)
• Last Tango in Paris (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)
• The Straight Story (dir. David Lynch, 1999)
• Hiroshima, Mon Amour (dir. Alain Resnais, 1959)
• In Treatment (HBO, 2008-2011)

Description: “Character” has long been a central, and at times controversial, category of analysis in Shakespeare studies. In this seminar we will ourselves attend to this aspect of Shakespeare’s works, and also track various responses to it through critical history. The seminar will consist of three parts. In the first part, we will introduce some key definitions, and examine the underappreciated prehistory of Shakespearean literary characterization, focusing on Geoffrey Chaucer’s “estates satire” in the Canterbury Tales. In the following weeks our readings of various plays will be connected to significant early modern contexts of character; topics to be considered will include character and gender, the rhetoric of character, character as a literary genre. The third part of the seminar will address the critical history of Shakespearean characterology, from the eighteenth century (John Dryden, William Richardson, Maurice Morgann), to Romantic statements on the topic (William Hazlitt, S.T. Coleridge), to Victorian-era feminine responses (Anna Jameson, Mary Cowden Clark), and finally to character criticism’s culmination in the work of A.C. Bradley. We will also attend to significant counterstatements by L.C. Knights and Terence Hawkes. In the last weeks of the seminar we will assess some of the ways in which character-based criticism is reconceived and revived in the work of Stanley Cavell, and Harold Bloom.

Evaluation: Seminar presentation  35%; Final Paper  50%; Weekly preparation and participation 15%

Texts:

• Bradley, A.C.  Shakespearean Tragedy
• Cavell, Stanley.  Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare
• A course-pak of collected texts will be available at the McGill Bookstore.
• The Riverside Shakespeare, or similar collection of the complete works.

Format: seminar 

Average enrollment: 15 students

Description:

“I look in vain for the poet whom I describe.” (Emerson, “The Poet”)

This advanced seminar will compare and contrast two idiosyncratic and foundational American poets: Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Extended studies of their works will trace similarities and differences--especially in their responses to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call for the emergence of an original “American Poet” and a radically new mode of “poetry.” The seminar will begin, then, with a unit on Emerson, analyzing the dynamics of his prose style and his characteristic imagery (circles, eyes, "the flowing," transparency, and so on) as well as his key notions about nature, language, symbolism, correspondence, representation, rhetorical process, eloquence, power, surprise, democracy, cultural leadership, selfhood, self-culture, self-reliance, vision, spiritual and intellectual progress, metamorphosis, dialogue and dialectic, polarity, the poet, poetry, authorship. After this contextualizing introduction, we will devote about five weeks to intensive close reading of major writings (mainly poems, but also prose pieces, letters, and manuscripts) by each poet--investigating the ways in which they can be seen to build upon, to transform, to test, or to challenge the bases of Emerson’s poetic model.

Expected Student Preparation:  Previous university-level course work offering some training in relevant areas: critical analysis of poetry; 19^th-century British and American Literature. 

Evaluation (tentative): participation (15%); 1 oral presentation (20%); 2 critical essays; (15% each); take-home final essay exam (35%)

Texts: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Writings; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass; Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems

Format: seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

Description: This course focuses on novels and short fiction written by a number of established and upcoming contemporary Canadian writers. Most of the works considered have appeared over the past decade. They allow us to rethink the ways in which history is understood, the relation between formal experimentation and radicalism, and the representation of marginalized people--from artists, to criminals, to sexual deviants and misfits. Although these works are quite recent, the course will also consider the broader development of Canadian fiction and will pay special attention to the cultural and material forces affecting literary production in Canada over the past few decades. 

Evaluation: Seminar presentation, 20%; attendance and participation, 20%; short paper, 20%; final paper, 40%

Texts:

• Adamson, Gil. The Outlander
• Blaise, Clark. The Meagre Tarmac
• Boyden, Joseph. Through Black Spruce
• deWitt, Patrick. The Sisters Brothers
• Gowdy, Barbara. We So Seldom Look on Love
• Grant, Jessica. Come, Thou Tortoise
• Mistry, Rohinton. Family Matters
• Moore, Lisa. February
• Robinson, Eden. Traplines
• Schofield, Anakana. Malarky

Average enrollment: 15 students

Description: This course is designed to bring together the Literature and Cultural Studies streams of the English Department around the concept of the uncanny—a concept that cuts straight to the troubled heart of literature, film, and other media in their definition and practice. The course may also appeal to theoretically minded Drama and Theatre students, since the uncanny cannot be fully conceived without the notion of theatricality. Together, we will attempt to track over 150 years of American Culture in some of its most unsettling manifestations in literature, film, radio, and television; it is the tradition in which “things are not what they seem,” in which tidy complacencies give way to vast unknown forces, where time is out of joint and the individual character/reader/viewer radically lost. We will provisionally expect the uncanny in three overlapping domains: in social worlds that resist navigation, in natural environments that defy mastery, and in technology that creates its own imperatives.  If these domains house respectively the American Dreams of equality, frontier, and progress, it may be only to show that there is nothing more uncanny than the idea of America itself.

Note: for the first class meeting all students will read the first three items in the coursepack: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” Freud’s “The Uncanny,” and Samuel Weber’s “Uncanny Thinking.”

Evaluation: term paper 40%, journals 30%, participation 20%, discussion questions 5%, paper proposals 5%

Texts: Possible authors include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Frank Norris, Edith Wharton, Shirley Jackson, Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, and Colson Whitehead.

Possible films include Vertigo, Seconds, Rosemary’s Baby, Klute, The Stepford Wives, Daughter Rite, Safe, Diary of the Dead, and Standard Operating Procedure.

TV and radio will include Orson Welles’ “panic broadcast” of The War of the Worlds and episodes of The Twilight Zone.

Format: seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

Description: In this course, we will read and view a range of queer plays and performances by North American authors.  The course will open with an introduction to the different critical investments and possibilities in the terms “queer”, “lesbian” and “gay”, as used in theatre and performance studies scholarship through readings from Jill Dolan, Sue-Ellen Case, Judith Butler, José Muõz, E. Patrick Johnson, and Tavia Nyong’o, among others.  Then, we will read widely across a range of genres of queer performance.  These will include: solo performance, puppet theatre, dramatic realism, performance art, and collective creation. Queer reception practices as theorized by Stacy Wolf, David Savran and D.A. Miller will also be engaged, especially in relation to musical theatre.

Evaluation: Discussion Questions and response paper (10%); seminar facilitation (30%); final paper (40%); participation (20%)

Texts: We will read -- and where possible see -- plays/performances by some of the following:Paula Vogel

• Paula Vogel
• Tony Kushner
• Ronnie Burkett
• Split Britches
• Dayna Macleod
• Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan
• Tomson Highway
• 2boys.tv
• Denise Uyehara
• Michel Marc Bouchard
• Normand Chaurette
• Jovette Marchessault
• Marga Gomez
• Nathalie Claude
• Marie Brassard
• Nina Arsenault
• Sky Gilbert
• Kate Bornstein
• Plus whoever comes to the Edgy Women festival of performance in March

Format: seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

Description: This course will explore the emergence of new modes of collectivity in recent cultural theory and political and aesthetic practices.  Our central question is: what are the techniques of togetherness being developed by artists and critics today? How have artists and critics responded to the challenges of new forms of technology, communication, labour, social assembly and creative practice in re-imagining how we might act and live together? We will read broadly in contemporary critical theory to explore concepts such as networks, distributed aesthetics, new ecologies, nonhuman affinities, creative commons, multitude, new ecologies and others. We will alternate these readings with case studies of collaborative aesthetic and social practices. 

Evaluation: TBA

Texts: Readings may include: The Invisible Committee. The Coming Insurrection; Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds. Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics; Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics; Jane Bennett. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things; Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, Felix Guattari. The Three Ecologies; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.  A Thousand Plateaus; Jussi Parikka, Insect Media. An Archaeology of Animals and Technology,Alex Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, Pierre Levy, Collective Intelligence. 

Format: seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students