Summer courses 2012

Description: This course will explore representative writings in American Literature from the Revolution to the late nineteenth-century.  We will consider the legacy of the Revolution in relation to both its role as a seminal event in the emergence of American national identity and its place in the international political scene of the late eighteenth-century.  We will also examine the shifting construction of this national identity in the first half of the nineteenth-century, paying particular attention to the ongoing conflicts between unification and division that culminated in the Civil War. We will situate the literary works in the context of central cultural and social issues of the period, including slavery, industrial growth, consolidation, reformation, and the First and Second Party Systems.  We will also consider the intellectual context of the period, specifically the movement between Transcendentalism and Romanticism, as well as the foundations of Pragmatism and Modernism.  Some of the writers we will read will include Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Emily Dickinson, and Henry James.

Texts: (available at the McGill Bookstore)

• The American Tradition in Literature, Volume 1, Twelfth Edition.
• James, Henry. Washington Square. Oxford University Press.   

Format: Lectures and Discussions

Evaluation:

• In-Class Essay: 20%
• Long Essay (7-8 pp., secondary research required): 30%
• Final exam: 35% (in class)
• Class participation: 15% (includes attendance and discussion)

Description: This is an introductory but occasionally advanced survey course that focuses on three aspects of film as mass medium: genre, propaganda, and celebrity. Beginning with Linda Williams’ assertion that “[m]elodrama is the fundamental mode of American moving pictures” (“Melodrama Revised,” 1998) and with a viewing of Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), we will trace that mode through four different genres to learn how genres teach viewers how to look at movies. Our main examples will be Citizen Kane, a fictionalized biographical film or biopic; Stevens’ Shane (1953), a Western; Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), a thriller; and Coppola’s Dracula (1992), a horror movie with surprising implications about film as a mass medium.

The second part of the course will focus on a broad historical range of propaganda, starting with Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) and Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942). In these examples, we will consider representations of nationality that often serve to mobilize support for war. With more recent films arguably involved in propaganda, such as Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), we will reflect upon the potential application of Williams’ arguments about melodrama—this time in the context of the documentary genre and realism. We will also consider a recent comic book adaptation, Favreau’s Iron Man (2008), so that we can discuss the relationship of propaganda and ideology in popular culture as a transition to the next unit of the course.

To conclude the course, we will consider our cultural and personal imagination of narratives of intimacy that promote celebrity. The main examples will be Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), Brittain and Owen’s Ladies and Gentlemen... Mr. Leonard Cohen (1965), Bergman’s Persona (1966), and Weir’s The Truman Show (1998). These films will remind us not only of how we have been taught to look at movies, but also of how we have been taught to look at celebrities. We will discuss the consequences—for us and them, and both together—of our looking and gazing at celebrities, who are almost inescapably objects of our interest. We will also discuss the system that produces celebrity and the simultaneously private and mass subject.

The course will have two screenings of the same film per week, and the remaining films will be viewed during regular class time or extra-curricularly. For students who cannot attend either the afternoon or evening screening, all the films will be available on reserve at the library, as will some of the additional texts (e.g. articles and chapters). Each week, one or two secondary readings on genre, propaganda, celebrity, or mass media will be required or recommended.

In support of local business and culture, the required textbook, Maria Pramaggiore and Tom Wallis’ Film: A Critical Introduction, third edition, will be available ($138) at The Word bookstore, 469 Milton Street (cash or cheque only). Used copies of the earlier edition might also be available, but some of the required readings might not be in that edition.

Format: Informal lectures, screenings, activities, and discussions.

Description: In this course we will examine the ways in which Renaissance writers represented the powers and dangers of passion. We will begin by looking at the different myths about desire which the Renaissance inherited from the classical and Christian traditions. Our main focus will be the rise and fall of Petrarchan love, which we will trace from the idealistic courtly lovers of 13th‐century Italy to the cynical rakes of late 17th‐England. Following the evolution of the passions through time and space will enable us to examine how desire is both an intimate expression of the individual self and shaped by cultural influences. Questions we will consider will include the nature of erotic passion and its relation to other forms of desire such as love of God, country, family, power, and especially art itself; same‐sex desire; the relation between desire and disgust. Readings of literature will be juxtaposed with visits to art galleries in Florence and other cities, and discussions of the historical contexts which shaped a growing passion for passion itself.

Texts (tentative): Course pack with short selections from: Plato; The Bible; Ovid; Ficino; Petrarch; Castiglione; Aretino; Wyatt; Surrey; Marlowe; Donne; Suckling; Carew; Marvell; Rochester; Dante, La Vita Nuova; Shakespeare: selections from the Sonnets, Venus and Adonis, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra

Prerequisites: None.

Method of Evaluation: Participation (20%); 10‐15 minute presentation (10%); Midterm (30%); final 10 page paper (40%).

Enrollment: Limited to 15 students, admission by permission of instructor. Students interested in taking this course should email maggie.kilgour [at] mcgill.ca as soon as possible.

Further information on McGill’s summer program in Florence, including costs and application forms, will be available in early January 2012 at www.mcgill.ca/italian.

* Note: this course will count towards the Backgrounds/Renaissance requirement of McGill’s English program.