200-level / Introductory Courses

Prerequisite: Open only to English Majors and Minors, or by special written permission of instructor.

Description: Required for English Majors and Minors, ENGL 202 is foundational to further study of literature in the department of English. Through readings of and lectures/discussions on a range of major non-dramatic works from the Anglo Saxon period to the mid 18th century, it introduces students to English literary history, while reflecting upon the meaning of tradition, the idea of a canon and of literary history, the concept of “Englishness,” and the significance and purpose of literature. We will trace the development through time of specific literary forms and genres, including lyric, elegy, epic, satire, sonnet, romance, and pastoral. At the same time, we will consider the relation between literature and religion, politics, and culture broadly, asking why people read and write literature, and following the changing ideas of the writer and his/her role in society. This course gives students a knowledge of early literature in English that prepares them for more advanced and specialized study in the department. Class discussions (especially in conferences) and written assignments will help students develop skills of interpretation and communication.

Texts (texts are available at McGill Bookstore):

Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol 1. 9^th Edition.
Edmund Spenser’s Poetry. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Anne Lake Prescott and Andrew D. Hadfield. (Included with the Anthology if purchased at the Bookstore)
The Canadian Writer’s Handbook. 6^th Edition. Ed. William E. Messenger et al. Toronto: Oxford, 2015. (RECOMMENDED)

Evaluation: 20% mid-term; 40% 5-6 page term paper; 30% formal final exam;10% conference participation.

Format: Lecture and conferences.

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 2.

Description: Focusing primarily on literature of the British Isles, this course surveys English Literature from the years following the French Revolution to the early twentieth century, with particular emphasis on poetry. We engage critically with the constructs of “Romanticism,” “Victorianism,” and “Modernism” traditionally governing the periodization and study of literature covered by this course, and we interrogate the concept of literary “canon.”

​Our work divides into four major modules. We open with what has come to be known as the Romantic period in British literature, between the last 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 the Romantic inheritance is a conception of the poet—as hero, rebel, solitary genius, and visionary—that still compels readers today. We then engage the Victorian period, whose writers often critiqued the Romantic emphasis on introspection, feeling, and individual visionary experience, and often shaped their work according to commitments to social justice. We close with the “fin de siècle,” usually read as a late-nineteenth century revolt against Victorianism from within, together with the movement that the fin de siècle is often read as ushering in: twentieth-century literary “modernism,” associated with pathfinding aesthetic, social, and philosophical innovation.

Texts:
Readings will likely include work by the following:
Romantic: Olaudah Equiano, William Blake, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, S.T. Coleridge, William Wordsworth, George Gordon Byron, Mary Robinson, John Keats, P.B. Shelley, John Clare
Victorian: Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater
Modern: W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H.D., Amy Lowell, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Kiran Desai, Zadie Smith
Possible novels: Jane Austen, Persuasion; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

Evaluation (tentative): 2 critical essays (6 pp.), final examination.

Format: TBA

Prerequisite: None.

Description: A representative sampling of Shakespeare’s plays will provide an introduction to the scope and variety of his drama as it relates to his cultural context and to most of the main genres of his writing. Shakespeare began creating plays around 1589, and the plays addressed in this course represent the development of his art from somewhat after its beginnings, up to its final phase, around 1612. They will be dealt with in chronological order, as in the following list of the course readings. The course will thus provide a strong foundation for appreciating and understanding Shakespeare’s drama.

Texts will be available in paperback for purchase at the Word bookstore, 469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640.

Since this course will have conferences, there will be no Monday class after the first week or two (TBA) of term, and conferences will instead be provided at various times on Mondays instead. You will choose the Monday conference time that suits your other commitments.

Texts:

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• As You Like It
• Twelfth Night
• Othello
• King Lear
• The Winter’s Tale
• The Tempest

Evaluation: Term paper, 50%; take-home final exam, 40%; conference attendance and participation, 10%.

Format: Lectures and weekly conferences.

 Prerequisite: none

Description: A survey of American literature from its beginnings to the Civil War (1860). While we may begin with early writing—Native Americans, explorers, Puritans, or 18th-century figures such as Benjamin Franklin, for example—the main emphasis will be on literature from the first half of the 19th century: authors such as Irving, Douglass, and Stowe, with a special focus on the major writers of the “American Renaissance”--Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Dickinson. Particular attention will be paid to representative American themes, forms, and literary techniques. No attempt will be made to cover all major writers or writings.

Texts:

Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings
The Norton Anthology of American Literature: 9th edition, Vol. B (1820-1865)

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

Format: Lectures and discussion sections.

Average Enrolment: 140 to 160 students.

Description: This course will provide students with a broad survey of American fiction from the mid-twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first. Through the close study of a diverse group of American novelists, we will work to identify the evolving aesthetics of several distinct literary periods: from social realism and late modernism at mid-century, to the postmodern play of the 1960s and 1970s, to the varieties of contemporary experience at century’s end. We will encounter outlaws, scoundrels, detectives, veterans, fugitive slaves, and municipal elevator inspectors. Moreover, we will consider the literary history of the twentieth century alongside cultural and historical phenomena such as World War II, the atom bomb, suburbia, the civil rights movement, and the rise of TV. The reading list includes works by Petry, Nabokov, O’Connor, Vonnegut, Silko, Robinson, Morrison, DeLillo, Whitehead, and a final novel or short story collection selected by student vote.

Texts:

• Ann Petry, selected short stories
• Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita [ISBN 9780679723165]
• Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories [ISBN 9780374515362]
• Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five [ISBN 9780440180296]
• Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony [ISBN 9780143104919]
• Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping [ISBN 9780006393740]
• Don DeLillo, White Noise [ISBN 9780140077025]
• Toni Morrison, Beloved [ISBN 9781400033416]
• Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist [ISBN 9780385493000]
• Final Text TBD by Student Vote

Evaluation (tentative): Lecture and conference participation (10%); midterm (25%); essay (30%); final exam (35%).

Format: Lecture and conferences.

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. Students will be introduced to a number of concepts related to literary analysis.

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

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lecture

Average Enrolment: 85 students

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 western theatre history, beginning with Ancient Greek tragedy 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 conceptualised in dramatic theory.

Texts (to be confirmed): J. Ellen Gainor, Stanton B. Garner, Jr. and Martin Puchner (eds), The Norton Anthology of Drama, Shorter Third Edition.

Evaluation (tentative): participation in conference sections (20%); midterm essay or exam (20%); production analysis (20%); final exam (40%).

Format: Lecture, conferences.

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 totaling approximately 50% of the evaluation) and various types of written assignments (approximately 50% of the evaluation).

Format: Group discussions, practical exercises, class presentations.

 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 (Barthes, Foucault, Barthes), we will survey such movements as the Frankfurt School, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, critical race studies, postmodernism, queer theory, and affect theory, 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:

• Stuart Hall, Representation
• Roland Barthes, Mythologies
• Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
• Edward Said, Orientalism
• Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark

Evaluation: TBA

Format: lecture, weekly TA-led conferences

Description: This course is designed to prepare students in the Cultural Studies and World Cinemas programs for future film courses at McGill. The course will introduce the student to central concepts in film form and aesthetics, as well as key theories of film production and reception. The main goal of the course is to familiarize the student with analytical tools to investigate and explain how a film generates its multiple effects—in short, to articulate how a film works.

Prerequisites: The course is limited to students in the Cultural Studies and World Cinemas programs.

Required Texts:
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction
Course pack with essays by Walter Benjamin, Elizabeth Cowie, André Bazin, Michel Chion, Linda Williams, Richard Maltby, Thomas Schatz, Annette Michelson, Laura Mulvey, Richard Dyer, and others.

Required Films:

• Man With A Movie Camera (U.S.S.R., Dziga Vertov, 1929)
• Exotica (Canada, Atom Egoyan, 1994)
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Germany, Robert Wiene, 1920)
• Taxi Driver (U.S.A., Martin Scorsese, 1976)
• Breathless (France, Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)
• The Conversation (U.S.A., Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
• The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (U.S.A., John Ford, 1962)
• Stella Dallas (U.S.A., King Vidor, 1937)
• The Hole (Taiwan, Tsai Ming-Liang, 1998)
• The Thin Blue Line (U.S.A., Errol Morris, 1988)
• Dog Man Star: Prelude (1961), Mothlight (1963), The Wold Shadow (1972), Rage Net (1988),
• Black Ice (1994) (all U.S.A., Stan Brakhage)
• Scorpio Rising (U.S.A., Kenneth Anger, 1964)
• Meshes of the Afternoon (U.S.A., Maya Deren, 1945)
• Vertigo (U.S.A., Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

Evaluation: Short scene analysis paper, longer paper on genre analysis, quizzes, final exam.

Format: Lectures, weekly TA-led conferences, weekly screenings.

Description: The history of world cinema is unimaginable outside of the history of revolution. As Vladimir Lenin said to Anatole Lunacharsky in anticipation of the conclusion of the Russian civil war: “You must remember that of all the arts for us the most important is cinema.” By interrogating the centrality of political and social rebellion to the development of world cinema, this course attempts to address why cinema, among all the arts, has been accorded such prominence by the revolutionary imagination. In doing so, it provides a critical introduction to the problems and possibilities of revolutionary cinema. Beginning with an investigation into the central role that cinema in mediating the Russian revolution, this course examines a wide selection of films from around the world that attempted to record, document, critique, celebrate, or otherwise mediate the various political revolutions that shook the world over the course of the twentieth century. Yet in addition to addressing the themes and histories of political revolution, this course focuses on films that are revolutionary in form as well as content—and had a revolutionizing impact on their audiences. Students will thus be exposed to a wide range of filmic modes and textual practices including such canonical movements as Soviet montage, Brechtian aesthetics, Italian Neorealism, 60s Counter Cinema, Third Cinema, as well as films associated with the Sexual Revolution. By examining films from the Soviet Union, Italy, France, Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, Algeria, Chile, USA, Canada, Germany, and Yugoslavia, students will learn about the histories of political revolution in these national contexts, as well as the complex relationship between radical politics and aesthetics in the most important mass medium of the twentieth century. While films are the primary texts of this survey, students will also be expected to read revolutionary theories, philosophies and manifestos that help to contextualize the cinematic texts that we study. Please note that attendance at weekly screenings is mandatory; do not enroll in this course if you cannot make the screening time each week. Furthermore, many of the films we will see this semester have violent, or otherwise provocative content that may be offensive to some sensibilities. Please consider this fact carefully before you decide to take this class, as we shall not shy away from discussing even the most difficult aspects of these films head on.

Selected Texts:

• The Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, USSR, 1925)
• The Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, USSR, 1929)
• Rome Open City (Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1945)
• The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, Italy/ Algeria, 1966)
• La Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1967)
• Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomas Gutierrez Alea, Cuba, 1968)
• Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, US, 1963)
• Fuses (Carolee Schneemann, US, 1965)
• Dyketactics (Barbara Hammer, US, 1973)
• WR: Mysteries of an Organism (Dusan Makavejev, Yugoslavia, 1971)
• Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles, US, 1971)
• The Hour of the Furnaces (Octavio Gettino & Fernando Solanas, Argentina, 1973)
• The Battle of Chile (Patricio Guzman, Chile, 1975)
• State of Siege (Costa-Gavras, France/ Italy/ West Germany, 1973)
• Les Ordres (Michel Brault, Quebec, 1974)
• Xica da Silva (Carlos Diegues, Brazil, 1976)
• Harlan County, USA (Barbara Kopple, US, 1976, 103 minutes)
• The Third Generation (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1979)
• Born in Flames (Lizzie Borden, US, 1983)
• The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, UK/ Denmark/ Norway, 2012)

Evaluation: TBA

Format: TBA