200-level / Introductory Courses

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.

Covering around 1000 years of literary history in only 13 weeks, 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 also 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 (available at the Word bookstore, 469 Milton Street)

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

Format: Lectures, conferences, discussions.

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: Focused primarily on literature of the British Isles, this course surveys literature in English from the years following the French Revolution to the early twentieth century, with particular emphasis on poetry. We engage critically with the received 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.”

​We open with what has come to be known as the “Romantic” era in British literature, falling 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, such that we still feel the influence of their ideas about the artist’s role, creative process, the power of the imagination, “Nature,” and the relationship between the individual and community. Especially salient in the Romantic inheritance is a conception of the poet—as hero, rebel, solitary genius, and visionary—that still compels readers today.

The Victorian period that followed often critiqued the Romantic emphasis on introspection, feeling, and individual visionary experience, and often shaped their work according to commitments to social justice. We address the Victorian “fin de siècle” is 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. We close with examples from contemporary literature engaging critically with history and literature of these eras and addressing postcolonial experience.

Texts: Readings will likely include work by the following:

Romantic: William Blake, S.T. Coleridge, Olaudah Equiano, John Keats, Mary Robinson, P.B. Shelley, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth,
Victorian: Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walter Pater, Christina Rossetti, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, John Ruskin, Oscar Wilde
Modern and Contemporary: 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; Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Ishiguro, Kazuo, Remains of the Day; Dickens, Charles, Hard Times; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

Format (subject to revision): 2 critical essays (6 pp.), final examination.

Description: TBA

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: TBA

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 18^th-century figures such as Benjamin Franklin, for example—the main emphasis will be on literature from the first half of the 19^th 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: 10th 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: Lecture and required discussion sections.

Average enrolment: 140 to 160 students.

Description: An introduction to Canadian literature in English from its beginnings through the Second World War. Early Canadian literature in English represents a diverse country changing with successive waves of colonization and modernization. The representation is vivid and imperfect, showing us Canadian beliefs and experiences as they were filtered through the English language, the book trade, literary movements, and broader ideological trends. The principal goal of this course is literary-historical: we will strive to understand why early English-Canadian writers wrote what they did, how their writing was published and received, what motives drove them, and what ideals structured their different visions of the nation. The problem of representing the First Nations in the colonial language, English, will be one theme of the course. Another will be the various ideals of religion, spirituality, and morality that writers explored through their work. A third theme will be poetics. Concepts of meter, rhyme, rhetoric, figurative language, and genre are fundamental to literary creativity, and learning about their historical application allows us to see the purpose of literature evolving. These and other themes will be traced across three units: (1) contact with the First Nations, exploration of the land, and settlement from the 17th to the 19th century; (2) the literary movement known as Confederation Poetry, which flourished from 1880 to 1900 and enjoyed a long popularity afterward; and (3) literary modernism in poetry and fiction. Students will become familiar with the major genres that writers in this country adopted to give expression to their experience of Canada, such as travel narrative, sketch, romance, lyric, narrative long poem, short story, free verse, and novel. Assessment will be based on quizzes designed to encourage diligent and thoughtful engagement with the assigned texts and lectures, and on essays aimed at improving students’ formal argumentative writing.

Required Books (tentative):

• Graham, Gwethalyn. Earth and High Heaven. 1944. Introd. Norman Ravvin. Toronto: Cormorant, 2003.
• Johnson, E. Pauline. Tekahionwake: E. Pauline Johnson’s Writings on Native North America. Edited by Margery Fee and Dory Nason. Peterborough: Broadview, 2016.
• Moodie, Susanna. Roughing It in the Bush; or, Life in Canada. Edited by Carl Ballstadt. Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1988.
• Thompson, David. The Writings of David Thompson. Edited by William E. Moreau. Vol. 1, The Travels, 1850 Version. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009.
• Further readings will be available online through McGill Library.

Recommended: Those wishing to improve their writing should order a copy of the following:

• William E. Messenger et al. The Canadian Writer’s Handbook (Oxford)

Evaluation: Quizzes on readings and lectures; assignment; two essays; participation.

Format: Lecture, with weekly conference sections for discussion.

Description: Theatre is a tree with deep roots and many branches: not only does the history of world theatre stretch millennia long, but theatre studies encompasses both textual analysis and investigation of all the aspects of a staged production: lighting, sound, movement, vocalizations and uses of language, set design, and stage-audience interactions. Given the complexity and breadth of the field, this course provides a critical introduction to theatre studies, focusing on play texts, drama theory, and theatre history. We will cover both western and non-western theatrical events, examining a range of works from Ancient Greek tragedy through contemporary and postcolonial performance, and including the Department of English mainstage show. Through the plays, we will examine what “theatre” is and does in different periods and places. We will learn how theatre is constituted by the material and social conditions of performance, codified in dramatic genres, and conceptualised in dramatic theory.

Texts:

• The Norton Anthology of Drama, Shorter Third Edition.
• Additional play texts and production videos, where available, will be provided through MyCourses. These may include Oedipus Rex; Bharata Muni’s Natya Shastra; extracts of Kālidāsa’s works; Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Loa to Divine Narcissus; Zeami’s Astumori; Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or What You Will; Anton Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard; Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman; Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play; Carol Churchill’s Cloud Nine; Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview; David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly.

Evaluation: Quizzes: 20%; short essays: 20%; midterm exam: 30%; final exam: 30%.

Format: Lecture, discussion, and group work.

Prerequisites: 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: TBA

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 discussion, 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 (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 (either Hill and Wang editions)
• Essays by Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Richard Dyer, Dick Hebdige, Stuart Hall, John Fiske, Janice Radway, Constance Penley, Lisa Nakamura, Sara Ahmed, Eric Lott, and others.

Evaluation: Quizzes, two short papers, final exam.

Format: Lecture; weekly, TA-led discussion sections.

The course will initially be restricted to Cultural Studies majors/minors and Film Studies minors. If space permits, some other students may be admitted.

Description: This course is designed to prepare students for future film courses at McGill. It is therefore dedicated to three main goals: establishing a frame of reference for the history of film and film theory, introducing key analytical concepts and skills, and inspiring an ongoing interest in film.

Texts: Coursepack.

Evaluation: Quiz 10%, 3-4 page paper 15%, 5-6 page paper 25%, conferences 15%, posted class notes 5%, final 30%.

Format: Lecture and conferences plus weekly screenings.

Expected Preparation: This is a required course for World Cinemas minors.

Description: Designed as one of the two core courses for World Cinemas Minors, this course introduces key historical moments, cinematic movements, formal styles, as well as historiographical and theoretical debates in the history of world cinema. The course maps out diverging trajectories and merging paths of exemplary filmmakers and filmmaking collectives in various nations and geo-political regions against the backdrop of the changing technological media environments. While we distinguish chronology from history, the course follows the transformation of cinema from its emergent era to the present. Students will read both historical and contemporary texts to gain a broad sense of the seminal debates in film studies, reception and criticism. This course aims to foster a critical understanding of cinema as an international, distributed and polycentric phenomenon.

Texts: Coursepack.

Evaluation: TBD

Format: Lecture, screenings, discussion.

Description: This course provides a critical introduction to postcolonial and world literature by engaging with the rich corpus of literary and filmic texts from South Asia. At the same time, it provides a critical introduction to modern South Asia by drawing on a range of novels, poems, short stories, travelogues, and films produced in that region during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The course examines how these texts conceive of, and represent, the lives and life-worlds of the South Asian region while situating them in relation to the critical and theoretical preoccupations of postcolonial and world literature studies. The course interrogates the (often contested) meanings of the term postcolonial and asks how it relates to categories such as anti-colonial and colonial besides familiarizing students with some of the key issues and contemporary debates in the field. In so doing, the course prepares students for further study in postcolonial and world literature.

Note 1: Attendance to TA conferences and, if scheduled, film screenings is mandatory. No exceptions.
Note 2: This is one of the required courses for the South Asian Studies minor (Stream 1: Culture and Civilization).

Texts:

Novels:

• RK Narayan – The Guide (1958)
• Salman Rushdie – Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990)
• Mohammed Hanif – The Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008)
• Megha Majumdar – A Burning (2020)

Travelogues:

• Vikram Seth – From Heaven Lake (1983)

Short Stories:

• Selections from Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain, Sadaat Hasan Manto, Manik Banerjee

Poetry:

• Selections from Rabindranath Tagore; Arun Kolatkar

Films:

• Shatranj ke Khiladi [The Chess Players] (Dir: Satyajit Ray, 1977)
• Peepli, Live! (Dir: Anusha Rizvi, 2010)

This is an indicative list and course texts will be finalized later.

Evaluation: Take home exams and papers.

Description: This course will provide students with a broad survey of twenty-first-century American fiction—or, at least, what we know of it thus far. Through the close study of a diverse group of writers, we will work to identify the central authors, historical contexts, and aesthetic features of what might otherwise fall under the amorphous label of “contemporary fiction.” We will investigate how literary fiction has responded to 9/11 and the forever wars it launched, the election of Barack Obama and the 2008 financial crisis that marked his early presidency, the meteoric rise of digital technology and mobile computing, and the ongoing global climate crisis. Along the way, we will consider not only how writers have engaged with their immediate historical, political, and economic circumstances, but also how they have communed with literary history, reimagining the texts, styles, and genres that came before them.

Texts:

• Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)
• Colson Whitehead, Zone One (2011)
• Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (2016)
• Tommy Orange, There There (2018)
• Ling Ma, Severance (2018)
• Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)
• Final Text TBD by Student Vote. Possible nominees include: Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) or 10:04 (2014); Richard McGuire, Here (2014); Mohsin Hamid, Exit West (2017); Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017); Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive (2019); Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019); Raven Leilani, Luster (2020).

Evaluation:
Lecture Attendance and Quizzes (10%)
Conference Participation (10%)
Midterm Exam (20%)
Midterm Essay (20%)
Final Essay (20%)
Final Exam (20%)