300-level / Intermediate Courses

Description: This course will canvas some of the “origins” of the English novel and trace its development (particularly as anti-romance satire and realism) up to the mid-eighteenth century. Our readings and discussion will refer to the European context of the evolution of this narrative form in England. We will consider the novel as responding to a network of interrelated problems – of the self and its imaginative politics – at the representational crossroads of medieval epic, courtly romance, spiritual autobiography, picaresque satire, colonialist adventure, gallant intrigue, baroque casuistry, bourgeois conduct book, sentimental love story, moral treatise, psychological realism, and mock-heroic “comic epic in prose.” As the emerging literary “form of forms,” the early modern novel vibrantly juxtaposes and interweaves all these different generic strands. Our work together will aim at a critical analysis of the textual ideologies articulated in this experimental process of historical combination.

Texts: The required reading for this course will include most or all of the following books, which will be available at The Word Bookstore (469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640). (The list of texts and editions below is tentative and incomplete, to be confirmed in January 2023.)

• The Song of Roland (Hackett)
• Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose (Oxford)
• Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur (Oxford)
• Abelard and Heloise, The Letters and Other Writings (Hackett)
• Lazarillo de Tormes (Norton)
• Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote (Norton)
• Madame de Lafayette, The Princess of Clèves (Norton)
• Aphra Behn, Oronooko and Other Writings (Oxford)
• Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess (Broadview)
• Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (Norton)
• Samuel Richardson, Pamela (Oxford)
• Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela (Oxford)

Evaluation: Paper (50%), tests (40%), participation (10%). Regular attendance is required for a passing final grade (a maximum of two absences will be allowed except for documented medical or similar emergencies).

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Note: There will be multiple sections of this course, each with a different instructor: Eli MacLaren, two graduate course instructors and another instructor to be announced.

Prerequisite or co-requisite: ENGL 202 or ENGL 200. This course is open only to English majors in the Literature stream. All Literature Majors must sign up for a section of ENGL 311 in their first year in the Literature program.

Description: This course introduces students to the formal and stylistic elements of poetry and prose fiction, provides them with a shared vocabulary for recognizing and analyzing different literary forms, and develops their reading, writing, and critical discussion skills. Although many critical methods can be applied to the works in this course, Poetics focuses on teaching students how to talk and write precisely about a wide range of formal and stylistic techniques in relation to literary meaning in poetry and prose fiction. All the critical methodologies you will learn in your other English courses will benefit from your knowledge of the material of ENGL 311. You will read some works in Poetics that are also required in other courses, such as ENGL 202 and 203, the Departmental Surveys of English Literature. In Poetics, we study such works not primarily in historical context, or as engagements with literary, cultural or social history, but for the techniques of literary art with which they communicate. The course instructors assume that students enrolled as English majors will already have some facility explaining what given works of literature mean; we instead focus on understanding how literature creates meaning. Discussions and assignments will therefore involve the memorization, identification, and application of concepts and terms essential to the study of literary techniques. The English Literature program requires that ENGL 311 be taken in U1 so that all Literature students will be well prepared for their other studies with a shared terminology and training in critical writing.

Texts:

• Abrams, M.H., and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 11th ed. Wadsworth-Cengage, 2014.
• Bausch, Richard, and R.V. Cassill, eds. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Shorter 8th ed. New York: Norton, 2015.
• Ferguson, Margaret, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy, eds. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 6th ed. New York: Norton, 2018.
• Messenger, William E., et al., eds. The Canadian Writer’s Handbook. 6th ed. Toronto: Oxford, 2015.

Evaluation: First essay, close reading of poem, 4 pp.; second essay, on short story, secondary research required, 6 pp.; mid-term exam (in class); formal final examination common to all sections of Poetics; class attendance and participation; willing and effective completion of occasional short assignments, such as pop quizzes, writing exercises, scansions, and recitations, including such assignments and discussion opportunities as may be posted on the course website. This evaluation is the same for all sections of Poetics.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: The plays that we will be reading in this course span from the 1970’s to the present day with a concentration on the last twenty years. Among the twelve texts selected, most were written in French and translated into English, others were written in English, and one was created in Inuktitut, French, and English and has been performed and published with English and French subtitles. We will investigate points of transition in the texts that magnify cultural shifts in society. We will investigate similarities and differences between the plays in terms of themes, language, familial and sociopolitical dynamics. We will investigate how the plays sit in relation to the political landscape regarding time and place, and we will examine what that might mean to an audience. This course will be a rough dramaturgical overview of fifty years in Quebec drama drawn from a survey of twelve plays.

Theatre artists from various backgrounds and experience in Montreal will share their expertise in the form of lectures and conversations throughout the term.

Texts:

• 1971 The Savage Season, Anne Hébert. Translated by Pamela Grant and Gregory Reid.
• 1972 Forever Yours Mary-Lou, Michel Trembley. Translated by Linda Gaboriau.
• 1995 The Orphan Muses, Michel Marc Bouchard. Translated by Linda Gaboriau.
• 2001 Je me souviens, Loreena Gale.
• 2003 The Malaceet Hamlet, Yves Sioui Durand & JF Mercier.
• 2005 Scorched, Wajdi Mouawad. Translated by Linda Gaboriau.
• 2009 The Sound of Bones Cracking, Suzanne LeBeau. Translated by Julia Duchesne and John Van Burek.
• 2012 The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs, Carole Frechette. Translated by John Murrell.
• 2013 And Slowly Beauty…Michel Nadeau. Translated by Maureen LaBonté.
• 2018 Collective Aalaapi. Akinisie Novalinga, Samantha Leclerc, Audrey Alasuak, Mélodie Duplessis, Louisa Naluiyuk, Marie-Laurence Rancourt, Daniel Capeille, Hannah Tooktoo, Nancy Saunders, Laurence Dauphinais, Ulivia Uviluk and Angel Annanack
• 2010 or 2018 Instructions to Any Future Socialist Government Wishing to Abolish Christmas, Michael Mackenzie.
• 2020 Sal Capone, Omari Newton.

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lecture, discussion, play-readings.

Expected Preparation: This course is intended for students in all three streams of McGill’s English program who wish to expand their knowledge of the development of drama in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and to hone their skills in reading and analyzing dramatic texts.

Description: This course offers a study of key plays, ideas, and movements that have animated drama, theatre, and performance over the course of the twentieth century. Throughout the semester, will consider how the form and style of our selected dramatic texts and theatrical productions reflected new ways of thinking about the world and the role of theatre in relation to the world—between what anthropologist Michael Taussig has called “the real” and “the really made up.” Rather than approaching twentieth-century drama from the perspective of a single lineage arising out of one cultural centre, we will bring mainstream and countercultural dramatic movements of Europe and North America into conversation and juxtaposition with theatrical innovations happening in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Twentieth-century drama is marked by playwrights mobilizing theatre for intellectual and emotional expression and political change. In this course, we will explore how our selected playwrights used dramatic and performance texts to express the experiences of socially marginalized groups and to effect social transformation. By the end of this course, students should be able to discuss major playwrights and movements in twentieth-century drama and articulate their own theoretically- and historically-informed perspectives on them. Students must come to class prepared with all of the assigned reading and will be expected to participate verbally in class on a weekly basis.

Required texts: a course pack of plays and readings in theory, an anthology of moderns plays, and several individual plays

Recommended texts: Patrice Pavis, Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms Concepts, and Analysis. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1998; Paul Alain and Jen Harvie, The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance. New York: Routledge, 2006

Evaluation: In-class participation; short, critical interpretation papers; group discussion leadership, final take-home exam.

Format: Lectures, group discussions, in-class close-reading, and analytical exercises.

Description: A representative sampling of Shakespeare’s plays will survey 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, one particular day of classes (TBA) will be cancelled after the first week or two of term, throughout the rest of the term, and conferences will instead be provided at various times on that particular day instead. You will choose the conference time that suits your other commitments.

Please note: this course is not open for credit to students who have taken ENGL 215, Introduction to Shakespeare, at McGill in prior years.

Texts:

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

Evaluation: Term paper, 45%; take-home final exam, 35%; course attendance and participation, 20%.

Format: Lecture and weekly conferences.

Prerequisite: Limited to students in English programs.

Description: This course will survey the emergence of theories and methodologies in philosophy and scholarship, especially in literary criticism, both from ancient intellectual models and in modern thought since the seventeenth century. As a basis for understanding and evaluating the role of “philosophical approaches” in literary and cultural studies, we will compare and contrast several kinds of critical thinking with the distinctive claims of philosophical formalism articulated influentially by Immanuel Kant. The Kantian legacy – not only its principles of moral and aesthetic autonomy and disinterestedness but also its emphasis on the conditions of knowledge and criteria of judgment – provides a powerful and continuing alternative to the nineteenth-century revival of dialectical thinking in Hegel, hermeneutics, and Marx. Our readings will reflect the far-reaching impact of the ideological opposition between the Enlightenment and Romanticism as exemplified by Kant and Hegel. We will examine the history of this opposition as a pattern of methodological assumptions and institutional practices. We will also review the claim that one literary genre in particular – the novel – embodies or expresses the characteristic philosophical problems of modernity.

Texts: Most of the books for this course will be available at The Word Bookstore (469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640). The textbooks listed below will be among those required. (Please note that Pluhar's translation of Kant is the only acceptable edition! The full list of texts and editions will be confirmed in September 2022.)

• Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle, eds., Critical Theory Since Plato (edition to be discussed)
• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Hackett)
• Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (MIT)
• Gerald Graff, Professing Literature (University of Chicago)

Evaluation: Papers (80%), test (10%), participation (10%). Regular attendance is required for a passing final grade (a maximum of two absences will be allowed except for documented medical or similar emergencies).

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: This course will introduce students to a range of thinkers invested in how literary texts come to be. Rather than focus on the individual talent or overarching historical forces, we will take up what James English has called the “middle zone of cultural space.” This is the zone of agents, publishers, translators, booksellers, prize committees, university English departments, creative writing programs, canon warriors, Goodreads, Amazon, and Oprah. Pairing critical readings with novels and short fiction, we will investigate the central institutions, figures, and forces that mediate contemporary literary production and reception. Who are the “unacknowledged legislators” of the literary field, and how do they come between writer and reader to shape what each can and should do? What forces influence our conceptions of aesthetic value, and how is literary prestige measured and doled out? How do literary texts circulate within a culture, and how have they travelled across national and linguistic boundaries? In all, students in this course will encounter a variety of critical and artistic texts that do not rely on the concept of “literariness,” but rather investigate how such a thing is produced in the first place. Note: This courses is not open to students who took ENGL 322 in the previous two academic years.

Texts:

• Percival Everett, Erasure (2001)
• John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (2010)
• Richard Jean So, Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (2020)
• Various readings available on myCourses

Evaluation:
Participation (10%)
Midterm Exam (20%)
Midterm Essay (20%)
Final Essay (20%)
Final Exam (30%)

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Expected Preparation: This course is one of the 300-level offerings that fulfills the theory and criticism requirement for students majoring in Literature, Drama and Theatre, or Cultural Studies. It is recommended that students take this course after they have completed the introductory required courses in their stream. Students not enrolled in an English program but who are interested in cultural theory may also take the course, if space is available.

Description: This course is a survey of some recent developments in cultural theory, especially as they apply to the study of literature; film, television, and other screen media; and theatre and other modes of performance. We will focus on theoretical interventions that seek to grasp new developments in the social and cultural field; in turn, we will consider how these interventions cause us to look at the literary and cultural past with new eyes. We will situate these theoretical approaches in relation to the wider traditions of Marxist, feminist, materialist, queer, affect, trans, Indigenous, and critical race theory. The course is organized in five thematically linked units: Theories of Reading, Then and Now; Identity Now; Capitalism Now; Colonialism and Empire Now; and Climate Now. The course aims not simply to instruct the student in recent theoretical approaches to these topics, but also to encourage the practice of theoretical reflection on one’s literary and cultural encounters more generally.

Texts: Essays by Sharon Marcus, Ted Underwood, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tavia Nyong’o, Cáel M. Keegan, Annie McClanahan, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Lauren Berlant, Sianne Ngai, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, Jasbir Puar, Rob Nixon, José Esteban Muñoz, and others.

Evaluation: Short summary and response papers; one longer final paper/project OR take-home final exam (students may choose).

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Expected Student Preparation: Previous university-level course work in American Literature, preferably before 1900, or permission of instructor.

Description: A mid-level survey of later-19^th-century prose fiction forms representing a wide range of literary movements and modes. The course will be organized to trace ever-widening geographical, literary, and cultural horizons. A first unit will explore “regionalist” or “local color” writings (by authors such as Irving, Harris, Harte, Twain, Chopin, Stowe, Jewett, Cable, Chestnutt, and Alcott) rooted in the specificity of a unique geographical place that is seen to define a unique cultural or psychological identity. The second course unit will survey classic writerly responses to the late-19^th-century city—seen (in authors such as Dreiser, James, and Wharton) as a new sort of humanly-constructed, hybrid environment or economy in which diverse strangers from a variety of homes and backgrounds are brought together to work out forms of coexistence. The final unit will then follow another group of turn-of-the-century writers as they expand American horizons even further, reflecting the nation’s move into the international arena with new fictional treatments of the International Theme. Authors such as James and Wharton ground their writing in the ever-shifting experience of cross-cultural travel and meditate anxiously on the situation of the writer as “cosmopolite”--perfectly placed (or dis-placed) to explore the problems and possibilities of inter-national interchange in a modern, globalizing world.

Texts (tentative; editions TBA): To be selected from authors noted in the description above. Readings will include not only short stories but also several longer novels; the amount of assigned reading will be fairly substantial—especially at the end of the semester.

• A collection of short stories—available in pdf on myCourses.
• Alcott, Little Women;
• Dreiser, Sister Carrie;
• Wharton, The Age of Innocence;
• Baym, ed., The Norton Anthology of American Literature (10^th ed., Vol. C).

Evaluation (tentative): 25% mid-term exam; 25% term paper; 10% class attendance and participation; 40% formal final exam. (NB: All forms of evaluation in this course—on exams as well as essays—test abilities in literary-critical writing and analysis; there will be no short-answer or multiple-choice exams graded by computer.)

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Although she published only three novels in her lifetime, Charlotte Brontë is a major Victorian novelist whose works continue to generate critical interpretation. Along with her sisters, writers Emily and Anne Brontë, she has inspired such public fascination that the story of a socially isolated woman who achieves literary celebrity rivals the novels themselves. This class considers Brontë’s major novels and their preoccupations with privacy and autonomy against a clamorous public determined to read them as transcripts of Brontë’s own thoughts and feelings. The novels will be contextualized in reference to realism, sensation, and the gothic, three primary genres of nineteenth-century fiction, and students will come to recognize their affiliations and disaffiliations with the Victorian novel more broadly. Other topics include the rise of the professional woman writer and the ramifications of reading fiction as history (or biography). Texts include Elizabeth Gaskell’s controversial biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), as well as critical and historical readings.

Note: This course fulfills the major author requirements for English majors.

Texts:

• Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre (1847); Shirley (1849); Villette (1853); Emma (fragment) (1860);
• Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857)
• Additional materials (articles, book chapters) will be made available online.

Evaluation: In-class participation; short, close-reading assignments (2); choice of 2 essays or 1 essay, 1 take-home exam.

Format: Lecture, discussion, group work.

Description: This course will survey a range of late Romantic literature through versions of ‘confessional’ writing, broadly conceived. We will read British, Scottish and Caribbean authors with a general interest in marginal texts: those overlooked or neglected in literary studies (even in the case of overtly canonical writers) and those that seek to represent experiences on the social, cultural and political margins. We will encounter social histories spanning the optimism of fugitive nineteenth-century queer communities and the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, as well as murder, addiction, bad marriages, nightwalking and a multitude of creative (sometimes questionable) lovers’ memorials. Within the extensive vocabulary used by Romantic writers to articulate suffering and anguish, we will seek moments of idealism and revelation, as well as considering the way in which literary disclosures of individual “pleasures and pains” can be either (and sometimes both) intensely conservative and highly reactionary. We will immerse ourselves in Romantic self-absorption and introspection, then aim to think beyond it. Beginning with William Blake’s curious would-be biography For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise (1818) and ending with Emily Brontë’s notoriously violent Wuthering Heights (1847), this course follows neither a strictly chronological nor thematic order. We will examine both fictional and autobiographic texts, with an eye to the limitations of this generic distinction in the nineteenth-century and the functions of anonymity and pseudonym.

Texts (provisional):

*With the exception of the major novels (Hogg, De Quincey, Brontë), texts will be made available online or via myCourses.

Evaluation: TBC (essays and assignments – no final exam).

Format: Discussion, lectures.

Expected Preparation: At least two prior university courses in English literature, such as Survey (ENGL 202 and 203), Poetics (ENGL 311), or two courses at the 200 or 300 level.

Description: This course focusses on a selection of British novels published since 1990. Some novelists turn to the past, especially in light of Thatcherite conservatism and the Brexit crisis. Taking a longer view of history, Pat Barker reinvents the Great War and Hilary Mantel, in one of her shorter novels, reflects on Irish migration to Britain in the eighteenth century. Other novelists, especially Zadie Smith and Andrea Levy, think about race relations in Britain. These novels adopt a variety of genres: historiography, comedy, diagnosis, dossier, autofiction.

Texts: A selection of six novels will be made in October 2022 from the following list.

• Muriel Spark, Symposium (1990)
• Pat Barker, Regeneration (1991)
• Hilary Mantel, The Giant, O’Brien (1998)
• Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000)
• Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001)
• Andrea Levy, Small Island (2004)
• Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (2004)
• Jim Crace, Harvest (2013)
• Rachel Cusk, Outline (2014)

Evaluation: Mid-term test (30%), essay (30%), participation (10%), final take-home exam (30%).

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Enrollment: 40 students.

Note: Students who have taken ENGL 348 under a different course topic are free to take this version of the course. Although the course number is the same, the content is entirely different; therefore, these will count as two different courses toward university and program requirements. For English Literature majors, this course counts in either the “backgrounds” or “medieval” categories. 

Description: This course examines several major works of European literature that significantly influenced Western understandings of the place of the individual human in society and in the cosmos. Among other things, course texts will present sensitive explorations of interiority, sexuality, ethics, and justice; authors will experiment with literary form, question received canons, and display radical dignity in the face of humiliating crisis. Readings include examples of literature spanning Late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages (4th through 15th centuries). We’ll read profoundly moving texts written in prison or in the rawness of regret; early romances that throw characters into impossible ethical ordeals; stories that represent flourishing creativity in a time of epidemic; and texts whose authors are torn between the sublimity of mystical ascent and the allure of human contact. This course introduces students to early literature as an object of study in its own right; it also provides important background for the study of concurrent or subsequent Western literature and culture, including in England. All course texts were written on the European continent and will be read in modern English translation. 

Texts (provisional):

• Augustine,  Confessions 
• Boethius,  The Consolation of Philosophy 
• Boccaccio, The Decameron (selections) 
• Chrétien de Troyes,  Arthurian Romances (selections) 
• Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies 
• Dante,  Vita Nuova 
• Marie de France, Lais 
• Petrarch,  Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works 
• Other required readings available via MyCourses 

Evaluation (provisional): Mid-term exam, 25%; final exam, 35%; analytical reading essays (x2) 30% (15% each); participation and attendance, 10%. 

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Expected Student Preparation: Prior experience in film studies is advantageous.

Description: This course will examine film in the context of World War II and its immediate aftermath. We will be interested particularly in the capacities of certain key genres and styles to manage the intense pressures of this explosive period in history. Indeed, we find these pressures coming not only from the direct experience of war, but from a pervasive sense of social disintegration. To understand how forties film functioned, we must investigate its various strategies for representing gender, race, and nationality as well as violence and loss. Special attention will be paid to the social and cinematic construction of space as a particularly telling lens. Our focus will be primarily on Hollywood film, with excursions to important European alternatives. Likely films include The Great Dictator, Casablanca, Meet Me in St. Louis, Le Corbeau, I Walked with a Zombie, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Intruder in the Dust.

Texts: Coursepack.

Evaluation: Quizzes, short assignments, term project, class notes, participation.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Expected Preparation: This course is intended for students in all three streams of McGill’s English program who wish to enhance their ability to read critical theory broadly focused on social justice and to use it for cultural interpretation.

Description: This course offers a study of some of the most influential thinking about the transformation of difference (social, cultural, sexual, gender-based, racial, economic, geographic, colonial) into hierarchies of power from the early twentieth century through to the present. Paying close attention to the ways in which we exist at the intersection of multiple axes of identity, we will think along with our selected critics, activists, and writers about the sometimes messy ways in which different individuals are denied or given power by reason of the overlapping social groups to which they belong. We will also learn about the many ways in which individuals and groups who have been denied power (social, economic, cultural, sexual, corporeal) have worked to transform the systems and conditions responsible for their oppression. Key topics in this course will be intersectionality, colonialism, postcolonialism, decolonialism, critical race theory, feminism, and queer studies. By the end of the course, students should be able to discuss major theorists and theories of power differences and the historical processes that led to their creation. They should also be able to articulate their own theoretically- and historically-informed perspectives on these differences. Students must come to class prepared with all of the assigned reading and will be expected to participate verbally in class on a weekly basis.

Required texts: a course pack of readings in critical theory

Evaluation: In-class participation; short, critical interpretation papers; group discussion leadership, final take-home exam.

Format: Lectures, group discussions, in-class close-reading, and analytical exercises.

Note: Students who have taken ENGL 391 in Summer 2022, 2021, or 2022 are not eligible to take this course for credit.

Description: Moving chronologically through the 20th century, this course will be structured around core cultural texts from different periods, communities, and moments in queer history, including novels, poetry, film, theatre, and performance. We will explore the cultural texts themselves, as well as the communities, scenes and cultures that produced, received, and formed around these texts.

The course begins with the turn of the century, examining early 20th century touchstones by artists such as Raclyffe Hall, Jennie June, and Gladys Bentley. This section will draw on scholarship such as George Chauncey’s study of gay culture from 1890-1940 and Susan Stryker’s work on early 20th century transgender history.

The course will then develop through the era between 1940 and 1969. We will study poetry and literary communities, examining the works of Audre Lorde and James Baldwin. We will also explore publications from rising advocacy groups such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis.

The next section will focus on post-Stonewall queer culture (1969-1980), looking at performance acts such as the Cockettes and Sylvester, as well as drag performance. The course will then end with the period between 1980-1999, looking at cultural responses to the AIDS crisis, New Queer Cinema, and other late 20th century cultural texts.

The course will also engage with Two-Spirit identities and Indigenous nations throughout the century, including readings by Qwo-Li Driskill, poetry by Billy-Ray Belcourt and performance by Waaawaate Fobister and Muriel Miguel.

Required books:

• Angels in America by Tony Kushner
• Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
• Two-Spirit Acts edited by Jean O’Hara.
• All other readings available via myCourses.

Recommended Texts: Gay New York by George Chauncey and Transgender History by Susan Stryker.

Literature will include: Audre Lorde, W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Cameron Awkward Rich.

Films will include: Kenneth Anger, Cheryl Dunye, Barbara Hammer, Jack Smith.

Performances will include: Waawaate Fobister, Kent Monkman, Muriel Miguel, Tony Kushner, and the Cockettes.

Evaluation: Short paper, longer paper (or creative alternative), quizzes, public engagement project.

Format: Lecture, discussion, and optional community connection component.

Description: TBA

Text: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: TBA

Note:  Students who have taken ENGL 356 under a different course topic are free to take this version of the course. Although the course number is the same, the content is entirely different; therefore, these will count as two different courses toward university and program requirements. For English Literature majors, this course counts toward the “medieval” or “Middle English” requirement. 

Description:  The fifteenth century in England was a dynamic time when concepts of authorship, communication, textual production, and literacy were undergoing tremendous change. English was developing quickly as England’s official language—something that hadn’t been the case for centuries, following the Norman Conquest—now overtaking French and Latin. Heresy and its suppression met with a burgeoning humanist movement, and mainstream religious practice was vibrant and varied. At the end of the fifteenth century, the medieval invention of print technology coexisted with a lively manuscript culture in England.  

This course situates fifteenth-century English literature in its dynamic cultural contexts, examining how late-medieval literature in England intersected with developments in politics, popular culture, literacy, religious controversy, technology, and gender relations. Readings will range from a devout woman’s defiant memoir to a bureaucrat’s struggle with anonymity; from a legalistic dream vision to romantic treatments of the outlaw Robin Hood. We’ll analyze the explosion of fifteenth-century dramatic production and culminate with Thomas Malory’s sophisticated re-imagining of Arthurian romance traditions during the Wars of the Roses. Students will also get to see original medieval manuscripts and early printed texts during workshops in McGill’s Rare Books and Special Collections. 

All primary texts will be read in the original Middle English, though no previous knowledge of the language is required. Portions of several classes will be spent developing proficiency in Middle English. 

Texts (provisional):

• Hoccleve,  My Compleinte and Other Poems 
• Lydgate,  The Temple of Glass 
• Malory,  Le Morte D’Arthur 
• The Book of Margery Kempe 
• Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales 
• Selections from collections of medieval drama 

Evaluation (provisional): Mid-term exam, 25%; final exam, 35%; analytical reading essays (x2) 30% (15% each); participation and attendance, 10%.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Expected Preparation: This is a required course for those in the Cultural Studies stream. Students are encouraged to take it after ENGL 277: Introduction to Film Studies and ENGL 275: Introduction to Cultural Studies. If you have not taken these courses beforehand, students are encouraged to contact the instructor before enrolling, as some concepts learned in those courses will prove beneficial for assignments. There is also a chance the course can contribute to the World Cinema minor, although students should contact their advisor to confirm.

Description: This course is designed to introduce students to close analysis skills for the study of visual media. Focusing on close, primary text analysis, students will leave the course with strong technical language and formal knowledge of media that will allow them to pay careful and close attention to objects of analysis. Looking at a variety of art forms including painting, film, photography, video games, comic books, manga, collage & mixed-media work, students will learn the formal building blocks that make up a piece of visual media and how to notice, interrogate, investigate, and understand how these fundamentals come together to make meaning. The course will then teach students how to connect form to content - understanding how these formal building blocks connect to a piece's themes or ideas and communicate this connection. Finally, students will learn how to push this understanding of form and content a step further by making innovative, original arguments that express their own ideas and critical thoughts about the work. Students will learn to develop a strong critical voice and a sense of who they are as critics, analysts, and close readers of visual media.

The following lists required texts, films, and media: however, a lot of these will be available through MyCourses or the McGill Library, so it's best to avoid buying anything before checking to see if you have to. 

Required Texts: 

• Berger, John. Ways of Seeing.
• Mock, Janet. Redefining Realness.
• Gaku, Keito. Boys Run the Riot Volume 1.
• Yamaguchi, Tsubasa. Blue Period Volume 1.

Required Films:

• Riggs, Marlon. Black Is, Black Ain’t.
• Gondry, Michel. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
• Dunye, Cheryl. The Watermelon Woman.
• Deer, Tracey. Beans.
• Kwan, Daniel and Daniel Scheinert. Everything Everywhere All at Once.
• Todd, Loretta. Monkey Beach.
• Young, Amanda. Biidaaban (The Dawn Comes)
• Episode 1 of Cowboy Bebop, “Asteroid Blues.”

Additional Material: 

• Visual art by Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Daphne Odjig, Jackson Beardy, Alex Janvier, Norval Morrisseau, Jane Ash Poitras, Edvard Munch, Bill Reid, Wangechi Mutu, Félix González-Torres, and Claude Monet.
• Critical readings by Scott McLeod, Nathalie Atkinson, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Kaja Silverman, Miguel Gutierrez, Neta Gordon, and others.
• Video games: Braid and Dark Souls.
• Videos from: Megan Thee Stallion, Nicki Minaj, Todrick Hall
• Photography by: Barry Pottle, Mike Ruiz, James Van Der Zee, Ernest Withers, Carrie Mae Weems, Cindy Sherman, and Ansel Adams.

Recommended Texts: Jade Armstrong, Scout is Not a Band Kid. Lee Lai, Stone Fruit.

Evaluation: 

• Form and Content Assignment: 10% (Due Feb. 13)

• Evaluative Writing Assignment: 15% (Due March 15)

• 2 Essays: 45% (Due Feb. 26 and April 11)*

• Online Quizzes (Feb. 22 and April 4) 2 x 15%
  *Note: only the highest grade of the 2 essays will be taken, making one of them optional.

Format: Lectures, group discussions, analysis activities.

Note: This is a required course for students of the Literature Honors stream. All other students should contact me for permission to register.

Description: This course will explore several topics that are central to modern and contemporary literary criticism and critical theory. These include, but are not limited to, representation, narrative, interpretation, ideology, signification, discourse as well as categories of difference such as class, race, gender, and sexuality. We will read excerpts from key texts from a range of critical thinkers, schools and practices to interrogate and engage with some of the fundamental that have animated literary studies: What constitutes literature? Who determines what texts mean, and how? How do texts relate to broader social structures? Considering these questions will necessitate careful and patient engagement with critical texts that will on occasion be dense and difficult.

Texts:

• Terry Eagleton – Literary Theory: An Introduction
• Readings from works by specific theorists will be provided.

Evaluation: Take home exams and papers.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: TBA

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: TBA

Expected Student Preparation: Priority will be given to Drama and Theatre majors and minors; ideally students enrolled in this course will have already taken ENGL 230 Introduction to Theatre Studies.

Description: An overview of dramatic forms and theatrical practice in Britain from the Restoration through the eighteenth century to the Romantic period (c. 1660-1843). The course is divided into four chronological units encompassing the reopening of the professional theatre and the advent of the professional actress, the rise of morality and sentiment in drama, the age of Garrick and the professionalisation of theatre, and the development of stage spectacle. Each unit will cover the theatrical conditions of the period and will examine a representative play staged at the time. Emphasis is placed on the plays as theatrical works rather than literary texts. Students will be asked to conceptualise performances of the plays as they might have taken place in the long eighteenth century and to consider how these plays might have been performed and received at the time they were written. We will also analyse historical documents to explore themes such as genre, acting style, audience experience, theatre architecture, financial practices, regulation of the stage, and company management. We will visit McGill Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections (in person or virtually) to complete a series of hands-on workshops and assignments with a collection of playbills from the period. This will allow us to deepen our understanding of eighteenth-century theatre through the study of print culture.

Texts: Peter Thomson, The Cambridge Introduction to English Theatre, 1660-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); a selection of representative plays (tentative): Aphra Behn, The Rover (1677); Richard Steele, The Conscious Lovers (1722); David Garrick and George Colman the Elder, The Clandestine Marriage (1766); Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Pizarro (1799); historical documents to provide context.

Evaluation (tentative): Participation 10%; production proposal assignment 20%; series of playbill assignments 30%; take home final exam 40%.

Format: Lecture, discussion, group work, work with rare books and special collections.

Note: Students who have taken ENGL 371 previously, with a different topic, may take ENGL 371 again for credit with the signature of a Department of English advisor.

Description: This course explores representations and constructions of U.S. national identity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular theatre and entertainments. As the nation experienced industrialization, urbanization, immigration, changing sexual and gender norms, and violent cultural and racial conflicts in the afterlife of Trans-Atlantic slavery and Indigenous genocide, popular entertainments attracted mass audiences and created spectacles of national inclusion and othering. Units on blackface minstrelsy, “Indian plays,” vaudeville, social dance, and other popular form address antebellum and post-Emancipation stagings of race; frontier spectacles; freak shows and penny museums; imperialism; and the complexities of social inequity in the Golden Age/Progressive Era. Through discussions and lectures, we will consider the place of the “popular” – in its classed, ethnic, racial, gendered, erotic, commercial, and hegemonic valences – in forging styles of U.S. citizenship and belonging that persist to the current day, albeit often in camouflage.

Texts:

• Play texts (Metamora; The Octoroon; Uncle Tom’s Cabin)
• Films (The Jazz Singer; Ethnic Notions)
• Online secondary sources including texts by W.E.B. Du Bois, Andrew Erdman, Susan Glenn, Saidiya Hartman, Julie Malnig, Andrea Most, Robert Rydell, David Savran, Kiara Vigil, and S.E. Wilmer, among others.

Evaluation: In-class participation: 10%; midterm exam: 30%; short response essays: 30%; research paper: 30%.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: TBA

Format: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: TBA

By permission of the instructor only. Please contact catherine.bradley [at] mcgill.ca.

Description: Costuming for the Theatre II builds on skills acquired in Costuming I, including costume construction techniques, and developing efficient costume production techniques. There are two main learning modules in advanced costuming: Technical Sewing, and Draping. Sewing skills that were gained in the first semester will be built upon through specific practical exercises, and by costuming the English Department Mainstage production (TDC). Draping techniques will be practiced on half-scale mannequins, and will culminate in a themed project.

More information will become available as the Winter semester theatre production plans are solidified.

Required texts: One selected play script TBA.

Evaluation: In-class participation, script analysis, hands-on projects, backstage experience (to be confirmed)

Format: Learning through doing. Demonstrations, lectures, hands-on learning, and practical projects, experiential learning. Class time + time spent in the atelier on practical projects.

Enrollment: 10 students.

Description: This course offers an introduction to Canadian Inuit, Métis and First Nations literature. Video and film will be discussed to a limited extent. It should be clear that the course is only an introduction because Canada is a very vast and varied country with over 600 different First Nations tribes, 4 distinct Inuit regions and several Métis groups who all have different traditions, often different languages and quite different histories.

We will look at works in English, either original or translated. The course will look at oral literature, storytelling and legends handed down through generations as well as contemporary “collaborative life stories”, novels, and essays. Examples of productions in television and film are included.

The common themes are survival, reconciliation and the effects of colonialism, in whatever form this may take, as well as a search for a renewed or continued identify in the contemporary world.

Texts:

Inuit texts:

• Nancy Wachowich: Saqiyuq
• Excerpts from Voices and Images of Nunavimmiut volume 1. Edited by Stenbaek and Grey (will be posted online)

Métis texts:

• Maria Campbell: Half-Breed
• Cherie Dimaline: The Marrow Thieves

First Nations texts:

• Richard Wagamese: Indian Horse
• Drew Hayden Taylor: Chasing Painted Horses
• Thomas King: The Truth About Stories. A Native Narrative
• CBC Massey Lectures, 2003

Supplementary material may be made available online.

Evaluation: Five reviews of a text (10% marks each) as well as one final longer essay (50%).

Format: Lectures, group discussions. In addition, there will be one or two pre-recorded modules every week consisting of additional lectures, power points, films, or videos. They will be posted on myCourses.

Description: This course will examine the role of minority media through a case study of the Canadian Inuit media experience in regard to television and film. The premise is that television and film productions made by members of the cultural and socio-economic group, they are portraying, are usually more accurate and truthful than productions made by outsiders. Some international films will be viewed.

The course will look at the development right from the start of the advent of satellite communications and ANIK in Canada. The early experiments and policy considerations. The establishment of The Inuit Broadcasting Corporation. The influence of the National Film Board, particularly its Challenge for Change program. The role of APTN, including productions by First Nations and Métis. The films of Zacharias Kunuk will be a main focus of the course.

Texts: Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada (2010). Ed by Waugh, Baker, Winton. McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Articles will be distributed on myCourses.

Please contact Prof. Stenbaek if you have trouble accessing course materials.

Evaluation: Five reviews of a text (10% marks each) as well as one final longer essay (50%).

Format: Lectures, group discussions. In addition, there will be one or two pre-recorded modules every week consisting of additional lectures, power points, films, or videos. They will be posted on myCourses.

Description: ‘Graphic narrative’ has been characterized by Monica Schmitz-Emans as “a literary genre that invents itself as using a global language in regionally different dialects.” In this course, we will use the dynamic relationship between North American comics and Japanese manga as a case study in our examination of the transnational and transcultural flows that dictate the importation, adaptation, and distribution of ‘graphic narratives.’ We will learn about the historical confluence of comics and manga. We will consider the formal and stylistic influences of each on the other.  We will consider the impact of context on content. And we will ask ourselves what happens to comics or manga when they are distributed outside their native context: How are they marketed for new readers? How do they achieve (or fail to achieve) positions of cultural and canonical status? How does their reception abroad affect their status and distribution at home? By answering some of these questions, we will achieve a better understanding of the institutional and cultural practices and discourses that regulate the distribution, consumption, and interpretation of ‘graphic narratives’ in a global world. 

Texts:

• Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics
• Oba Tsugumi and Obata Takeshi, Bakuman, Vol.2
• Tezuka Osamu. Astro Boy Omnibus Edition, Vol.1
• Kuwata Jiro, Batman: The Jiro Kuwata Batmanga, Vol. 3
• Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham, Batman Incorporated Vol.1: Demon Star
• Paul Pope, 100%; Bryan Lee O’ Malley Scott Pilgrim Vol. 5: Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe
• Fujimoto Tatsumi, Chainsaw Man Vol. 1
• Tatsumi Yoshihiro, A Drifting Life
• Hergé, Tintin in Tibet

Evaluation: First Paper, formal analysis (25%); in class workshop (10%); brainwriting exercise (10%); discussion board posts x3 (5% each); second paper, research paper (40% [5% proposal, 5% annotated bibliography, 30% paper])

Expected Preparation: Previous experience in film and/ or cultural studies.

Description: In 2021, shooting wrapped on David Cronenberg’s first film since 2014’s Maps to the Stars. Cronenberg is looping back to his roots, in a remake/ reimagining of his 1970 post-apocalyptic sci-fi horror, Crimes of the Future. In the 2022 version, "Accelerated Evolution Syndrome" names the radical capacity of humans to mutate their biology in adaptationvand experimentation with a synthetic environment challenges all social norms. Cronenberg’s fiction films are a long series of experiments with the porous boundaries between human, technologies and the wildness of the life of the flesh. His early efforts produced gleeful, shocking and wildly inventive first films (Shivers, Rabid, The Brood), prompting the invention of a new genre (body horror), a rash of Grand Guignol nicknames (the Baron of Blood, the King of Venereal Horror), and outraged debates in the Canadian House of Commons over public funding for popular horror films. Although today he has become the eminence grise of Canadian Cinema, the spectacular displays of his early films haven’t gone away, but have become a molecular kind of mutation in films like Eastern Promises and A History of Violence. Cronenberg’s body of work provides us with one of the best sets of texts for exploring the wild variations of our existence in an era of intensive technological change. We will work through Cronenberg’s films as engagement with questions around biotechnologies, media, memory, the body and the self, alongside key texts from contemporary cultural theory.

Required texts: Coursepack.

Evaluation: Group discussion sections; screening logs; final paper or project; participation.

Format: Lecture, screenings, discussion, collaborative projects.

Prerequisite: At least 12 prior credits in ENGL courses are expected, such as Survey (ENGL 202 and 203), Poetics (ENGL 311), or other courses at the 200 and 300 level.

Description: This course offers a selection of literary and mass-market novels about spies and traitors from different national origins. The course will pay particular attention to the political ambiguities of spy plots. The course will ask questions about the aesthetic uses of fear, as well as the narrative uses of codes, abduction, disguise, torture, defection, language, accent, and decoding. Narrative technique—narrators, implied narrators, coincidence, focalization—will be addressed during discussions. Distinctions between “high” and “popular” culture will be examined through styles of espionage, such as melodrama, realism, and adventure.

Texts: A selection of six or seven novels will be made from the following provisional list.

• John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps
• Graham Greene, The Third Man
• Ian Fleming, Casino Royale
• John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
• Joan Didion, Democracy
• John Banville, The Untouchable
• Tan Twan Eng, The Gift of Rain
• Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

Evaluation: Mid-term test, essay, take-home exam, participation.

Format: Lecture and discussion.