400-level / Advanced Courses

Description: One of the centrally fashionable literary genres of early modern Europe, romance was the most important precursor of the novel, though in many ways different. It was characterized by much narrative variety, multiple plots, open-ended structures, digression, coincidence, fantasy, wonder, and wish-fulfilment; in its uniquely serendipitous version of the world, few social conventions or expectations can be taken for granted. Its great exponents include Ariosto, Tasso, Cervantes, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare. From around 1575 to 1610, the writing of romance became particularly vibrant in England. Focusing on the diverse expressions of this literary form at this time there, in prose fiction, narrative poetry, and drama, this course should especially interest those attracted to early modern studies, or to the history and development of the novel, or to the theory and history of literary forms. Proceeding chronologically, the course will address texts that epitomize romance’s scope in this period, including the qualitatively best and most influential exemplars, as well as those most popular in sales, such as Robert Greene’s, which illustrate the genre’s cultural topicality. So as best to define romance and its interactions with other genres in particular texts that engineer complex generic mixtures, such as Sidney’s and Spenser’s, attention will be given to the theory of literary genres.

Texts

• --Sir Philip Sidney, The New Arcadia, edited by Maurice Evans, Penguin paperback
• --Edmund Spenser, Books I and VI of The Faerie Queene; both Hackett paperbacks
• --William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest; all Oxford World Classics paperbacks
• --Course Reader for ENGL 400, provided as files for each text, on the ENGL 400 Mycourses website, such as Robert Greene’s Pandosto and Menaphon (both short)

Evaluation: Term paper, 50%; final exam, 40%; class attendance and participation, 10%.

Format: Lecture and class discussion.

Description: This course spotlights literature of the British 1890s—the Victorian “fin de siècle”—testing received ideas about the decade’s dominant moods, keynotes, and memes against a range of fiction, poetry, and drama. The years between 1890 and 1900 are those of Stoker’s Dracula, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, controversy about the “New Woman,” the “dandy,” Aestheticism and Decadence, concerns about what George Gissing called “sexual anarchy,” the late work of Thomas Hardy, the controversial journal The Yellow Book, Aubrey Beardsley and Art Nouveau, and both the meteoric success and the trials of Oscar Wilde.

Although the era to which the 1890s belong (called the “fin de siècle”) is often understood as a transitional stage between Victorianism and modernism, a brief phase registering defiance of the Victorian aesthetics and mores of previous decades, we consider the period as importantly distinct from both the Victorian and modernist eras—with a cultural environment, leading concerns, guiding anxieties, structures of feeling, and aesthetic commitments of its own.

The decade was widely understood as deriving character from its fin-de-siècle position. Public discourse of the time suggested that as the nineteenth century drew to a close, the moment was ripe for speculation about what the new century might bring: commentators such as Holbrook Jackson read the era’s emphasis on iconoclasm, artifice, style, and adventure as auguring promising new beginnings. Yet others construed the times as characterized by a foreboding “sense of an ending” suggesting a culture in decline: in Degeneration (1892), Max Nordau diagnosed what he read as a diseased society through the “symptoms” of aberrant behavior, bizarre art, and a taste for what Walter Pater called “strange” sensations. As we both explore the diversity and common threads among the literature we investigate, we will consider the nature of the decade’s rejoinders—often critical, mischievous, defiant, exploratory—to earlier Victorian literature, as well as ways in which its cultural work paves the way for the innovations of modernism.

Texts (provisional):

• Egerton, George (Mary Chavelita Dunne), Keynotes and Discords (1893-4)
• Gissing, George, The Odd Women (1893)
• Hardy, Thomas, Jude the Obscure (1896)
• James, Henry, stories (“Collaboration,” “The Real Thing”)
• Shaw, G.B., Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1894)
• Stoker, Bram, Dracula (1897)
• Wells, H.G. War of the Worlds (1898)
• Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
• Wilde, Oscar, plays: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), Salomé (1893)

We will also read short fiction (including the work of Henry James, as well as “New Women” writers such as Mona Caird and Sarah Grand); excerpts from Gilbert & Sullivan; and poetry by Ernest Dowson, Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Oscar Wilde, and W.B. Yeats. Contextual material will treat the work of Max Nordau, Aubrey Beardsley and The Yellow Book, Walter Pater, Charles Baudelaire, and Algernon Swinburne.

Evaluation: Wwo brief essays (4 pp.), Keywords project (3-4 pp.), longer essay (7-8 pp.), participation.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: Ecocriticism and the politics of climate change have renewed interest in the nature lyric. A genre with a rich history in Canadian literature, the nature lyric has become a key site of critical examinations of the self in relation to the environment. In this course we will study its recent and contemporary development through the work of one of its most accomplished practitioners – Don McKay. McKay, winner of the 2007 Griffin Prize, stands out as a model for emerging poets for a number of reasons: his expert combinations of experimental and traditional poetics, his signature avian imagery and variations on the familiar trope of poet as bird, his generosity as a mentor and editor, his founding of a small press and involvement in literary magazines, and perhaps above all his influential contributions to the theory of wilderness. McKay is at the forefront of a group of poets who have devised ways to write poetry that responds equally to romantic fascinations with the natural world and to new ethical restraints against exploring, using, or even knowing it. Through McKay’s approach to these and other issues, we will consider the broad shape of contemporary ecopoetics. What are the motives and goals of environmental poetry, and how are these developing and changing today? Readings in ecocritical theory by Lawrence Buell, Mark Tredinnick, and others will foreground this underlying question of the course. We will strive to answer it, principally, through the poetry of a major author – Don McKay – and of his cohort and successors, including Dennis Lee, Jan Zwicky, Ken Babstock, Phoebe Wang, Rita Wong, Michael Prior, and Stephen Collis. Interpreting the work of these prominent voices will yield an understanding of the evolution and diversity of ecopoetics in Canadian literature today.

Required Books (tentative):

• Don McKay, Camber: Selected Poems (McClelland & Stewart)
• Secondary readings will be available online through McGill Library

Evaluation: Oral presentations (20%); first essay (close reading) (30%); second essay (research and comparison) (40%); participation in every class (10%).

Format: Discussion.

Preparation: Ideally, students will have taken at least one 200-level and one 300-level course in English; and ideally, will have previous work in poetry.

Description: Until the 1980s, the canon associated with modern anglophone poetry, established by mid-twentieth-century critical work, was often assumed to consist of the work of major figures such as W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams. This mid-century consensus—now problematized but still influential—largely overlooked many women who had contributed vitally to the development of modern poetry. Yet between 1900 and 1960, many women engaged actively in the effort to revolutionize anglophone poetry: within early twentieth-century literary circles, their work was acclaimed, and they fulfilled pivotal cultural roles. This course focuses on the women that Bonnie Kime Scott has called the “forgotten and silenced makers” of modern poetry. We consider how women shaped the development of modern poetry not only as poets, but also as critics, patrons, publishers, and editors. We also engage how recent scholarship has sought to redress the historical record, return them to attention, and acknowledge their contributions.
In addition to reckoning closely with their poetry, often involving the many forms of “difficulty” associated with modern poetry, we also engage from a literary-historical angle their contributions to the “making of modern poetry.” We address, for example, H.D.’s crucial role in the formation of the poetic movement of “Imagism,” as well as her influential critical engagements with Ancient Greek literature; tensions between Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound over command of Imagism as a movement; Millay’s “it girl” celebrity; Mina Loy’s vexed alliance with Italian Futurism and her “Feminist Manifesto” of 1914; Marianne Moore’s editorship of The Dial; collaborative relationships between H.D. and Moore, and Moore and Bishop; and Gertrude Stein’s many connections with the visual arts. We also consider how these women poets engaged the feminisms of their time, often as mediated by the early twentieth-century concept of the “New Woman.”

Texts: Readings include poetry by Elizabeth Bishop, H.D., Dorothy Livesay, Amy Lowell, Mina Loy, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, P.K. Page, Muriel Rukeyser, Gertrude Stein, and Stevie Smith; we will also consider work by E.E. Cummings T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and W.B. Yeats.

Evaluation (subject to revision): brief critical analysis (5-6 pp., 20%), brief essay (4-5 pp., 25%), fictional autobiography (4 pp., 15%), final essay (8 pp., 30%), participation (10%)

Format: Lecture and discussion

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

Description: This course surveys Virginia Woolf’s major novels and critical prose. The course will focus on Woolf’s innovations in novelistic representation. Readings in her essays will be slated alongside the novels. Topics of discussion will include Woolf’s feminism; her relations with other modernist writers; her invigoration of biography as a genre; her responses to interwar and wartime politics; her evaluation of family and sexuality; her abiding sense of grief and bereavement; her antipathy to colonialism; her appreciation of modern technologies, such as the radio, gramophone, and motorcar; her understanding of the decorative arts; her appreciation of music; her metropolitan and country lives; and her suicide.

Texts: The following list of texts is provisional and a final list will be available in October 2022.

• Woolf, Jacob’s Room
• Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
• Woolf, To the Lighthouse
• Woolf, Common Reader (series one and two)
• Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
• Woolf, The Waves
• Woolf, The Years
• Woolf, Between the Acts

Evaluation: Essay one (30%), essay two (30%), participation (10%), final take-home exam (30%).

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Enrollment: 30 students.

Expected Preparation: Students who have taken ENGL 421 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 “major author” requirement.

Description: Starting his writing career with the publication of Children of Iroko in 1973, a little over a decade after Nigeria’s independence and in a period when writers from across Africa truly started to “decolonize” their style, Tanure Ojaide is a writer whose works embody the decolonial temper in African writing. With over twenty poetry collections, four novels, four short story collections, two memoirs, and numerous anthologized works and other important academic essays and books, Ojaide is one of Africa’s most prolific and influential writers and thinkers and arguably the most important writer from the Niger Delta, an oil-rich minority region in Nigeria whose socio-political marginality and ecological devastation Ojaide constantly decries. Studying a writer like Ojaide would reveal not only the artistic development of a major author but also some of the significant currents in African writing since shortly after the post-independence period. Using Ojaide as a case study, this course will answer questions like: is there a canon of African literature, and what are its defining features? What are some of the main issues African writers have taken up since the 1970s? How do African writers respond to the postcolonial nation? What does it mean for an African writer to be exiled from home? What is identity to the African writer, and how is it constructed? How do African writers imagine the environment? What are the connections between oral literatures, folklore, and African writing?

We will read a selection of Ojaide’s poetry, prose fiction, memoirs, and essays together with important works by Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and others to explore the intersections between personal vision, the postcolonial condition, minority discourse, environmentalism, diasporic identity, gender, and the general human condition. This course will reveal how Ojaide’s works and critical responses to them provide important registers in postcolonial studies and in fields like exilic and new world African diasporic studies, among others.

Texts (tentative):

• *Selections from Children of Iroko & Other Poems (1973)
• Selections from Labyrinths of the Delta (1986)
• Selections from The Fate of Vultures (1990)
• Selections from Delta Blues and Home Songs (1998)
• Selections from When It No Longer Matters Where You Live (1999)
• Selections from In the Kingdom of Songs (2000)
• Selections from The Tale of the Harmattan (2007)
• Selections from Songs of Myself: A Quartet (2015)
• Selections from Narrow Escapes: A Poetic Diary of the Coronavirus Pandemic (2021)
• Selections from God’s Medicine Men and Other Stories (2004)
• Selections from The Old Man in a State House and Other Stories (2012)
• Stars of the Long Night (2012)
• Excerpts from Great Boys: An African Childhood (1998)
• Excerpts from Drawing the Map of Heaven: An African Writer in America (2012)
• Secondary readings on Ojaide, African literature, postcolonial studies, Niger Delta literature, and relevant media like short films and documentaries will be available through the McGill Library.
• *Selections will be between 4-8 poems or 3-5 short stories.

Recommended texts: Onookome Okome (ed.), Writing the Homeland: The Poetry and Politics of Tanure Ojaide; Onookome Okome and Obari Gomba (eds.), Tanure Ojaide: Life, Literature, and the Environment; Tanure Ojaide and Enajite Eseoghene Ojaruega (eds.), Literature and Arts of the Niger Delta.

Evaluation: 15% for group presentation on an assigned topic, 20% for midterm take-home exam, 20% for reading journal, 35% for final paper, and 10% for active class participation.

Format: Background lectures, seminar discussions, in-class close-reading and analytical exercises.

Expected Student Preparation: Previous coursework in American Literature before 1900, or in 19th-century British fiction, or permission of instructor.

Description: Intensive study of a diverse range of shorter prose fictions produced by American authors—mainly over the course of the long nineteenth century, but culminating in close readings of some of the classic short stories produced in the early twentieth century, and ending with a quick look at some contemporary case studies that develop and test the potential in earlier models. Rather than tracing a singular evolution of the short story mode, we will explore a variety of authors whose works test the possibilities of the short form in very different ways. Each of these writers discovered early on that the short story is not simply a miniaturized novel but operates as a literary vehicle with its own distinctive powers and limitations. After an introductory review of recent scholarly work on the theory of the modern short story, and on the history of its development, we will survey a selection of foundational and influential short fictions that reveal the short story’s uses in relation to myth, romance, and the fantastic; to uncanny plots about ghosts and haunting; to evocation of suppressed emotional or psychic states; to representation of neglected cultural identities; to the impulses of regionalism; to urban experience; to crime and detection; and to self-reflexive interrogations of fictional form itself. Indeed the short story has often served for thoughtful and ambitious American writers not only as a simple form with which they could begin their literary training but as a privileged site for self-conscious experimentation with new modes of imagery, new subject matter, and new narrative techniques. Though it may sometimes be seen as minor, low-brow, and popularizing, always hidden in the shadow of the high art of the Great American Novel, the short story in fact frequently functions as a rarefied realm for serious ideological and formal critique—a testing-ground for the most advanced critical and self-critical thinking by American writers. We will focus on the foundational works of authors selected from the following list: Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Harte, Twain, Cable, Chesnutt, Crane, Gilman, Chopin, Jewett, London, James, Wharton, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Anderson, Porter. More contemporary case studies may include works by authors such as O’Connor, Updike, Salinger, Ford, Baldwin, Diaz, Chabon, Mukherjee, Lahiri, Paley, Carver, Ohlin, Saunders, and Davis.

Texts: Course-pack collections of a wide range of short fiction.

Evaluation (tentative): Attendance and participation in discussions, 15%; series of 3 brief textual analyses, 15%; two critical essays, 20% each (or one extended research paper, 40%); take-home final exam, 30%.

Format: Some framing lectures—but emphasis on multi-voiced seminar discussion.

Enrollment: Capped at about 30-35 students.

Description: British Romanticism is a literary movement often associated with a turn to the local and the mundane—from the portraits of rural life by Wordsworth, Clare, and Keats, to the domestic fiction of Austen—paralleled by an introspective appreciation of the significance of subjective feelings. At the same time, the Romantic period is also one of increasingly prominent global phenomena: ecological disturbances, transnational wars, the rise of industrial capitalism and the development of finance capital, along with the significant growth of the transatlantic slave trade and of British colonial expansion. This course will examine the interplay of those two tendencies. One part of the course will be dedicated to the way canonical Romantic authors registered the realities of an increasingly globalized world, even when not entirely conscious of it. We will investigate how transnational and transhistorical forces manifest themselves in scenes of the everyday, and the writing strategies employed to tackle global phenomena that resist direct representation. In the second half of the course, we will look at the way British Romantic literature was itself deployed, received, and engaged with abroad. The focus here will be on writers and traditions often considered “peripheral” to the project of Romanticism, such as British colonial subjects, Indigenous writers, and Black abolitionists. By looking at the way “global Romantics” drew inspiration from and entered in dialogue with their British counterparts, we will assess the affordances and limitations of Romantic preoccupations such as sympathy, freedom, and the revolutionary spirit.

Texts (tentative): Works by Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, John Clare, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jane Austen, Henry Derozio, Egbert Martin, George Copway, George Moses Horton, William Wells Brown, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and M. NourbeSe Philip, along with scholarly pieces by Mary Favret, Patricia A. Matthew, Ian Baucom, Manu Samriti Chander, Gauri Viswanathan, and Nikki Hessell.

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Classes will be mostly discussion-based, with occasional lecture components.

Description: Raymond Williams reminds us that the idea of “nature,” though typically contrasted from human activity, “contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history.” Williams’s statement underlines the fact that humans have intervened in nature from times immemorial to change it, and the way we live in nature. This course will focus on a range of literary texts to examine their environmental imagination. It will draw out how the texts imagine the environment and, just as crucially, the interaction between nature and human beings. It will also situate these texts in relation to theorizations of the production of nature and space as well as to the broad and uneven terrain of ecocriticism and environmental criticism.

Texts:

• Amitav Ghosh – Gun Island
• Peter Matthiessen – The Snow Leopard
• Jamaica Kincaid – A Small Place
• Indra Sinha – Animal’s People
• Selections from the poems of Rabindranath Tagore, Jibanananda Das, Arun Kolatkar.
• Selections from theoretical and critical texts.

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

Evaluation: Papers.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: This course will focus on a main figure in Canadian Inuit literature: Alootook Ipellie. His work portrays many of the effects of colonialism and his own reactions in the contemporary world. Ipellie is introverted and spiritual but also radical and outspoken in his quest for meaning in a life where he lives in “two worlds” but with “one spirit”. His work reflects what was the reality for many Canadian Inuit, since 1950.

Ipellie’s work explores these themes in a variety of formats: cartoons, drawings, political articles, poetry and essays.

Texts:

• The Diary of Abraham Ulrikab. University of Ottawa, 2005
• Excerpts from Arctic Dreams and Nightmares. Alootook Ipellie. Theytus Books Ltd. 1993.
  Please note that all necessary excerpts will be posted online.
• Animation and films.

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

Format: Lecture, 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 My Courses.

Description: To read a book by an indigenous author is a step towards reconciliation.

Often times, Inuit literature is thought to be mainly legends or myths, recorded by outsiders. This course will focus on works actually written by Canadian Inuit, in a variety of formats: diary, poetry and essays, satirical and political cartoons, drawings, articles, animated films, autobiographies or short stories. It will examine some of the earliest work, but the course focuses mainly on contemporary times, after 1950.

The course will also include several films that are connected to the texts.

The course will begin by looking at the diary of the first Canadian Inuit writer, Abraham Ulrikab, from Nunatsiavut, that he wrote in 1880.

Saqiyuq is a collaborative life story told by three Inuit women, between 1930- 1995 in Nunavut. The three women lived the extraordinary changes that took place during these years.

Alootook Ipellie, 1951-2007, is also from Nunavut. He is an Inuit artist whose work portrays many of the effects of colonialism and his own reactions to that situation in the contemporary world. Ipellie is introverted and spiritual but also radical and outspoken in his quest for meaning in a life where he lives in “two worlds” but with “one spirit”. His work reflects what was and is the reality for many Canadian Inuit, since 1950.

Daisy Watt remembers her youth in Nunavik. Sheila Watt-Cloutier, her granddaughter, is also from Nunavik and writes a compelling story of the Inuit and climate change in the midst of cultural, social and political changes. Her book, The Right to be Cold portrays the contemporary world in which modern-day Inuit live. She was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize because of her work.

Texts:

• Excerpts from Arctic Dreams and Nightmares. Alootook Ipellie. Theytus Books Ltd. 1993. Please note that all necessary excerpts will be posted online.
• Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women. Nancy Wachowich. McGill-Queen's University Press. 2001.
• The Diary of Abraham Ulrikab. University of Ottawa. 2005.
• The Right to Be Cold: One Woman's Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic, and the Whole Planet. Sheila Watt-Cloutier. University of Penguin Canada. 2016. Paperback
• Excerpts from Voices and Images of Nunavimmiut volume 1. Edited by Stenbaek and Grey. The Daisy Watt story is in this volume. Posted.

Some other poems and articles may be distributed on myCourses.

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: A rich body of literature developed in the European Middle Ages that explored worlds or realities that stood somehow apart from the realm of everyday experience. Yet these other (or  under-) worlds were never entirely separable from what people regarded as the sphere of their day-to-day lives. By exploring these worlds, authors and readers simultaneously cultivated a renewed understanding of their own experience of time, geographical space, and the ways in which their belief systems infused both with meaning. In this course, students will analyze several literary accounts of worlds or landscapes that stand in some way apart from what their authors and audiences regarded as ordinary. The geographical focus will be the medieval north (Nordic regions, Britain, and Ireland, but also “Little Britain”, or Brittany), though course texts will sometimes draw on depictions of other regions of the known world (especially Asia). We will read dream visions, including visions of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory; we’ll encounter underworlds that are geographically contiguous with specific locations in Europe; we’ll study narratives of fairy otherworlds and read of encounters with the exotic or marvelous; and we’ll examine the value that was (or was not) placed on direct experience or evidence of travel. This course will introduce students to texts written in England, Ireland, Iceland, and on parts the European continent during the period ca. 800-1400. 
 
While the historical scope of the course will span much of the medieval millennium and take in literature from the outside of England, we will focus on the later Middle Ages, and especially the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Several of our 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. For English Literature majors, this course counts toward the “medieval” or “Middle English” requirement. It also satisfies the MDST 400 requirement for Medieval Studies minors. 

Texts (provisional):

• Chaucer, selections from The Canterbury Tales 
• Geoffrey of Monmouth, The Life of Merlin 
• Gylfaginning 
• The Mabinogion 
• Marie de France, Lais 
• St. Patrick’s Purgatory (Sir Owain) 
• Pearl 
• Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales 
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 
• Sir Orfeo 
• The Voyage of St. Brendan 

Evaluation  (provisional): Research project, 45%; short analytical responses, 30%; presentation, 10%; participation, 15%.

Format: Seminar discussion.

Expected Preparation: This is a required capstone course for LACS majors; LACS students will be given preference. Knowledge of written Spanish is beneficial but not necessary. Students in the Department of English are expected to take at least one 300-level course prior to this seminar.

Description: Feminism and gender and sexuality activism are some of the most important contemporary social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean. In addition to gaining victories within and outside of political, juridical, and human rights institutions, these movements have created widespread grassroots support networks and have made gender politics into mainstream topics of conversation across the region. Moreover, these movements draw upon artistic, cultural, and digital methods to pursue their manifold aims.

This course will survey the recent history of gender and sexuality activism in Latin America and the Caribbean to theorize why and how these movements have made such inroads, even high rates of gender violence across the region mean that substantial work remains to be done.

Starting with the historic anti-dictatorship activism of the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the course moves to recent past and contemporary activist movements like #NiUnaMenos, Les Nietes, #WeAre2047, #MiPrimerAcoso, and the “Green Tide.” In understanding these movements, we must combine studies of history, politics, economics, social life, and culture. We will examine the following topics as related to gender and sexual activism:

• Past and present approaches to violence, including femicide, and intersections with a materialist approach to politics (e.g., research on links between neoliberal capitalism and gender violence)
• Gendered dimensions of modernity and the coloniality of power
• Intersectionality with race, specifically Indigeneity and African diasporic descendancy
• Labor movements, historical socialist movements in the region, and the idea of the “feminist strike”
• Transitional justice, and the activism of those within and outside of traditional structures of power in post-Cold War societies
• Uses of art, culture, and performance in the feminist movement – including film, video, visual art, literature, popular art, popular performances and theatre; “artivismo”
• Uses of the digital and “hashtag activism,” as well as “hacktivism”
• Intersections between environmental justice and feminist movements

We will ask how and why gender and sexual rights have expanded since the end of the Cold War and have, significantly, been adopted as central platforms by many on the contemporary Left. We will also examine the relationship between these movements and the so-called “Pink Tide,” a series of left-leaning governments that came into power beginning in the late 1990s and has appeared to lose potency of late, especially following the global economic crisis of 2008.

Texts: The instructor will provide a digital course reader via MyCourses. We will read texts by Rita Segato, Verónica Gago, Sayak Valencia, Cecilia Palmeiro, Héctor Perlongher, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Agustín Lao-Montes, Diana Taylor, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, María Pia López, and many others.

Evaluation: Participation 10%; short assignments due throughout the term: 20%; midterm essay 30%; final essay 40%

Format: In-class discussion, group work, and lecture.

Description: This course will approach the form of autobiography in the Enlightenment through a brief survey of the European tradition of autobiographical texts from antiquity to the Renaissance. Classic models such as Plato’s Apology, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, and Saint Augustine’s Confessions will help us appreciate the motivation and methods of later writing in autobiographical form. Our readings will include not only “real” autobiographies but also first-person narratives in philosophy and literature that provide a background for understanding the emergence of the novel in the “long” eighteenth century (1650-1850). A basic assumption of this course is that the modern novel absorbs and adapts conventions of spiritual autobiography and the presuppositions of selfhood in other forms of first-person storytelling such as dramatic monologue, letter writing, and the diary. We will analyze autobiographical narratives to develop a critical vocabulary that should enable us to conceptualize key problems in the evolving relationship between truth and fiction in the history of first-person narrative. Our study of these problems in the representation of inner experience and the sociohistorical conditions of subjectivity will focus on claims to truth or authenticity in relation to the logic of eros, confession, and self-construction.

Texts: All the books below contain required reading for the course. The books will be available at The Word Bookstore (469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640).

• Plato, The Apology and Related Dialogues (Broadview)
• Plato, Plato on Love (Hackett)
• Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations (Oxford, Penguin, or Hackett)
• Saint Augustine, Confessions (Hackett or Oxford)
• Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova (Oxford or Penguin)
• Benvenuto Cellini, My Life (Oxford)
• Michel de Montaigne, Essays (Hackett)
• Daniel Defoe, Roxana (Broadview or Oxford)
• Denis Diderot, The Nun (Oxford or Penguin)
• Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (Broadview)
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sufferings of Young Werther (Norton or Penguin)
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (Oxford or Penguin)
• Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (Broadview)

Evaluation: Presentations (40%), participation (10%), and a final term paper (50%). The "presentations" will consist of the submission of questions for seminar discussion. "Participation" refers to contributions to discussion and consultation about the paper topic. Insofar as possible, regular attendance is expected except when technical issues, medical problems, or other personal emergencies arise.

Format: Seminar.

Prerequisites: Registration for this class is by application only. Interested students should send me an email at ned.schantz [at] mcgill.ca with the subject heading “application to ENGL 472” stating their interest in the course and qualifications.

Expected Student Preparation and Commitment: 20 applicants will be admitted. All admitted students are expected to make the course a priority, keeping up with work and attending every seminar meeting.

Description: This course will test Garrett Stewart’s recent claim that, in the past few decades, narrative has come to suffer from “plot exhaustion,” from an inability to render contemporary social forces and lived experience in the form of a coherent, forward-moving story with a satisfying resolution. Homing in on some of the more elaborate plot conceits of recent fiction, we will consider to what extent these narrative strategies confirm our worst dilemmas in the way Stewart suggests, and to what extent they offer new ways of conceptualizing the relations that make up our world. Possible films include Groundhog Day, Memento, and After Life. Possible novels include Kindred, Life After Life, and My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

Note: Students must have access to the Netflix series Russian Doll.

Texts: Coursepack of narrative theory.

Evaluation: Film journals, short assignments, term paper, participation.

Format: Seminar.

Expected Preparation: There are no official prerequisites for this course. However, since much of the reading material will be highly theoretical in nature, familiarity with literary theory and/or cultural studies will be very, very useful.

Description: This course will critically examine a series of efforts within the Marxist tradition to theorize literary and cultural production. After starting with an overview of Marxism as a system of thought, we will trace the critical formulations of various Marxist theorists as they address the aesthetic modes of realism, modernism, and postmodernism—modes whose periods of cultural dominance correspond, Fredric Jameson and others have suggested, to different stages in the development of the capitalist mode of production. As we follow a somewhat chronological itinerary through the critical debates each of these aesthetic modes has occasioned, we will also engage with Marxism’s dialogue (and sometimes conflict) with other critical traditions, particularly feminism and queer theory. Throughout the term, we will also examine some primary works of literary and cultural production to “test out” the claims of these theorists. The guiding metaphor for our inquiries will be that of base and superstructure: How are literary and cultural productions related to the realm of economic production? What role does the study of aesthetic form have in Marxist analysis? Our inquiries will be undertaken in a collaborative, rather than competitive spirit, even as we pursue what Marx once called the “ruthless criticism of all that exists.”

Texts:

• Theory: Aesthetics & Politics, Theodor Adorno et al
• Essays by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Bertolt Brecht, Fredric Jameson, Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, Heidi Hartmann, Nancy Fraser, Judith Butler, Silvia Federici, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and others
• Test cases: Père Goriot, Honoré de Balzac (Norton Critical Edition)
• Endgame, Samuel Beckett
• Tout va bien, dir. Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin
• Fight Club, dir. David Fincher
• Selected episodes of UnREAL, season 1

Evaluation: Short response papers; longer final essay.

Format: Lecture, discussion, occasional screenings.

Description: This course examines the unique formal and aesthetic qualities of the North American graphic novel, with particular emphasis on visual analysis. Considerable attention will therefore be paid to close reading and to the analysis of formal and stylistic elements that distinguish comics as a unique artistic phenomenon. The course does not provide an historical survey of comics, nor does it evince interest in popular genres. The emphasis of the course leans towards recent graphic novels.

The texts will be chosen based not only on historical impact, verifiable influence or general popularity with readers but also with an eye to comics that experiment and expand the boundaries of the medium.

The course will be organized into approximately four thematic groupings: revisionist narratives within the mainstream, memoirs and confessionals, new journalism, and auteur comix.

Writers and artists to be chosen from may include: Thi Bui, Nick Drnaso, Adrian Tomine, Guy Delisle, David Mazzuchelli, Debbie Dreschler, James Sturm, Lynda Barry, Ivan Brunetti, Howard Cruse, Eddie Campbell, Art Spiegelman, Julie Doucet, Chester Brown, Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, Alison Bechdel, David Collier, Ben Katchor, Marjane Satrapi, Rutu Modan, Jason Lutes, Jeff Smith, Joe Sacco, Carla Speed McNeil, David B., Chris Ware, Los Bros. Hernandez, Nick Abadzis, Rick Veitch, Phoebe Gloeckner, Harvey Pekar, R. Crumb, Jack Jackson, Craig Thompson, James Kochalka, Tom Gauld, Ed Piskor, Jeff Lemire, Jillian Tamaki, Mariko Tamaki, Kate Beaton, Gene Luen Yang, Faryl Dalrymple, Matt Kindt, Stephen Collins, Sarah Glidden, Will Eisner, Alex Robinson, and Scott McCloud.

Texts: TBA

Evaluation:
One formal analysis: 25%
One mid-term essay: 30%
One final essay: 30%
Class Participation: 15%

Format: Group discussion.

Prerequisites: By arrangement with individual instructor. Permission must be obtained from the Department before registration.

Description:  

• This course is normally not available to students who are not Majors or Honours students in the Department.
• Intended for advanced and/or specialized work based on an extensive background in Departmental studies. 

Application Deadline: Fall 2022 Term: Monday, September 12, 2022 by 4:00 PM

engl495_496_application_2022_23.pdf

Prerequisites: By arrangement with individual instructor. Permission must be obtained from the Department before registration.

Description:  

• This course is normally not available to students who are not Majors or Honours students in the Department.
• Intended for advanced and/or specialized work based on an extensive background in Departmental studies. 

Application Deadline: Winter 2022 Term: Monday, January 16, 2022 by 4:00 PM

engl495_496_application_2022_23.pdf

Description: For internship details, eligibility requirements, approval procedures and methods of evaluation see the Faculty of Arts Internship Office.

Application Deadline: Monday, September 12, 2022 by 4:00 PM

Application Form: covid_version-faculty_of_arts_internship_for_academic_credit_form.pdf