2023-24 Courses

Description: A study of diversities of gender, sexual expression, and sexual affiliation in early modern culture from the later fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, encompassing viragos, prostitutes, sodomites, tribades, sapphists, and hermaphrodites among others, as they were represented within different literary forms, intellectual disciplines, and discourses. My own approach will combine sexual history, literary historicism, and historical formalism, and other approaches are welcome. Surveyed disciplines and discourses will include, with varying degrees of emphasis, medicine and the other former sciences (such as physiognomy and astrology), as well as verbal and visual erotica, theology, philosophy, and law. Our readings of primary sources will also encompass imaginative fictions such as Marlowe’s Edward II, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Milton’s masque Comus, and, in translation, Nicholas Chorier’s Dialogues of Venus and some of Michelangelo’s sonnets, as well as Montaigne’s essay on friendship and Caterina Erauso’s remarkable autobiography. Depending on the size of the seminar, each member will likely do two seminar papers, each in a different part of the term. According to their own particular interests, members will determine their own topics for seminar presentations and hence related discussions, as well as discussion topics in the final period. Insofar as possible, presentations will be grouped in a series of informal “conference sessions” on related matters according to a schedule we will establish at the start of the course, that will fully take into account the scheduling preferences of each member. This format aims to create a diverse, open, and responsive seminar.

Texts:

• General Course Reader, Same-Sex Desire in the English Renaissance: A Sourcebook of Texts, 1470-1650
• Supplementary Course Reader with various additional readings including Milton’s Comus
• Marlowe, Edward II (edition is optional)
• Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (edition is optional)
• Caterina de Erauso, Memoirs of a Basque Lieutenant Nun (paperback)

Texts will be available at the Word Bookstore, 469 Milton Street, 514.845.5640.

Evaluation: Two seminar papers, about 9/10 pages of text each (12 point), to count 45% each; class attendance and participation, 10%.

Format: Seminar with papers and discussion.

Average Enrollment: 10 to 12 students.

Description: This course focusses specifically on the genre called “life writing” in contemporary literature and art. Although the roots of life writing can be found in conventional forms of autobiography, biography, and memoir, more recent experiments have broadened our conception of the genre to include life stories by unknown or marginalized people, bio blogs, diaries, letters, intimate disclosures, reality television documentaries, standup comedy performances, criminal confessions, graphic biographies, and multimodal narratives that can be visual, digital, musical, or theatrical. The course is organized around an extraordinary range of recent life writing texts and artworks that raise questions about the construction and performance of human identity. We will engage in discussion and analysis of these different forms of life writing. Students will also have the opportunity to focus on creative assignments related to the course texts.

As Susan Cheever has said, “memoir is the Barbie of literary genres. It exaggerates the assets and invites the reader into an intimate alternative world, sometimes complete with a dream house. We hungrily buy and read memoir even as we express contempt for it. Memoirs are confessional and subversive; memoirs drop names. Memoirs print whispered secrets on their covers in 24-point type. Memoir is so much the genre of our time that sophisticated readers look for memoirs in fiction, hunting for clues to the ‘real story’ with a fervent appetite for details of the writer’s real life.” The Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk, draws our attention to another aspect of life writing: it is about each of us and how we tell our self-generating story. As Pamuk says, “Whatever we call it—false consciousness, fantasy, or old-style ideology— there is, in each of our heads, a half-legible, half-secret text that makes sense of what we’ve done in life.”

The works studied in the course present an array of personal narratives about obsession, incest, confession, crime, sexuality, race, indigenous identity, parental bonds, crazy childhoods, pain and failure and triumph. We will also look at the self-referential portraits of Cindy Sherman; the performance installations of Tracey Emin; celebrity autobiography; and musician memoirs.

Students enrolled in the course should be prepared to read, on average, one full-length memoir per week, and should be prepared to discuss their own creative work in class.

Texts

Note: All texts will be available from The Word Bookstore (469 Milton).

• Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home
• Harrison, Kathryn. The Kiss
• Laymon, Kiese. Heavy
• Page, Elliot, Pageboy
• Whitehead, Joshua. Jonny Appleseed
• Yuknavitch, Lidia. The Chronology of Water

Evaluation (tentative): Group project (20%); short response essays (20%); individual life writing project or final paper designed by each student (40%); attendance, discussion questions, and participation (20%).

Description: TBA

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: TBA

Description: The course seeks to illuminate a central question: how has historical materialism (aka Marxism) shaped our understanding of literature, aesthetics, and culture? It draws on the writings of Karl Marx, but more significantly, on works by scholars and critics who have taken up Marx’s insights to shape the uneven and contested terrain of materialist literary and cultural criticism. The course examines some of the key issues and debates in this critical tradition, namely, the relationship of literary form to history (for instance, the emergence of the novel; debates on realism, modernism, and irrealism), the concept of allegory, the culture industry and commodity aesthetics, the idea of utopia, and the critical practices such as symptomatic reading and dialectical criticism. It also aims to understand how these critics theorize some of the concepts that are central to their critical enterprise: history, ideology, totality, reification, dialectics, modernity, and structure of feeling. Furthermore, the course tracks the persistence of these issues, debates, and concepts in literary and cultural studies in our contemporary moment in categories such as “national allegory,” “magic realism,” “global novel,” “peripheral realism,” “global modernism” and “world literature.”

Texts (tentative):

• Raymond Williams – Marxism and Literature.
• Selections from works of other theorists including but not limited to: Gyorgy Lukacs, Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin, Raymond Williams, Frantz Fanon, Fredric Jameson, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Gayatri Spivak, Aijaz Ahmad, Roberto Schwarz, Kojin Karatani, and Silvia Lopez.

Evaluation: Participation: 10%; short response papers (3-5pp. x7): 35%; paper proposal: 15%; final paper: 40%

Format: Seminar

Prerequisite: Open to Honours and MA Students.

Description: The Brexit vote in June 2016 and the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union has turned the world’s eyes towards Britain and raised pressing questions about British cultural identity and the relationship of “Britishness” to the history of immigration to England.

This course is concerned with representative plays by both established playwrights and the new generation of young dramatists in the United Kingdom. Our particular focus will be the representation of cultural and ethnic diversity in post-Imperial England.

The syllabus will be made up of plays that demonstrate an interest in the unique aesthetics of theatre while simultaneously evincing social commitment and an engagement with politics.

Our syllabus is organized into three units: the political play pre-Thatcher, the political play post-Thatcher, and the political play post-2001.

We will consider a variety of different dramatic responses to the transformations of British identity in the face of various significant historical events.

Examples of such events include the de-colonization of India, the decline of the British Empire, the increased waves of commonwealth immigration to the UK in the 1960s and 1970s, the Irish Troubles of the 1970s, the dismantling of the Soviet Union following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the siege of Sarajevo and the war in Bosnia, the changing face of terrorism in the post 9/11 and 7/7 era, the financial crisis of 2007-08, globalization, the out-sourcing of labor to India and the growth of transnational capitalism, the “special relationship” between George W. Bush Jr. and Tony Blair, the international proliferation of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, and most recently the exit of the UK from the European Union.

Evaluation (Provisional):

1. Seminar presentation with accompanying written component, 20%
2. Two ten-page essays, 30% each
3. Class participation, 20%

Required Readings: TBA

Instructional Method: Seminar discussions.

Description:  Shakespeare’s fools are a class of character that audiences, readers, and even scholars of today typically have enormous difficulty understanding. In this seminar we will study Shakespeare’s works that represent some of the natural fool’s many guises as a familiar social type in early modernity, including The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado About Nothing, Henry the Fourth Part One, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, All’s Well That Ends Well, and King Lear. Along the way we will also consider the enduring cultural influence of the humanistic “cult of folly” in the work of Erasmus, as well as early modern accounts of fools in the writings of Robert Armin and Timothy Granger. Recent work on the history of intellectual disability by scholars such as C.F. Goodey and Tim Stainton will provide important context for our efforts as we trace the fool’s connections to other closely-related figures such as clowns, fairy changelings, melancholics, and madmen. 

Texts: Specific texts are TBA.

Evaluation: Seminar presentation 35%; long paper 50%; participation (includes 2 written presentation responses) 15%.

Format: Seminar.

Average Enrollment: 15 students.

Description:  Improvisation is a multifaceted, complex concept and practice, with many connotations, definitions, and applications. Improvisation can mean (among other things) “making do,” playing, resisting oppressive structures through detournement and detour, as well as turning spontaneity into automaticity and reflex. This course will be kaleidoscopic, generating reflection on how improvisation can contribute to our research – and how the interdisciplinarity of improvisation might shake up our preconceived notions of what we are doing as scholars, researchers, and artists. We’ll consider the idea of improvisation through multiple areas – from music, dance, and theatre to poetry, anthropology, Black politics, medicine, disability studies, and critical theory.

Improvisation is aesthetic, social, political, and material. Improvisation encompasses a variety of sometimes contradictory modes and possesses multiple, intersecting genealogies. Alongside our discussions, readings, and essays, we will include practical exercises in improvisation so as to ask: what are social, psychological, political, and aesthetic components and ramifications of improvisation? In what ways might improvisation be a helpful contribution or intervention now? Can improvisation be transformative, or does it threaten to reiterate and bring to the surface our unconscious biases? In what ways has our capacity for improvisation been exploited and subverted by state and neoliberal forces– and how can we “improvise better?”

Required texts (a possible list):

• Georgina Born, William Straw, Eric Lewis, Improvisation and Social Aesthetics (2017)
• Danielle Goldman, I Want to Be Ready
• All other readings will be available as PDFs on myCourses.

Evaluation: Participation 10% discussion forum 20%; in-class group or solo presentation 30%; final essay 40%. 

Format: Seminar, group discussion.  

Description: In the period since the 1980s, several key institutions of American literary canon formation—from the National Endowment for the Arts to literary prize organizations, from university syllabi to literary criticism itself—have transformed in ways that either expressly or implicitly promoted historical fiction as contemporary American literature’s most prestigious and politically potent genre. Moreover, American fiction’s “historical turn” has been especially pronounced among racially and ethnically minoritized writers, whose increasing recognition and consecration has been almost exclusively in the idiom of historical fiction. What are the political, aesthetic, and literary-historical stakes of American fiction’s decisive turn toward the past? What new possibilities and problems arise when, as Toni Morrison famously put it, “nothing ever dies”? Working comparatively across ethnic literary traditions, this seminar will focus on a handful of contemporary fiction’s historical sub-genres, including contemporary narratives of slavery, the World War II novel, the multigenerational family saga, and allegories of the so-called “Canon Wars.” Our readings will include a selection of the novels below, paired with a wide range of critical texts.

Description: In this seminar, we will work toward an understanding of the history of the consolidation of humanities scholarship within the institutional space, practices, and culture of the academy and the turning of the humanities away from a broader, more variegated public life inside and outside the academy. We will develop a theoretical understanding of what the public is and what publics are. We will pay attention to the wide range of innovative public scholarship initiatives that have grown up over the past few decades as well as to a number of exemplary public scholarly undertakings from the past. 

Description: In this course we will employ multiple approaches to reading black and Indigenous North American literatures in their formal, theoretical, and historical relations. In recent years, scholars within North American black studies and Indigenous studies have made frequent calls to trouble the boundaries between the two fields; while black and Indigenous political organizers have underscored the urgency of narrating histories of colonization, slavery, and black and native political struggles together. In turn, both raise questions about how black and Indigenous histories and literatures historically came to be studied, theorized, and narrated separately. This course asks students to pursue this question, by examining the cultural and political differences, literary canonization, and academic disciplines that have shaped the terms and housed separate literary traditions. With these considerations, we will engage in multiple practices of reading that test separateness and highlight relation. Reading “in relation” will take multiple forms across the course: comparison, conversation or correspondence, solidarity, entanglement, and embodiment, in the case of authors who are both black and Indigenous. Authors may include: Pauline Hopkins, E. Pauline Johnson, Angel De Cora, Zora Neale Hurston, Julie Dash, George Elliot Clarke, M. Nourbese Philip, Layli Long Soldier. These readings will be paired with works of critical literary history and theory by figures such as: Sylvia Wynter, Édouard Glissant, Tiffany Lethabo King, Denise Ferreira da Silva, David Kazanjian, Frank Wilderson, Jenell Navarro, Kathryn Walkiewicz, Mishuana Goeman, and others. While focusing on particular cultural, political, and social relations of black and Indigenous writings, this course asks students to think more broadly about the formation of ethnic literary traditions and the political borders of literary study.

Evaluation: 2 oral presentations, midterm paper, final research essay, participation.

Format: Seminar

Description:  This course will focus theoretical questioning on Samuel Richardson’s million-word-long Clarissa, which many readers since the eighteenth century have regarded as the greatest European novel. From week to week, our readings will canvas various approaches to different parts of this gigantic text. Insofar as possible, the syllabus will orient our discussion toward an analysis of the terms in which Clarissa articulates a theory that some of Richardson’s contemporaries viewed as an encyclopedic “system” of thought. We will be concerned with interactions or disjunctions between large conceptual areas such as Richardson’s celebrated “new” psychology, his account of moral judgment, and his critique of aesthetics. Clarissa is a self-consciously intertextual work. To relate our understanding of the novel’s argument to Richardson’s literary-cultural and intellectual context, we will read a wide range of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts drawn from the traditions of the emblem book, libertine poetry, the Restoration stage, sentimental romance, erotic narrative, theological controversy, British moral philosophy, and early feminist criticism. (To supplement seminar discussion we will also view performances of operas by Lully, Purcell, Händel, and Mozart as well as films by Dreyer, Rohmer, Breillat, and Almodóvar.) The logic of this course, as of Richardson’s novel, gives particular attention to the conflicting ideological and representational claims of allegory and theatricality. It is hoped that such textual and conceptual analysis will enable (1) a theorization of problems in Clarissa and (2) an understanding of Clarissa’s contribution to the “history of problems” – problems not only of literary form but also of gender, psychology, ethics, law, politics, and religion – that constitute the theory of the novel. 

Texts:  The recommended version of Clarissa is the one-volume Penguin paperback (ISBN 0140432159 or 9780140432152) edited by Angus Ross. The books for this course will be available at The Word Bookstore (469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640). One or more photocopy packets may supplement the books on order. A full schedule of assignments will be available at the first meeting of the seminar. Our readings, in addition to Clarissa, will probably include assignments in the following texts. 

• Emblems of Francis Quarles and George Wither (seventeenth century) 
• John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester (1647-80), poems 
• Thomas Otway, Venice Preserv’d (1682) 
• John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1690) 
• Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks (1711; rev. 1714) 
• Eliza Haywood, Fantomina (1725) 
• William Law, An Appeal to all that Doubt the Gospel (1740) 
• Sophia, Woman’s Superior Excellence over Man (1740) 
• Samuel Johnson, Rambler No. 4 (1750) 
• Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) 
• Denis Diderot, Éloge de Richardson (1762) 
• Vivant Denon, “No Tomorrow” (1777)  

Films:  A screening session will usually be scheduled every week. Viewing the films is a requirement of the course, and attendance at the screenings is an expected form of participation. Most screening sessions will last about two hours in a supplementary period following the seminar; some films will be longer. (The following list of films is tentative. The choice of films will depend partly on the prior viewing experience, interests, and preferences of the seminar participants.) 

• Lully, Atys (1676) and Armide (1686) 
• Purcell, Dido and Aeneas (1689?) 
• Händel, Agrippina (1709), Semele (1744), and Theodora (1750) 
• Peter Watkins, Culloden (1964) 
• Catherine Breillat, Fat Girl (2001) 
• Mozart and da Ponte, Così fan tutte (1790) 
• Krzysztof Kielsowski, Dekalog 6 and A Short Film about Love (1988) 
• Carl Theodor Dreyer, Gertrud (1964) 
• Eric Rohmer, The Marquise of O... (1976) 
• Pedro Almodóvar, Talk to Her (2002) 

Evaluation: A substantial amount of careful reading, a class presentation, participation in discussion, and a 20-page paper will comprise the work in the course. The evaluation of this work will be weighted as follows: paper (60%), presentation (20%), and general participation (20%). Regular attendance is mandatory. 

Format:  Seminar. 

Maximum Enrollment: 15 students. 

Note on Enrollment: Permission of the instructor is required. As a rule of thumb, enrollment is limited to 15 MA and PhD students. All others must consult the instructor before registering. Students who are interested in taking this seminar but cannot register in Minerva should contact Professor Hensley. (Please bear in mind that electronic registration does not constitute the instructor’s permission.) 

Course Description: How does Romantic poetry capture what it means to work, labour or serve; to be productive or creative; to work for oneself or for others? Whether the choice to work is made freely or under coercion—including under threat of suffering, imprisonment or death—working is transforming and transformative. Working can reveal that effort produces change (the garden grows, the house is built) that may change us in turn: we see that we are capable of altering the world in material ways. Yet the burden of work, the ways labour is captured to serve others’ ends, transforms the world too, and these are transformations with the power to invent and maintain racial, gendered, class-based, and other hierarchies. In this course, we will tarry together with theories of labour by thinkers from Hegel and Marx to Da Silva and Berlant. We will read poems by John Clare, Ann Yearsley, Phillis Wheatley Peters, William Cowper, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and others. At the same time, historical systems and developments not limited to the Transatlantic slave trade, revolutions in agriculture and industry, and Romantic-era print culture will help us to contextualize Romantic representations of labour and laboriousness in the formal and stylistic interventions of poets and other writers in this period. Don’t be fooled by the course description: history is important to the reading together of theory and poetry too.

Required Texts: The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Literature Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition Joshua Clover, Riot, Strike, Riot Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism + excerpts, essays and chapters by G. F. W. Hegel, Hortense Spillers, Julius S. Scott, Jennifer L. Morgan, Fredric Jameson, Karyn Ball, Lenora Hanson, and more

Evaluation: Six “Notework Journal” assignments, participation and attendance (total 20%); Research Essay Proposal (15%); In-Class Research Presentation (20%); Final Research Essay (45%)

Format: Seminar

Description: With the repeal of knowledge taxes in Britain, in an increasingly saturated marketplace, newspapers began to vie with another popular form of print media for readers’ attention: the novel. Readings will explore how Victorian fiction and newspapers entered a sustained dialogue that would have wide-ranging effects on their mutual development. While authors began to incorporate aspects of newspaper culture into their fiction, newspaper readership was bolstered by an appetite for the themes and narratives of crime, mystery, and detection.

In this course, we will survey the increase of newspaper/periodical circulation in this period, noticing ways fiction writers leverage the content and form of newspapers to engage their readers. Class discussion will touch on the emergence of the consulting detective in life and in literature and aim to identify emerging narrative frameworks for detective fiction. We will also play close attention to perspective as we negotiate fictional narratives woven with intrigue and misdirection, as well as narratives emerging from newspapers’ episodic and often anonymous installments.

Primary Course Texts:

• Wilkie Collins, “Who is the Thief?” (from The Atlantic Monthly, 1858); reprinted as “The Biter Bit” in Queen of Hearts (1859).
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret (1862).
• Andrew Forrester (James Redding Ware), The Female Detective (1864).
• Charles Reade, Griffith Gaunt or Jealousy (1866).
• Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868).
• Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (from Beeton's Christmas Annual, 1887).
• Catherine Louisa Pirkis, The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (1894); first published in The Ludgate Monthly, London, February-July 1893.
• Assigned secondary readings will be available via myCourses.

Evaluation: In-class participation and critical interpretation assignments (with written and oral components); collaboration on a library exhibition in December 2023; term paper.

Format: Socratic lectures, guest presentations, in-class discussion and analytical exercises, on-site work and visits to special collections reading room as McGill library renovation work permits.