2021-22 Courses

Description: This course examines ways in which travel, landscape, and cultural contact were represented in the medieval period. The subject matter will take a global approach to the Middle Ages. Medieval people traveled widely and for a number of reasons: pilgrimage, crusade, commerce, diplomacy, and even pleasure. Travel could also take the form of dream visions or mystical revelations. Medieval travel narratives are seldom if ever dispassionate accounts of experiences or conditions in foreign places. Many of them tend toward descriptions of the fantastic or dangerous, and they reveal as much (if not more) about the investments of those doing the representing as about what is represented. At the same time, we can’t always assume that an author who describes a journey or cultural exchange actually made the trip that the text narrates. These narratives are often highly learned, and some betray formulaic narrative elements that rely on established tales of travel, natural history, encyclopedias, and other source material. Medieval travel narrative is also generically ambiguous. Complex theories of the cosmic order might be couched in a dream vision; an account of diplomatic travel might contain lengthy descriptions of marvelous objects or peoples; and a description of geographical space might require allegorical interpretation.

We will examine a diverse set of medieval texts to understand how they represent cultural contact and movement through time and space—whether physical, spiritual, or otherwise. Some sessions will be spent considering the genealogies and textual histories of our source material. A major emphasis will be the materiality of travel and communication in the medieval period. Topics of discussion will include medieval definitions of time (including apocalyptic time); the cosmos and the afterlife; the marvelous and the miraculous; the relationship between body and soul; curiosity; geography, natural history, and anthropology. 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.

Texts (provisional):

• Alexander and Dindimus
• The Book of John Mandeville
• The Book of Margery Kempe
• Capgrave, The Solace of Pilgrims
• Chaucer, The House of Fame
• Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio
• The Travels of Marco Polo
• Biblical dream visions and revelations
• Excerpts from medieval itineraries
• Pilgrims’ guides (“Stations of Jerusalem”)
• Select Purgatory poems
• Weekly readings from secondary scholarship

Evaluation: Short papers (25%); long paper (50%); presentation (10%); participation (15%).

Description: This seminar is a study of two novels by Frances Burney—Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782) —and four by Jane Austen—The Watsons (c. 1805), Sense and Sensibility (1811), Emma (1816) and Sanditon (1817). A particular focus of the course will be the two novelists’ obsessive interest in money: how to inherit it, marry into it, make it, invest it, and spend it. We shall look at Burney’s and Austen’s own precarious finances, and how each used the income from her novels to eke out her own small income and savings. Our principal concern, however, will be with the question of “getting and spending” in their novels. Money is the driving force in Burney’s and Austen’s fiction: it is money that determines how their characters will live, whom they might hope to marry, and what their status will be in a highly class-conscious society. We shall look at their fascination with material possessions, their habitual anxiety about the cost of living, and their determination to increase their wealth despite the heavy expenses entailed in maintaining their social status.

Texts:

• Jane Austen, Jane Austen’s Manuscript Works, ed. Linda Bree, Peter Sabor and Janet Todd, Broadview, 2013
• -------, Sense and Sensibility, ed. John Mullan, Oxford World’s Classics, 2019
• -------, Emma, ed. George Justice, Norton, 2011
• Frances Burney, Evelina, ed. Vivien Jones, Oxford World’s Classics, 2002
• -------, Cecilia, ed. Peter Sabor and Margaret Anne Doody, Oxford World’s Classics, 1988

Evaluation: Class participation, 25%; seminar presentation, 25%; term paper, 50%.

Description: The field of feminist narratology was formulated in the last quarter of the twentieth century, when critics including Susan Lanser and Robyn Warhol began to identify gender dynamics in a text’s formal structure. Critics of the Victorian novel have been slow to develop this approach as they contend against the dominantly historical and materialist reading practices associated with this period. They also grapple with a conventional literary history that dates innovations in the novel to the Modernist period, when writers dispensed with realistic representation and linear plots. This course will answer to these two critical challenges by working to post-date formal expressions of gender in the 1850-1900 period. We will read familiar and lesser-known novels as well as two purported memoirs, looking for feminine subjectivity in the methods of narration, the portrayal of information and authority, and the use of parody and satire.

Our class readings will include a range of essays defining and sometimes challenging feminist narratology, but the novels will be the primary focus. This course would be appropriate to students interested in the novel, the nineteenth-century, feminist criticism, and narratology, but only prior experience with the novel is required.

Texts (provisional):

• Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853)
• Rhoda Broughton, Cometh Up as a Flower (1866)
• F.W. Robinson, Memoirs of Jane Cameron, Female Prisoner (1864)
• Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady (1875)
• Margaret Harkness, A City Girl (1888)
• Kate Marsden, On Sledge and Horseback to the Outcast Siberian Lepers (1892)
• Grant Allan, The Typewriter Girl (1894)

***other texts to be provided on myCourses

Evaluation (provisional): Review assignment 20%; final research paper 50%; presentation 15%; participation 15%.

Description: “Character” has long been a central, and at times controversial, category of analysis in Shakespeare studies. In this seminar we will attend to this aspect of Shakespeare’s works, and also track various responses to it through critical history. The seminar will consist of three parts. In the first part, we will introduce some key definitions, and examine the underappreciated prehistory of Shakespearean literary characterization, focusing on Geoffrey Chaucer’s “estates satire” in the Canterbury Tales. In the following weeks our readings of various plays will be connected to significant early modern contexts of character; topics to be considered will include character and gender, the rhetoric of character, character as a literary genre. The third part of the seminar will address the critical history of Shakespearean characterology, from the eighteenth century (John Dryden, William Richardson, Maurice Morgann), to Romantic statements on the topic (William Hazlitt, S.T. Coleridge), to Victorian-era responses by female critics (Anna Jameson, Mary Cowden Clark), and finally to character criticism’s culmination in the work of A.C. Bradley. We will also study significant counterstatements by L.C. Knights and Terence Hawkes. In the last weeks of the seminar we will assess some of the ways character-based criticism is reconceived and revived in the work of Stanley Cavell, and Harry Berger, Jr.

Texts:

• Bradley, A.C. Shakespearean Tragedy
• Cavell, Stanley. Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare
• A course-pak of collected texts will be available at the McGill Bookstore.
• The Riverside Shakespeare, or similar collection of the complete works.

Evaluation:
Seminar presentation 35%
Final Paper 50%
Weekly preparation and participation 15%

Description: In close study of approximately seven exemplary poets and four novels, the course will examine the birth, growth, and consolidation of Canadian modernist writing from 1920 to 1960. Canadian modernism has recently enjoyed a critical renaissance triggered by a wave of activity in the scholarly editing and publication of little-known or out-of-print works. As a result, the canon of Canadian modernism is more fluid than ever before, and so is the critical understanding of “modernism” that underpins much of this recent activity. We will read our authors as individuals participating consciously in the global modernist project, and as Canadians fashioning a distinct national discourse and qualities for that project. In the process, we should gain a sense of global modernism’s essential characteristics—of what may and may not rightly be called modernist—as well as of its possible national variations. We will be attentive to the Anglo-American and European sources of Canadian modernism, in particular to T.S. Eliot’s ideals of “impersonality” and “the objective correlative” and their eventual supplanting by a newly lyric modernism in the 1950s, as well as to the little-noticed Surrealist vein in Canadian modernist writing. We will note the relative prominence of women writers in Canadian modernism after 1945 and also seek to clarify relations among modernism and ethnicity, regionalism, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism. Discussion will close with consideration of Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook (1959), which has been called both the first modernist and the first post-modernist novel in Canada; we may wish to revisit that debate, but the novel will also help us open up new ethical approaches to Canadian modernist writing.

Texts (McGill Bookstore):

• Trehearne, Brian, ed. Canadian Poetry 1920 to 1960. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart [New Canadian Library], 2010.

Four of the following novels will be assigned:

• Buckler, Ernest. The Mountain and the Valley. 1952.
• Cohen, Leonard. Beautiful Losers. 1966.
• Grove, Frederick Philip. The Master of the Mill. 1944.
• Klein, A.M. The Second Scroll. 1951.
• Laurence, Margaret. The Stone Angel. 1964.
• Richler, Mordecai. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. 1959.
• Ross, Sinclair. As for Me and My House. 1941.
• Smart, Elizabeth. By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. 1945.
• Watson, Sheila. The Double Hook. 1959.
• Wilson, Ethel. The Equations of Love. 1952.
• ---. Swamp Angel. 1954.

Evaluation:

• Seminar presentation on one poet or novelist, 25%: 20 minutes of presentation time with 10 minutes of follow-up discussion directed by you; your topic must be cleared in advance with the instructor; you will circulate a one-page abstract of your argument with a short bibliography of recommended primary and secondary sources by e-mail to the instructor and your classmates no later than one week in advance. If you are working on a poet it is presumed that you will buy a comprehensive edition of the poet’s complete or at least selected works as you prepare your presentation. You have two options for the grading of this assignment: (1) I will grade you only on what happens in your half hour in the seminar room: on your argument; on your clarity; on your effective delivery of your argument to a listening audience; on your ability to generate and focus discussion; and on your verbal responses to your paper’s discussion by others. Alternately, (2) Your mark will assess all components listed under Option (1) but emphasize a formally presented essay version of your remarks (8-9 pp.) that you turn in shortly after your presentation. This essay, revised, may then be incorporated into your major research paper (see below). Option (2) is the better choice for those who would like guidance on their scholarly writing prior to the submission of the research paper.
• Major research paper (20 pp), 50%. This paper may (1) extend and enrich the ideas of your seminar presentation and incorporate its content in revised form; the recycled material must show clear evidence of response to critiques received from instructor and peers; or (2) may take up an entirely new topic, including a topic on a different writer; in this case, the new essay topic must be cleared with the instructor in advance.
• Informed participation in class discussion, 25%. NB: consistent and informed participation in scholarly discussion is not optional in the academic profession and so cannot be in this course, which has among its obligations the task of preparing potential apprentices for that profession. Mere attendance is not relevant to your participation grade; absences will be noted, but full attendance is presumed. A failing grade will be given in this category to those who don’t participate consistently, constructively, and in an informed way in class discussions.
• Please note that this evaluation scheme may have to change if the Fall 2021 semester is to be taught remotely because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Format: Seminar. A seminar is a chaired discussion group in which all participants are equally responsible for effective consideration of subject matter and readings. Lectures will be minimal.

Description: According to classical legend, when the hero Hercules died, he was rewarded for his life of labour with immortality in heaven. But Hercules has achieved a different kind of immortality on earth where his life has constantly been re-imagined. Many of you will have grown up watching the Disney Hercules; I spent my formative years glued to the TV watching an embarrassingly primitive cartoon show, The Mighty Hercules. Appealing to every generation, Hercules is in many ways the archetypal hero, the hero of heroes. But he is also the most complex: the legendary worker who saves the world from monsters and even harrows hell is also a cross-dresser, mad man, and murderer, who kills his own family and himself meets a tortured and fiery end. While political rulers have often used Hercules as an icon for authority, law and order, many artists have been interested in exploring the anti-social nature of this figure.

In this course we will consider broadly the cultural and social uses of myth by looking at some of the conflicting treatments of this contradictory hero. What concerns does he address? What cultural myths does he embody and what rifts and contradictions does he expose? We will consider especially his prominence in ancient Athens and Alexandria, Augustan Rome, and early modern England. At the end of the term we will also consider how Hercules figured as a problematic model for returning GIs in post World War II films, while final student presentations will explore how Hercules is figured in culture today.

Expected Background Preparation: Though the broad interests of this course are cultural, our main focus will be on works for literature from a range of genres and our approach will be largely literary historical.  When necessary, I will provide historical background (such as sketches of Athenian, Alexandrian, Augustan, and Elizabethan politics and/or culture), but students should be familiar already with some of the following forms: Homeric epic, Greek tragedy, Renaissance epic, Renaissance drama.

Texts will include (some of these, as well as supplemental readings, will be available on myCourses):

• Selections from Hesiod, Xenophon, Pindar, Theocritus
• Sophocles, Women of Trachis
• Euripides, Herakles, Alcestis
• Aristophanes, Frogs
• Apollonius of Rhodes, Voyage of the Argos
• Virgil, Aeneid (Book 8)
• Ovid, Metamorphoses (9,12)
• Seneca, Hercules Oetaeus; Hercules Furens
• Marlowe, Tamburlaine 1 & 2
• Spenser, Faerie Queene 5
• Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra
• Jonson, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue
• Milton, Samson Agonistes
• John Dryden, All for Love

Evaluation: 5 page paper on a labour; 20 page research paper; final class presentation; participation.

Prerequisite: Open to graduate students and Honours students.

Description: A number of compelling and significant new theories of literature and culture have emerged in the past 20 years, in the wake of the high moment of "critical theory." This course offers a critical survey of these theories in order to introduce graduate students to the current cutting edge of literary theory today.

Theories and paradigms to be covered include: the new formalism, post-critical reading, sociology of literature, environmental humanities, digital humanities, Afro-pessimism, critical algorithm studies, object oriented ontology, and affect theory.

Major figures associated with these theories include: Caroline Levine, Rita Felski, Mark McGurl, Rob Nixon, Ted Underwood, Christina Sharpe, Safiya Noble, Graham Harman, and Lauren Berlant.

This course will help lay out the current scholarly landscape for literary studies and so will be of use to graduate students developing dissertation projects and undergraduates working on the Honours essay, and determining what types of arguments and theses would be most compelling for their fields.

Possible readings:

• Levine, Forms
• Felski, The Limits of Critique
• McGurl, The Program Era
• Nixon, Slow Violence
• Underwood, Distant Horizons
• Sharpe, In The Wake
• Noble, Algorithms of Oppression
• Harman, "The Well Wrought Hammer"
• Berlant, Cruel Optimism

Evaluation: Weekly posts/responses, regular class participation, final paper.

Description: The course familiarizes students with the broad and diverse field of Postcolonial Studies. It focuses on the development of the field: the rise of the “poco” paradigm in the North American academe; its critiques, especially of the conception of postcolonialism in an “end of history” vein; its re-formation as a field of world literature studies. The course also introduces students to some of the key claims, debates, and concepts from the set of theoretical positions signified by the term postcolonial theory. Finally, the course considers postcolonial as a critical lens and reading practice to understand what a postcolonial reading of a literary text might mean. In addition to interrogating the category of the postcolonial, the course will also situate the category in relation to related categories such as colonialism, anti-colonialism, decolonization, and globalization.

Possible texts:

• Novels by authors such as Mulk Raj Anand, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, GV Desani, Jamaica Kincaid.
• Poetry by Rabindranath Tagore, Derek Walcott, Vikram Seth.  
• Selections of theoretical texts by Gayatri Spivak, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha.
• Critical readings of literary texts by Chinua Achebe, Gayatri Spivak.

This is a suggestive list and texts will be finalized in the weeks leading to the term.

Evaluation: TBA

Description: This seminar will consider some of the major interventions of feminist theatre workers (playwrights, performers, critics, producers, etc.) in the theatre culture of Canada and the United States from about 1965 to today. Key questions for discussion will include: How might we define “feminist aesthetics” and “feminist dramaturgy”? Can one occupy a feminist spectatorial position? How are women’s bodies used on stage to alter relations between spectacle and spectator?

We will consider a range of contemporary dramatic and performance forms along with their theoretical exegetics which engage diverse perspectives on women and race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and gender identity.

Plays/readings/criticism: Approximately twelve plays/performances will be selected from the following list; they will be read alongside articles or chapters of feminist dramatic performance theory (from the second list). We will not be reading all these works, alas. A final decision will be made about which texts will be on the syllabus by the end of May 2021.

Readings may include plays by Split Britches, The Five Lesbian Brothers, Ntozake Shange, ahdri zhina mandiela, Maria Irene Fornes, Carmelita Tropicana, Paula Vogel, Pol Pelletier, Jovette Marchessault, Djanet Sears, Evelyne de la Chenelière, Suzan-Lori Parks, Cherrie Moraga, Adrienne Kennedy, Anne-Marie MacDonald, Amanda Parris, Lisa Codrington.

And critical writings by: Jill Dolan, Stacy Wolf, Lynette Goddard, Jennifer Devere Brody, Robin Bernstein, Susan Bennett, Sue-Ellen Case, TL Cowan, Kate Davy, Elin Diamond, Judith Butler.

Evaluation: Participation (15%, will include a structured debate); annotated bibliography (20%); oral presentation (25%); final research paper of approximately 20 pages (40%).

Description: This course will consider film’s fundamental representational and transformational capacities from a broad ecological perspective—which is to say, in terms of the sustainable flourishing of life in any number of environments, such as the unforgiving terrains of cities, suburbs, highways, deserts, and oceans. Our concern will be to understand film ecologies socially, which means in terms of their principles of association, of how human and nonhuman members come into relationship. The course will therefore be as much about cinematic form as about “green” themes, considering how cinema itself produces environments in specific relational terms. In short, the premise of this class is that film inevitably is social theory (whether implicit or explicit), and the procedure of this class will be to put film and film theory in conversation with other social theory, including Critical Space Theory, Ecofeminism, Animal Studies, Actor-Network Theory, and Theories of Affect. Possible films include The Gleaners and I, Los Angeles Plays Itself, Leviathan, Amores Perros, The Turin Horse.

Note: We will read the poems in the original, but the textbook comes with a CD-ROM containing a prose translation by the editors.

Possible texts:

• John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds
• Hugh Raffles, Insectopedia

and a coursepack

Evaluation:

Weekly film journals 60%
Presentations 10%
Participation 30%

Format: Lecture/discussions and weekly conferences.

Description: British Library Manuscript Cotton Nero A.x, dating from the mid-fourteenth century, contains the four poems known as Pearl, Cleanness (or Purity), Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – a dream-vision, a homily, a near-allegory, and a chivalric romance. Such disparate genres and subjects, however, do not point to disparate authors: there is sufficient internal evidence from the West Midland dialect of the poems to presume that they were composed by the same person, a near contemporary to Chaucer – but perhaps they were not.

The poems reflect the fourteenth-century alliterative revival, as exemplified by William Langland’s Piers Plowman, and like Langland, the poet employs the modes of dream-vision and allegory. Pearl offers the vision of a man grieving for the loss of a child, who is taken on a journey of theological enlightenment; Cleanness carries its theme through a sweep of biblical narrative to emphasize the moral point, while Patience teaches the virtue by means of exemplar. These three all deal with Christian beliefs and morality from what many see as a clerical point of view, but what of the last piece? Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is ostensibly a secular narrative which takes chivalric romance in a new direction, exploring chivalric ideals in a landscape where such ideals are challenged and the language of ‘courtly love’ proves wanting.

Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are perhaps the best known of the four, and each has attracted a substantial body of scholarship. However, studies of the four poems together are not as plentiful. The aim of this course is to read and analyze each of these poems in their manuscript sequence, to uncover what (if any) literary evidence exists that might allow us to view them in dialogue, in order to interrogate their generic modes and their political, social and religious concerns.

Note: We will read the poems in the original, but the textbook comes with a CD-ROM containing a prose translation by the editors.

Text: The Poems of the Pearl-Manuscript, ed. Andrew Waldron and Malcolm Andrew. Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies. Liverpool University Press, 2008 (ISBN 9780859897914).
If you purchase the text online, make sure you get the one with the red pentangle on the cover.

Evaluation: Essay, seminar presentation, final paper.

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.

The historical account we will build of the academic institutionalization of humanities research and publication and our theoretical understanding of “publicity” (i.e., the condition of being public) will be foundational for our experiments with the re-mobilization of humanities scholarship—experiments that will also draw on recent and past initiatives in public scholarship. Throughout the seminar, we will engage in serious intellectual play designed to teach our scholarship in the humanities how to move.

Texts: TBA

Evaluation
Journal 25
3-minute presentation 10
Research paper (10 pages approx) 25
Public scholarship project 25
Participation 15

Description: Improvisation in the arts carries a historical legacy of interest across disciplines, and improvisation and its synonyms are gaining ground as tactics of political resistance, action, and subversion. Improvisation might be said to encompass a variety of multifaceted and sometimes contradictory modes: unpredictability, spontaneity, reflexivity, opacity, aleatory action, automaticity, bricolage, “making do,” and many other functions that route us beyond intentionality and into a place of radical possibility, conviviality, and resourcefulness/richness. Improvisation also possesses multiple genealogies sometimes working at cross-purposes, involving elements of freedom and automation, or spontaneous impulse and rehearsed reflex. Improvisation figures widely in a range of art forms – from nonwhite, nonwestern forms like jazz and salsa, to Happenings and other avant-garde performance practices, to High Modernist literature and classical music. The works considered in this course will foster a broad and general understanding of the contributions of this form to artistic movements across time.

Because improvisation can operate at the subconscious level, it can be said to be an affective modality, but it can also be “trained” or structured, as in disciplines like jazz performance and improv comedy. In this course, we will explore the multiple histories and new frontiers of improvisation across literature, theatre, performance, film, visual art, and music. We will also examine the increasing adoption of improv theatre discourses and practices in corporate and medical service communities. Alongside our discussions, readings, and essays, we will include practical exercises in improvisation so as to ask: what are the 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 rather 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?”

Texts: Possible readings include (in no particular order, on purpose):

• Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation (2013).
• Georgina Born, Eric Lewis, and William Straw, eds., Improvisation and Social Aesthetics (2017)
          - More generally, several works in the Duke University Press series “Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice”
            (https://www.dukeupress.edu/books/browse/by-series/series-detail?IdNumber=2880420)
• Rebecca Caines and Ajay Heble, eds. The Improvisation Studies Reader: Spontaneous Acts (2015)
• Rob Wallace, Improvisation and the Making of American Literary Modernism (2010)
• Viola Spolin, Improvisation for the Theatre: A Handbook of Teaching and Directing Techniques (1963)
• Bob Kulhan and Chuck Crisafulli, Getting to “Yes, And…:” The Art of Business Improv (2017)
• Brent Hayes Edwards, Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (2017)
• Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003)
• Clayton D. Drinko, Theatrical Improvisation, Consciousness, and Cognition (2013)
• Mike Sell, Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism (2008)
• Allan Kaprow, Jean-Jacques Lebel, and Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai, Assemblage, Environments and Happenings (1966)
• Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere, eds., Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader (2003)

Evaluation: To be confirmed.

Description: This course examines crucial issues confronting Indigenous peoples in Canada today. By looking at fiction, prose, and poetry published by Métis, Inuit, and First Nations authors over the last decade, we will explore writing that challenges the power dynamics inherent in Canadian practices, policies, and laws. The course will foreground the ways in which literary works represent and interrogate the social, cultural, and historical challenges that mark Indigenous-settler relations. In this context, it will also trace the effects of colonialism and racism on literary production in Canada by looking at how specific historical experiences have shaped contemporary representations of Indigenous culture. We will read works that allow us to better understand the legacy of the Indian Act, the residential school system, and the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015). Background information concerning the historical underpinnings of contemporary Indigenous issues will be based on works by influential writers and theorists, including Daniel Francis, Michelle Good, Tomson Highway, Thomas King, Eden Robinson, Tanya Tagaq, Richard Wagamese, and Joshua Whitehead. We will also look at the work of several indigenous artists, including Christie Belcourt, Kent Monkman, Norval Morrisseau, Nadia Myre, and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun.

Texts (tentative):

• Francis, Daniel. The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture. 
• Good, Michelle. Five Little Indians. 
• Highway, Tomson. Kiss of the Fur Queen. 
• King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. 
• Robinson, Eden. Son of a Trickster. 
• Tagaq, Tanya. Split Tooth. 
• Wagamese, Richard. Indian Horse. 
• Whitehead, Joshua. Jonny Appleseed.

Evaluation (tentative) : Participation in discussions, 20%; series of short response papers, 20%; oral class presentation, 20%; final research paper, 40%.

Description: Small-scale publishing has played a crucial role in the creation of Canadian literature. Often run by writers themselves, the small press operates at the fringe of commercial publishing, without much (if any) office space, staff, or marketing, and the little remuneration offered in exchange for a manuscript is far less than minimum wage. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the small press is greatly responsible for the making of Canadian authors, especially poets – connecting them with a local public, drawing them into an editorial relationship (usually their first), and giving them the validation of a properly published book bearing their name. The purpose of this course is to explore the strategies, alliances, and compromises made by Canadian writers and publishers at this intersection of literary ambition and material constraint. What conditions have shaped the literary small press in Canada? What sorts of careers have authors who published with small presses been able to pursue? Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, we will examine cases of local, self-, micro-, subscription, coterie, and subsidized publishing in order to understand the origins and evolution of the small press in Canada and its position within the international field of English-language publishing. In the 1840s, John Lovell of Montreal published The Literary Garland, the first Canadian literary magazine to pay its contributors, supporting authors such as John Richardson, Susanna Moodie, and Charles Sangster. In the 1880 and ’90s, Bliss Carman, living in New England, edited little magazines in which he published Canadian writers, while his fellow Confederation poet, Archibald Lampman, living in Ottawa, found his way up the steep slope of self-publishing a book. In the 1920s, the Ryerson Press began to carve out an original literary publishing program within and against its wider operations as a distributor of foreign books to the Canadian market. This initiative, born out of the nationalism of the First World War, manifested in the Ryerson Poetry Chap-Books, a long-running series that not only gave Anne Marriott, Dorothy Livesay, Al Purdy, and other Canadian poets some of their first books, but also served as a model for the subsidized small press. Since 1970, with the rise of state sponsorship of book publishing, Véhicule Press has emerged as the leading English literary publisher in Montreal, and our survey of Canadian poetry and small-press publishing will culminate here, with a behind-the-scenes look into its operations, including, possibly, a guest presentation by the publisher. Secondary readings in the history of the book, such as recent monographs by Sandra Campbell and Kirsten MacLeod, will orient and contextualize our effort better to understand and describe the small press in Canada and its impact on the possibility of Canadian literature.

Texts (tentative): 

• Selections from The Literary Garland
• Charles Sangster, The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay
• Archibald Lampman, Among the Millet, and Other Poems
• Anne Marriott, The Wind Our Enemy and Salt Marsh
• Louis Dudek, The Searching Image
• Asa Boxer, Skullduggery
• Susan Glickman, What We Carry
• James Arthur, The Suicide’s Son
• Secondary readings in the history of the book

Evaluation: Seminar presentation (15%), bibliographical essay (30%), research paper, (40%), active participation in every class meeting (15%).

Description: A forum for inquiry into The Faerie Queene (reading Books III, IV, and VI) and Paradise Lost, with about half the course devoted to each of Spenser and Milton. The central topics of those highly complementary parts of The Faerie Queene are, respectively, love, friendship, and courtesy. For each text, initial sessions will introduce its literary, socio-political, and intellectual contexts, and outline effective methods of original primary research. These discussions will emphasize current issues in Spenser and Milton studies while also providing a toolbox of techniques for devising and supporting original interventions. According to their own particular interests, seminar members will determine their own topics for seminar presentations and hence related discussions, as well as discussion topics in the final seminar session. Insofar as possible, presentations will be grouped in a series of informal “conference sessions” on related matters according to a schedule that we will consultatively establish (bearing in mind the diverse commitments of seminar members) at the start of the course. This format aims to establish a diverse, open, and responsive seminar.

Texts: I recommend the Longman Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost because of their very helpful annotations, which appear on the same page as the lines discussed. There is also a Course Reader. All these texts are available at the Word Bookstore.

Evaluation: Two seminar presentations at 45% each, one on Spenser and the other on Milton seminar attendance and participation 10%.

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.

Description:The course will explore the remarkable Romantic turn to the nonhuman during the era that saw the invention of modern geology, the rise of industrial capitalism, the institution of global warfare, and the appropriation of new colonial natures. Our diverse investigations of the nonhuman will encompass apocalyptic plague, eternal wanderers, wild weather, chilling phantoms, revolutionary rocks, and sensitive plants. Instead of delimiting the nonhuman and the human as separate spheres, however, we will trace their mutual construction and imbrication as ecologies, atmospheres, things, and networks. This seminar will thus necessarily interrogate so-called universal theories of nature and the historical relations between landscape and laboring-class, feminized, and non-Western bodies.

We will survey newer identifications of Romanticism with the Anthropocene and what Anahid Nersessian has recently termed “the calamity form”—as well as more familiar associations of the period with “nature poetry,” “natural supernaturalism,” and aesthetic theories of the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque. Our inquiries into the nonhuman will range across the diverse array of genres, modes, and traditions that collectively sought to redefine the borderlines between nature and culture, body and machine, country and city, and life and death: pastoral, anti-pastoral, georgic, sketch, descriptive poem, chivalric romance, elegy, botanical epic, prophetic text, and locodescriptive lyric. Our intellectual forays will also require the re-evaluation of literary and ecological forms of uncultivated trash and debris: the gothic fictions, vulgar ballads, rural tunes, and fragment poems that themselves variously represent wastelands and common greens by way of formal fracture, excess, openness, and/or decomposition. Within these forms, we will examine relevant figures and tropes: personification, apostrophe, pathetic fallacy, catachresis, symbol, analogy, caesura, and others. Parting ways with the so-called egotistical sublime, we will discover what Bo Earle terms “Post-personal Romanticism” in the period’s poetics of impersonality and posthumous vision.

Finally, we will trace how Romantic writers’ diverse engagements with what Jane Bennett terms “vibrant matter” pose active challenges to anthropocentric definitions of ontology, action, catastrophe, and form. Moreover, our conversations will explore how Romantic theories (Darwin’s evolutionary poetics, Wordsworth’s conservationism, Keats’s chameleon poet) and formal innovations (Smith’s botanical verse, Clare’s descriptive poetry, Radcliffe’s atmospheres, Blake’s illuminated books) resonate with the recent turn toward deep time, the wild, animal rights, recessive action, postcolonial ecology, and environmental justice in contemporary critical theory. Together, we will attempt to map the contested ground of Romantic literature’s alternative visions of nonhuman spirit and substance.

Texts (provisional): 

• William Blake, The Book of Urizen, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion
• Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year
• Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
• Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer
• Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest 
• Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey
• Walter Scott, The Lady of the Lake
• John Keats, Isabella: Or, The Pot of Basil and letter to Woodhouse (“the chameleon poet”)
• William Wordsworth, Guide to the Lakes and selected poems
• Felicia Hemans, from The Forest Sanctuary And Other Poems
• Erasmus Darwin, selections from The Botanic Garden
• Charlotte Smith, Beachy Head and selections from Elegiac Sonnets
• John Clare, selections from Poems of the Northborough Period, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, The Village Minstrel and Other Poems, and The Shepherd’s Calendar
• Ann Yearsley, A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade and from Poems, on Several Occasions and The Rural Lyre
• Selected essays/book chapters from some of the following critics: Alan Bewell, Donna Haraway, Theresa Kelley, Raymond Williams, Anne-Lise François, Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, Geoffrey Hartman, Rob Nixon, Ian Baucom, Ursula Heise, Kevis Goodman, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Tobias Menely, Jayne Lewis, Marjorie Levinson, Denise Gigante, Siobhan Carroll, Noah Heringman, Mary Favret, Michel Serres, Anahid Nersessian, Amanda Jo Goldstein, and Heather Keenleyside.

Evaluation: Participation (15%), reading responses (20%), presentation (15%), seminar paper (50%).

Description: Literature represents the limits and possibilities of human rights. Via a series of weekly discussions, this course will consider the emergence of human rights as a legal category in the twentieth century, which culminates, at least in a mid-century iteration, in the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Although that document is aspirational in its ideals rather than enforceable in practice, it sets parameters for discussions of justice for individuals, regardless of their nationality, citizenship, statelessness, race, sex, beliefs, or other criteria. In addition to the UDHR, we will consider legal documents such as the British Nationality Act 1948, the UN Convention against Torture, and the Geneva Protocol regarding civilians during times of war. We will question the utility and validity of reading legal documents against literary texts. This course will therefore draw upon law and history, but it will presume that human rights are a lived experience as well as problems in literary narrative. The majority of texts on this syllabus are novels, yet we will also read some non-fiction (Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, Philip Gourevitch) and plays (Samuel Beckett). Some visual material, particularly photographs, will be discussed (from the Spanish Civil War and the opening of Dachau concentration camp). A wide variety of topics ought to surface during discussions: refugees, dignity, torture, race, war, genocide, empathy, intervention, nationality, liberty, bare life, temporality, humanitarianism, witnessing, legality, judgment, internal dislocation, and so forth. The readings are not designed to limit discussion or set boundaries for human rights; instead, primary and secondary texts should serve as templates for application to other literary examples, regardless of national origin or genre. Contextual and theoretical readings by Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Ian Baucom, Seyla Benhabib, Matthew Hart, Joseph Slaughter, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and others will supplement primary texts.

Texts: (this list is provisional; a final list will be available in July 2021)

• Nadine Gordimer, July’s People
• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
• Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat
• Caryl Phillips, Foreigners
• Rebecca West, A Train of Powder
• Storm Jameson, A Cup of Tea for Mr. Thorgill
• John le Carré, Mission Song
• George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
• Primo Levi, If This is a Man
• Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon
• Graham Greene, The Quiet American
• Samuel Beckett, Rockaby, Happy Days, Not I, Rough for Radio II
• Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
• Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies

Evaluation: Short paper 25%; long paper 60%; attendance and participation 15%.

“It does not permit itself to be read.”
(Poe, “The Man of the Crowd”)

Description: Intensive study of a diverse range of American literary writings that attempt, over the course of the long nineteenth century, to develop new aesthetic forms appropriate to expression of new modes of consciousness associated with the experience of life in the modern city. Readings will include selected works of poetry, non-fiction prose, novels, short stories, highbrow literature and pop-cultural expression by authors such as: Franklin (Autobiography); Hawthorne (“My Kinsman, Major Molineux”); Poe (“Man of the Crowd,” “Cask of Amontillado,” detective stories); Melville (“Bartleby”); Thompson (Venus in Boston) or Lippard (another “city mystery” writer); Whitman (“Song of Myself” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”); Cable (“Jean-ah Poquelin”); Crane (Maggie: Girl of the Streets); Dreiser (Sister Carrie), Alger (Ragged Dick, a rags-to-riches story for boys); Riis (How the Other Half Lives); Chopin (“A Pair of Silk Stockings”); James (“The Jolly Corner,” American Scene); Wharton (Age of Innocence), and others (perhaps L. Frank Baum, Howells, the diarist George Templeton Strong, Holmes). At the same time, we will study diverse critical analyses of the city in literature, and theoretical works (often coming out of Walter Benjamin’s seminal studies) defining the dynamics of an emerging "city consciousness": the base value of mobility linking mental movements to the flow of urban crowds; the power of clothes and commodities in a culture of “conspicuous consumption” and “image management”; the stress on aesthetic gifts for show and performance necessary for self-fashioning in the social theater; and the desperate search for new modes of literacy that might satisfy the felt need to read city experience or to master the circulation of print in the literary marketplace of an emerging mass culture. To deepen our sense of the urban context for these primary writings, we may make side trips to explore secondary readings surveying the cultural history of urban crowds, urban periodicals, flânerie, bohemian enclaves, Olmsted’s urban parks, shows and amusements, arcades and department stores, world's fairs, museums, hotels, tenements, and also parallel developments in other arts related to the urban scene (painting, photography, panorama, cinema).

Texts: TBA—selected from among the authors mentioned above.

Evaluation: Tentative: Participation in discussions, 20%; series of short response papers, 20%; oral class presentation, 15%; final research paper, 45%.

Description: This course is a hybrid seminar/ artistic workshop that invites students to create their own non-conventional portraits and self-portraits in response to the literary and cinematic texts that we read and watch. Our focus will be experimental novels, poetry collections, and films that challenge conventional understandings of autobiography and portraiture. This will include fictional autobiographies in which the author masquerades as their subject; portraits that intentionally depersonalize or otherwise objectify their subjects; and self-portraits which rely upon the construction of intertextual surrogates a way of exploring the porous boundaries between reality and fiction. We examine these texts in order to explore how the boundaries between subject and object, and self and other collapse in poetic investigations of the relational nature of subjectivity. In response to these texts, students will be asked to experiment with multimedia formats to create their own experimental portraits and self-portraits. While formal artistic training is not required for admission into the course, enthusiasm to experiment with both literary and cinematic form is necessary.

Books:

• Martin Buber, I & Thou
• Chantal Akerman, My Mother Laughs
• Amra Brooks, California
• Anne Carson, The Autobiography of Red
• Lynn Crosbie, Life is About Losing Everything
• Nick Flynn, The Ticking is the Bomb
• Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
• Maggie Nelson, Jane
• Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family
• Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Films & Visual Art

• Chantal Akerman, News from Home & No Home Movie
• Laurie Anderson, Heart of a Dog
• Stan Brakhage, Window Water Baby Moving
• Sophie Calle, Autobiographies
• Shirley Clarke, Portrait of Jason
• Jonathan Caouette, Tarnation
• Maya Deren, Meshes of the Afternoon
• Hollis Frampton (nostalgia)
• Su Friedrich, The Ties that Bind
• Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
• Barbara Hammer, Jane Brakhage, Women I Love, and Audience
• Jim McBride, David Holzman’s Diary
• Jonas Mekas, As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
• Marlon Riggs, Tongues Untied & Non, je ne regrette rien
• Carolee Schneemann, Fuses & Kitsch’s Last Meal
• Agnes Varda, Uncle Yanko & Varda par Agnes
• Andy Warhol, selected Screen Tests
• Carrie Mae Weems, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried

Evaluation:
Participation: 15%
Literary fragments: 15%
Photo essay, slideshow or video (experimental portrait or auto-portrait): 30%
Final creative project: 40%

Format: Seminar/ Workshop