Current Courses

Description: Under Elizabeth I, England began to imagine itself as a political and cultural rival to the ancient empires of Athens and Greece. It therefore needed a great national poet to represent its power to the world, and the ambitious and brilliant Edmund Spenser stepped in. The poetry he wrote is deliberately archaic and difficult; it is highly indebted to classical writings as well as those of contemporary France and Italy, takes place in fantastical worlds of shepherds, knights, and faeries, and yet engages deeply with late 16th-century English concerns and created the foundation for a modern poetic voice that would then be further developed by Milton and the Romantics. In this course, we will read some of Spenser’s early works, especially The Shepheardes Calendar and Muiopotmos, but concentrate on his great unfinished epic, The Faerie Queene. A new kind of protean epic, the Faerie Queene seems to change in essence in each book, so that the reader of Book 1 might well wonder how book 6 could be part of the same work. We will consider how and why Spenser’s mutable text uses his convoluted stanza and range of genres including pastoral and romance to represent Elizabethan politics and religion, and address questions such as the nature of tradition, meaning of gender, the ethics of colonialism, and the meaning of change itself. Spenser creates a complex world in which the Queen’s virginity is both celebrated and a national disaster; in which English domination of Ireland unleashes a brutality that disrupts the fantasy world of faerie; and in which historical change is a source of both hope and despair.

Texts: Complete Works of Spenser (editions TBA)

Evaluation: short paper (close reading) 20%; class participation 30%; final paper (research and interpretive) 50%

Format: class participation may include short in-class assignments

Description: Some narratives are designed around the central problem of seduction. Other narratives explain the consequences of seduction—as a justification or a recrimination. In certain cases, seduction occurs from motives of revenge, misogyny, aggression, and, of course, passion. Why is seduction linked to narrative? What happens when seduction occurs across class lines? Does homosexual seduction differ from heterosexual seduction, and if so, how? What transpires when an older woman falls in love with a younger man, or an older man and a younger woman? What ethics are implicit within narratives of seduction? To some degree, psychoanalysis, narrative theory, and queer theory will frame our inquiries into the narrative representation of seduction. Although novels might be defined by pervasive “love interest,” it is possible to imagine a character entirely unmoved by desire and therefore free from the ensnarements of seduction, which raises a question about the conjunction of seduction and sexuality, as well as the conjunction of seduction and love. Beginning with Freud’s theory that children attempt to seduce their parents (a theory that Freud himself subsequently renounced), we will examine a range of texts that investigate the lexicon of seduction. In the novels under consideration in this course, we will encounter instances of insincere seduction, foiled seduction, adultery, cheating, pregnancy, sapphism, inversion, virginity, celibacy, compulsive Don Juanism, indifference, sadism, obsession, intimacy, transitory crushes, flirtation, and the unshakeable template that first love sets for subsequent case histories of love. Theoretical readings will include pieces by Adam Phillips, Mladan Dolar, Georg Simmel, Jane Gallup, Janice Radway, Peter Brooks, and others.

Texts: (this list offers some possibilities of what will appear on the syllabus; a final list will be available in July 2026)

• Alain de Botton, Essays in Love
• Thomas Hardy, The Well-Beloved
• Sigmund Freud, Dora
• D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love
• Colette, Chéri
• Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
• James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
• Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt
• Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance
• Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You
• Sally Rooney, Normal People
• Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

Evaluation: short paper or research project 30%; long paper 50%; attendance and participation 20%

Description: The 1930s marked a period of massive change for both the U.S. as a whole and its film industry. The Great Depression that ravaged the nation’s economy also threatened to destroy the Hollywood studios, forcing them to re-organize themselves less as family businesses and more as modern corporations. The labour radicalism ignited by the Depression sparked union drives within Hollywood as well. Concern over the influence of films on America’s youth prompted the expansion and stricter enforcement of the industry’s Production Code, which imposed multiple constraints on both film form and content. In addition, Hollywood’s transition to synchronized sound necessitated a series of changes, both technological and aesthetic, that transformed the vocabulary of cinema. Operating from an understanding of these multiple social, industrial, and aesthetic contexts, this course will examine several different film genres and cycles that attempted to address—directly and indirectly—the Great Depression as it was underway. Of key interest will be questions of narrative form: how did classical Hollywood narration—whose causal structure is driven by the agency of its individual protagonists—represent a social world that dramatized the ineffectual nature of personal agency in the face of economic collapse? The course will pay special attention to genres and cycles that treated forms of life whose position in the social order was precarious—the gangster film, the fallen woman cycle, the social problem film—while also examining film styles whose relationship to the Depression may seem more tenuous, such as screwball comedy and the musical.

Required films:

• Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, First National/Warner Bros., 1931)
• Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, Paramount, 1932)
• American Madness (Frank Capra, Columbia, 1932)
• Prosperity (Sam Wood, MGM, 1932)
• I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy, Warner Bros., 1932)
• Wild Boys of the Road (William A. Wellman, First National/Warner Bros., 1933)
• Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, Warner Bros., 1933)
• 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, Warner Bros., 1933)
• Gabriel Over the White House (Gregory La Cava, MGM, 1933)
• Stand Up and Cheer! (Hamilton MacFadden, Fox Film, 1934)
• It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, Columbia, 1934)
• Our Daily Bread (King Vidor, King W. Vidor Productions/United Artists, 1934)
• Black Fury (Michael Curtiz, First National/Warner Bros., 1935)
• My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, Universal, 1936)
• Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, Charles Chaplin Productions/United Artists, 1936)
• Fury (Fritz Lang, Loew’s/MGM, 1936)
• Marked Woman (Lloyd Bacon/Michael Curtiz, Warner Bros./First National, 1937)
• Black Legion (Archie Mayo, Warner Bros., 1937)
• Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, Paramount, 1937)
• The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1940)
• Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges, Paramount, 1941)

Required readings:

Eric Rauchway, The Great Depression & The New Deal: A Very Short Introduction
Essays by Robert Sklar, Richard Maltby, Lawrence Levine, Victoria Sturtevant, Danae Clark, Martin Rubin, Henry Jenkins, Thomas Schatz, Michael Denning, Michae Rogin, Amy Louise Wood, Rita Barnard, and others.

Format: seminar, weekly screenings (usually, 2 films a week)

Description: One word for diary, now sadly obsolete, is “ephemeris.” Its usages include both keeping a record of daily life and predicting how that life will be. (Another obsolete usage: “A book in which the places of the heavenly bodies and other astronomical matters are tabulated in advance for each day of a certain period; an astronomical almanac.” [OED]). This course takes ephemeris as a conceptual framework for encountering and responding to Romantic poetry. Each class we will read a poem or poems that we have not seen before—poems that were not assigned prior class—without any contextual materials. That is, we will initially meet poems as “words on a page” that wholly contain the conditions of possibility for their interpretation. Of course, our interpretations will also be animated by what we already know as individuals and as a class about poetry—about literary allusions, formal dynamics, canonical authors, and the like. As a return to something like I.A. Richards’s Practical Criticism (1929), this approach will emphasize close reading as the primary mode of engagement, encouraging us to explore and clarify our readerly responses, cognitive and affective, to works of art. After class, readings will be retroactively provided and students will be tasked with writing weekly responses to the poems both “in and of themselves” and in context. In this way, the course asks us to record, in order to examine, ephemeral forms of recording and prediction. What do we gain and what do we lose by the attempt to preserve literary interpretations that will inevitably be reshaped, or even supplanted, by author biography, material history, etc.? What can we discover about Romanticism, as a literary and intellectual movement, from readings that begin with poetry rather than history? What would it mean to embrace “guesswork” in literary analysis, as a means of engagement without recourse to online fact-checking? In this way, the course asks us to examine what we think we know, what we can guess, and what we do know, about poems as aesthetic objects and objects of criticism.

In addition to attending regularly scheduled classes, students will be required to attend, in person, at least two extra-curricular writing sessions held at different times during the semester (exact dates and times TBD)

Texts: coursepack

Evaluation: in-class engagement (may include activities such as participation in discussions, writing prompts, and mini-presentations) (30%); “ephemeris” critical responses (30%); final research essay (includes precis and annotated bibliography) (40%)

Format: seminar discussion

Description: What is an archive? And what is the place of “the archive” in literary studies? Or in literature? In this seminar, we will approach these questions in theory and method. We will trace the historical and institutional formation of archives, examining the power dynamics they reproduce and the issues of provenance that trouble them. We will investigate methods for the keeping and transmission of knowledge that have existed outside of traditional archives, and the possibilities and perils of impermanency. And we will examine where archives appear in, inform, or form contemporary literary works. Throughout our readings, we will ask the question: what are the formal boundaries of an/the archive? What can, and cannot, be housed in an archive? Readings will include works by: Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Brent Hayes Edwards, Saidiya Hartman, Ann Cvetkovich, Natalie Diaz, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Arlette Farge, Carolyn Steedman, Diana Taylor, Robin Coste Lewis, Ocean Vuong, Valeria Luiselli, Namwali Serpell, Cherise Smith, and Eunsong Kim.

Selected texts (subject to change):

• Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past (1995)
• Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” (2008)
• _____, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019)
• Michel Foucault, “The Lives of Infamous Men,” (1977)
• Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (1995)
• Robin Coste Lewis, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness (2022)
• Namwali Serpell, The Furrows (2021)
• Natalie Diaz, When My Brother was an Aztec (2012)
• Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive (2019)
• Eunsong Kim, The Politics of Collecting (2024)
• Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire (2003)

Evaluation: seminar presentation (15%), short essay (30%), research paper (40%), active participation in every class meeting (15%)

Format: seminar

Prerequisites: You must be a graduate student OR an undergraduate Honours student to register for this course. In all other cases, you need special permission from the instructor to register.

Expected Student Preparation: Please note that it is both a critical studies seminar AND a creative workshop. Some fluency in critical theory, cultural studies and/or art history is expected. Background in visual art, performance, poetry, dance, or music is encouraged but not required.

Description: This hybrid seminar/workshop is designed to:

1) to teach students to respond critically and creatively to experimental art, film, and literature.
2) enable students to create experimental forms of writing and visual media that responds to the texts we study.

Calling all creative misfits who long to engage in forms of critical thinking that expand beyond the traditional scholarly essay! By focusing on multi-media artworks that interrogate and undermine conventional forms of representation through their contrapuntal use of image, sound, and text, we shall explore how meaning in contemporary art is often generated across multiple registers. Over the course of the semester, students will be introduced to important examples of experimental film and video, poetry, and art from the 1960s to the present. In addition to writing critically about these works, students will be asked to experiment with some of the artistic strategies we study to create their own self-directed artistic, literary, critical, or curatorial projects. In other words, students will not only be expected to discuss, think, and write about the works we study, but to design and execute creative projects that respond meaningfully to them. Occasionally, local and/or international artists will be invited to class to give special seminars and workshops. On other occasions, the class will meet outside of our normal meeting time and place to participate in screenings, exhibitions, and performances.

Films and artworks:

• Puce Moment (Kenneth Anger, US, 1949)
• Blonde Cobra (Ken Jacobs, US, 1963)
• Christmas on Earth (Barbara Rubin, US, 1963)
• Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, US, 1963)
• Wavelength (Michael Snow, US, 1967)
• T.O.U.C.H.I.N.G. (Paul Sharits, US, 1968)
• Fly (Yoko Ono, US, 1971)
• (nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, US, 1971)
• Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, France, 1983)
• The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (Nan Goldin, US, 1985)
• Tongues Untied (Marlon Riggs, US, 1989)
• Blue (Derek Jarman, UK, 1993)
• As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (Jonas Mekas, US, 2000)
• Notes on Blue (Moyra Davey, US, 2015)
• Love is the Message, The Message is Death (Arthur Jafa, US, 2016)
• Bird Calls (David Baumflek, Canada, 2018)
• Altiplano (Malena Szlam, Canada, 2018)
• earthearthearth (Daichi Saito, Canada, 2021)
• Selected films by Sky Hopinka, including Lore (2019), When You’re Lost in the Rain (2018) and I’ll Remember You as You Were Not as What You’ll Become (2016)

Evaluation:

participation: 15%
short form writing: 15 %
experimental slideshow (text + image): 20 %
video portrait: 20%
final project 30 %
(can be scholarly essay, experimental film or video, or other critical, creative or curatorial project)

Format: seminar, workshop, student “crit,” and mandatory weekly screening

Description: William Langland’s vast, protean Piers Plowman, written and revised over the last quarter of the fourteenth century, would come to inspire protesting laborers in 1381 and any number of religious reformists who found the plowman “Piers” to be a fitting mouthpiece for their critiques of institutional ills throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This embryonic allegorical poem begins in a “fair field full of folk” and quickly explodes into a troubling examination of the causes of injustice, societal division, and a quest to learn—through a process of intense questioning—the best way to live. In the process, Langland explores the workings of the English legal system, theories of consent, contemporary educational systems, corrupt and incorrupt authority, the just treatment of the poor, faculty psychology, natural philosophy, and virtually every branch and level of medieval society. Though the poem does envision the betterment of society, its outlook remains grim. Utopian vision emerges momentarily, only to be undermined in an enormously complex and disquieting series of visions that refuse to “arrive” at a solution or static program for living. Its protagonists experience and reflect on suffering and injustice, even as they imagine alternatives. The series of dreams and waking moments that make up Piers Plowman thus present visions “for”, but not necessarily “of”, a just society, drawing on sophisticated traditions of theological, political, philosophical, and scientific learning.

Topics to be explored include, but are not limited to, the just treatment of the poor; labor conditions; excess and material possessions; authority and corruption; education and literacy; law and justice; tyranny and revolt; debt and salvation; sin and mercy; and the faculties of the soul. Students in this seminar will read Piers Plowman and a series of poems in the “Plowman Tradition” in the original Middle English. No prior experience with the language is necessary or assumed; portions of several classes will be spent developing proficiency in Middle English.

Texts (provisional):

• William Langland, Piers Plowman (emphasis on the B-Text, with passages from the A, C, and Z texts)
• Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede
• The Ploughman’s Tale
• The Praier and Complaynte of the Ploweman unto Christe
• Mum and the Sothsegger
• Jack Upland, Friar Daw’s Reply, and Upland’s Rejoinder

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

Format: seminar

Description: How did Shakespeare come to occupy his preeminent place in English literature, culture and society? Shakespeare’s fame waned after his death and in 1660 he was a little-known dramatist, but by 1814 a character in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park could declare Shakespeare “part of an Englishman’s constitution” and the idea of Shakespeare’s cultural capital remains strong today. This course will explore how Shakespeare achieved this reputation. It will therefore be relevant to students with interests in the eighteenth century, Shakespeare and the early modern period, drama and theatre studies, celebrity culture, reception studies, memorialisation, and iconicity.

The roots of Bardolatry can be traced to the eighteenth century, a period in which society became fascinated both by the man and his works and in which Shakespeare was deliberately constructed as a national hero, the archetype of theatrical and literary culture, and the arbiter of all things English. We will examine the phenomenon of Bardolatry in the period 1660-1769 by analysing a variety of texts, including some of the following:

• Adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays which sought to make the works conform to new cultural and aesthetic standards (such as Nahum Tate’s “happy ending” King Lear).
• Editing and criticism of the works which often advanced a separate agenda (including Elizabeth Montagu’s Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear, which mobilised the Bard against the French in the service of English nationalism).
• Discoveries and forgeries of Shakespeare plays (such as Lewis Theobald’s Double Falshood, an adaptation of the lost Shakespeare play, Cardenio).
• Performances of Shakespearean drama which portrayed his characters in line with eighteenth-century behavioural norms (such as David Garrick’s sentimentalised portrayal of Leontes in The Winter’s Tale as a “man of feeling”).
• Representations of Shakespeare in visual culture (including paintings, sculptures, and souvenirs of the man, his works and the actors who performed his characters).
• Social groups who promoted appreciation of Shakespeare (such as the Shakespeare Ladies Club, a group of women who petitioned theatre managers to stage more Shakespeare plays).
• Cultural events which popularised the Bard (including the most (in)famous event of eighteenth-century Bardolatry, David Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee).

Texts (provisional):

• The texts studied will be made available on myCourses.
• We will also be studying several of Shakespeare’s plays, therefore a good edition of the complete works (e.g. Oxford, Norton, Riverside) or of the individual plays (e.g. Arden, Cambridge, Oxford, Penguin) is recommended.
• We will make good use of the essays and resources in Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) (available as an ebook through the McGill library catalogue).

Evaluation:
participation and weekly writing (20%);
research presentation (20%);
paper proposal and annotated bibliography (10%);
paper (50%)

Format: discussion seminar

Description: As a field, Modernist literary studies, focused on early twentieth-century anglophone experimental writing, has changed shape significantly over the past thirty years, in large part through a major wave of archival work of these decades—a kind of “archive fever”—which defined the “New Modernist Studies” and expanded and diversified understandings of what was associated with literary modernism. As Ron Schuchard suggested at the turn of the twenty-first century, there was no more exciting time to be working in the area—as new concepts of modernism emerged from the archives: a wealth of hitherto unpublished material became more widely accessible, destabilizing received conceptions of both what counted as modernist and what “modernism” came to represent.

This new availability took various forms: as a moment of heightened canon debates, these years were marked by a nexus of intentional efforts to recover from the cultural archives many writers and texts once integrally part of early twentieth-century modernist culture, yet generally subordinated or erased by the later academic consensus about the range and definition of “modernism.” Moreover, surfacing from the archives was a trove of material from what are sometimes called “grey canons”— contextual and paratextual material such as relevant manuscripts, letters, and historical records, which contributed considerably to revising (as Adrienne Rich puts this, “re-visioning”) how commentators were interpreting the inherited texts associated with modernism.

With this first wave of modernist archival work recently past, how might it be used to reassess what “modernist literature” entails—and approach it newly? How might we draw upon material from the cultural archive to intervene in received narratives about both modernist literature and the early twentieth-century modernist cultures from which it emerged? How might the idea of the “cultural archive” be used more broadly, in a Benjaminian sense, to read modernist novels and poems themselves as “archives” of thought and feeling? This course reflects on what Robert Spoo calls “new riches” from the modernist archives, considering now these might help to extend and renovate our ideas of modernism—and read experimental modernist texts with fresh eyes.

Texts (provisional): Readings will include work by Patrick Anderson, T.S. Eliot, H.D., Zora Neale Hurston, James Joyce, Marianne Moore, P.K. Page, Ezra Pound, Muriel Rukeyser, and Virginia Woolf.

Evaluation (provisional): brief essay (20%); book review (15%) oral presentation (20%); longer essay (30%); participation (15%)

Format: seminar

Description: Sleep is an experience, and a form of intimacy, that we often don’t trust. Our own testimony of sleep is undercut by a lack of conscious access to the experience itself--we can only report back from the margins of experience, impacting credibility and expertise even when it comes to our own bodies. Sleep confounds normative epistemologies and forms of control. A recently identified sleep disorder--”orthosomnia” (Abbott et al 2017), or “straight sleep” –names how “poor” sleepers attempt to conform to the biometric data of sleep monitors in order to measure up to social norms; poor sleep is an antisocial state. We are both experts of our somatic experience of sleep, and yet access to our sleeping selves often relies on the perceptions of human and technological “others.” In sleep, we are our own intimate stranger: our autonomy is dispossessed and redistributed, and we become radically vulnerable in a way that requires social forms of care and collective concern for sleep’s tender thresholds. Looking at sleep, exhaustion and fatigue, this seminar examines how the sleeper’s relation to the social since the 1970s, as medicalization, metrics, media and monitoring have experimented with the ability to make sleep “actionable” in the service of something other than rest. Especially attentive to how sleep has increasingly become a site of work, we will also look at the critiques and resistances of attempts to exploit our off hours. We will read recent works exploring the rise of 24/7 cultures, the history of sleep medicine, and aesthetic and political mobilizations around sleep equity, or the uneven distributions of rest and recuperation in society. We will explore how artists, scientists and technologies have sought to make sleep representable, shareable, exploitable and protected. Through late 20th and 21st century theorists and media/performance artists exploring multimedia and intersectional approaches to sleep as a sociable form across minoritarian lifeworlds, we will trace the somatics, politics and aesthetics of sleep’s intimate opacity.

Texts: Possible readings and screenings may include:

• Jonathan Sterne, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment,
• Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die
• Emily Di Carlo, ed. We Imitate Sleep to Dream of Dissent
• Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society
• Jean-Luc Nancy, The Fall of Sleep
• Marcos Gonsalez , Revolting Indolence: The Politics of Slacking, Lounging, and Daydreaming in Queer and Trans Latinx Culture
• Matthew Fuller, How to Sleep
• Franny Nudelman, Fighting Sleep: The War for the Mind and the US Military
• Cressida Heyes, Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge
• Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, Somniloquies
• Tsai Ming Liang, I don’t want to sleep alone
• Apitchatpong Weerasthekul, Cemetery of Splendour
• Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation
• Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalisms and the Ends of Sleep
• Andrea Knezović and Agata Bar, Nocturnalities: Bargaining Beyond Rest
• Tricia Hersey, Rest is Resistance

Evaluation: TBA

Description:

This seminar examines a range of experimental Canadian writing from the mid-twentieth century to the present, focusing on how authors challenge conventional narrative form, structure, and genre. Our work will include innovative novels, hybrid prose texts, book-length poems, and contemporary poetic and narrative experiments that test the limits of voice, representation, and textual architecture. We will also consider how these literary innovations resonate across media through a single film—Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (2007)—which extends the concerns of experimental writing into visual and cinematic practice. Throughout the term, we will ask how formal disruption shapes questions of identity, embodiment, memory, and the politics of representation. Students should be prepared to engage closely with demanding, often non-linear works that reward patient, attentive reading. Weekly discussions and written assignments will emphasize interpretive depth, theoretical framing, and sustained attention to stylistic and conceptual experimentation.

We begin with Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945), whose lyrical prose unsettles the boundaries between novel and poem, followed by Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter (1976), a postmodern reimagining of biography and jazz-informed narrative structure. We then turn to George Elliott Clarke’s Whylah Falls (2000), a hybrid Black Canadian text blending poetry, drama, and storytelling. The course continues with Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red (1998), a genre-defying verse novel that reimagines classical myth through formal innovation; Joshua Whitehead’s Full-Metal Indigiqueer (2017), which fuses Indigeneity, queer theory, and cyber aesthetics; David Bradford’s Dream of No One But Myself (2021), a fragmented poetic autobiography; Pik-Shuen Fung’s Ghost Forest (2022), a minimalist novel-in-vignettes exploring grief and diaspora; and Cory Doctorow’s The Bezzle (2024), which extends Canadian experimentalism into speculative, structurally adventurous prose. We conclude with My Winnipeg, examining how its dream-documentary mode interfaces with the technical and conceptual provocations animating the works studied throughout the term.

Texts (tentative):

• Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945)
• Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter (1976)
• Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red (1998)
• George Elliott Clarke, Whylah Falls (2000)
• Joshua Whitehead, Full-Metal Indigiqueer (2017)
• David Bradford, Dream of No One But Myself (2021)
• Pik-Shuen Fung, Ghost Forest (2022)
• Cory Doctorow, The Bezzle (2024)

Films:

• Guy Maddin, My Winnipeg (2007)

Evaluation: TBA

Format: seminar (presentations and discussion)

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.

• Ovid (43 B.C.-A.D. 17/18), Metamorphoses
• 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)
• Eliza Haywood, Idalia (1723) and 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, class presentations, 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 (50%), two presentations (40%), and general participation (10%). Regular attendance is mandatory.

Format: seminar

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.)

Description: This course will explore film theory through and against the tradition and current practice of meta-cinema, broadly construed. It is designed to appeal to students of widely ranging film backgrounds—certainly it can provide a substantial introduction to film studies for literary specialists; for more experienced cinema students, it can perhaps defamiliarize typical viewing habits and critical moves. Our themes will be loosely divided into three clusters—Part I (visibility), Part II (time and death) and Part III (production and performance)—though expect and be prepared to seek out connections throughout the course.

Possible films include:

• Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924)
• Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder 1950)
• 8 ½ (Fellini, 1963)
• Samuel Beckett’s Film (Alan Schneider, 1965)
• Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, Take One (William Greaves, 1968)
• The Last Movie (Dennis Hopper, 1971)
• Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, 1973)
• Daughter Rite (Michelle Citron, 1980)
• Close Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)
• After Life (Hirokazu Koreeda 1998)
• Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
• The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, 2000)
• Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, 2003)
• Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003)
• Caché (Haneke, 2005)
• Rubber (Quentin Dupieux, 2010)
• The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012)
• The Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012)
• Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, 2012)
• Long Day’s Journey into Night (Bi Gan, 2018)
• We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (Jane Shoenbrun, 2021)

Evaluation: viewing journals 55%, participation 30%, presentation 15%

Format: seminar (presentations and discussion)

Description: How do you “read” a graphic novel? Does one “read” pictures, and if so, what does this mean?

This course examines the unique formal and aesthetic qualities of the contemporary adult graphic novel, with particular emphasis on visual analysis. Considerable attention will therefore be paid to close study and to the analysis of stylistic elements that distinguish comics as a unique artistic phenomenon. The course does not provide an historical survey of comics, nor does it examine popular genres such as superhero comics. The emphasis of the course leans towards recent graphic novels by single author/artists and narratives oriented at the adult reader.

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 with 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:

Kate Beaton, Ebony Flowers, Thi Bui, Nick Drnaso, Ben Passmore, Sarah Glidden, Nora Krug, 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, Gene Luen Yang, Faryl Dalrymple, Matt Kindt, Stephen Collins, Will Eisner, Alex Robinson, and Scott McCloud.

Evaluation:
seminar presentation with accompanying written component, 20%;
two 10-page essays, 30% each;
class participation, 20%

Format: group discussions

Description: This course explores the cultural environment that gave rise to the first full translation of the Bible in English, as well as the controversies and other developments that followed in its wake. The translation of the Wycliffite Bible by followers of the Oxford theologian and reformist John Wyclif was not only a textual project but a momentous cultural event. Produced in two main forms in the late fourteenth century, it soon came to circulate in greater numbers than any other Middle English text through to the end of the Middle Ages. The project led to an intense debate over the translation of Scripture into the vernacular, as well as legal efforts to curtail vernacular translation and theological discourse among the laity in English. Out of this controversy came refined theories of translation, textual criticism, authorship, and the nature of the material text.

Yet the Wycliffite Bible was also a product of broader, and pre-existing, cultural currents. Though it was associated with reformists, many of whom would be charged with heresy, there was nothing particularly controversial about the translation itself. Outside of England, several Bible translations already existed, and parts of the Bible had previously appeared in English, even as far back as the Old English period. The Wycliffite Bible was produced at a time when more and more texts were being written in English, many of which responded to the increasing demand for books from people who sought to cultivate their devotional lives. This was also a time when people sought out popular preachers, openly criticized those who fell short of their pastoral mission, attended civic performances of biblical stories, travelled to far-flung pilgrimage shrines – a time when more and more people could read, or at least knew someone who could read to them. The Wycliffite Bible, along with a number of impressive Wycliffite preaching aids, was intended to provide preachers with the means to respond to the spiritual needs of their communities and to base their preaching in Scripture.

Students in this course will study the debates that led to and stemmed from the production of the Wycliffite Bible. They will also read texts from a variety of genres that attest to the wider cultural currents that surrounded this translation. These will include anti-clerical satire, devotional writings written by (or for) the laity, popular sermons, heresy trials, and popular saints’ lives. And students will, of course, study parts of the Wycliffite Bible itself, examining its forms, narrative framing, and production. This will include close work with digitized copies of this hand-written (manuscript) project and training in Middle English paleography. Most course texts will be read in the original Middle English. No prior knowledge of Middle English is required or assumed, and portions of several sessions will be spent bringing everyone up to speed on the language. Several workshops on medieval manuscripts will be held in McGill’s Rare Books and Special Collections and Osler Library.

Texts (tentative):

• Wycliffite Bible (selections, incl. the “General Prologue”)
• Wycliffite preaching aides, incl. the Glossed Gospels, Floretum, Rosaium
• Wycliffite and non-Wycliffite sermons in English
• John Wyclif, On the Truth of Holy Scripture (excerpts)
• texts from the Bible translation debate
• Constitutions of Thomas Arundel (and other legislation)
• The Testimony of William Thorpe and other trial records
• medieval passion plays (and the Wycliffite treatise against “miracle plays”)
• ecclesiastical (esp. antimendicant) satire
• Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (selections)
• saints’ lives
• Richard Rolle (selections from various writings, incl. the English Psalter)
• The Book of Margery Kempe (selections) and other vernacular devotional writing
• John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (Book of Martyrs) (selections)
• weekly secondary readings

Evaluation: manuscript/paleography project (25%); research paper (50%); presentation (10%); participation (15%)

Format: seminar and workshop

Description: In Fred Moten’s pivotal text, In the Break, he writes: “And I’m interested in the concept of race. I’m interested in the opening of its differentiation and in the differentiation of its categorization. I’m interested in the frame, in framing, in the frame’s rupture and in the invention of the frame’s hidden internal corners … race cuts race and frame cuts frame.”

In this course, we will look to the recent art-writing practices of Black studies scholars to consider how contemporary art by Black diasporic makers is being engaged, articulated, and theorized in and as Black Study. Recognizing the symbiotic relationship between Black life and the critical orientations that arise from it, we will contend with the specific methodologies that these scholars have proposed for looking at, thinking about, and writing alongside Black visual art. Thinking carefully about the particular demands that Blackness places upon language and grammar, we will consider how these writers trouble, manipulate, or expand the traditional essay form in order to shape their critical writing into a kind of art practice in its own right. Some of the questions that will guide our exploration include: How are contemporary visual arts responding to and reflecting upon Black life in the present? How are writers and scholars extending the innovative work of these artists through their critical writing? What methods of witnessing and writing will allow us to contend more meaningfully with visual arts as instantiations of Black study? Examining the work of scholars including Kevine Adonis Browne, Tina Campt, Amy Sall, Sarah Jane Cervenak, and Rizvana Bradley, amongst others and their consideration of contemporary visual arts ranging from film and photography to sculpture and painting, this seminar will provide opportunities for each of us to sharpen our own art-writing skills through procedural practices and iterative revision.

Texts (tentative):

• A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See by Tina Campt
• The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema, and Power by Amy Sall
• Crafted Kinship: Inside the Creative Practices of Contemporary Black Caribbean Makers by Marlene Barnett
• Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life by Sarah Jane Cervenack

Evaluation: discussion lead (20%); active participation (20%); two short papers (30%); final paper / creative project (30%)

Format: seminar

Description: This course offers an in-depth exploration of the life and work of Leonard Cohen, from his poetry, to his novels, to his music. Cohen’s multifaceted career, spanning seven decades, provides a unique lens through which to study the convergence of literature, music, and popular culture. His work continually grapples with some of the most profound concerns of his era: the purpose of the writer, the nature of spirituality, the complexities of desire, the challenges of celebrity, and the transformative power of art. Beginning with his literary roots, we will trace the development of Cohen’s early poems and novels that established him as a prominent voice in the post-Beat generation. From his novels—The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers—to his influential poetry collections, Cohen’s literary output reflects his deep engagement with the human condition. As his career evolved, Cohen’s artistic identity expanded to encompass music; his transition from poet-novelist to globally renowned singer-songwriter marks a key point of focus in this course. We will examine how Cohen’s musical career extends the themes present in his poetry, while also introducing new layers of spiritual and existential inquiry. Cohen’s lyrics, often dark, meditative and philosophical, are a natural extension of his poetic voice, adding a rich, auditory dimension to his artistic legacy. Through close readings, listening sessions, and film screenings, we will investigate Cohen’s complex relationship with fame and his continual quest for artistic and personal authenticity. Cohen’s later years, especially his return to touring in the 1990s, underscore his enduring need to reconcile the creative process with the demands of the performative life. For Cohen, that kind of reconciliation can be invigorating. As Cohen himself reflected, “I like life on the road. It’s a lot easier than civilian life. You kind of feel like you’re in a motorcycle gang.”

Texts: TBD

Evaluation (tentative): short paper (25%); group Presentation (20%); final paper (40%); participation (15%)

Format: seminar

Note: For BA English Majors, this course qualifies for the required three credits in Canadian literature or on a major author.

Description: One signature of early twentieth-century modernist literature is its deep allusiveness – its marked tendency to signify through implicit reference to other texts. The bent of writers such as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, H.D., Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore for allusive writing forms a major part of what makes for both the richness of their work and its fabled “difficulty.” The modernist tendency to deal in allusion, even rely on allusion for some levels of signification, also indicates ways in which modernist experimental writing was intentionally formed and informed by texts from other times and cultures. Joyce’s Ulysses parallels Homer’s Odyssey through extended allusion; H.D.’s poems often revise Greek myth; Marianne Moore’s poems often read as networks of quotations; and Eliot’s The Waste Land bristles with allusions to a bewildering array of other texts. The modernist text can sometimes come across as a kind of cento, a fabric of allusion to other texts.

A subset of the larger category of intertextuality, as Allan Pasco notes, allusion is a technique whereby a text external to the one at hand is implicitly referenced, whether or not intentionally, and thus “grafted” on to the immediate text in a synergistic relation. George Steiner comments on how allusions make possible “the compact largesse of the text.” Modernist allusions function variously: Moore’s allusions can bring in a turn of concept from an external text that adds precision to her “host” text; what Ron Bush calls T.S. Eliot’s “passionate allusions” signify through “emotional aura”; in H.D.’s novels, allusion imports an ulterior world into the primary text. Modernist allusions can indicate a turn to anterior texts for wisdom or lexicon—or a reach to alterity as wellspring for innovation.

This course explores questions about the reasons behind such widespread modernist allusiveness. How might this tendency relate to what experimental modernists saw as their commitments and allegiances; and how might it bear on the complex, generative relationship between modernist work and what Eliot theorized as “tradition”? We address how different instances of allusion operate, addressing their effects on readers’ experience and how they contribute to the way a text makes meaning.

Texts (provisional):

• T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems
• H.D., HERmione, Trilogy
• James Joyce, Dubliners
• Marianne Moore, Complete Poems
• Ezra Pound, selections from Personae and The Cantos
• Jean Rhys, The Wide Sargasso Sea
• Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead
• Melvin Tolson, “Harlem Gallery”
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Evaluation (provisional): brief essay (25%); book review (20%); longer essay (30%); presentation (15%); participation (10%)

Format: seminar and discussion

Description: How do museums perform knowledge? How do they teach us, display their collected objects, and craft overarching narratives about shared and possible pasts, presents, and futures? Specifically, what techniques of dramaturgy, scenography, sound and lighting design, and spectacle do museums employ to make their acquisitions “perform” for museumgoers, and to make us both audiences and actors in immersive museal spaces? Museums are complex institutions that have changed over time, from the cabinet of curiosities to the anthropological taxonomy to the contemporary white cube / science center / natural history hub. As prototyped and paradigmatic institutions, museums intersect with entertainment industries and questions of the archive; as sites of knowledge production, circulation, and reception, museums utilize performance practices centrally in determining which items to display and how to display them. Furthermore, museums are enmeshed in a range of political, economic, and social networks and institutions. Their exhibitions can enact change – including affective and epistemological transformation – on both individual and collective scales.

This course will survey theories, histories, and critical readings at the meeting points of museum studies, anthropology, theatre and performance studies, and art history and communication studies to understand how different kinds of museums have performed knowledge and cultural expression over several hundred years. We will also be taking trips to local museums to observe how these sites construct their objects of study in diverse ways, and to investigate the benefits and pitfalls of their strategies of display and (re)presentation.

Texts:

• Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture
• Susan Bennett, Theatre & Museums
• Scott Magelssen and Rhona Justice-Malloy, Enacting History
• Scott Magelssen, Living History Museums
• Shimrit Lee, Decolonize Museums
• Bettina Messias Carbonell, Museum Studies
• Susan E. Cahan, Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power
• Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives (ed. Susan Sleeper-Smith)
• selections from The Theatre and Performance Historiography Reader (ed. Davis and Marx)
• additional readings by Harvey Young, Margaret Werry, Tracy C. Davis, Amelia Jones, Uri Macmillan, Liz Son, Pierre Nora, and others

Format: seminar and site visits

Evaluation: participation (20%); short essays (20%); presentation (20%); final essay (40%)

Description: Since the Brexit vote in June 2016 and the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union, theatre in the UK has 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-Brexit. 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 decolonization 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 2007–8, globalization, the out-sourcing of labour 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.

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: seminar discussions

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 Affect Theory. Possible films include The Gleaners and I, Amores Perros, Leviathan, Killer of Sheep, The Turin Horse.

Texts:

• Hugh Raffles, Insectopedia
• coursepack

Evaluation: weekly film journals 55%, presentations 15%, participation 30%

Format: seminar

Description: “Night is a world lit by itself” (Antonio Porchia). The emerging interdisciplinary field of Night Studies assembles perspectives that seek to account for how shifts in technology, labour, documentation, art, leisure, social imaginaries and chronology have altered or amplified the transformative and opaque space-time of the nocturnal. This course explores key contemporary texts—critical, cinematic, artistic, and literary—of the night that focus on urban nocturnality. Who inhabits the night? Who has the right to the night? Who is seen and unseen? How do we live the urban night in different relations of risk? What kinds of encounters are specific to the affordances of the urban nocturnal? What are the methods and epistemologies specific to the night? Our course will be split between seminars on key texts of the urban night, and creative and curatorial workshops focused on our semester long case study of the urban night in Montreal. Students will collaborate with the research project, “Nighttime Design for/with Marginalized Communities” on speculative curatorial projects and workshops on nighttime methods.

Texts: authors and artists may include William Straw, Sarah Sharma, Kemi Adeyemi, Nick Dunn, Matthew Fuller, Benjamin Reiss, Jean Ma, Jonathan Crary, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Tsai Ming Liang, Apitchatpong Weerasthekul, and Shu Lea Cheang

Evaluation: TBA

Format: seminar, discussion, and workshops

Description: This seminar will focus on various topics central to the philosophical study of cinema, especially those having to do with the perennial question, “What is cinema?” In responding to this question, we will engage with a variety of ongoing debates and seemingly intractable puzzles having to do with the nature of cinema, the specificity of cinematic artworks, and the distinctive aspects of our experiences of works of that kind. Topics to be discussed include: theories of representation and illusion, linguistic and semiotic theories, authorship, categories of cinematic expression and art, differences between cinematic and literary narration, cognitive approaches to cinema studies, and cinema’s possible contributions to philosophy.

Texts (tentative):

• Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (2008)
• Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (2010)
• Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi, eds., Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology (2006)
• Noël Carroll, Laura T. Di Summa, and Shawn Loht, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures (2019)
• Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga, eds., Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (2009)
• selection of recent essays from analytic-philosophical aesthetics and related fields.

Evaluation: short essay (20%); seminar presentation based on short essay (20%); term paper (60%)

Format: seminar

Description: The medieval idea of health went beyond a mere freedom from illness or disease, and recognised the holistic and mutual nature of body and soul. In doing so, the concept of health went hand in hand with the concept of salvation, drawing on the Latin word salus and its dual meaning. The epistemological framework within which medieval people operated attested to the symbiotic relationship between medicine and religion. Hence to pursue health meant both a state of physical wellbeing as well as spiritual wellbeing.

England entered a period of deep social and environmental changes in the fourteenth century amidst wars, insurrections, and a major pandemic which decimated one third of the country’s population. Mortality was hence at the forefront of people’s lives, and many sought to understand and convey what it meant to live well.

From Gregory the Great’s and St Augustine’s models and ideals of pastoral care, to John Mirk’s Instructions for Parish Priests, and John Lydgate’s Dance of Death, this course examines how both clergy and laity took part in fostering health by applying themselves to cura animarum (the cure of souls) throughout the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries in England. By exploring concepts and practices such as spiritual seeking, therapeutic reading, soul-health, Ars Moriendi (the art of being towards death), birth girdles, and prayers for the dead, we will uncover what personal and communal wellbeing entailed for readers of these texts.

Texts (provisional):

• Gregory the Great, Pastoral Care
• Ancrene Wisse
• John Mirk, Instructions for Parish Priests
• Julian of Norwich, Revelations
• The Book of Margery Kempe
• Minor poems of the Vernon Manuscript (selection)
• selection of Middle English Lyrics
• John Lydgate, Dance of Death
• Thomas Hoccleve, ‘My Compleinte’
• John Audelay, selection of lyrics
• birth girdles

Evaluation (provisional): participation 20%; presentation 10%; short essays 20%; term paper 50%

Format: seminar

Description: Is Shakespeare a force for the advancement of social justice—the recognition of the dignity and the right to flourish of all persons, no matter their race, religion, gender, sexuality, or abilities? The answer that the seminar begins with is “yes and no.” No: prejudices of all kinds are baked into Shakespeare’s texts. No amount of special pleading—and there has been plenty of it—is able to transform the plays into texts that issue from some kind of enlightened wizard who sits in the sunbright air high above the darkness of Western social, political, and economic history. And yes: the history of the reception, performances, and adaptations of the plays often brings forward the full-fledged personhood of reviled characters—all the way from Katherina in Taming of the Shrew to Shylock to Othello to Caliban. Is there something in Shakespeare and in theatrical practice that is able to bring us face to face with the humanity of shrews, Jews, Blacks, and what the First Folio calls the “savage and deformed slave,” Caliban?

Members of the Shakespeare and Social Justice seminar will work together on the reception, performance, and adaptation history of three plays: Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. Each member of the seminar will also choose one other play as their research focus and will develop an historically grounded account of how that play has moved across time (and perhaps space also) and how it has worked for and/or against the cause of social justice. Together the members of the seminar will produce a new, multi-sided history of Shakespeare and social justice.

Readings will include: work on what social justice is and how we might know when we have it (by thinkers such as Kant, John Rawls, Franz Fanon, Audre Lorde), strong arguments on both sides of the core question, discussions of how Shakespeare has changed and continues to change, and essays on the social-justice politics of Shakespeare as text, as performance, and as source and provocation for other artists. There is no prohibition against the use of ChatGPT and/or similar AI systems in the course.

Texts:

• Merchant of Venice, ed. Jay L. Halio (Oxford University Press, 2008)
• Anthony and Cleopatra, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford University Press, 2008)
• The Tempest, ed. JF Bernard and Paul Yachnin (Broadview Press, 2021)
• all other readings will be provided on myCourses

Evaluation: journal (30%); individual presentations (20%); participation (10%); research project (40%)

Format: informal lecture and discussion

Description: In Capital, Karl Marx notes that human beings work on nature to transform it, and in so doing, transform themselves. In the course of human history, the Himalaya has been a key site that has been transformed by human activity, a process that has also informed how human beings have lived in relation to the mountains. As human being have traversed and climbed them; cultivated on the mountainsides, and built dwellings and temples on them, the Himalaya also emerged as a crucial subject of literary and visual depictions. Examining such depictions, the course seeks to understand how these literary and visual texts imagine and represent mountains, and human interactions with them; how they articulate human-nonhumans relations in such locales. The course will also examine theorizations of the production of nature and space; recent debates on the Anthropocene and the capitalocene; and engage scholarship from cultural anthropology, religion, and human geography in addition to insights from literary and cultural studies.

Texts (tentative):

• Novels:
  Kim by Rudyard Kipling
  Two Leaves and a Bud by Mulk Raj Anand
• Poetry:
  “Meghadūta” by Kalidasa
  “Meghdūt” by Rabindranath Tagore
• Non-Fiction:
  The Valley of Flowers by Frank Smythe
  Man-eaters of Kumaon by Jim Corbett
  The Waiting Land by Dervla Murphy
  Annapurna by Maurice Herzog
• Photographs: Samuel Bourne; Vittorio Sella
• Selections from the theoretical/critical works of Henri Lefebvre, Raymond Williams, David Harvey, Doreen Massey, Don Mitchell, Denis Cosgrove, Jason Moore, Marjorie Nicolson, Veronica della Dora.

Evaluation: critical responses (x8), abstract & annotated bibliography, final paper (12-15pp), participation

Format: seminar

Description: This course examines the long and multifaceted discourse around the place of English literature in the construction of something like “the human condition,” or, what it means to be human in the West. We will examine this discourse at multiple intersections, including the claim of literature’s humanizing effects, the crisis of literary arts and the humanities, and the role of reading and writing in self-making. These discussions will in turn be placed in historical perspective, within the long struggle over the Human and its production through colonial relations and racial power in the North American/Anglo-American context. We will read works by: Sylvia Wynter, Mel Chen, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Katherine McKittrick, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Alicia Carroll, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Diana Fuss, among others.

Possible Texts:

• Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, On Being Human as Praxis (2014)
• Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (2016)
• Mel Chen, Animacies (2012)
• Diana Fuss, Human, All too Human (1996)
• Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All too Human (1878)
• Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human (2020)
• Farah Jasmine Griffin, Read Until You Understand (2021)
• Alicia Carroll, Indiscipline (2024)
• W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
• Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)

Evaluation (tentative): In-class Presentation, 20%, Short Essay 20%; Final Essay 40%; participation 20%.

Format: seminar

Description: TBA

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: seminar

Description: This course will offer a study of the diversity 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, students 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 that we will establish at the start of the course, which will fully take into account the scheduling preferences of each person. 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 (any edition)
• Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (any edition)
• 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 each (45% each); class attendance and participation, 10%

Format: seminar with papers and discussion.

Description: A close reading of Milton’s major poetical works, focusing on Paradise Lost, but beginning with selected early poetry and some prose, and finishing with a brief look at the double volume of Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regain’d. We will trace Milton’s development as a poet and its relation to his political thought as it evolved over time and in response to the dramatic social and political changes from the 1640s on. We will especially consider the relations between poetry, freedom, and change in his work. From Areopagitica on, Milton is a passionate defender of the freedom of the imagination as essential to a democratic society. His God is above all a creator who inspires creativity in others – not only Adam and Eve, but also the poet himself. Paradise Lost has itself has inspired many later responses and reworkings by writers and visual artists, from Dryden’s State of Innocence to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Through critical readings and individual projects we will consider Milton’s pivotal role in the canon and the many myths of Milton, Romantic revolutionary, as well as the source of Bloom’s anxiety of influence and Gilbert and Gubar’s spectral “bogey.”

Texts:

• Stella Revard, ed., John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)
• Barbara Lewalski, ed., John Milton: Paradise Lost (Blackwell, 2007)
• selections from the prose, online
• selected criticism

Evaluation (tentative): book review (10%); editorial exercise (10%); reception project (10%); participation (includes class prolusion) (20%); final 20-page paper (50 %)

Format: seminar

Description: After a brief primer in the lyric poetry and prophetic visions of British and European Romanticism, this course considers how the Romantic movement spread outside of Europe into Africa, the Caribbean, India, North America, and other global contexts, where Romantic ideas landed with the force of colonialism’s civilizing mission, on the one hand, and liberalism’s moral and political ideals, on the other. In the nineteenth century, Romantic ideas were part of the Euro-western educations of colonial subjects; they also proved central not only to the abolishment of slavery but also to nationalist movements for freedom, liberation, and self-determination. Attention will be paid to the work of the progressive British aristocrat Lord Byron, whose models of liberation and self-assertion well-suited nineteenth-century Black radicals who took up Byron’s work as a way of processing their relation to the traditions of Romantic revolution. Authors to be considered beyond European Romanticism may include Henry Derozio (India), Egbert Martin (Guyana), Indigenous writers Jane Johnson Schoolcraft (Ojibwe), and E. Pauline Johnson (Kanien'kehá:ka), and Black US writers like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, George Moses Horton, Albery Allison Whitman, and Joshua McCarter Simpson. We will ask not only how global writers borrowed from European Romanticism but also, and perhaps more importantly, how that very borrowing changed the meaning and inflections of Romanticism itself.

Texts:

• The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period
• Matthew Sandler, The Black Romantic Revolution: Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery (Verso 2020)
• The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race (CUP 2024)
• Lord Byron: Selected Writings (Oxford University Press, 2023)

Evaluation: leading class discussion (15%); race, gender, and Romanticism bibliography (10%); research exercise and article report (25%); final paper (50%)

Format: seminar

Description: In this course, we will examine contemporary fiction not as the product of a few lone author-geniuses (struck by inspiration as inexplicable as lightning), nor as the logical outcome of totalizing historical forces like political revolutions, economic crises, and technological innovations. Instead, we will consider literary works in the context of the social relations that govern their production, circulation, reception, and consecration. That is, we will investigate the various actors and institutions that bring books into the world, cast a select few as literature, and canonize fewer still as literary history. To do this, we will read a range of scholarly work on the sociology of literature alongside, and in alternation with, an array of novels that thematize the same logics and phenomena.

Texts (tentative):

• Mona Awad, Bunny (2019)
• Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art (1992; trans. 1996)
• Clayton Childress, Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel (2017)
• Beth Driscoll, The New Literary Middlebrow (2014)
• Percival Everett, Erasure (2001)
• Alexandra Kleeman, Something New Under the Sun (2021)
• Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (2014)
• Mark McGurl, The Program Era: The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009)
• Simone Murray, The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation (2011)
• Richard Jean So, Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (2021)
• John B. Thompson, Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing (2021)
• John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (2010)
• Julia Whelan, Thank You for Listening (2022)
  
  ***All other required readings will be available digitally via myCourses.

Assignments and Evaluation:

class participation (10%)
position papers (30%)
5 Min. research presentation (10%)
10 min. research presentation (20%)
final research project (30%)

Format: seminar

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, Primo Levi, Philip Gourevitch) and plays (Samuel Beckett). Some visual material, particularly photographs, will be discussed. 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, Joseph Slaughter, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and others will supplement primary texts.

Texts (tentative):

• Omar El Akka, What Strange Paradise

• Nadine Gordimer, July’s People
• Caryl Phillips, Foreigners
• Rebecca West, A Train of Powder
• 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 Comedians
• 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
• Behrouz Boochani, No Friend but the Mountains

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

Format: seminar

Description: Over the past thirty years or so, the term “precarity” has been used by theorists and activists to identify the particular kinds of social and economic vulnerability generated by current conditions under globalized capitalism, especially the fraying of the social safety net and the attenuation of other forms of worker protection as part of capital’s demand for a more “flexible” workforce. According to many critics, these conditions have generated a new “precariat” which is made up of not only the industrial and post-industrial working class but also undocumented immigrants and other marginalized workers not normally represented by labour movement institutions, as well as some highly-credentialed professional workers who have become newly exposed to the vicissitudes of “contingent” employment. This course will survey the theoretical and political work that has generated the concept of precarity—from the Italian “autonomist” movement to more recent North American theorists of “post-Fordist affect”—and utilize this body of thought to examine a series of recent films from around the globe which attempt to visualize and narrate precarious life. How do these films depict our changing social order? What narrative trajectories do they create for characters who are struggling (and sometimes failing) to locate themselves in this social order? Do the films indicate a precariat coming into being as a class-in-itself, or even a class-for-itself?

Films:

• Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, Italy 1948)
• Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica, Italy, 1952)
• La promesse (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium, 1996)
• L’emploi du temps (Time Out) (Laurent Cantet, France, 2001)
• Juventude em Marcha (Colossal Youth) (Pedro Costa, Portugal, 2006)
• Chop Shop (Ramin Bahrani, U.S.A., 2007)
• 24 City (Jia Zhangke, China, 2008)
• Le silence de Lorna (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium, 2008)
• Up in the Air (Jason Reitman, U.S.A., 2009)
• Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols, U.S.A., 2011)
• Atlantique (Mati Diop, France/Senegal, 2019)
• Sorry We Missed You (Ken Loach, U.K., 2019)
• Nomadland (Chloé Zhao, U.S.A., 2020)

Readings: essays by Zygmunt Bauman, Angela Mitropoulos, Søren Mau, Michael Denning, Gilles Deleuze, Maurizio Lazzarato, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière, Giorgio Agamben, Kathi Weeks, the Institute for Precarious Consciousness, Lee Edelman, Lauren Berlant, Linda Williams, Karl Schoonover, and others.

Evaluation: class contribution; class presentation; final term paper

Format: weekly screenings, seminar discussion

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 on 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 as a way of exploring the porous boundaries between reality and fiction. We examine these texts 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.

Evaluation: participation (15%); literary fragments or multimedia experiments (15%); experimental portrait or auto-portrait (illustrated essay, slideshow or video) (30%); final creative project (40%)

Books (tentative):

• Martin Buber, I & Thou
• Anne Carson, The Autobiography of Red
• Lynn Crosbie, Life is About Losing Everything
• Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee
• Eileen Myles, A Working Life
• Maggie Nelson, Jane
• Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family
• Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes
• Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Films & visual art by: Chantal Akerman, Laurie Anderson, Shirley Clarke, Jonathan Caouette, Moyra Davey, Hollis Frampton, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Su Friedrich, Nan Goldin, Barbara Hammer, Kahlil Joseph, Isaac Julien, Jim McBride, Jonas Mekas, Marlon Riggs, Carolee Schneemann, Andy Warhol

Format: This seminar is a hybrid of critical and creative practice. We will divide our time between discussing the course materials and sharing our own creative and critical work in a rigorous “group crit” format. There will be weekly screenings of the films.

Description: TBA

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: TBA

Description: TBA

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: TBA