Past Courses

Prerequisite: None.

Expected Student Preparation: some background in English literature, preferably with a bit of medieval literature.

Description: This course aims to examine the idea of the fantastic and the grotesque in some of the most popular forms of literature in the Middle Ages - heroic romances and legends of saints - in the light of medieval heroic tradition, popular culture, and medieval ideas of monstrosity.

The fourteenth-century poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, provides a starting point to explore depictions of the grotesque and the discourse of both monstrosity and sanctity. Reading about saints was not confined to the cloister; these stories were read and heard alongside secular tales, both of which could feature demons, dragons and damsels in distress. The fantastic extended to human-animal interaction, the perception of the foreign and exotic (the ‘other’), and certain tropes in both secular and ecclesiastical narratives where virtue must win out (such as the use of prophecy or the plot line of loss and recovery). The questions which are arise are: what was considered monstrous and what was human? What was the divide between humans and animals, humans and monsters? How should we approach the grotesque?

The course includes (but is not confined to) readings from the South English Legendary and other saints’ Lives (such as the legends of St Eustace, St. Margaret, and St George (with that dragon!)); the fantastic pilgrimage in St Patrick’s Purgatory; some popular Middle English romances; the werewolf tale of Bisclavert by Marie de France; the Welsh tales of Arthur and of Merlin; the fictional Letter of Alexander the Great; and the account of Sir John Mandeville, whose travels to the East provided much influential, fantastic fare.

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: Seminar presentation, 15%; essay, 25%; term paper, 50%; attendance and participation, 10%.

Format: Seminar.

Maximum Enrollment: 15 students.

Prerequisites: Limited to Honours and MA students (see note below).

Description: This course will contextualize the villain-hero of eighteenth-century English literature in a European tradition of philosophical, religious, and political problems, social criticism, and artistic commentary from the Renaissance to Romanticism. Against the background of representations of the desire for knowledge and power in Elizabethan drama, the anthropology of Caroline political theory, Satanic revolt in Milton, and libertine devilry in Rochester and Restoration plays, we will examine the villain-hero as a figure of persistently fascinating evil power – a power subversively critical as well as characteristically satiric, obscene, and cruel in its skepticism, debauchery, and criminality. The readings will focus especially on two examples of this figure, Faust and Don Juan, whose development we will consider from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.

Texts: The reading for this course includes the following books, which will be available at The Word Bookstore (469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640). (The list of texts below is tentative and incomplete, to be confirmed in January 2021.)

• Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (Norton or Hackett recommended)
• Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
• Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Hackett, Oxford, or Penguin recommended)
• La Rochefoucauld, Maxims and Reflections (Oxford recommended; or Penguin)
• John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester, Selected Poems (Oxford) or Selected Works (Penguin)
• William Wycherley, The Country Wife
• William Congreve, The Way of the World
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust. Part One (Oxford or Norton)
• Pierre Choderos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Oxford or Penguin)
• Giovanni Giacomo Casanova, The Story of My Life (Penguin)
• Lord Byron, Don Juan (Penguin)
• Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin (Penguin recommended)

Films: Usually one film will be shown each 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 provisional.)

• Jan Svankmejer, Don Juan (1970) and Faust (1994)
• Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (Greenwich Theatre, London; Stage on Screen, 2010)
• F. W. Murnau, Faust (1926)
• Hector Berlioz, La Damnation de Faust (dir. Sylvain Cambreling, 1999)
• Charles Gounod, Faust (dir. Antonio Pappano, 2010)
• Alexandr Sokurov, Faust (2011)
• Wycherley, The Country Wife (1992); and Congreve, The Way of the World (1997)
• Stephen Frears, Dangerous Liaisons (1988)
• Mozart, Don Giovanni (dir. Nikolaus Harnoncourt, 1996; and others)
• Rupert Edwards, The Real Don Giovanni (1996)
• Benoit Jacquot, Sade (1999)
• Frederico Fellini, Fellini’s Casanova (1976)
• Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky, Eugene Onegin (dir. Daniel Barenboim, 2007; and others)

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

Format: Seminar.

Maximum Enrollment: 15 students.

Note on Enrollment: Permission of the instructor is required. As a rule of thumb, enrollment is limited to 15 MA and advanced undergraduate students (Honours students in their final year have priority). MA and Honours students may register for this course but must confirm their registration with the instructor. 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.)

Prerequisite: Open to Graduate Students.

Description: The Brexit vote and its aftereffects have turned the world’s eyes towards the United Kingdom and raised pressing questions about British cultural identity and the relationship of “Britishness” to the history of immigration to England.

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

Special attention will also be paid to the “In-Yer-Face” moment of theatre in the mid-1990s (Kane, Ravenhill) as an unorthodox response to the “state-of-the-nation” play and the aftereffects of this theatrical moment on the contemporary UK theatre scene.

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

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

Texts to be chosen from (tentative):

• Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine
• Brian Friel, Translations
• David Edgar, Destiny
• David Edgar, Pentecost
• Sarah Kane, Blasted
• David Edgar, Testing the Echo
• Ayub Khan-Din, East is East
• Sebastian Barry, The Steward of Christendom
• Robin Soans, Talking to Terrorists
• Richard Bean, England People Very Nice
• Mark Ravenhill, Product, Some Explicit Polaroids
• Caryl Churchill, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You
• Anupama Chandrasekhar, Disconnect
• Jez Butterworth, Jerusalem
• debbie tucker green, Truth and Reconciliation
• Phil Davies, Firebird
• Rory Mullarkey, The Wolf from the Door
• Caryl Churchill, Escaped Alone
• Mike Bartlett, Albion
• Alistair McDowell, Pomona

Evaluation:
Seminar presentation with accompanying written component, 20%;
Two ten-page essays, 30% each;
Class participation, 20%.

Instructional Method: Seminar discussions

Maximum Enrollment: 15 students

Description: Members of the “Performing the World” seminar will work together toward a wide-ranging and deep understanding of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. In addition to our central work on the Sonnets themselves, our readings will include selected poetry by Shakespeare’s near-contemporaries (Sidney and Spenser especially) and predecessors(especially Petrarch). We’ll dig into the critical literature, which variously brings forward how the Sonnetsspeak brilliantly to concerns in social politics (including gender, sexuality, religion, and social rank), philosophy (including philosophies of the self, language, knowledge, and natural and human temporality), and the arts (including how poetry lives in the worldand what it is able to do in the world). That extraordinary breadth of address in the Sonnetsthemselves will enable members of the seminar to develop their individual research projects, which will in turn contribute to the shared understanding of how the Sonnetshave become formative new ways of performing the world.

A special feature of the “Performing the World” seminar will be the opportunity for seminar members to meet and workwith the actor and writer Jessica B. Hill. Jessica will share with us her work-in-progress, The Dark Lady, a play that stages an imaginedlove relationship between Shakespeare and AemiliaBassano by bringing the Sonnets intopassionate and brilliant dialogue with Bassano’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, the first poem by a Englishwoman to be printed in England.

Texts:

These texts are available free from Oxford Scholarly Editions Online.

• The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (2008).
  https://www.oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/view/10.1093/actrade/97801981843...
• Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,ed. Ian Small
  https://www.oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/view/10.1093/actrade/97801981195...

Note that you have to be signed onto the McGill system by VPN to access these texts.

In addition, there are excellent online collections of major sonnet sequences:

• Petrarch, Canzoniere
  https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Italian/Petrarchhome.php
• Thomas Wyatt, Sonnets
  http://www.sonnets.org/wyatt.htm
• Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella
  http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/stella.html
• Edmund Spenser, Amoretti
  http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/amoretti.html
• Samuel Daniel, Delia
  http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/delia.html
• Barnabe Barnes, Parthenophil and Parthenophe
  http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/barnes
• Anne Locke, Meditation of a Penitent Sinner
  http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/locke2.html

Evaluation: Journal 30%; 3-minute presentation 10%; research paper (12-15 pages) 35%; non-academic version of your paper 10%; participation 15%.

Notes: 

Journal
Your journal is, first of all, for you to do some thinking by writing at each step of the course. But it is also something you do for marks, so you have to write at least a page (about 350 words) about each week’s readings. Think about writing twelve journal entries in all. You can write about the discussions we’ve had in class, but do undertake to devote most of your thinking by writing about two or three or four unfolding and growing questions and/or ideas that you find particularly important and interesting. Your journal certainly doesn’t have to be formal like an essay. After all, it mostly for you and about your thinking, questioning, arguing. But it’s also going to be read by me, so make it reader-friendly.

Presentation
From near the start of the course, you’ll be thinking about the research paper that you will want to write. I’ll work with you and provide a sounding board for your ideas. We’ll put on a course conference in the middle of the term. You will have three minutes to present the question and/or argument that you will develop into your research paper. This part of the course is based on the three-minute thesis program, where graduate students compete for prizes in recognition of the clarity, succinctness, value, and appeal of their research. We’ll take the competition out of what we do, but leave in the emphasis on clear, succinct, and engaging accounts of valuable research. We’ll do prep work leading up to the course conference. And note that the presentations will be prerecorded by you on powerpoint with audio.

Research Paper
Your course paper will develop a topic of your own devising. Your work will need to take account of the most important research on the argument you’re developing. What you write does not have to be original work, in the sense that it does not have to be an idea or a view that no one has thought of before. But it does have to be work that you care about, have thought a good deal about, and are keen to share with others. So you could write about the Sonnets as a rethinking of the sexuality of the self, which is not a new idea, but you could do that with new evidence, with thinking that takes previous work further than it was willing or able to go, and with a conclusion that might shift the perspective from which we see the relationship among poetry, sexuality, and selfhood in Shakespeare’s time.

Public Scholarship
Once you’ve completed your course paper, you’ll have one more task. This one is non-traditional, even experimental. You’ll create a version of your paper’s central argument as if for a non-academic audience—people who are intelligent and thoughtful but who have not taken the course and who are not in the academy (though they might have an undergrad education in their past). So think about writing a piece on Shakespeare’s Sonnets for the weekend edition of the Globe and Mail, or The Walrus, or maybe as a script for a Ted Talk. We’ll take a bit of time during the course to look at models for this kind of writing.

Participation requires your vital presence in class. You have to zoom to each class with questions, ideas, puzzlement (which you have to speak about), expressions of joy or grief. It is true. It’s really true: there is no such thing as a stupid question.

Maximum Enrollment: 15 students.

Description: Intensive study of short prose fictions and critical essays by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, as these foundational authors can be seen to work in dialogue with one another, exploring aesthetic problems and cultural preoccupations crucial to mid-nineteenth-century America at the same time that they break the ground for the emergence of the modern short story—anticipating fundamental developments in form and theme that would become the bases for self-conscious, experimental short fiction produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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

Texts (tentative; editions of collected short fiction TBA):

• Poe, The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe;
• Hawthorne, Selected Tales and Sketches;
• Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter;
• Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor, and Selected Tales or Great Short Works of Herman Melville.

Evaluation (tentative): Participation in seminar discussions, 20%; series of one-page textual analyses, 20%; oral presentation, 20%; final research paper, 40%.

Format: Seminar discussion.

Maximum Enrolment: 15 students.

Prerequisite: None.

(Note: For English Majors, this course qualifies for the required three credits from a course in Canadian literature)

Description: This course deals with the poetry of four major contemporary Canadian poets: Margaret Atwood, Robert Kroetsch, Michael Ondaatje, and Karen Solie. Through a study of some of their most rewarding and challenging poems, we will explore a number of central issues: perceptions of Canada, modern adaptations of myth, politics and poetry, and the representation of female agency (Atwood); the nature of postmodernism and its relation to our understanding of history, creativity, and place (Kroetsch); the confessional mode and questions about the identity of the modern writer (Ondaatje); eco-feminism and renditions of figurative landscapes transformed through human intervention and climate change (Solie). We will devote approximately three weeks to each poet, focusing on some of their richest works. The course will also explore a variety of reading methods that can be applied to the interpretation of poetry in general. A background in Canadian literature is helpful but not required. Evaluation is based on a series of personal responses to the poetry (the online journal entries); a library research project that will familiarize students with basic research skills; collaborative discussion of particular poems that will focus on developing reading methods; and a final paper that will be geared toward potential publication.

Texts: A coursepack will be available containing the required texts.

Evaluation: A series of short, online journal entries (40%); a library research project (15%); participation (15%); final paper (30%).

Format: Weekly seminars, discussion.

Maximum Enrolment: 15 students.

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

Texts:

• General Course Reader, Same-Sex Desire in the English Renaissance: A Sourcebook of Texts, 1470-1650
• Supplementary Course Reader with various additional readings including Milton’s Comus
• Marlowe, Edward II (edition is optional)
• Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (edition is optional)
• Caterina de Erauso, Memoirs of a Basque Lieutenant Nun (paperback)
  Texts will be available at the Word Bookstore, 469 Milton Street, 514.845.5640.

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

Format: Seminar with papers and discussion.

Average Enrolment: 7 to 10 students.

Description: “National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the many national and local literatures, a world literature arises.” This trenchant statement was not issued in the past decade; more than a century and a half earlier, and following in the footsteps of their compatriot Goethe, Marx and Engels made it part of their argument in the “Communist Manifesto.” Yet their call resonates today in the academic world. Since the start of the new millennium countless tomes have been dedicated to asking what is world literature?; how does one read world literature?; how is canon of world literature formed?; what is the relation between the world-system and world-literature?; how does a specific national literature relate to world literature? To these, we will add a few of our own questions to unearth what other models of world literature exist but might have been forgotten by mainstream scholarship. In order to get a better sense of these issues, we will look at paradigms and methodologies from the latter half of the twentieth century that have allowed researchers to transcend a narrow focus on national literatures: Third World literature studies, postcolonial studies, Pan-Africanism, Tricontinentalism, and comparative literature studies. We will engage with contemporary essays and books by Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, The Warwick Research Collective, Maria Khotimsky, Rossen Djagalov, Fredric Jameson, as well as with earlier theorizations by J. W. von Goethe, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Maxim Gorky, as well as within journals like Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings. We will use a couple of novels (for instance Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred years of Solitude.)

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Seminar.

Maximum Enrollment: TBA

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) teach students to create experimental forms of writing and visual media, and

2) to teach students to respond critically and creatively to experimental art and literature.

By focusing on multi-media artworks that incorporate elements of image, sound, and/or text, we shall explore how meaning in contemporary art and culture is often generated across multiple registers. Over the course of the semester, students will be introduced to important examples of experimental film and video, Conceptual art, body art, photography, sculpture, and installation 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 in order to create their own self-directed visual art and curatorial projects. In other words, students will not only be expected to discuss, think and write about the works we study, but to create creative projects that respond 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 in order to attend contemporary art exhibitions and performances.

Required Films and Artworks

• Puce Moment (Kenneth Anger, 1949, US)
• Un Chant d’Amour (Jean Genet, France, 1959)
• 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)
• Theme Song (Vito Acconci, US, 1973)
• The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (Nan Goldin, US, 1985)
• Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (Jonas Mekas, US, 1972)
• Kitch’s Last Meal (Carolee Schneemann, US, 1973-1976)
• News from Home (Chantal Akerman, US/ Belgium, 1977)
• Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, France, 1983)
• The Blind. At Home (Sophie Calle, France, 1986)
• Tongues Untied (Marlon Riggs, US, 1989)
• Blue (Derek Jarman, UK, 1993)
• From Here I Saw What Happened and Cried (Carrie Mae Weems, 1995-1996)
• Les Goddesses (Moyra Davey, US, 2011)
• Love is the Message, The Message is Death (Arthur Jafa, US, 2016)
• Bird Calls (David Baumflek, Canada, 2018)
• Altiplano (Malena Szlam, Canada, 2018)

Required Texts:

• Yoko Ono, Grapefruit
• Roland Barthes, Camera Obscura
• Derek Jarman, Chroma
• Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
• Anne Carson, Short Talks
• Maggie Nelson, Bluets
• Carol Mavor, Blue Mythologies

Evaluation: Short form writing; experimental slideshow (text + image); video portrait; final video, manuscript, or installation.

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

Maximum Enrollment: 15 students.

Description: Students in this course will analyze literary texts, dramatic scripts, trial records, and other accounts that comment on or otherwise represent a broadening of social participation in key debates, controversies, and cultural developments in late-medieval England (ca. 1375-1500). During this dynamic period concepts of authorship, communication, textual production, and literate activity were undergoing tremendous change. English was developing quickly as England’s official language, overtaking the use of French and Latin. Heresy and its suppression met with a burgeoning humanist movement, and popular expressions of religious devotion were vibrant and varied. More people were finding it necessary or expedient to navigate legal systems and documents that encroached upon their daily lives. In the second half of the fifteenth century, the new print technology coexisted with a booming manuscript culture. Crucially, all of these developments unfolded in ways that cut across boundaries between Latin and the vernacular, the learned and the lay, the religious and the secular—a fact that was celebrated by some and resisted by others. Intellectual debates that were once relatively confined were now characterized by the concerns and participation of a wider, and mixed, English population.

We will begin in the late fourteenth century, with the serious debates surrounding the controversial Wycliffite reformists, who produced the first full translation of the Bible in English and brought sophisticated theological debates out of the Latinate sphere of the university and into the “streets”. We’ll discuss the Bible translation debate c. 1401, legislation aimed at limiting vernacular activity, and trials or dialogues in which the possibilities and limits of lay participation in these debates were negotiated. In this context we’ll study lay participation in sophisticated scholastic and scientific discourses, as seen in the writings of Chaucer and his contemporaries. We’ll read the Book of Margery Kempe to explore the possibilities for (and limits of) female participation in text-based practices, and to get a sense of how laypeople interacted with books and deployed their learning in their communities. A significant portion of the course will be devoted to medieval drama. We’ll study the work of ambitious playwrights who imagine sophisticated audiences that can navigate doctrinal impasses, complex scriptural treatments, the playful intermingling of sacred and profane, and the possibilities of dramatic form. As part of many of our discussions we will attend to changing concepts of authorship, the mingling of law and vernacular poetry, and the idea of public texts in a manuscript culture. Students will be asked to question received notions that link “public” with print, or which place the formation of a public sphere after (sometimes long after) the fifteenth century. Attention to the materials and circumstances of communication and textual circulation will be central to the course, and some sessions will be spent working with original medieval manuscript and early print material in McGill’s Rare Books and Special Collections. Most primary texts will be read in the original Middle English, though no previous knowledge of the language is required or assumed. Portions of several classes will be spent developing proficiency in Middle English.

Texts (provisional): 

• Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (selections)
• Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe (with selections from the Showings of Julian of Norwich)
• Thomas Hoccleve, ‘My Compleinte’ and Other Poems
• John Lydgate, The Temple of Glas
• Reginald Pecock (selections from various writings)
• Medieval drama: the Chester Mystery Cycle, the N-Town Plays, and the Towneley Plays (selections)
• Readings from the Bible translation debate
• Select heresy trials and records
• Weekly readings from secondary scholarship

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

Format: Seminar.

Maximum Enrollment: 12 students.

Description: Scholarly attention to the figure of the fool in Shakespeare has tended to focus on the festive licence the fool enjoys in his interactions with other characters. Shakespeare’s “artificial” or “wise” fools derive this licence from their mimicry of “natural” fools—individuals of limited mental capacity who were known in the period by a variety of names such as idiot, imbecile, mome, moron, and numerous similar epithets still in use today. Broader studies of the fool as a literary and historical type also highlight the figure’s ambivalence, an ambivalence which seems to originate in medieval and early modern attitudes toward individuals with intellectual disabilities. The fool’s very lack of cognitive ability was also considered a positive trait, for such individuals remained impervious to and unaffected by the corruptive effects of social life and manners. What rendered the natural fool special in terms of his relationship to the social environment was his aloofness from it. This positive quality was frequently construed in a religious sense as sacred.

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

Texts: Specific texts are TBA.

Evaluation: Seminar presentation 35%; long paper 50%; participation 15%.

Format: Seminar.

Average Enrollment: 15 students.

Description: “Performance” has gained widespread currency as a heuristic device and analytic tool in the humanities and social sciences. From pedestrian business usage (“performance indicators”) to rather more involved literary theories of “performativity,” the metaphor of performance has proven useful to a range of academic disciplines and critical projects. Indeed, in Perform, or else, Jon McKenzie speculates that “performance” will be to 21st century thought what “discipline” was to the 19th.

We will read widely in performance theory from the 1970s to today, beginning with an exploration of the ontology of performance through readings of now-classic texts in performance theory, and engagements with a series of performance art events.

Required texts:
(at McGill Bookstore and on reserve at Mclennan Library)
Laura Levin and Marlis Schweitzer, ed. Performance Studies in Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2017.
Custom coursepack

Evaluation: Presentation (30%), final research paper proposal (15%); final research paper (40%); participation (15%).

Format: Seminar.

Maximum Enrollment: 12 students.

Description: This course provides hands-on training in the use of computers and statistical methods to analyze literature – an approach also known as “literary text mining.” In the past ten years, computational methods to study culture, particularly literary texts, have increasingly moved out of the margins. We’ve seen the publication of a string of important articles in major literary studies journals, and the release of several new monographs. At the same time, we’ve seen an increase in the number of academic positions advertised in the “digital humanities” and “cultural analytics” in English and literature departments. As research in this sub-field expands and improves, the digital humanities and cultural analytics will continue to grow, making larger and more significant interventions into the discipline.

This course means to prepare graduate students in English and literature to perform applied research in the digital humanities. In this seminar, students will learn how to write computer code in Python – a standard computing language used in data science – and the rudiments of statistical methods useful for a data-driven analysis of literary texts. By the end of the course, students will be able to perform simple to intermediate computational and statistical analysis on literary corpora, such as collocations analysis, most distinctive words analysis, and topic modeling. Most of the core “shallow” methods for text analysis, like simple counting, as well as several “deeper” methods, like vector semantics, will be introduced in a live context. We will leverage the availability of a number of free online corpora – for example, a large collection of English-language novels from 1800 to 1923 – to build case studies.

At the same time, the second half of the class will introduce excellent recent examples of digital humanist and cultural analytics research from scholars such as Ted Underwood, Andrew Piper, Lauren Klein, Michael Gavin, and several others. The purpose of this is two-fold: first, to allow students to be aware of the “cutting edge” in this field – the most interesting work that is currently happening – and have an opportunity to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses, and second, to allow them to replicate existing examples of DH work from the ground-up. With the instructor’s help, we will often reproduce these arguments to see how they work. This then provides a useful template for students to develop their own ideas.

There are no prerequisites for this class. All that is required is a healthy dose of curiosity, open-mindedness, and willingness to learn. It is particularly aimed at literature students who do not think of themselves as “good at math,” or even imagine themselves as averse to “science.” The class will be challenging to students with no background in quantitative research insofar as it will train them in habits of thought somewhat alien to the humanities, such as mathematical logic and algorithmic thinking. But the course will entirely be taught through a humanistic lens, meaning that the instructor will introduce all methods and concepts through literary studies examples and the logic of familiar approaches like close reading. In other words, the course is not a seminar in “computer science”; it is a seminar in humanistic research that ideally will become useful as part of the student’s literary studies toolkit.

Texts (provisional): 

• Andrew Piper, Enumerations
• Sarah Allison, Reductive Reading
• Daniel Shore, Cyberformalism
• Ted Underwood, Distant Horizons
• Katherine Bode, A World of Fiction
• Franco Moretti, Distant Reading
  Other texts to be provided on myCourses.

Evaluation (provisional): Weekly problem sets (50%); final project (25%); attendance and participation (25%).

Format: Seminar.

Maximum Enrollment: 12 students.

Description: This course is designed to bring together Literature and Cultural Studies students around the concept of the uncanny—a concept that cuts straight to the troubled heart of narrative media in their definition and practice. The course may also appeal to theoretically minded Drama and Theatre students, since the uncanny haunts the scene of theatricality. Together, we will track far and wide a peculiarly mobile generic constellation: the tradition in which “things are not what they seem,” in which tidy complacencies give way to vast unknown forces, where time is out of joint and the individual character/reader/viewer radically lost. We will provisionally expect the uncanny in three overlapping domains: in social worlds that resist navigation, in natural environments that defy mastery, and in technology that creates its own imperatives.

Note: for the first class meeting all students will read the first three items in the coursepack—Hoffmann, Freud, and Royle, as well as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”

Texts:

• Possible novels include: Linden Hills, Duplex, When We Were Orphans, Fingersmith
• Possible films include: The Invitation, Blue Velvet, Cure, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Evaluation: Weekly journals 60%; presentations 10%; participation 30%.

Format: Seminar.

Maximum Enrollment: 12 students.

Description: Patricia Kathleen Page (1916-2010) is now widely recognized as one of the two or three major Canadian poets before Atwood. She has been studied for her modernism; for her depictions of selfhood, psychology and identity; for her variant of feminism; for the fascinating arc of a creative career that included a prolonged period of creative crisis as a poet and a stunning turn to the production of visual art that receives increasing acclaim and scrutiny; and for her practice of memoir, of particular interest to recent post-colonial scholars who investigate her responses to Brazilian and Mexican periods of residence. Receiving slighter scrutiny are her short fiction and her work as a scriptwriter for the National Film Board of Canada during the Grierson era. Page is currently the subject of an expansive editorial project directed by Zailig Pollock that includes digital reproduction of her complete works in all her chosen arts (The Digital Page) and a series of printed volumes making her selected poems, fiction, memoirs, and visual art available. A graduate seminar spending a full thirteen weeks on close interpretation of Page’s works would be fully justified.

In this course, however, we will also try to position this diverse artist as thoroughly as possible in the contexts that make her legible, whether to readers of her time or to us today. These will include contexts with which the instructor is familiar, such as the sources of her written modernism (Imagism, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden) and of her Canadian modernism; her negotiations with the literary cultures of sentimentalism and impersonality; and her engagement with Surrealism, and especially with the Surrealist women painters with whom she associated during her time in Mexico. Of equal interest will be contexts and “times” with which the instructor is less familiar and which will require fully engaged student investigation and input. These may include the techniques, media, and sources of her visual art; the Sufism that inspired her later works; the Spanish courtly verse form known as the glosa, that would dominate her later poetic career and her impact on younger poets; new technologies for the dissemination of Canadian writing, such as radio, television, and film; the theory and canonization of post-modernism in Canadian writing, by Linda Hutcheon and others, in the 1980s; and Page’s own canonical history, which saw her rise from a period of substantial neglect in the late 1980s and 1990s to her widely recognized eminence today.

As this is the course’s first iteration, it will work partially on a workshop model in which a given week’s discussions give rise to a set of questions that will be assigned for follow-up reports by students to the next week’s seminar. As far as is practicable, the subject matter of those reports and investigations will be suggested by students on an ongoing basis, and the instructor’s role (apart from a necessary evaluation) will be to make sure such impromptu assignments are equally distributed among all participants across the semester. The course is on P.K. Page, and its primary objective will be a thorough knowledge among all seminarists of her works, but the ideal realization of the course will also develop students’ understanding of the variety of cultural and historical contexts within which any such major author of the twentieth century can be studied.

Texts:

• the presently available selection of Page’s poetry: Kaleidoscope, ed. Zailig Pollock, The Porcupine’s Quill, 2010
• as well as her late volume Holograms, Brick Books, 1994
• one or both memoirs may be assigned: Brazilian Journal, eds. Suzanne Bailey and Christopher Doody, The Porcupine’s Quill, 2011; Mexican Journal, ed. Margaret Steffler, The Porcupine’s Quill, 2015
• depending on the Fall 2020 status of The Digital Page, the instructor will seek access for seminarists to yet-to-be released materials
• a course-pack will likely be necessary for access to Page’s fiction and some other writings

Evaluation: 

• 25%: Some combination of short research and writing tasks: for example, a two-page report on a given facet or context of Page’s works (e.g. “Women Surrealist Painters”), assigned one week and delivered verbally to the seminar the next week. The mark will assess both the verbal delivery of your report and the discussion it occasioned, a short bibliography you will distribute guiding your peers’ further research, as well as a formal polished document submitted for marking shortly afterward. I presently envision that you will complete two such short assignments in the semester. Given the workshop model of the course, the timing of your assignments may not be knowable in advance;
• 50%: Major research paper, minimum 20 maximum 25 pp. It will combine close study of a selection of Page’s works and research into the intellectual, historical, cultural, and / or critical contexts you think essential to their study. Your paper’s topic must be proposed and approved at least one month in advance of the due date, at or shortly after the end of term;
• 25%: Preparedness for and participation in all seminar discussions, including discussion of research and reports presented by your peers. NB: attendance is not relevant to this portion of your evaluation, since at the graduate level it is assumed you will attend every class without exception. A failing grade (below “B”) must be given in this category to those who don’t participate consistently, constructively, and in an informed way in class discussions.

Format: Seminar.

Maximum Enrollment: 8 students.

Description: We live in a world that is a coherent whole, intimately connected through structures of capital and supranational political and legal institutions. At the same time, it is also profoundly uneven, manifested not only in the underdevelopment of the Global South but also through the dynamics of core and periphery in metropolitan regions of Euro-America. This course focuses on combined and uneven development to understand how it has shaped – and continues to shape – aesthetic forms and norms in both the metropolitan as well as peripheral regions of the world. Specifically, it will interrogate four formal categories in a global and comparative framework: Realism, Modernism, Irrealism, and the National Allegory. Drawing on literary texts, critical work from literary and cultural studies as well as theory, this seminar will attempt to think through the aesthetics (and politics) of uneven development on a global scale.

Texts: We will study a selection of novels, poems, and short stories by authors such as Rabindranath Tagore, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Mulk Raj Anand, Alejo Carpentier, Jibanananda Das, Toni Morrison, and Arundhati Roy.

Theoretical texts may include essays or extracts from longer works by Gyorgy Lukacs, Theodor Adorno, Raymond Williams, Herbert Marcuse, Gayatri Spivak, Fredric Jameson, Aijaz Ahmad, Benita Parry, Susan Andrade, and Ulka Anjaria.

This is an indicative list. Final texts will be decided in August 2020.

Evaluation: Participation; critical responses (x10); final paper.

Format: Seminar.

Maximum Enrollment: TBA

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, considering especially the relations between poetry, freedom, and change. 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.

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, on-line
• 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.

Maximum Enrollment: 15 students.

Description: The course will explore the remarkable long nineteenth-century turn to fictional experiments during the era that saw the invention of modern geology, the rise of evolutionary discourse, the origins of science fiction, and the institution of new industrial technologies. Our diverse investigations of the changing relationship between literature and science during the age of empire will encompass mad doctors, reanimated bodies, lost worlds, two-dimensional universes, and artificial people. This course seeks to account for the historical relations between new scientific paradigms, technologies, and theories and laboring-class, feminized, and non-Western bodies.

Instead of understanding the scientific and the literary as separate spheres, however, we will trace their mutual construction and imbrication in the face of increasing disciplinary differentiation. This seminar will thus necessarily reflect on the relationship between scientific and literary forms, interrogating the professionalization of science and rise of the universal discourses of so-called subjectivity and objectivity. While our discussions will encompass the relationship between Victorian debates about vivisection, degeneration, and progress in an increasingly global world, they will also examine prior Romantic concepts of natural history, taxonomic discourse, and deep time.

This seminar will also reevaluate the origins of science fiction and its generic relatives: utopian fiction, adventure fiction, gothic literature, and scientific romance. We will study how these works anticipate present-day insights and interventions in science and technology studies and feminist science studies. These early literary experiments offer visions of what Darko Suvin terms the simultaneous experience of “estrangement and cognition” and what Sherryl Vint terms the imagination of “possible future selves . . . as sites for identification.” These works collectively redefine the borderlines between nature and culture, experimenter and experiment, body and machine, and here and elsewhere. Together, we will attempt to map the contested ground of the nineteenth century’s alternative visions of scientific community and practice, exploring what counts as science and who defines the role of the scientist.

Texts:

• Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden (1791)
• Charlotte Smith, Beachy Head (1807) and selected sonnets
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818), “Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman” (1826), and “The Mortal Immortal” (1833)
• Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844, selections)
• Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859)
• Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)
• Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly (1872), including Carmilla
• Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872)
• Edwin Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884)
• Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and selected stories
• H. Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure (1887)
• H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895) and The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896)
• Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
• Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World (1912)
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (1915) and selected short fiction
• Selected essays/book chapters from Alan Bewell, Donna Haraway, Gillian Beer, Sherryl Vint, Darko Suvin, Laura Otis, Robert Mitchell, Bruno Latour, Anne K. Mellor, Theresa Kelley, George Levine, Lorraine Daston, Robin Valenza, Kevis Goodman, John Rieder, Alan Richardson, Sandra Harding, Londa Schiebinger, Sander L. Gilman, Jon Klancher, Evelyn Fox Keller, Thomas Kuhn, Ian Duncan, Peter Logan

Evaluation: Participation (15%), reading responses (25%), presentation (10%), seminar paper (50%).

Format: Seminar.

Maximum Enrollment: 12 students.

Description: Epistolary fiction, in which the narrative is conveyed through an exchange of letters, has ancient and medieval antecedents. This course, however, begins with Pamela (1740), the first (and much the shortest) of Samuel Richardson’s three novels, in which he began to develop the epistolary techniques that he would deploy further in his later fiction. We shall also study two of the earliest, and finest, of the many parodic responses to Pamela: Henry Fielding’s Shamela (1741) and Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela (1741). We shall then turn to three comic novels published in the decade from 1769 to 1778: Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague, set partly in Quebec City and showing the interplay between French, English and Huron communities; Tobias Smollett’s final novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, in which the author experimented with epistolary fiction for the first and only time; and Frances Burney’s dazzling first novel, Evelina, in which she exploits the resources of epistolarity to the fullest, only to abandon it in her three subsequent novels. We shall conclude with three of Jane Austen’s short youthful writings of the 1790s: “Love and Friendship,” “Lesley Castle,” and “Lady Susan.” For all her admiration of Richardson, Austen was acutely conscious of the limitations of epistolary form. After parodying it in her juvenilia, written when she was in her mid-teens, she wrote the novella-length “Lady Susan,” which she completed but did not attempt to publish. In considering why Austen, like Burney, made the move from epistolarity to third-person narration, we shall fulfil part of the course’s principal objective: to examine the various advantages and disadvantages of telling a novel in letters.

Texts:

• Samuel Richardson, Pamela, Oxford World’s Classics
• Henry Fielding, Shamela and Eliza Haywood, Anti-Pamela, Broadview
• Frances Brooke, The History of Emily Montague
• Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, Norton
• Frances Burney, Evelina, Oxford World’s Classics
• Jane Austen, Manuscript Works, Broadview

Evaluation: Seminar presentation (30%); term paper (50%); participation (20%).

Format: Seminar.

Maximum Enrollment: TBA

Description: What is contemporary literature? Is it a literary-historical category? An aesthetic one? An empty placeholder? To hear Theodore Martin tell it, “the contemporary has its problems”: historically indeterminate and formally ambiguous, “a moving window” without a proper frame. Students in this course will study a selection of major works from the early twenty-first century, alongside the critics who have grappled with them, in an effort to bring the contemporary—and its problems—into focus. From the so-called “war on terror” to catastrophic climate change, from rapid technological advancement to rampant inequality and the global refugee crisis, this course will work to investigate literary representations of recent history, as well as to situate those representations in longer literary-historical timelines. Paying close attention to issues of form, we will try to identify both what is new—and not so new—about twenty-first-century American fiction. Toward the end of the semester, we will hold a public symposium on contemporary literature, presenting original work, fielding questions from other scholars, and identifying avenues for further research. The final text in the course will be nominated and selected by the seminar.

Texts:

• Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
• Mohsin Hamid, Exit West 
• Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station
• Tao Lin, Taipei
• Cormac McCarthy, The Road
• Richard McGuire, Here
• Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation
• Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
• Philip Roth, The Plot Against America
• Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones
• Colson Whitehead, Zone One
  Final Text TBD by Student Vote

Evaluation (tentative): Participation (10%); research presentation (20%); conference paper (30%); final paper (40%).

Format: Seminar.

Maximum Enrollment: 12 students.

Description: From his own time to the present, the Roman poet Ovid has been a continuous source of inspiration for later artists and writers who have metamorphosed his tales of love and metamorphoses. While it may seem extravagant to claim that English literature begins with Ovid, it is clear that the burst of creative energy in the 16th century that we call the English Renaissance was fuelled by translations and adaptations of this Protean poet. In this course we will try to understand how and why Ovid spoke to the Elizabethan situation in particular. We will examine how Ovid was taught in school and popularized through allegorical readings and English translations, and then see how his stories and verbal ingenuity in general inspired and influenced the development of epyllia, drama, and love poetry. Does the poet associated with change help Elizabethans understand the changes taking place in their own time – as he may help us in ours?

Prerequisite: No formal prerequisite; however, all students must have read the entire Metamorphoses before the first class. Knowledge of Ovid’s other works and some background in Renaissance literature and classics is also very useful.

Evaluation: 5 page research paper on an Ovidian myth (20%); final 20 page paper (55%); participation (25%).

Texts: Shakespeare: Venus and Adonis; Rape of Lucrece; Midsummer Night’s Dream; Titus Andronicus

On myCourses:

• Selections from Elizabethan epyllia, poetry, translations, commentaries, and emblems
• Marlowe, Hero and Leander
• Spenser, “Muiopotmos”; Faerie Queene 3; Mutabilitie Cantos
• Ben Jonson, Chloridia; Poetaster
• Milton, A Mask/Comus

Format: Seminar

Maximum Enrolment: 15 students

Description: Austerity, rationing, youth culture, race riots, sex scandals—British literature in the 1950s covers a gamut of topical material. To segment the 1950s from other heuristic categories, such as “postwar,” “the Atomic Age,” or “mid-century literature,” is to impose a synchronic analysis on a national literature. Like a sensitive recording machine, British fiction registers social changes, such as the upward scramble for prestige in Angus Wilson’s novels or the taboo of adultery in Elizabeth Taylor’s novels. Many 1950s novels look back to the war; after all, the Second World War had bankrupted the nation and the consequences of heavy bombardment remained visible in metropolitan centres well into the 1950s. If the 1950s concern the aftermath of the war, they also take a robust perspective on British industry, trade, and research, as manifest in the Festival of Britain (1951) and the injection of vigour given by the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (1953). An unusual number of 1950s British novels speculate on the nature of state sovereignty and the role of individuals in respecting the law, as in John Wyndham’s dystopic novels about carnivorous plants that invade England. Although the Welfare State mandated a levelling down of social difference, many characters in 1950s fiction, usually young urban males, are on the make: they want to fight their way to success, either through employment or strategic marriage. Spivs and hustlers abound in this decade. In works by Barbara Pym, Muriel Spark, and Alan Wildeblood, queer young men risk criminal records by having sex with other men. Consequently, this course will deal with changing ideas of sexuality for men and for women. It will also cover domestic and international politics, manifest in Welfare State reforms, the Suez Crisis, and the Notting Hill race riots. Some short stories and films will be included on the syllabus. Critical readings will range from works by Raymond Williams, Frank Kermode, Iris Murdoch, and J. B. Priestley, to Alice Ferrebe, Alan Sinfield, and Richard Hornsey.

Evaluation: Participation (15%); short paper (25%); long paper (60%).

Texts: This list is provisional and subject to modification.

• William Golding, The Inheritors (1955)
• John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (1951)
• John Braine, Room at the Top (1957)
• Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners (1959)
• Iris Murdoch, Under the Net (1954)
• Peter Wildeblood, Against the Law (1954)
• Nevil Shute, On the Beach (1958)
• Muriel Spark, The Comforters (1958)
• Barbara Pym, A Glass of Blessings (1958)

Format: Weekly seminars, discussion

Maximum Enrolment: 15 students

Description: In the period since the 1980s, several key institutions of literary canon formation—from the National Endowment for the Arts to literary prize organizations, from university syllabi to literary criticism itself—have transformed in ways that either expressly or implicitly promoted historical fiction as contemporary literature’s most prestigious and politically potent genre. Moreover, American fiction’s “historical turn” has been especially pronounced among minority writers, whose increasing recognition within both the academy and the prize economy has been almost exclusively in the idiom of historical fiction. What are the political, aesthetic, and literary-historical stakes of American fiction’s decisive turn toward the past? What new possibilities and problems arise when, as Toni Morrison famously put it, “nothing ever dies”? Working comparatively across ethnic literary traditions, this seminar will focus on a handful of contemporary fiction’s historical sub-genres: the WWII novel and Holocaust fiction; narratives of immigration and the multigenerational family saga; and experiments with mass-market genres like detective and spy fiction. Our readings will include the novels below—paired with short fiction and a wide range of critical texts—as well as a final novel or short story collection selected by the class.

Texts:

• Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (ISBN 9780679745426) and excerpts from Beloved
• Art Spiegelman, Maus, Vol I: My Father Bleeds History (ISBN 9780394747231)
• Ronyoung Kim, Clay Walls (ISBN 9781877946783)
• Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (ISBN 9781400079490)
• Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban (ISBN 9780345381439)
• Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (ISBN 9780385686136)
• Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, A Kind of Freedom (ISBN 9781640091030)
• Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer (ISBN 9780802124944)
• Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing (ISBN 9781501126079)
• Tommy Orange, There There (ISBN 9780525633013)
  Final Text TBD by Student Vote

Evaluation (tentative): Participation (15%); research presentation (25%); midterm essay (25%); final research paper (35%).

Format: Seminar

“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 by authors such as: Franklin, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Lippard (or another “city mystery” writer), Whitman, the diarist George Templeton Strong, Holmes, Cable, Crane, Dreiser, Alger, L. Frank Baum, Jacob Riis, Chopin, Howells, James, Wharton. 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).

Evaluation (tentative):
Participation in discussions (20%)
Series of one-page textual analyses (20%)
Class presentation (15%)
Final research paper (45%)

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

Format: Seminar

Maximum Enrolment: 15 students

Description: In close study of 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 course 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.

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) I will grade you on all components listed under Option (1) but also on a formally presented essay version of your remarks (8-9 pp.) that you turn in immediately following 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.

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.
• 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.

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

Maximum Enrolment: 15 students

Prerequisite: This course is reserved for undergraduates in the Honours program and graduate students.

Expected Student Preparation: Familiarity with concepts and terminology from film studies and cultural studies will be very useful.

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 while 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 the musical.

Evaluation: Participation; class presentation; seminar paper.

Required Readings: Course pack including essays by Michael Rogin, Paula Rabinowitz, Robert Warshow, Fran Mason, Thomas Schatz, Henry Jenkins, Richard Maltby, Lary May, Rita Barnard, Michael Denning, Lea Jacobs, Vivian Sobchack, Lawrence Levine, Victoria Sturtevant, Robert Sklar, Danae Clark, Robin Wood, Giorgio Agamben, and others.

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)
• Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy, 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)

Format: Seminar, weekly screenings.

Description: Theatre has long been a site of feminist contestation, experimentation, and pleasure. That this performing art takes place (usually) in a shared time and space via live bodies heightens its affective draw, narrative force, and political potentials. This makes theatre an inviting – and also risky – space for feminist-identified theatre workers to produce. What kinds of representations are available to feminist performers, for instance? Following Teresa de Lauretis we might ask, How does a feminist enter representation? What are the conditions of her appearance? How might feminist theatre and its theories alter such conditions? This course investigates feminist responses to and innovations in contemporary North American theatre. Through readings (and/or viewings) of feminist plays/performances and of key texts in feminist dramatic and performance theory, we will consider how feminist theatre -- exemplified for the purposes of this course in select artists, practices, and institutions -- negotiates and reconfigures the gendered power dynamics of dramatic literature, theatrical production, and performance theory.

Evaluation: Participation; seminar presentation; final research paper.

Texts: 

Coursepack may include excerpts from:

• Kim Solga, Theatre and Feminism
• Laura Levin, Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage and the Art of Blending In
• Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis
• Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic
• Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: performance and politics
• Ellen Donkin and Susan Clement, eds. Upstaging Big Daddy: Directing Theatre as if Gender and Race Matter
• Shelley Scott. Nightwood Theatre: A Woman’s Work is Always Done

Possible Plays/Performances:

• The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein, How to Become a Cupcake
• Peggy Shaw, Menopausal Gentleman
• Marie Clements, The Unnatural and Accidental Women
• Rebecca Belmore, Vigil
• Adrian Piper, “My Calling Cards”
• Adrienne Kennedy, Funnyhouse of a Negro; and A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White

Format: Seminar

Maximum Enrolment: 15 students

Description: This course provides hands-on training in the use of computers and statistical methods to analyze literature – an approach also known as “literary text mining.” In the past ten years, computational methods to study culture, particularly literary texts, have increasingly moved out of the margins. We’ve seen the publication of a string of important articles in major literary studies journals, and the release of several new monographs. At the same time, we’ve seen an increase in the number of academic positions advertised in the “digital humanities” and “cultural analytics” in English and literature departments. As research in this sub-field expands and improves, the digital humanities and cultural analytics will continue to grow, making larger and more significant interventions into the discipline.

This course means to prepare graduate students in English and literature to perform applied research in the digital humanities. In this seminar, students will learn how to write computer code in Python – a standard computing language used in data science – and the rudiments of statistical methods useful for a data-driven analysis of literary texts. By the end of the course, students will be able to perform simple to intermediate computational and statistical analysis on literary corpora, such as collocations analysis, most distinctive words analysis, and topic modeling. Most of the core “shallow” methods for text analysis, like simple counting, as well as several “deeper” methods, like vector semantics, will be introduced in a live context. We will leverage the availability of a number of free online corpora – for example, a large collection of English-language novels from 1800 to 1923 – to build case studies.

At the same time, the second half of the class will introduce excellent recent examples of digital humanist and cultural analytics research from scholars such as Ted Underwood, Andrew Piper, Lauren Klein, Michael Gavin, and several others. The purpose of this is two-fold: first, to allow students to be aware of the “cutting edge” in this field – the most interesting work that is currently happening – and have an opportunity to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses, and second, to allow them to replicate existing examples of DH work from the ground-up. With the instructor’s help, we will often reproduce these arguments to see how they work. This then provides a useful template for students to develop their own ideas.

There are no prerequisites for this class. All that is required is a healthy dose of curiosity, open-mindedness, and willingness to learn. It is particularly aimed at literature students who do not think of themselves as “good at math,” or even imagine themselves as averse to “science.” The class will be challenging to students with no background in quantitative research insofar as it will train them in habits of thought somewhat alien to the humanities, such as mathematical logic and algorithmic thinking. But the course will entirely be taught through a humanistic lens, meaning that the instructor will introduce all methods and concepts through literary studies examples and the logic of familiar approaches like close reading. In other words, the course is not a seminar in “computer science”; it is a seminar in humanistic research that ideally will become useful as part of the student’s literary studies toolkit.

Evaluation (provisional): Weekly problem sets (50%); final project (25%); attendance and participation (25%).

Texts (provisional):

• Andrew Piper, Enumerations
• Sarah Allison, Reductive Reading
• Daniel Shore, Cyberformalism
• Ted Underwood, Distant Horizons
• Katherine Bode, A World of Fiction
• Franco Moretti, Distant Reading

Other texts to be provided on myCourses.

Format: Seminar

Maximum Enrolment: 15 students

Description: How do anarchival impulses reanimate the anarchic and anachronistic elements of the archive? In this course, our focus will be on how (an)archival practices of queer, feminist, racialized and indigenous lifeworlds are critical and creative responses to hegemonic conditions of knowledge and power. What are the political, ethical and aesthetic questions and challenges that the archive poses? Who can access the archive? How do we recognize one? How has the digital altered our notions of access, remixing and recirculating the archive? What is the work of materiality in constituting the archive as a site of encounter? This course takes an anarchival approach to archives, through three units: media, body, performance. Attentive to material practices and reading across key texts of contemporary theorizations of the archive, we will explore case studies that address questions of liveness, animacy and agency. In collaboration with the national research project “Archive/Counter-Archive: Activating Canada’s Moving Image Heritage” this course will include a collaborative case study of a local media archive, bringing hands-on experience in reanimating archives through research-creation to the overall course goals.

Evaluation (provisional): Weekly responses (20%); final research project (40%); collaborative case study (30%); participation (10%).

Texts: TBA

Format: Seminar, with site visits and film screenings.

Maximum Enrolment: 15 students

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. 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 title 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.

Texts: The Poems of the Pearl-Manuscript, ed. Andrew Waldron and Malcolm Andrew. Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies. Liverpool University Press, 2008 (ISBN 9780859897914).

Students are requested to purchase the text online – make sure you get the one with the red pentangle on the cover – as this is easier and less costly.

Evaluation: Essay; seminar presentation; final paper.

Format: Seminar

Average Enrolment: Capped at 15 students.

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,
• iconicity.

The roots of Bardolatry can be traced to the 18th 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 18th-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 18th-century Bardolatry, David Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee).

Evaluation (tentative): Participation (15%); research presentation (25%); paper proposal and annotated bibliography (10%); paper (50%).

Texts (provisional):

The texts studied will be supplied in a course pack available for purchase from the McGill University Bookstore.

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).

Format: Discussion seminar, possibly some performance work with adaptations.

Maximum Enrolment: 15 students

Description: In 1989 the Berlin Wall came down, marking the end of a period that involved not only the USA and the USSR, but engulfed the entire world. Following the most recent research in the field, we will discuss literary works and films from Britain, the USA, and Anglophone (post)colonial nations that present the Cold War as a world-wide conflagration, which involved both superpowers from the Northern hemisphere and nations from the global South. What scientific and technological developments fueled the arms race and how were they represented in fiction? What literary genres emerged as a result of the competition between East and West? What forms of masculinity and femininity were forged by Cold War cultures? How does the East that constitutes the object of Cold War studies compare to the East discussed in postcolonial criticism? These questions will constitute the starting point for our exploration of literary representations of espionage and intrigue, the nuclear threat, the space race, new forms of imperialism, the Bandung Conference and the Non-Aligned Movement, African socialism, utopian and dystopian societies. Along with films and literary works, we will read essays by Jacques Derrida, Jean Franco, Timothy Brennan, Ann Douglas, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, etc.

Evaluation (tentative): Presentation (20%); short paper on theoretical text (20%), final essay (45%); participation (15%).

Literary Texts (provisional list): 

• Graham Greene, The Quiet American
• Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross
• Mark Behr, The Smell of Apples
• Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban
• Richard Wright, The Color Curtain

Films (provisional list):

• Dr. Strangelove, Dir. Stanley Kubrik
• The Manchurian Candidate, Dir. John Frankenheimer
• The Hero, Dir. Zeze Gamboa
• Apocalypse Now Redux, Dir. Francis Ford Coppola
• Double Take, Dir. Johan Grimonprez

Format: Seminar

Maximum Enrolment: 12 students

Description: Ekphrasis is the term used to describe literary works that are based on visual art. Ekphrastic texts have a dynamic relationship with their visual source. As Ruth Webb observes, ekphrasis is “a form of vivid evocation that may have as its subject-matter anything – an action, a person, a place, a battle, even a crocodile. What distinguishes ekphrasis is its quality of vividness, enargeia.” Ekphrastic relationships encourage us to interrogate their visual sources and to question our own process of interpreting those sources. Ekphrasis can help us understand painting, and painting can help us understand poems. The course focuses on a series of provocative paintings in order to explore a wide range of visual and verbal forms of creativity, with an emphasis on nineteenth and twentieth-century works. As indicated below, the paintings to be considered include those produced by canonized artists such as Breughel, Cezanne, Dürer, Klimt, Rousseau, and Van Gogh, along with poems by Blake, Browning, Carson, Ginsberg, Keats, Ondaatje, Sexton, Tennyson, and Whitman, to name a few. At the same time, the course will introduce students to a range of contemporary works by new artists and writers who challenge conventional ekphrastic boundaries. Students will learn how to explore paintings and how to approach poems based on those paintings. The method of study will be collaborative, with equal time given to visual and written texts. A tentative description of each weekly class follows:

1. Desiring ekphrasis: Introduction to ekphrastic models, with poems by Robert Browning and John Keats that imagine non-existent paintings. What is the nature of ekphrastic desire?
    
2. Animals with human faces: We enter the animal world through engravings by William Blake and paintings by Henri Rousseau and Albrecht Dürer, along with poems by Kathleen Jamie and David Zieroth.
    
3. Water worlds: Dive into ekphrasis with Katsushika Hokusai, Paul Cézanne, Allen Ginsberg, and others. How does the fluidity of water find its way into poetic form?
    
4. Bodies and embodiment: Destabilizing conventional conceptions of the body and the traditionally canonized representation of humans over time including Juan Carreno de Miranda’s La Monstra Desnuda and Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. With poems by X.J Kennedy, Mary Meriam, and Lorette Collins Klobah.
    
5. Representing the male body: The presence of the male body as captured through painting and poetry, from Jean François Millet’s L’Homme à la Houe and Thomas Eakins’ The Swimming Hole, to a screenshot of Sayo Yamamoto’s Yuri!!! On Ice. With poems by Edwin Markham, Ethan Leonard, and Walt Whitman.
    
6. Representing the female body: Female poets Anne Carson, Margaret Atwood, and Lisel Mueller challenge the painterly male gaze in canvases by Edward Hopper, Edouard Manet, and Paul Delvaux. How do these female poets re-appropriate names (“mermaid,” “prostitute,” “nun,” “slut”) and spaces?
    
7. Pre-Raphaelite passion: Spend a week in the nineteenth century with Alfred Lord Tennyson, some pre-Raphaelite painters (John William Waterhouse, John Everett Millais) and their muses. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood often depicted women and experimented with new forms of expressing passion and sensation. How do they challenge the established artistic systems of authority? How do they depict femininity?
    
8. Dreams and a kiss: For every painting this week, there are two poems. How does the poetic dialogue between these poems allow us to experience Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Rousseau, Gustav Klimt, and their works? With poems by Anne Sexton, Charles Simic, and Michael Ondaatje.
    
9. Scandalous bodies: An exploration of sexual taboos (rape, incest, exhibitionism) in the paintings of Balthus and the poetry of Stephen Dobyns, who is often obsessed with Balthus.
    
10. Death by art: Whether it’s a beheading or losing wax wings to the sun, Renaissance painters bear witness to the tragic. Artists such as Leonardo Da Vinci, Pieter Breughel – along with Shelley, W.H. Auden, and e.e. cummings – re-imagine depictions of violent death.
     
11. The face of war: Great war scenes as painted by Goya, Stanley Spencer, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dali. With poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Billy Howell-Sinnard, and Sandra Sneed. How do these ekphrastic conversations alter our perception of conflict and open a dialogue about war, with its expectations and inevitable casualties?
     
12. Who do you think you are? The art of self-representation through portraits such as Andy Warhol’s Self Portrait, Frida Kahlo's Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, and Winold Reiss’ Langston Hughes. Can paintings and poems modify our conception of identity? With poems by Adrian Clarke, Barbara Crooker, and Winold Reiss.
     
13. “Camera Lucida”: In the final week, students will be asked to apply their knowledge of ekphrastic art to photographs by Diane Arbus, Sally Mann, Grete Stern, and Nick Ut. How do poets grapple with controversial images? What does the shift from painting to photo entail?
     

Evaluation: Short papers; class presentation; class participation.

Texts: TBA

Format: Seminar

Maximum Enrolment: 12 students

Description: As a field, Modernist Studies, focused on early twentieth-century experimental writing, has changed shape significantly over the past thirty years, in part due to the major wave of archival work of these decades—a kind of “archive fever”—which considerably expanded and diversified understandings of what was associated with “modernist literature.” As Ronald 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 stepped out of the archives: a wealth of hitherto unpublished material became more widely accessible, destabilizing received conceptions of both what counted as modernist and what “Modernism” stood for. This new availability took various forms: as a moment of heightened canon debates, these years saw a wealth of intentional efforts to recover from the cultural archive many writers and texts once integrally part of early twentieth-century modernist culture, yet generally erased by the later academic consensus about the range and definition of “modernism.” Moreover, surfacing from the archives was a trove of material from “grey canons”: contextual 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 modernism’s inherited texts.

Now that this first wave of modernist archival work is just past, how might it be used to reassess what “modernist literature” entails—and reread it newly? How might we draw on 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 Joycean Robert Spoo calls “our new riches” from the modernist archives, considering now these might help to “make new” our concepts of modernism—and read experimental modernist texts with fresh eyes.

Evaluation (provisional): Brief essay (25%); oral presentation (20%); longer essay (40%); participation (15%).

Texts: Texts will include work by W.H. Auden, Djuna Barnes, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, James Joyce, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Muriel Rukeyser, and Virginia Woolf.

Format: Seminar

Maximum Enrolment: 12 students

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 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 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 consultatively establish (bearing in minds the diverse commitments of seminar members) at the start of the course. This format aims to establish a diverse, open, and responsive seminar.

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

Texts (provisional): I recommend the Longman Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, and there is a Course Reader, all available at the Word Bookstore.

Format: Seminar

Maximum Enrolment: 12 students

Description: Members of the “Performing the World” seminar will work together toward a wide-ranging and deep understanding of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. In addition to our central work on the Sonnets themselves, our readings will include selected poetry by Shakespeare’s near-contemporaries (Sidney and Spenser especially) and predecessors (especially Petrarch). We’ll dig into the critical literature, which variously brings forward how the Sonnets speak brilliantly to concerns in social politics (including gender, sexuality, and social rank), philosophy (including philosophies of the self, language, knowledge, and natural and human temporality), and the arts (including how poetry lives in the world). That extraordinary breadth of address in the Sonnets themselves will enable members of the seminar to develop their individual research projects, which will in turn contribute to the shared understanding of how the Sonnets have become formative new ways of performing the world.

Evaluation: 
Journal 30%
3-minute presentation 10%
Research paper (12-15 pages) 35%
Non-academic version of your paper (3-5 pages) 10%
Participation 15%

Texts:

• The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (2008).
• Oscar Wilde, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime; The Portrait of Mr. W. H., and Other Stories (Methuen, nd).

Both books available at Paragraph Books.
Other texts will be provided in electronic form.

In addition, there are excellent online collections of major sonnet sequences:

• Petrarch, Canzoniere
  https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Italian/Petrarchhome.php
• Thomas Wyatt, Sonnets
  http://www.sonnets.org/wyatt.htm
• Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella
  http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/stella.html
• Edmund Spenser, Amoretti
  http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/amoretti.html
• Samuel Daniel, Delia
  http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/delia.html
• Barnabe Barnes, Parthenophil and Parthenophe
  http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/barnes

Format: Seminar

Maximum Enrolment: 12 students

Description: The realistic novel of the 19th C is often used to exemplify the apex of the novel’s mimetic project. But from the beginning of the century, realistic novels used parodic elements to heighten, not undermine, their representational authority. In this class we will read novels that evince realism and parody as mutually reinforcing techniques, challenging the idea that nineteenth-century British novelists use ‘realism’ to elevate the seriousness of their art at the expense of humor, irony, and experimentalism. Many of the novels we will read, furthermore, comment on the practice of writing novels and the stakes involved in various realisms. We will consider a variety of critical approaches to realism, from the 19th C to the present day, and class time will include student presentations and discussion of the students’ final papers.

Evaluation: Presentation (20%); informal participation (10%); abstract (10%); long essay (60%).

Required Texts: Available at the University Bookstore and online (book list is subject to change)

• Edgeworth, Maria. Castle Rackrent (1800)
• Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey (1817)
• Thackeray, W.M. Vanity Fair (1847-8)
• Trollope, Anthony. Can You Forgive Her? (1864)
• Riddell, Charlotte. A Struggle for Fame (1883)
• Gissing, George. New Grub Street (1891)

Additional critical texts to be read via McGill’s online databases.

Format: Seminar

Maximum Enrolment: 12 students 

Description: This seminar will undertake a close study of the novels of Jane Austen (1775-1817), concentrating on those that she wrote in the early nineteenth century. Austen wrote drafts of her first three novels – Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey – in the late 1790s, and they respond, often satirically, to Richardsonian, sentimental, and Gothic fiction. Numerous critics have focused on Austen in her eighteenth-century context; this course will focus, instead, on Austen in her later years. We will begin with two anomalies: Austen’s only novella, “Lady Susan,” probably written in the 1790s but copied in c. 1804 and the first of her two aborted novels, “The Watsons” (c. 1805). We will next study her last four published novels, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion and Northanger Abbey (these two appearing together as a four-volume set shortly after her death), as well as “Sanditon,” which she was writing but could not complete at the end of her life. We will also study Austen’s little-known manuscripts “Opinions of Mansfield Park,” “Opinions of Emma,” and “Plan of a Novel.” Particular attention will be paid to Austen’s own commentary on the art of fiction, both within her novels and in her letters.

Evaluation: Participation (20%); seminar presentation (30%); term paper (50%).

Texts:

• Emma, ed. George Justice, Norton
• Mansfield Park, ed. Claudia Johnson, Norton
• Manuscript Works, ed. Linda Bree, Peter Sabor and Janet Todd, Broadview
• Northanger Abbey, ed. Claire Grogan, Broadview
• Persuasion, ed. Linda Bree, Broadview
• Selected Letters, ed. Vivien Jones, Oxford World’s Classics

Format: Seminar

Maximum Enrolment: 12 students

Description: The recent Brexit vote in June 2016 has turned the world’s eyes towards the United Kingdom and raised pressing questions about British cultural identity and the relationship of “Britishness” to the history of immigration to England. This course is concerned with representative plays by both established playwrights and the new generation of young dramatists in the United Kingdom. Our particular focus will be the representation of cultural and ethnic diversity in post-Imperial England. Special attention will also be paid to the “In-Yer-Face” moment of theatre in the mid-1990s (Kane, Ravenhill) as an unorthodox response to the “state-of-the-nation” play and the aftereffects of this theatrical moment on the contemporary UK theatre scene. We will consider a variety of different dramatic responses to the transformations of British identity in the face of various significant historical events. Examples of such events include the de-colonization of India, the decline of the British Empire, the increased waves of commonwealth immigration to the UK in the 1960s and 1970s, the Irish Troubles of the 1970s, the dismantling of the Soviet Union following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the siege of Sarajevo and the war in Bosnia, the changing face of terrorism in the post 9/11 and 7/7 era, the financial crisis of 2007-08, globalization, the out-sourcing of labor to India and the growth of transnational capitalism, the “special relationship” between George W. Bush Jr. and Tony Blair, the international proliferation of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, and most recently the (pending) exit of the UK from the European Union.

Evaluation (tentative):
Seminar presentation with accompanying written component (20%)
Two ten page essays (30% each)
Class participation (20%)

Texts to be chosen from (tentative):

• Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine
• Brian Friel, Translations
• David Edgar, Destiny
• David Edgar, Pentecost
• Sarah Kane, Blasted
• David Edgar, Testing the Echo
• Ayub Khan-Din, East is East
• Sebastian Barry, The Steward of Christendom
• Robin Soans, Talking to Terrorists
• Richard Bean, England People Very Nice
• Mark Ravenhill, Product, Some Explicit Polaroids
• Caryl Churchill, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You
• Anupama Chandrasekhar, Disconnect
• Jez Butterworth, Jerusalem
• debbie tucker green, Truth and Reconciliation
• Phil Davies, Firebird
• Rory Mullarkey, The Wolf from the Door
• Caryl Churchill, Escaped Alone
• Mike Bartlett, Albion
• Alistair McDowell, Pomona

Format: Seminar

Maximum Enrolment: 12 students

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, including 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, and Actor-Network Theory. Possible films include The Gleaners and I, Los Angeles Plays Itself, Leviathan, The Turin Horse, Under the Skin.

Evaluation: Weekly film journals (60%); presentations (10%); participation (30%).

Texts (provisional):

• John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds
• Hugh Raffles, Insectopedia
• Michel Serres, The Natural Contract
  and a coursepack

Format: Lecture/discussions and weekly conferences

Maximum Enrolment: 12 students

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 a wide range of literary and cinematic texts. The focus of the seminar is on experimental novels, poetry collections, and films that challenge conventional understandings of autobiography and portraiture. We examine these texts in order to explore the ways in which the boundaries between subject and object, and self and other collapse in poetic investigations of the thoroughly relational nature of subjectivity. Beginning with two foundational texts that explore charged forms of intimacy and inter-subjectivity--Gertrude Stein’s “novel” about her lover’s life, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and Martin Buber’s philosophical inquiry I and Thou--this course explores 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. In response to these texts, students will be asked to experiment with multimedia formats to create their own experimental portraits and self-portraits. While artistic background or demonstrable talent is not required for admission into the course, a desire to experiment with both literary and cinematic form is both necessary and highly encouraged.

Evaluation (provisional):
Participation (15%)
Creative exercises (15%)
Experimental portrait or self/ portrait (30%)
Final creative audiovisual project (40%)

Texts (provisional):

• Martin Buber, I and Thou
• Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice Toklas
• Sylvia Plath, Ariel
• Sina Queyras, My Ariel
• Maggie Nelson, Jane
• Sigmund Freud, Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis
• Rachel Cusk, Outline
• Anne Carson, The Autobiography of Red
• Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
• Ara Osterweil, “Between Her Body and The Stain”

Films (provisional):

• Maya Deren, Meshes of the Afternoon
• Andy Warhol, selected Screen Tests
• Jonas Mekas, Lost, Lost, Lost, & As I was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
• George Kuchar, Hold Me While I’m Naked and selected Weather Diaries
• Jim McBride, David Holzman’s Diary
• Su Friedrich, The Ties That Bind & Sink or Swim
• Carolee Schneemann, Kitch’s Last Meal
• Marielle Nitoslawska, Breaking the Frame
• Michelle Citron, Daughter Rite
• Greg Bordowitz, Fast Trip, Long Drop
• Jonathan Caouette, Tarnation
• Sarah Polley, The Stories We Tell
• Chantal Akerman, No Home Movie

Format: Seminar, workshop

Maximum Enrolment: 12 students

Description: Samuel Johnson (1709-84) is perhaps best known today as a literary critic, as the author of Rasselas, a seminal work in the oriental tradition, and as the compiler of the first major English dictionary: hence his sobriquet, Dictionary Johnson. He was also however, a major theoretician on the art of biography and among its most important practitioners in the eighteenth century. As he wrote to his own biographer, James Boswell, shortly after they first met in 1763, “the biographical part of literature is what I love most.”

This course will begin with a study of Johnson’s writings about formal biography and life-writing in general, both in his periodical essays of the 1750s—The Rambler, The Adventurer and The Idler—and in other miscellaneous publications. We shall then examine some of the many biographies, epitaphs and obituaries that Johnson produced in the early part of his writing career before turning to the remarkable series of critical biographies collected as Lives of the Poets that he wrote in his final years. His lives of Milton, Dryden, Addison, Pope, Swift and Gray will be among those studied. We shall consider some of the questions about life-writing that Johnson’s biographies raise and that he himself posed in his theoretical essays. How blunt, for example, should a writer of obituaries and epitaphs be about his or her subject? To what extant should a biographer draw on personal knowledge of the subject, and how tendentious should his treatment of the subject be? How large a place should critical analysis play in life writing about a literary figure?

Seven years after his death, in 1791, Johnson himself became the subject of what many consider the finest biography in English, or perhaps in any language: James Boswell’s Life of Johnson. We shall focus on specific sections of this massive work, considering the strategies that Boswell used to immortalize his close friend, and to what extent his own techniques of life-writing drew on, and differed from, those practised by Johnson. 

Evaluation: Short paper, 15%; seminar presentation, 15%; participation in class discussion, 20%; research paper, 50%. 

Texts: 

• James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R.W. Chapman, intro. Pat Rogers. Oxford World’s Classics, 1980.
• Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets, ed. John Mullan. Oxford World’s Classics, 2009.
• Coursepack: a selection of short biographies and writings on biography by Johnson taken from The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson.

Format: Seminar

Description: The field of feminist narratology was formulated in the last quarter of the twentieth century, when critics such as 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.  

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

Texts (provisional):

• Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (1848)
• Amelia Edwards, Barbara’s History (1864)
• F.W. Robinson, Memoirs of Jane Cameron, Female Prisoner (1864)
• Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady (1875)
• Eliza Lynn Linton, The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland (1885)
• Kate Marsden, On Sledge and Horseback to the Outcast Siberian Lepers (1892)
• Other texts to be provided on MyCourses

Format: Seminar

Description: Members of the “Performing the World” seminar will work together toward a wide-ranging and deep understanding of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. In addition to our central work on the sonnets themselves, our readings will include selected poetry by Shakespeare’s contemporaries (Sidney and Spenser especially) and predecessors (like Petrarch and Thomas Wyatt). We’ll dig into the critical literature, which variously brings forward how the Sonnets speak brilliantly to concerns in social politics (including gender, sexuality, and social rank), philosophy (including philosophies of the self, language, knowledge, and natural and human temporality), and the arts (including how poetry lives in the world). That extraordinary breadth of address in the Sonnets themselves will enable members of the seminar to develop their individual research projects, which will in turn contribute to the shared understanding of how the Sonnets have become formative new ways of performing the world.

A special feature of the “Performing the World” seminar will be the opportunity for seminar members to workshop with the actors, mask-maker Brian Smith, and director Guy Sprung of Infinithéâtre’s production of “Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Comic Half Masks: The Voices of Montreal,” which will be performed at McGill in October 2018.

Evaluation: 

Journal 30
3-minute presentation 10
Course paper (12-15 pages) 35
Non-academic version of your paper (3-5 pages) 10
Participation 15

Your journal is, first of all, for you to do some thinking by writing at each step of the course. But it is also something you do for marks, so you have to write at least a page (350 words) about each week’s readings (and our discussions of the readings.

From near the start of the course, you’ll be thinking about the course paper that you will want to write. I’ll work with you and provide a sounding board for your ideas. We’ll put on a course conference in the middle of the term. You will have three minutes—you’ll be on the clock—to present the question and/or argument that you will develop into your course paper. This part of the course is based on the three-minute thesis program, where graduate students compete for prizes in recognition of the clarity, succinctness, value, and appeal of their research. We’ll take the competition out of what we do, but leave in the emphasis on clear, succinct, and engaging accounts of valuable research. We’ll do prep work in the weeks leading up to the course conference.

Your course paper will develop a topic of your own devising. Your work will need to take account of the most important research on the question or argument you’re developing. What you write does not have to be original work, in the sense that it does not have to be an idea or a view that no one has thought of before. But it does have to be work that you care about, have thought a good deal about, and are keen to share with others. So you could write about the Sonnets as a rethinking of the sexuality of the self, which is not a new idea, but you could do that with new evidence, with thinking that takes previous work further than it was willing or able to go, and with a conclusion that might shift the perspective from which we see the relationship among poetry, sexuality and selfhood in Shakespeare’s time.

Once you’ve completed your course paper, you’ll have one more task. This one is non-traditional, even experimental. You’ll write a version of your paper’s central argument as if for a non-academic readership—readers who are intelligent and thoughtful but who have not taken the course and who are not in the academy (though they might have an undergrad education in their past). So think about writing a piece on Shakespeare Sonnets for the weekend edition of the Globe and Mail, or The Walrus, or maybe as a script for a Ted Talk. We’ll take a bit of time during the course to look at models for this kind of writing.

Participation requires your presence in class, both body and mind. You have to come to each class with questions, ideas, puzzlement (which you have to speak about), expressions of joy or grief. It is true—it’s really true: there is no such thing as a stupid question.

Texts: 

• The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (2008).
• Other texts will be provided in electronic form.

Format: Seminar

Description: Adaptation is one of the most engaging and influential art forms. It encompasses debates about the nature of originality and influence. It testifies to the ongoing presence of the past, and to the ways in which creators often try to refashion the past. Adaptations are always hungry: they cannibalize other works. Adaptation is a form of intertextuality. It is also a form of criticism, since whenever a work is adapted, the adaptation itself becomes a commentary on the original or “source text,” raising questions about its relevance and the ways in which it has been understood by different audiences over time. Adaptation invites a kind of reading that is always a rereading. By extension, adaptation is about multiple ways of seeing the world. As Julie Sanders points out in her commentary on Adrian Poole’s treatment of the Victorian interest in “reworking its artistic past,” there are several enticing terms that can be associated with adaptation: “borrowing, stealing, appropriating, inheriting, assimilating . . . being influenced, inspired, dependent, indebted, haunted, possessed . . . homage, mimicry, travesty, echo, allusion, and intertextuality.”

This course will enter into those terms by looking at several forms of adaptation as they appear in novels, short fiction, poetry, journalism, painting, film, photography, and music. It will focus on some of the most powerful and diverse examples of adaptation, with an emphasis on modern and contemporary works. In doing so, it will explore some central questions. How do adapted works become collaborative texts that illustrate synergies between creators of different media? How is the reshaping of a text a political or moral act? In what ways can an adaptation question the existing canon or reformulate systems of authority (an issue raised by postcolonial and feminist theory)? What happens to the original work or the source text when it is reinterpreted through adaptation, and how does its adaptation reconfigure the source text’s value? How have different interpreters conceived of different adaptations over time? In what ways can theories of adaptation be applied to contemporary models, including mixes, samplings, song covers, web sites, and other experimental forms of adaptation?

These questions will be explored through several provocative texts. Students should be prepared to allow extra time for screenings (approximately five screenings from 5:30 – 8:30 p.m. during the term). Students who cannot accommodate this extra screening time should not enroll in the course. Although the final syllabus will inevitably change due to the availability of different media, a preliminary example of some of the modules to be considered in the course would include the following:

1. “This is the end, my only friend”: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), with music and poetry by The Doors, The Beach Boys, and T.S. Eliot, among others.
2. Variations on Virginia Woolf: A study of gender representation and subjectivity in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), adapted to film by director Marleen Gorris (1998), and then reimagined in Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours (1999), which inspired Stephen Daldry’s feature film of the same name (2003).
3. Identity: Sherlock Holmes is the most widely read and re-appropriated detective-figure in the Western world. A recent collaborative project between comic writer Karl Bollers and graphic artist Rick Leonardi, Watson and Holmes: A Study in Black (2013), modernizes Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887). Set in Harlem, the graphic novel both adapts and subverts Holmes’s Victorian fixation with evolution and physiognomic investigative practices.
4. From Sight to Sound: An in-depth look at Picasso’s The Old Guitarist (1903) and its reinterpretation in both poetry and song, as exemplified by Wallace Stevens’ “The Man with A Blue Guitar” (1937) and Paul McCartney’s “Two Fingers & Whistling” (“When the Wind is Blowing”) (1971), which was later sampled in Kanye West’s hit single “All Day” (2015).
5. Desire: Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain” (1997) and Ang Lee’s film adaptation (2005) both showcase the complications of gendered and sexual desire and repression, while simultaneously unpacking the implications of socially enforced masculinity, through the depiction of cowboy figures in the American Western.
6. Obsession: Based on the New Yorker article “Orchid Fever,” by Susan Orlean (1995). Later turned into a book (1998), and followed by the movie Adaptation (2002), directed by Spike Jonze, which is itself about the problem of adapting the original article and the book.
7. Haunting: David Constantine’s short story “In Another Country” (2015) and Andrew Haigh’s film adaptation 45 Years (2016) both examine the intricacies of haunting (the haunting of an old love, the past, commitment, guilt, and endless regret).
8. Hysteria: We read Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca (1938) and watch Alfred Hitchcock’s film adaptation of the same name (1940).
9. Subversion: Canadian First Nations artist Kent Monkman satirizes the white, Western gaze through his paintings and performance pieces, often drawing from classical art directly. We will examine his recreation of famous artworks by Raphael, Manet, and Caravaggio, among others.
10. Freaks: Tod Browning’s classic film Freaks (1932) is based on “Spurs” (1923), a short story by Tom Robbins. We look at both, as well as parodies of the film that appeared on The Simpsons, South Park, and in Insane Clown Posse’s song “Oddities” (1998), the video of which features clips from the film.
11. Poems based on paintings: Including “Mourning Picture” by Adrienne Rich (1965), “Musée des Beaux Arts” by W. H. Auden (1938), “Hunters in the Snow” by William Carlos Williams (1962), “The Starry Night” by Anne Sexton (1961), “The Disquieting Muses” by Sylvia Plath (1957). We look at the poems and paintings together.
12. Forgery: Michael Frayn’s Headlong (1999), a comic novel built around Pieter Breughel’s series of paintings called The Months (1565). Deceit and deception mark this satire of the art world. We look at the paintings described in the novel, and try to find the real one. Or is it also fake? 

Evaluation (provisional): Short papers 40%; final paper 30%; attendance 10%; participation 10%.

Texts: TBA

Format: Seminar

Prerequisite: Open to Honors and Masters Students

Description: This course will introduce students to contemporary graphic novels from a variety of different theoretical perspectives, attending to the form as a popular medium while also considering its unique aesthetic qualities.  Considerable attention will be paid to close reading and to the analysis of formal and stylistic elements that distinguish comics as a unique artistic phenomenon.  Students will be encouraged to develop their own approaches and bring diverse critical and theoretical frames of reference to bear upon the texts studied.

The course will be organized into approximately four thematic groupings: revisionist narratives within the mainstream, memoirs and confessionals, new journalism, and auteur comix.  The texts will be chosen based not only on historical impact, verifiable influence or general popularity with readers but also with an eye to comics that experiment and expand the boundaries of the medium.  So, while students will no doubt recognize some familiar names and titles, there will also be some less well-known books represented.

Evaluation: 

Seminar presentation with accompanying written component, 20% 
Two 10-page essays, 30% each 
Class participation, 20% 

Texts: Writers and artists to be chosen from include: Sarah Glidden, David Mazzuchelli, Lynda Barry, Julie Doucet, Will Eisner, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, James Sturm, Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Eddie Campbell, Art Spiegelman, Chester Brown, Frank Miller, Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, Alison Bechdel, Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, Chris Weston, Warren Ellis, David Collier, Ben Katchor, Marjane Satrapi, Rutu Modan, Jason Lutes, Kurt Busiek, Alex Ross, Jeff Smith, Guido Crepax, Joe Sacco, David B., Chris Ware, Los Bros. Hernandez, Nick Abadzis, Rick Veitch, Phoebe Gloeckner, Neil Gaiman, Harvey Pekar, R. Crumb, Adrian Tomine, Jack Jackson, Craig Thompson, James Kochalka and  Scott McCloud.

Format: Seminar

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 talking teacups, petitioning mice, 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 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, oriental romance, chivalric romance, it narrative, ode, elegy, science fiction, 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, 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, etc. Parting ways with the “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 (Percy Shelley’s vegetarianism, Coleridge’s organic form/one life, Mary Shelley’s vitalism, Wordsworth’s conservationism, Keats’s chameleon poet) and formal innovations (Smith’s botanical verse, Clare’s descriptive poetry, Brontë’s atmospheres, Blake’s illuminated books) resonate with the recent turn toward deep time, the wild, animal rights, recessive action, 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.

Evaluation: Participation (15%), Reading Responses (25%), Presentation (10%), Seminar Paper (50%)

Texts (provisional):

• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
• William Blake, The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Book of Urizen, Songs of Innocence and Experience
• Matthew Lewis, The Monk
• James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
• Robert Burns, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect
• Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L. E. L.), The Faery of the Fountains and selected poems
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel and selected prose
• John Keats, Isabella: Or, The Pot of Basil, Lamia, and selected letters
• Paintings by J. M. W. Turner
• Mary Robinson, selected poems, including “The Haunted Beach,” “The Linnet’s Petition,” etc.
• Anna Barbauld, selected poems, including “The Groans of the Tankard,” “The Mouse's Petition,” etc.
• Lord Byron, “Darkness” and Don Juan (canto 2)
• John William Polidori, The Vampyre
• Erasmus Darwin, selections from The Botanic Garden: The Loves of the Plants 
• Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Vindication of Natural Diet, “The Sensitive Plant”
• William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads (1798; 1800), Guide to the Lakes, and selected poems
• John Clare, selections from Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, The Village Minstrel and Other Poems, and The Shepherd’s Calendar
• Charlotte Smith, Beachy Head, Elegiac Sonnets
• Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
• Selected essays/book chapters from Timothy Morton, Alan Bewell, Donna Haraway, M. H. Abrams, Raymond Williams, Jonathan Bate, Anne-Lise François, Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, Giorgio Agamben, Rob Nixon, Lawrence Buell, Daniel Tiffany, Ursula Heise, Kevis Goodman, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Tobias Menely, Jayne Lewis, John Barrell, Katherine Hayles, Noah Heringman, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Bill Brown, Carolyn Merchant, Anahid Nersessian, etc.

Format: Seminar

Description: This course is designed to bring together the Literature and Cultural Studies streams of the English Department around the concept of the uncanny—a concept that cuts straight to the troubled heart of literature, film, and other media in their definition and practice. The course may also appeal to theoretically minded Drama and Theatre students, since the uncanny cannot be fully conceived without the notion of theatricality. Together, we will attempt to track over 100 years of U.S. Culture in some of its most unsettling manifestations in literature, film, radio, and television; it is the tradition in which “things are not what they seem,” in which tidy complacencies give way to vast unknown forces, where time is out of joint and the individual character/reader/listener/viewer irredeemably lost. We will provisionally expect the uncanny in three overlapping domains: in social worlds that resist navigation, in natural environments that defy mastery, and in technology that creates its own imperatives. If these domains house respectively the American Dreams of equality, frontier, and progress, it may be only to show that there is nothing more uncanny than the idea of America itself.

Note: for the first class meeting all students will read the first three items in the coursepack: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” Freud’s “The Uncanny,” and Samuel Weber’s “Uncanny Thinking.”

Evaluation (provisional): journals 65%, participation 25%, presentations 10%

Texts (provisional): Possible literature includes Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-Paper, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived At the Castle, Philip K. Dick’s Ubik, and Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist. Films could include Vertigo, Blue Velvet, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Meek’s Cutoff. We’ll watch episodes of The Twilight Zone and listen to radio episodes of Suspense.

Format: Seminar

Description: Our seminar will take much of its theoretical orientation and its conceptual preoccupations from arguments developed by Peter Brooks in The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (1976; republished with a “new Preface’ in 1995) and in various book chapters and articles by him, in which he postulates that “melodrama is a form for a post-sacred era, in which polarization and hyperdramatization of forces in conflict represent a need to locate and make evident, legible, and operative those large choices of ways of being which we hold to be of overwhelming importance, even though we cannot derive them from any transcendental system of belief.” To advance his case, Brooks examines recurrent terms and concepts, including the confluence of verbal and non-verbal sign systems; hysteria as an exercise in “bodily writing;” repressed affects and effects; psychoanalysis as a melodramatic heuristic device; the aesthetic values and ethical preoccupations of the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque; the literal and figurative journey, from which no return might be possible, into a kind of Conradian ‘heart of darkness;’ “somatic form” and somatic psychology; ‘expressionism’ avant la lettre as inherently a mode of demonstrative and troubled excess; guilt and what is often figured, somewhat paradoxically, as  its antinomy, purgation; “’demonic dread;’” “manichaeistic demonology;” “the Gothic castle [as] an architectural approximation of the Freudian model of the mind;” “an epistemology of the depths;” the “’moral occult;’” the “romance” conventions that govern and are articulated by the triad of “fall-expulsion-redemption;” the “’Naturalization of the dream life;’” “the melodrama of psychology;” the functions and forms of “rhetorical excess;” the poetics of torture and terror; the phenomenon of “self-nomination;” “the topos of the voix du sang;” “’the text of muteness;’” the appetite for wonder; the pleasures of virtuosic performance; magical transformations of quotidian life into the realm of the extraordinary, perhaps particularly the 'green world';  the locked-room paradigm; “the language of presence used for the expression of absences;” the “anaphoric” and “desemanticized” nature of the vocabulary and syntax of the language of gesture;  the performative construction of The Other; seeking to speak “the unspeakable” and to transcend the limits of representation; the pervasive presence of doppelgängers; engagements with the uncanny; and the pro-generative, modern, and post-modern Gothic imaginary.

Although Brooks includes the study of fiction by Balzac and James, our seminar will instead concentrate on plays for and on the stage, with excursions into the screening and analysis of several twentieth-century melodramatic films: Sergei Eisenstein’s ¡Que viva México!, Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis, Jim Sheridan’s In The Name Of The Father, Nicholas Nickleby, adapted from Dickens’s novel by David Edgar, directed by Jim Goddard, and Douglas Sirk’s Written On the Wind, along with selected scholarly literature.

A magisterial work that serves as a kind of meta-text for Brooks’s study is Martin Meisel’s Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth Century England, which, among other tasks, reflects on a wide range of melodramas in relation to a study of painting, fiction, and performance.  Close readings of Meisel will not only re-introduce preoccupations found in Brooks, but, together with the critical articles and chapters you will be reading in concert with specific plays, will introduce another complementary cluster of interrelated themes, subjects, structures, and modes of articulation, including: seeing the melodramatic tableau as an exercise in affective pictorial anagnorisis engendered by both movement and stasis; the gentrification of melodrama; Christian mytho-poesis; the policing and normalization of traditional gender roles, along with incipient interrogations of those roles; fears of industrialization;  the exploitation of workers, along with resistance from workers, together with rebellions, and continuing anxieties about the potential for a large-scale political revolution; the baleful consequences of land enclosures and the predatory actions of absentee landlords; the human suffering caused by unchecked urbanisation; inter-racial strife and the creation and legitimation of racialized and racist discourse; what Jacky Bratton has described as “the important ironizing influence of the comic dimension of Victorian melodrama, which was in many ways the element which added complexity to the high drama of right and wrong;” the juxtaposition of radical and conservative values and value-systems, in some instances in the same play; the project to give expression to ‘voices from below’ and in doing so to question the rigid divisions of the class system--what Emily Allen has referred to, in glossing the work of Elaine Hadley, as the ways in which “the melodramatic mode provided a public and theatricalized paradigm for resistance to the hierarchies of market capitalism;” the phenomenon of frequently making women characters into (often masked, often deformed) villains,  a move that asked / asks questions about female agency and identity; and the use of melodrama as an instrument to advance and legitimate the jingoistic project of world-wide imperialism.

Plays will include, amongst others,  Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon, for comparative purposes, Branden Jacbos-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (2009-10), Leopold Lewis’s and Henry Irving’s The Bells, Thomas Holcroft’s A Tale Of Mystery, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Pizarro, George Aikens’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Douglas Jerrold’s Black- Eyed Susan and The Rent Day, H. M. Milner’s Frankenstein: Or The Man and

The Monster, Richard Brinsley Peake’s Frankenstein: A Romantic Drama, and Milner’s Mazeppa; or, the Wild Horse of Tartary. All texts will be read in their original editions; in the case of films, their directors’ final shooting scripts might also be read. 

Evaluation: Fully engaged and continual participation in the intellectual and cultural life of the seminar: 15%; a presentation on a play / production and / or theoretical-historical text or a workshop: 15%; an 8-page essay arising from that presentation or workshop in the form of a distilled critical argument: 20%; a scholarly paper, with an analytical through-line, all themes / topics to be individually-negotiated, in the order of 15 to 20 pages: 50%.

Texts: Plays will include, amongst others,  Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon, for comparative purposes, Branden Jacbos-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (2009-10), Leopold Lewis’s and Henry Irving’s The Bells, Thomas Holcroft’s A Tale Of Mystery, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Pizarro, George Aikens’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Douglas Jerrold’s Black- Eyed Susan and The Rent Day, H. M. Milner’s Frankenstein: Or The Man and
The Monster, Richard Brinsley Peake’s Frankenstein: A Romantic Drama, and Milner’s Mazeppa; or, the Wild Horse of Tartary. All texts will be read in their original editions; in the case of films, their directors’ final shooting scripts might also be read. 

Format: Brief lectures; led-discussions; individual and collective presentations including interrogative Q & As; mini-performances / workshops; and lots of reading plays out loud as we seek to understand the plays original interpretations and modes of performance.  Acting experience is not required. 

Expected Student Preparation: Please note that it is both a critical studies and an art-making course. 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 experimental seminar is designed 1) to help students respond critically and creatively to contemporary art, and 2) to help students learn to create experimental and/or hybrid forms of writing and digital media.  By focusing on multi-media artworks that incorporate elements of image, sound, and/or text, we shall explore how meaning in contemporary art and culture is often generated across multiple registers.  Over the course of the semester, students will be introduced to important examples of experimental film and video, Conceptual art, body art, photography, sculpture, and installation 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 in order to create their own self-directed visual art and curatorial projects.  In other words, students will not only be expected to discuss, think and write about the works we study, but to create more experimental projects that respond 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 in order to attend contemporary art exhibitions and performances.

Evaluation: TBD

Selected artworks by: Chantal Akerman, Michael Snow, John Cage, Derek Jarman, Su Friedrich, Jonas Mekas, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, Marlon Riggs, Kenneth Anger, Chris Marker, Adrian Piper, Valie Export, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Yvonne Rainer, David Wojnarowicz, Catherine Opie, Sophie Calle, Moyra Davey, Sharon Hayes, Greg Bordowitz, Glenn Ligon, Carrie Mae Weems, Martha Rosler, and others. 

Texts: Sergei Eisenstein, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, John Cage, Michael Fried, Douglas Crimp, Amelia Jones, Rebecca Schneider, Peggy Phelan, Carol Mavor, Kaja Silverman, Jacques Attali, Svetlana Boym, Jacques Rancière, Jennifer Doyle, Maggie Nelson, Wayne Koestenbaum, Rebecca Solnit

Format: Seminar

Description: David M. Lubin writes of his book, Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images, “This is a book about connectivity: about links and relationships, especially during the postwar information age presided over by John F. Kennedy. Our perceptions of JFK and his era, not to mention our own, rely entirely upon the endlessly replicated and infinitely elastic chains of images from art, literature, and the media that constantly inform us, often in contradictory ways, of who we are, who we ought to be, and where we belong.” With attention to these relationships, perceptions, “infinitely elastic chains of images,” and contradictions we will examine the (mostly) North American pre-occupation with the Kennedy family through its mediated constructions of it. The Kennedys are fictional characters to us and will be treated as such. Much attention was paid to JFK – he was President after all – before he was assassinated but that attention morphed into a peculiar kind of fascination following his death. The same could be said about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, his wife, and in a different though related vein, of the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Kennedy was the 4th US president to be assassinated, so how can we interpret the enduring fascination with him (and Jacqueline)? Among other things, thus, we will focus on the peculiar nature of his death and the cultural contexts for what can be referred to as the “Kennedy industries.” These will include enhanced visibility of the presidential office and family, charisma and the photogenics of power, the culture of the “cold war” and the transition from the late 50s to the early 60s. But, we will also look at some related issues and questions, among them: the fusion of celebrity and politics; the role of trauma and the body in the maintenance of national identities; the investment in secrets, conspiracy theories and gossip in the mass media age; the function of popular memory; the celebrity fan relationship. Key questions here will be, among others, what do we need to remember of the Kennedys and what do we insist on forgetting? Note: this course is not concerned with getting at any truths about the Kennedys; therefore, we will not try to compare media images against some perceived or even real truth. We only know the Kennedys in mediated form. The course thus seeks to address the circulation of stories, the proliferation of statements, “facts,” images which go into the “cultural screen saver”* called JFK (*Thomas Mallon, Mrs. Paine's Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy, 2002).

Again, this course does not begin with the premise that JFK was a great president or in any essential way special. We will not try to figure out who he really was, nor do we measure the media analysis of him against assumptions of his ‘true’ self and presidency. We will not assume the media provide a distorted view of him and Jacqueline; rather – and this is the focus of the course – we take as given that the media have constructed (and continue to construct) the icons we know as JFK, Jackie (O) and Oswald. They are, to us, the same as fictional characters. Thus our questions should be, what factors go into their makeup? How are they constructed and reconstructed as “characters”? How do we “read” them? What plots are in circulation about these figures? What metaphors – visual and verbal – are employed? Our objectives in this course are also: to ask why “JFK” and “Jackie” have endured as signs to be read; to learn how to read those signs so as to question what appears to be inevitable; to question the larger cultural investments in certain representative figures; and to learn to be engaged readers of cultural icons and artifacts. We will pay special attention to language and image. The tools we employ can be used in the study of many if not all popular figures – JFK and Jackie (and Oswald) are merely examples of that type of figure.

Our “data” for the course consists of, among others: clips of JFK’s campaign; the televised debates with Richard Nixon; televised interviews with JFK and Jacqueline; magazine and newspaper coverage of the Presidency; magazine and newspaper coverage of the assassination of JFK and the death of Jacqueline; literary fiction; popular films; documentaries. 

Evaluation (provisional): short papers 50%; project based on primary research 30%; presentation 10%; participation 10%

Texts (provisional):

• David M. Lubin, Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images
• William Manchester, The Death of a President, November 20-November 25, 1963
• Wayne Koestenbaum, Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon
• Don DeLillo, Libra
• Adam Braver, November 22, 1963
• Jed Mercurio, American Adulterer
• Thomas Mallon, Mrs. Paine’s Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy
• Other articles and chapters to be provided on MyCourses from, Michael J Hogan, The Afterlife of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Peter Knight, The Kennedy Assassination, Art Simon, Dangerous Knowledge: The JFK Assassination in Art and Film; Norman Mailer, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket”; Max Weber, “The Sociology of Charisma”

Films and media material

• JFK
• The House of Yes
• Jackie
• Jackie O: An Opera​
• Smash His Camera
• Documentaries: Primary; Crisis; The Kennedy Mystique; The Lost JFK Tapes; Faces of November; JFK: Three Shots that Changed America

Format: Seminar, lecture, discussion; several film screenings; the screening of visual material

Description: In the Middle Ages, the idea of collecting gradually came to take on a positive cultural value, though the value of collecting remained (and remains) hotly contested. Medieval innovations in collecting and archiving hold great significance for medieval and early modern humanist, antiquarian, religious, and political developments, as well as for modern concepts of evidence, research, and historical narrative. Yet while early modern antiquarianism and collecting have received a great deal of scholarly attention, we still know relatively little about collecting or collectors in the Middle Ages. In the medieval period, however, we witness vibrant developments in the book form, mnemonics, encyclopedism, compilation, preservation, and retrieval of knowledge, often informed by classical mnemonic theory. We also see the formation of lively social networks that surrounded collectors and their collections, library formation, communication, and the introduction of print technology. In England, we find the ironic situation that an explosion of collecting activity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, combined with a rapid increase in textual production (and the introduction of print technology), was immediately followed by a wave of library destruction and redistribution in the sixteenth. This development in turn contributed to unprecedented preservation attempts and historical narrative that some have claimed gave “birth” to modern historiography and archival practice.

Students in this course will explore medieval mnemonic and archive theory, some of it inherited from classical and late antiquity. We will also study literary engagements with this theory as it intersected with other contemporary social and material developments. The course will be organized around categories including the following: mnemonic theory (classical, late antique, medieval); writing and artificial intelligence; memory and the archive; curiosity and collecting; preservation and destruction, remembering and forgetting; storage and access; the book form (manuscript and print); and information overload. The class will meet frequently for workshops in McGill’s Rare Books and Special Collections and in the Osler Library of the History of Medicine, where we will examine original manuscript and early print materials. While the historical scope of the course will begin with classical antiquity and extend to the start of the seventeenth century, we will focus on the Middle Ages, and especially the literature of the fourteenth century. Some 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. 

Evaluation: short papers 25%, long research paper 50%, presentation 10%, participation 15%

Texts (provisional):

• Richard de Bury, Philobiblon
• William Langland, Piers Plowman
• Geoffrey Chaucer, The House of Fame
• John Leland/John Bale, The Laboryouse Journey

Coursepack readings, including selections from:

• Plato, Meno, Phaedo, Phaedrus
• Aristotle, On Memory and Recollection
• Cicero, Pseudo-Cicero, and Quintilian(writings on memory)
• St. Augustine, Confessions
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae
• Hugh of St. Victor, The Three Best Memory Aids for Learning History
• Roger Chartier, The Order of Books

Format: Seminar

Description: Scholarly attention to the figure of the fool in Shakespeare has tended to focus on the festive licence the fool enjoys in his interactions with other characters. Shakespeare’s “artificial” or “wise” fools derive this licence from their mimicry of “natural” fools—individuals of limited mental capacity who were known in the period by a variety of names such as idiot, imbecile, mome, moron, and numerous similar epithets still in use today. Broader studies of the fool as a literary and historical type also highlight the figure’s ambivalence, an ambivalence which seems to originate in medieval and early modern attitudes toward individuals with intellectual disabilities. The fool’s very lack of cognitive ability was also considered a positive trait, for such individuals remained impervious to and unaffected by the corruptive effects of social life and manners. What rendered the natural fool special in terms of his relationship to the social environment was his aloofness from it. This positive quality was frequently construed in a religious sense as sacred.

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

Evaluation: seminar presentation 35%, long paper 50%, participation 15%

Texts: TBA

Format: Seminar

Description: “Performance” has gained widespread currency as a heuristic device and analytic tool in the humanities and social sciences. From pedestrian business usage (“performance indicators”) to rather more involved literary theories of “performativity,” the metaphor of performance has proven useful to a range of academic disciplines and critical projects.

This seminar will provide a critical introduction to performance theory as it is currently deployed in performance studies and English studies. After exploring “what is performance” and its “universals” through readings of now classic texts in performance theory (Schechner, Phelan, Turner, Hochschild, etc.), we will read theories of performance’s relationship to text (Worthen, Brody, Puchner), of performativity (Butler, Schneider, Davis), and of cultural memory (Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Roach, Taylor, Richards). Special attention will be paid to recent turns in performance theory, which investigate affect (Ridout, Muñoz, Dolan, Warner) and objects or things (Hamera, Schweitzer, Bernstein). 

Evaluation (provisional): Discussion prompts 10%, Presentation 25% (10 minutes), Long paper 50% (5000 words), Participation 15%

Texts (provisional):

• Laura Levin and Marlis Schweitzer, eds. Performance Studies in Canada.
• Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction.
• Course-pack of readings

Format: Seminar

Description: This course offers a graduate-level introduction to the emerging academic field known as “the digital humanities” (or “DH”). “DH” refers to a broad collection of new practices and intellectual concerns for the humanities, particularly history and literary studies, that center on the growing ubiquity of computation, data, and algorithms in society. This includes: the creation and curation of large digitized corpora of texts; the use of empirical and quantitative methods, such as text mining and GIS, to study culture and literature; the increasing use of technology in the classroom; and the critique of data and data science from the perspective of the humanities. The digital humanities is a relatively new field yet has attracted a great deal of controversy, both in academic journals and the popular press. In this seminar, we review a series of important debates related to this field, which shed light both on its origins and where it likely is heading.

We will focus on two broad forms of the debate. The first concerns the relation between data/numbers and humanistic scholarship. In its earliest iteration, the primary terms of the debate consisted of: “can art and literature be quantified? Is culture data?” Here, we look at polemics for and against this position. Readings will include essays by (for) Franco Moretti, Alan Liu, and Johanna Drucker and (against) Stanley Fish, David Golumbia, and Wendy Chun. Next, we look at more mature iterations of this debate. If we accept that literature and art can be quantified, what types of methods are appropriate for studying culture as data? Here, we explore attempts to synthesize methods and tools from statistics and computer science, such as topic modeling and network analysis, to study literature, art history, and cultural history. We will pay particular attention to Moretti’s paradigm of “distant reading,” and review debates over close and distant reading. Finally, we will consider the cutting edge of computational criticism and cultural analytics that seeks to take on difficult questions of race, gender, economics, and other issues central to the study of literature and culture. Authors will include: Ted Underwood, Andrew Piper, and Jo Guldi. We will assess the strengths and weaknesses of this work.

In the second part of this course, we explore broader, meta-reflexive questions regarding the increasing presence of quantification/data in the humanities. A number of scholars, such as Christopher Newfield and Sara Brouillete, have associated the rise of the digital humanities with the intensifying “neoliberalism” of the corporate university. Here, we review several histories of how the university became corporatized in the past thirty years and how that trend has effected the humanities, particularly its relationship to the social sciences and the sciences. The main question to be considered is: does “DH” represent a threat to the core values of the humanities under the sign of neoliberalism, or does it signal an opportunity for the discipline to “modernize” and take advantage of new developments in technology? Readings will cover recent critiques and histories of data science and the university, such as O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction, as well as recent polemics in the popular press. Such readings will also help us to contextualize scholarship we’ll have read in the first part of the class.

Generally, this course aims to give graduate students an introduction to an increasingly contentious and important new direction in the humanities. It does not offer a hands-on introduction to applied research in the digital humanities, such as text mining, but for students that are interested in pursuing this work, it is a good first gateway course to taking future classes in this area. In the final weeks of the seminar, there will be a few opportunities for interested students to try out several basic computational methods for cultural analysis in a casual and exploratory environment.

Evaluation: 15% weekly response papers, 15% class participation, 20% presentation, 50% final paper

Texts: 

• Franco Moretti, Distant Reading
• Debates in the Digital Humanities (selections)
• Drucker, et al., Digital_Humanities
•  Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction 
• Ted Underwood, “Theorizing Research Practices”
• Andrew Piper, “There Will be Numbers”
• Brouillete, et al, “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives)"
• Alan Liu, “Where is Cultural Criticism in Digital Humanities?”

Format: Seminar

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

Evaluation: short papers; final paper; class presentation; class participation 

Texts (provisional):

• Marx for Beginners, Ruis [recommended, not required]
• Marxist Literary Theory, eds. Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne
• Aesthetics & Politics, Theodor Adorno et al
• Père Goriot, Honoré de Balzac (Norton Critical Edition)
• Endgame, Samuel Beckett
• Tout va bien, dir. Jean-Luc Godard
• Fight Club, dir. David Fincher
• Selected episodes of UnREAL
• Course pack with essays by Fredric Jameson, Colin MacCabe, Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, Heidi Hartmann, Fred Pfeil, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, and others

Format: Seminar

Description: All of the major English-Canadian poets from 1920 to 1960 recognized modernism as the definitive literary, cultural, philosophical, and critical innovation of their era.  Like modernists in almost all the English-speaking traditions, Canadian poets organized themselves into cultural (usually regional) groups, produced and defined themselves through little magazines, published and “boosted” themselves and one another in those little magazines and in associated small presses, and contributed polemical and self-canonizing critical statements to the national literary discussion.  They were not, with a few exceptions, the innovators of modernism: they were innovators in Canadian poetry who saw in modernist developments elsewhere both a literary consciousness to which they were deeply sympathetic and an opportunity to develop and promote their own poetry as the needed Canadian expression of that consciousness.  While they pursued such modernist ideals as T.S. Eliot’s notion of impersonality and Ezra Pound’s injunction to “make it new,” they typically adopted modernist techniques and socio-political analyses to their own ends, which include an often covert cultural nationalism at odds with the interna­tionalist assumptions of most Anglo-American modernist criticism and theory, and a socialist vision at odds with authoritarian and fascist sympathies that are occasional if incoherent in Pound, Yeats, and Eliot.  The surprisingly strong Surrealist strain in Canadian poetry is one sign of what A.J.M. Smith called its “eclectic detachment,” its readiness to import, with discrimination and adaptation, its inspirations from a wide range of sources.  The relative prominence of women poets in the Canadian modernist canon, from its earliest formation by anthologists, is another noteworthy national phenomenon.  Canadian modernist poets were readier to revert to traditional verse forms now and then than their counterparts elsewhere, and they were slower to develop the modernist long poem that has been seen as definitive of modernist consolidation in England and the United States.  In short, Canada’s poetic modernism is a distinct national expression which must be studied in the context of original modernisms elsewhere but is not usefully measured against them.

We will study six to eight Canadian poets as individual modernist writers first and foremost and attempt to bring important new light to bear on the work of each.  Close readings through group discussion of assigned poems will take up a substantial part of our class time.  There has been much recent editorial and critical activity in the area of Canadian modernism, and we will profit from new textual and contextual information in our studies.  The major Canadian little magazines of the period in question will provide a secondary narrative of development in the period; we will also be attentive to the history of the modernist canon in Canadian criticism, for the canonical place of many of these poets is by no means assured today.  Finally, readings from an anthology of the period’s poetry will allow students to hear rival and collaborative voices and to assess the instructor’s representation of a Canadian modernist canon.  

Evaluation: 

25%: Conference paper, 20 minutes’ reading time, about 8-9 pages, followed by your chairing of 15 minutes’ discussion by the class.  Your topic must be cleared in advance with the instructor, and you will circulate a one-page abstract of your argument with a short bibliography of primary and secondary sources by e-mail to your classmates no later than one week in advance.  As well as for the abstract, bibliography, and paper, you will be assessed for your ability to generate and focus discussion and for your responses to your paper’s discussion by others

50%: Major research paper, minimum 20 maximum 25 pp.  It may derive from your symposium presentation or be wholly independent of it

​25%: Preparedness for and participation in seminar discussions and symposia.  NB: attendance is not relevant to this portion of your evaluation, since at the graduate level it is assumed you will attend every class without exception.  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

Texts to be determined, drawing six to eight poets from the following:

• Avison, Margaret. Always Now: The Collected Poems.
• Cohen, Leonard. Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs.
• Dudek, Louis. Infinite Worlds: The Poetry of Louis Dudek.
• Glassco, John. The Complete Poems of John Glassco [due 2018].
• Klein, A.M. The Complete Poems of A.M. Klein.
• Layton, Irving. A Wild Peculiar Joy: Selected Poems.
• Livesay, Dorothy. The Self-Completing Tree and Archive for Our Times.
• Page, P.K. Kaleidoscope: Selected Poems.
• Scott, F.R. Collected Poems.
• Smith, A.J.M. The Complete Poems of A.J.M. Smith.
• Webb, Phyllis. The Vision Tree:  Selected Poems and Water and Light.

Format: Seminar

Description: The 17^th century has often been described as a period of social, philosophical, scientific, political, and indeed psychological revolution that produced the modern world and subject. In England, especially, this time of intense change was marked equally by intense poetic productivity and experimentation. In this course we will consider this period through the short poetry of a wide range of writers, including Jonson, Donne, Wroth, Lanyer, Herbert, Herrick, Lovelace, Suckling, Crashaw, Vaughan, Traherne, Milton, Cowley, Marvell, Philips, and Cavendish. Beginning with Jonson and Donne, poets whose careers were forged in the 1590s, we will trace the development of English verse through the period of Civil War up to the Restoration. Our primary focus will be formal and literary historical, as we consider this critical period in the shaping of English literature. We will begin therefore by looking briefly at the formal innovations of the 16^th century to see how 17^th century writers continuously both drew on and rebelled against them, as they further experimented with new genres and forms, to represent the shifting experiences of this turbulent time. At the same time, however, we will consider the relation of the new poetics in the formation of modernity.  We will therefore need to interpret formal innovations in the context of larger social, political, and philosophical changes: urbanization, developments in science and industry, the effects of deforestation and environmental change, debates over religion and the place of women, the agitation for political reform and, most of all, the Civil War itself. 

Evaluation: book report (10%); 5 page close reading of Donne or Jonson (15%); 20-25 page research paper (50%); participation (25%)

Texts: 

• Ben Jonson, Complete Poems, ed George Parfitt (Penguin, 1975)
• John Donne, John Donne’s Poetry, ed Donald R Dicksin (Norton, 2007)
• George Herbert, The Complete English Poems, ed John Tobin (Penguin, 1991)
• Andrew Marvell, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed Nigel Smith (Longman, rev. ed. 2007)
• Selections from all other poets will be posted on Mycourses.

Format: Seminar

Description: In this collaborative interdisciplinary seminar, led by Jennifer Drouin (Law) and Paul Yachnin (English), students from Law and graduate students from English will team up to argue cases in the “Court of Shakespeare” (i.e., where the sole Institutes, Codex, and Digest, is comprised by the plays of William Shakespeare).

The overall aims of the course are to –
(a) provide an organic and responsive model for the ways in which resources to articulate social values can be developed;
(b) explore the ways in which traditions of legal and textual interpretation are created, grown, and modified;
(c) offer new insights into the normative implications of a body of work of supreme cultural significance;
(d) explore the particular nature of Shakespeare’s drama, and of literature generally, as an expressive register of normative social values;
(e) consider how literature and literary thinking might influence and might have already influenced law and legal thinking.

Pairing law students with graduate scholars in literature, the project is intended to allow a depth of connection between the discourses of law and the humanities that is rarely achieved. Law and English students will learn about the processes of reasoning and analysis in the other discipline, and they will come to appreciate the cultural imbrications of these forms. At the same time, students will develop their skills of argument in a new and challenging context.

The students who participate in the Shakespeare Moot Course will find themselves at a rare moment of unfettered creativity. They will not only study the emergence and nature of a legal system. They will be making one. This is especially the case because the participants will create the precedents from which the future legal system will continue to grow.

The course will have a number of components. Part of your time will be spent working in two-person teams with a colleague from the other discipline. Teams will be arguing for or against a particular legal remedy in the case before the court, and you will, of course, be arguing against each other. The case will be chosen and/or created by the instructors. Each team will be responsible for the preparation of a factum, and each team will also plead their side of the argument before the court at a formal hearing. Students will also read and discuss a number of works that theorize the relationship between law and literature, the nature and social situation of literature, and questions of authority and interpretation. We will study the role of Shakespeare and of literature in general as a site for public debate and for the articulation of public emotions and therefore as sites of informal, collective law-making. On the basis of these discussions and your own directed reading, each student will be expected to write an essay that reflects what they have learned from the moot project, and that focuses in particular on questions about Shakespeare as / and law, the question of interpretation and authority, or the nature of the relationship between law and literature.

The 2019 McGill Shakespeare Moot Court course will initiate the International Court of Shakespeare. In Winter 2019, Professor Desmond Manderson will lead students at the Australian National University in a Shakespeare Moot Court of their own, focusing on the same case that is before the McGill Court. The winning teams from McGill and ANU will face off before an international panel of judges at McGill’s Faculty of Law in Spring 2019.

Evaluation: 
Factum - 30%
Oral pleading at Moot Court - 30%
Reflection paper - 30%
Participation - 10%

Texts: TBA; these will include a selection of Shakespeare plays most pertinent to the case before the Court as well as a robust selection of essays on legal and literary history and theory.

Format: Seminar

Description: This course will focus theoretical questioning on Samuel Richardson's million-word-long Clarissa, which many readers since the eighteenth century have regarded as the greatest European novel. From week to week, our readings will canvas various approaches to different parts of this gigantic text. Insofar as possible, the syllabus will orient our discussion toward an analysis of the terms in which Clarissa articulates a theory that some of Richardson’s contemporaries viewed as an encyclopedic “system” of thought. We will be concerned with interactions or disjunctions between large conceptual areas such as Richardson’s celebrated “new” psychology, his account of moral judgment, and his critique of aesthetics. Clarissa is a self-consciously intertextual work. To relate our understanding of the novel’s argument to Richardson’s literary-cultural and intellectual context, we will read a wide range of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts drawn from the traditions of the emblem book, libertine poetry, the Restoration stage, sentimental romance, erotic narrative, theological controversy, British moral philosophy, and early feminist criticism. (To supplement seminar discussion we will view a wide range of relevant films – including operas by Lully, Purcell, Händel, Gluck, and Mozart; and 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 categorial 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.

Evaluation: participation (20%), oral presentation (20%), term paper (60%)

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) 

Format: Seminar

Description: Literature represents the limits and possibilities of human rights. Via a series of weekly discussions and some assignments, 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 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.

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

Texts: (provisional)

• 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

Format: Seminar

Description: This seminar on literary responses to and enactments of cosmopolitan vision in nineteenth-century America will begin by surveying definitions and uses of the notion of "cosmopolitanism" in other eras and contexts. In early weeks, we will compare and contrast some key twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of the cosmopolitan (Bourne, Robbins, Nussbaum, Clifford, Hannerz, Bhabha, Appiah, Anderson, Gilroy, and others) with writings by Benjamin Franklin that epitomize the Enlightenment "cosmopolitan ideal" as it was developed in eighteenth-century England and Europe. This international and cross-historical context may then help us to see nineteenth-century American writing in an unusual new perspective, bringing out developments often ignored through a traditional critical focus on dominant tendencies to nationalism, regionalism, nativism, provincialism, ruralism, and so on.  From this perspective, though, we can trace a long and important alternative line of American writing and thought as it develops through a somewhat unusual roster of authors and works. This survey of the varieties of cosmopolitan experience will include a primary focus on authors selected from the following list: Franklin, Irving, Hale, Melville, Taylor, Fuller, Cable, Du Bois, James, and Wharton. Melville's deeply divided relation to the cosmopolitan will be central to the course; we will focus on "Benito Cereno," and on the predicament of Ishmael and Queequeg in Moby-Dick, in the context of allusions to passages from Melville's early travel writings. We will then end the course with a quick comparative look at 20^th-c. American fictions by authors such as Fitzgerald, Mukherjee, and Lahiri.

Tracing this line of American writing as it develops through the nineteenth century, we find that we are following an ongoing, anxious debate about the powers and limits of the cosmopolitan, about the American writer as a cosmopolitan figure, and even about America as a cosmopolitan culture. Indeed, this tradition of nineteenth-century American writing gives us some of the clearest examples we have of what Randolph Bourne describes in his famous essay evoking a "Trans-National America," and what anthropologist James Clifford describes as the vision of a "traveling culture." Following the evolution of cosmopolitan thought in this line of writers, what emerges is the paradox of a national vision that finds itself most fully in trans-national situations, where the writer is characteristically seen not as a defender of unicultural coherences but as an intercultural ambassador, speaking not from within a bounded and self-contained "home culture" (be it American or European or cosmopolitan) but more often from a life of constant physical and spiritual movement through a series of homes-away-from-home. Here cosmopolitanism can emerge less as a privilege than as a predicament; it does not always involve the easy detachment of the distant, aesthetic observer. When the protagonists in these exploratory writings move away from isolation and detachment, their travelers’ experience leaves them torn between the competing responsibilities and emotional involvements that come with multiple allegiances to diverse home-worlds. No longer in the classic position of the leisured aesthetic tourist, they find themselves condemned to cosmopolitanism—in the role of the homeless bachelor wanderer. The story of this sort of cosmopolitan figure then raises large questions about (to borrow a phrase from Homi Bhabha) "the location of culture": the location of home, the location of home culture, for American writers who characteristically see themselves, after this move into the realm of the international or inter-cultural, as unable to go home again. 

Evaluation (tentative): participation 20%; series of one-page response papers or textual analyses 20%; oral presentation 15%; final research essay 45%.

Texts (provisional): selections from among the following works: Franklin, Autobiography; Irving, Sketchbook (selections); Melville, Moby-Dick (selections), and "Benito Cereno"; Hale, “Man Without a Country”; Cable, Old Creole Days (selections); W. E. B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk; James, "Daisy Miller,” “An International Episode,” Ambassadors or Portrait of a Lady; Wharton, The Age of Innocence; Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night; stories by Mukherjee, Lahiri; course pack of additional readings in 19th-c. literature and in contemporary theory of the “cosmopolitan.” 

Format: Seminar

Description: The affective turn in critical theory sought to explore sensation, intensity and feeling as productive, rather than simply reactive, forces, building on insights from the artistic, critical and political projects of minoritarian subjects for whom feeling otherwise was a creative response to a world not made for them. Such forces traverse what Felix Guattari called the three ecologies: subjective, social and environmental lifeworlds; these transversal movements are also re-compositional practices that renew and reimagine what is possible. This course will explore contemporary art, media and cultural theory rethinking of questions of life, embodiment and relationality today, through creative practices of resistance drawn from queer, feminist, critical race and other perspectives. How do we rethink concepts such as agency, corporeality, feeling, action and politics from an expansive ecological perspective, beyond the concept of the anthropocene? 

Evaluation (provisional): participation; response paper(s); final project

Texts: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (Anna Tsing et al.); Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (Eric Stanley, Johanna Burton, and Reina Gossett); Geontologies (Elizabeth Povinelli); In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Christina Sharpe); The Undercommons (Fred Moten and Stefano Harney); The Intimacies of Four Continents (Lisa Lowe); The Three Ecologies (Felix Guattari); Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Donna Haraway); “An Ecology of Practices” (Isabelle Stengers); As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Leanne Simpson); Cruising Utopia (José Muñoz); Black Quantum Futurism: Theory & Practice (Volume 1) (Rasheedah Phillips)

We will also be screening films, as well as attending performances, workshops and exhibitions. This class will include a research-creation component.

Format: Seminar

Description: This course aims to examine the idea of the fantastic and the grotesque in some of the most popular forms of literature in the Middle Ages - heroic romances and legends of saints - in the light of medieval heroic tradition, popular culture, and medieval ideas of monstrosity.

The fourteenth-century poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, provides a starting point to explore depictions of the grotesque and the discourse of both monstrosity and sanctity. Reading about saints was not confined to the cloister; these stories were read and heard alongside secular tales, both of which could feature demons, dragons and damsels in distress. The fantastic extended to human-animal interaction, the perception of the foreign and exotic (the ‘other’), and certain tropes in both secular and ecclesiastical narratives where virtue must win out (such as prophecy or loss and recovery). The questions which are arise are: what was considered monstrous and what was human? What was the divide between humans and animals, humans and monsters? How should we approach the grotesque?

The course includes (but is not confined to) readings from the South English Legendary and other saints’ Lives (such as the legends of St Eustace, St. Margaret, and St George (with that dragon!)), the fantastic pilgrimage in St Patrick’s Purgatory, as well as popular Middle English romances (such as Sir Isumbras, Octavian, Sir Eglamour, among others), the werewolf tale of Bisclavert by Marie de France, the Welsh tales of Arthur and of Merlin, and the romance of Alexander the Great and the account of Sir John Mandeville, whose travels to the East provided much influential, fantastic fare.

Evaluation: Seminar presentation, 15%; essay, 25%; term paper, 50%; attendance and participation, 10%.

Texts: TBA

Format: Seminar

Description: This course will contextualize the villain-hero of eighteenth-century English literature in a European tradition of philosophical, religious, and political problems, social criticism, and artistic commentary from the Renaissance to Romanticism. Against the background of representations of the desire for knowledge and power in Elizabethan drama, the anthropology of Caroline political theory, Satanic revolt in Milton, and libertine devilry in Rochester and Restoration plays, we will examine the villain-hero as a figure of persistently fascinating evil power – a power subversively critical as well as characteristically satiric, obscene, and cruel in its skepticism, debauchery, and criminality. The readings will focus especially on two examples of this figure, Faust and Don Juan, whose development we will consider from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.

Evaluation: Participation (20%); seminar presentation (30%); term paper (50%)

Texts: The reading for this course includes the following books, which will be available at The Word Bookstore (469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640). (The list of texts below is tentative and incomplete, to be confirmed in September 2017.)

• Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (Norton or Hackett recommended)
• Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
• Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Hackett, Oxford, or Penguin recommended)
• La Rochefoucauld, Maxims and Reflections (Oxford recommended; or Penguin)
• John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester, Selected Poems (Oxford) or Selected Works (Penguin)
• William Wycherley, The Country Wife
• William Congreve, The Way of the World
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust. Part One (Oxford or Norton)
• Pierre Choderos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Oxford or Penguin)
• Giovanni Giacomo Casanova, The Story of My Life (Penguin)
• Lord Byron, Don Juan (Penguin)
• Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin (Penguin recommended)

Films: Usually one film will be shown each 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; some will be longer. (The following list of films is provisional.)

• Jan Svankmejer, Don Juan (1970) and Faust (1994)
• Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (Greenwich Theatre, London; Stage on Screen, 2010)
• F. W. Murnau, Faust (1926)
• Hector Berlioz, La Damnation de Faust (dir. Sylvain Cambreling, 1999)
• Charles Gounod, Faust (dir. Antonio Pappano, 2010)

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students maximum

Description: Nothing seems more natural to us than the act of reading—and yet reading is anything but natural. Its performance relies on specific material and cultural parameters: the physical spaces and textual communities in which one reads; the texts and paratexts to which one is directed to attend; the temporal, spatial, and somatic habits one cultivates through scenes of literary instruction. This course examines reading as a densely mediated activity. It examines the institutional histories that have yielded such familiar twentieth-century practices as “close reading” and “critical reading,” as well as less valorized modes of reading: reading imitatively, reading emotionally, reading faddishly, reading superficially, reading pornographically.

Evaluation: TBA

Texts: (subject to change)

• Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
• Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend
• Chris Kraus, I Love Dick
• Tom McCarthy, Remainder
• Toni Morrison, Beloved
• Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
• Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
• Chris Ware, Building Stories
• Richard Wright, Black Boy
• Essays/book chapters from Stephen Best, Pierre Bourdieu, Rita Felski, Michel Foucault, John Guillory, Gerald Graff, Bernard Lahire, Heather Love, Deidre Lynch, Sharon Marcus, Eve Sedgwick, Namwali Serpell, Michael Warner, etc.

Format: Seminar

Average Enrollment: 15 students 

Description: “Be realistic, demand the impossible!”; “Peace, bread, and land!”; “Hate cannot drive out hate”; “We are the 99%”—these are slogans or quotations that summarize important moments of activism and revolutionary action from the 1900 to the present. What are the discursive roots of these slogans and how do they connect to the cultural output of other activist and revolutionary movements across the globe? Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this course examines literary and cultural reflections of various forms of revolutions throughout the 20th and the early 21st centuries. From the Bolshevik Revolution to the suffrage movement, from Gandhi’s satyagraha to the violence of the Algerian war of independence, from the effervescence of the year 1968 to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and from the antiapartheid struggle to the Occupy Movement, these are some of the moments with which we will engage.

How do ideas of radical political transformation travel to other sites and historical eras? What is the role of intertextuality and reading practices in this process? Novels, memoirs, poetry, paintings, manifestos and other cultural texts will be read in dialogue with essays by Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Simone de Beauvoir, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Walter Rodney, Kwame Nkrumah, Aghostino Neto, Ruth First, etc.

Evaluation: Attendance and participation: 15; Instructional Poems: 5; Mixed Media Portrait: 15; Archive/ Museum Curation Project: 15; Slideshow/ Video/ Sound Installation: 15: Final Project: 35

Texts: (Final list will be available July 2017)

• Joseph Conrad “An Anarchist”
• Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
• Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban
• Milan Kundera,  The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• Alicia Partnoy,  The Little School
• Marjane Satrapi,  Persepolis
• Mongane Wally Serote, To Every Birth Its Blood
• Richard Wright, The Color Curtain

Films:

• ​Sergei Eisenstein, The Battleship Potemkin
• Gillo Pontecorvo, The Battle of Algiers
• Rehad Desai, Miners Shot Down

Format: Seminar

Average Enrollment: 15 students

Description: In this seminar we will canvas various critical and theoretical approaches that have come to characterize Shakespeare Studies in the 21st Century. Our attention will focus on readings that exemplify current critical perspectives on Shakespeare such as Presentism, Disability Studies, Adaptation Studies, Ecocriticism/Green Shakespeare, Queer Studies, Cognitive Theory, New Economics, Philosophical/Ethical Criticism, and the New Formalism. In addition to the theoretical reading, we will discuss a selection of Shakespeare's plays in relation to these approaches.

Evaluation:

seminar presentation 35%
long paper 50%
participation 15%

Format: Seminar

Average Enrollment: 15 students

Description: In close study of 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 course 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 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.

Evaluation:

• Conference paper 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 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: on your argument; on your clarity; on your effective delivery of the paper 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) I will grade you on all components listed under Option (1) but also on a formally presented essay version of your remarks (8-9 pp.) that you turn in immediately following 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 conference paper 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 on a different writer; in this case, an 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

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.
• Grove, Frederick Philip. The Master of the Mill. 1944.
• Klein, A.M. The Second Scroll. 1951.
• 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.

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

Average Enrollment: 10 students

Description: One of the signatures of early twentieth-century modernist literature is its deep allusiveness – its marked tendency to signify through implicit reference to other texts. Many recognize that 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 depend on allusion for some levels of signification, also indicates ways in which their experimental writing was crucially (and committedly) informed by texts from other times and cultures. Joyce’s Ulysses parallels Homer’s Odyssey through extended allusion; Marianne Moore’s poems often read as networks of quotations; and 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 Pasco notes, allusion is the technique whereby a text external to the one at hand is implicitly referenced, deliberately or not, and thus “grafted” on to the immediate text in a relationship generating more than the sum of its parts. As George Steiner notes, allusions make possible “the compact largesse of the text.” Modernist allusions operate 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 what I.A. Richards called “emotional aura”; Pound’s many allusions in the Cantos often highlight memes in myth and history; and 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 as reach to alterity as seedbed for modernist innovation.

This course will explore questions about the reasons behind such widespread modernist allusiveness. How does it relate to what experimental modernists saw as their commitments; and how relate to the complex and generative relationship between modernist work and what Eliot theorized as “tradition”? We will explore how different instances of allusion function, addressing their effects on readers—and how they contribute to the meaning-making of a text in question.

Texts (tentative): 

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems
H.D., Selected Poems and Trilogy
H.D., HERmione
James Joyce, excerpts from Ulysses
Marianne Moore, Complete Poems
Ezra Pound, selections from Personae and The Cantos
Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead
Louis Zukofsky, Selected Poems

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

Description: This course focuses on points of contention among literary theorists. It will expose students to a variety of critical viewpoints, focusing especially on questions of textual interpretability, canon formation, and the difference between literary theory and literary criticism. By examining divergent interpretative approaches to works of literature in poetry and prose, we shall appreciate in greater depth why professors of literature sometimes adopt polemical positions against each other.

Evaluation: Attendance/participation (15%); ongoing position papers (30%); oral presentation (15%); final 15pp essay (40%)

Texts: TBA

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

Description: This course will focus squarely on recent developments in narrative theory as a means of asking questions about fiction and history.   It will explore the "literary" in a few examples of American historiography (specifically in its narrative forms) and the "historical" in some American historical fiction.  In order to open this inquiry we will need to gain some in depth knowledge of narrative theory, theories of history, historiography, and the historical novel, so theoretical and critical texts will be central to our discussions.

The course is designed as a discussion seminar, and students will have some input into the readings. Some possible theorists:
Gérard Genette
Hayden White
Robert Berkhoffer
David Herman
Georg Lukács
F. R. Ankersmit

Texts:

• J.F. Cooper, The Pioneers
• Nathanial Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
• Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
• William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
• J. W. Cash, The Mind of the South
• E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime
• Simon Schama, Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations
• Toni Morrison, Beloved

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Seminars

Description: This course will examine examples of cross-dressing in the theatre from the long eighteenth century with the goal of exploring how they might inflect our understanding of transvestism as an aspect of the trans* experience today. We will begin by examining the change in gender dynamics that occurred on the English stage from 1660 onwards when women began to play Shakespeare’s cross-dressed heroines, roles that were originally written for boy actors. Focusing on the stage, we will consider actresses who made their name in breeches parts and travesty roles (such as Margaret “Peg” Woffington and Dorothy Jordan) and examples of men dressing as women in performance (such as David Garrick as Sir John Brute in The Provoked Wife and the roles that Samuel Foote wrote for himself). We will also discuss Charlotte Charke, a performer who cross-dressed outside the theatre.

Furthermore, we will explore examples of real-life transvestites including Hannah Snell (a female soldier), the Chevalier d’Éon (who infiltrated the court of the Empress of Russia by presenting as a woman), John Cooper (a.k.a. Princess Seraphina), Margaret Ann Bulkley (who as James Barry performed the first C-section surgery in which both mother and baby survived), Mary Hamilton (who allegedly duped another woman into marriage by posing as a man), Hortense Mancini (a mistress of Charles II with a penchant for cross-dressing), and female pirates Ann Bonny and Mary Reade. These real-life examples will help us to understand the context in which stage transvestites might have been received.

Our discussion will of course be informed by theoretical work on cross-dressing by Marjorie Garber and others and by theorists of gender performativity such as Judith Butler. We will consider cross-dressing as a form of gender expression, an opportunity for objectification and eroticisation, a type of deception, and a means of liberation. Throughout the course we will interrogate whether contemporary ideas of gender as spectrum rather than binary are in fact new.

Evaluation (tentative):

• participation (20%)
• research presentation (20%)
• response to another student’s research presentation (5%)
• paper proposal and annotated bibliography (5%)
• paper (50%)

Texts (provisional): Primary texts may include:

• Shakespeare’s cross-dressing plays (e.g. Twelfth Night, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice)
• William Wycherley, The Country Wife (1675) and David Garrick’s adaptation The Country Girl (1766)
• Aphra Behn, The Rover (1677)
• George Farquhar, The Constant Couple (1700) and The Recruiting Officer (1706)
• John Vanbrugh, The Provoked Wife (1697)
• A Narrative of the Life of Mrs Charlotte Charke (1755)
• The Female Soldier; Or, The Surprising Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell (1750)
• Henry Fielding, The Female Husband (1746)

Other readings may include:

• Contextual primary source material (such as performance reviews, actor biographies and newspaper commentary)
• Historical fiction/drama
• Critical essays on primary sources
• Theoretical readings

Format: Discussion seminar, presentations

Average enrollment: 15 students

Description: Vladimir Nabokov describes writing from personal memory this way: “Certain tight parentheses have been opened up and allowed to spill their still active contents” (Speak, Memory). With this evocative quote Nabokov points to at least three features of the memoir that we will pay attention to in this class. One is the slender focus of the memoir (often only what is contained within the parentheses). Another is the way the material (the “contents”) is remembered and re-worked. And a third, closely related to the re-working, is the form – the shape or way the narrative is told. Thus it is of interest that Nabokov employs a grammatical term (the parenthesis) to emphasize the telling of personal stories. That is, even personal stories are subject to the form, the medium, the narrative “grammar”: the diary, the letter, the essay, the book-length story, the photograph and film, some poems. We will look at a selection of all of the above with a view to how stories are told as well as what the contents of those stories are.  Therefore, the course readings are grouped according to form and not topic/content. But, there is much overlap between the two and among the readings. So, for example, the graphic memoir may contain photographs and will also use theory; Between the World and Me, a book, is also written as a letter.

Further to Nabokov’s spilling of “still active contents”: this suggestion of an involuntary and volcanic rush of memories connotes authenticity, the truth. However, memories by their very nature are unreliable, change and mutate. For Paul Auster, memory is “the space in which a thing happens for the second time” (The Invention of Solitude).  A performative space is just that – a recreation – where nothing is performed the same way twice. Here is Nietzsche: “’ I have done that’, says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually – memory yields” (Beyond Good and Evil). So, what is truth in the recounting of one’s memoir? How reliable is it and how would the reader know? In the telling of a good story, does it matter?

It is tempting to see the memoir as comprised of ‘authentic’ and unassailable details – the truth in other words – as if the traditional idea of the truth were a  “bourgeois plot against the people” (Ben Yagoda, Memoir: A History). We will resist the urge to read these works as truthful non-fiction and instead read them as if they were fiction, ghost-written, in a sense, by the author. To that end, we will recall Virginia’s Woolf’s take on the writing of memoirs: “the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important” (in Yagoda, Memoir). We could ask, what does each text not say, not reveal, suppress and repress? What is still aching to get out, to slip outside the parentheses, to partake of that spilling of contents? And yet cannot. Auster: “even the facts do not always tell the truth.”

And, Auster again: “Playing with words … [is] not so much a search for the truth as a search for the world as it appears in language. Language is not truth. It is the way we exist in the world. Playing with words is merely to examine the way the mind functions, to mirror a particle of the world as the mind perceives it… As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other. ‘Two faces are alike’, writes Pascal. ‘Neither is funny by itself, but side by side their likeness makes us laugh’. The faces rhyme for the eye, just as two words can rhyme for the ear… It is possible for events in one’s life to rhyme as well. A young man rents a room in Paris and then discovers that his father has hid out in this same room during the war. If these two events were to be considered separately, there would be little to say about either one of them. The rhyme they create when looked at together alters the reality of each… two (or more) rhyming events set up a connection in the world, adding one more synapse to be routed through the vast plenum of experience.”

We will want to ask what are the rhyming events in the stories we read. To what does the author attach meaning? What does the author believe to be true and how does that truth resonate? What words, images, metaphors are employed? What is the story trying to be told?

Evaluation (tentative):

• Participation 10%
• Short commentaries 6X5%= 30%
• Short essays on 3 books 3X20% = 60%

Texts (provisional):

• Books: The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson, Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Kiss, by Kathryn Harrison
• Essays: by Daphne Merkin, Katha Pollitt, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Zadie Smith, Steve Martin
• Journals, diaries, letters: selections from Anais Nin, Heidi Julavits, Sylvia Plath, John Cheever, Karl Ove Knausgaard
• Theoretical reflections: selections from Roland Barthes, Olivia Laing, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Blake Morrison
• Autobiographical photography: by Sally Mann, Annie Leibovitz, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano; selections from Annette Kuhn, Paul Auster, Marianne Hirsh
• The graphic memoir: selections from Alison Bechdel, Art Spiegelman, Roz Chast
• Film: Stories We Tell (dir. Sarah Polley, 2013)

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

Description: The medieval millennium (c. 500-1500) saw the birth of Islam, the expansion and formalization of western and other forms of Christianity, the continued development of Jewish culture in the diaspora surrounded by majority Christian and Muslim populations, and the rise of universities that benefitted from intellectual exchange among Christians, Jews, and Muslims, including the re-introduction of Aristotelianism. This course examines how later medieval English writers registered some of these developments and the opportunities or challenges they posed for interfaith encounter and self-definition. These encounters will often involve representations of racial, physiological, and gendered difference, among others. The genres and literary modes we will discuss include travel writing, romance, allegory, hagiography, and mystical writing.

English people in the later Middle Ages (c. 1350-1500) had much to say about religions, cultures, and practices from elsewhere in the known world and had frequent contact, often through travel and trade, with African, Asian, and what we now call Middle Eastern peoples. They participated in academic and cultural developments that had origins in the rich cultural interchange (both peaceful and violent) between Christians and their Jewish and Muslim neighbors. In medieval England we find a variety of representations of Jews and Muslims, though (in the late Middle Ages, at least) few Jews or Muslims could be found living anywhere in England. And so the representations would seem to stem from textual influences, international communication, or reliance (in the case of the Jews) on older accounts from England. The religious experiences of English people also shared a great deal with that of their contemporaries on the European continent. In some important ways, then, it is misleading to speak of English religious culture as “insular”. At the same time, there were many developments in England that held little in common with what was happening elsewhere, and so it is valid to study English religiosity as involving unique phenomena or developments that took on a particularly English identity—though never in isolation. In the late Middle Ages we witness the rise of a vibrant lay piety, including detailed representations of women’s religious experiences; the first complete translation of the Bible into English; and an unprecedented academic heresy (Wycliffism) that spread from university halls to the wider population. Many of these developments were in turn met by severe responses that were not always consistent with attitudes on the continent. A variety of voices, many of them reformist, could still be heard in the face of strong opposition, and England would eventually become one of the decisive centers of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century and after. These later developments cannot be understood completely without an awareness of late-medieval English religious experience in a global context. Nor can modern dynamics involving Christian, Jewish, and Muslim populations be fully grasped without an understanding of their medieval origins—a context that is frequently mischaracterized for ideological purposes in present-day political discourse and fundamentalist rhetoric.

Secondary readings will take historical and theoretical approaches to the primary material. Students will have opportunities to view medieval maps and original medieval manuscripts during workshops held in McGill’s Rare Books and Special Collections and the Osler Library of the History of Medicine. Primary course texts will be read in the original Middle English. Prior experience with the language is helpful but not required, and portions of several seminar sessions will be spent on gaining facility with Middle English.

Evaluation (provisional): short papers 25%; final research project 50%; presentation 10%; participation 15%

Texts (provisional):

Geoffrey Chaucer, selections from The Canterbury Tales
William Langland, Piers Plowman
Thomas Malory, selections from Le Morte d’Arthur
The Siege of Jerusalem
The Book of John Mandeville
The Book of Margery Kempe
English Wycliffite writings (selections)

***other texts to be provided on MyCourses

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

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

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

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

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

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 7 to 10 students

Description: The uneven development of our world is an obvious fact: from the underdevelopment of the Global South to the dynamics of core and periphery in political and economic structures, a globalized world of equality remains a distant utopia. Yet the world is also a coherent whole, intimately connected through structures of investment in addition to supranational political and financial institutions. Centered in contemporary Marxist theory, this course examines our globalized world through the lens of uneven development. It seeks to understand the structure of our present conjuncture that is marked, simultaneously, by hierarchy and difference as well as integration and homogeneity. We will locate this question in the relation between the sphere of culture and the logic of capital. In addition, it queries how this uneven world shapes social, cultural, and aesthetic forms (and norms) in addition to our conceptions of time and space. The course will take up four themes: the social formation; the question of transition; the national question; and peripheral aesthetics. Drawing on readings from history, literary and cultural studies, film studies, and theory this seminar will attempt to think through the politics and aesthetics of uneven development on a global scale.

Enrolment: Instructor permission required. Please e-mail either Gavin Walker (gavin.walker [at] mcgill.ca) or Sandeep Banerjee (sandeep.banerjee [at] mcgill.ca) to enroll in the course.

Enrolment: Instructor permission required. Please e-mail either Gavin Walker (gavin.walker [at] mcgill.ca) or Sandeep Banerjee (sandeep.banerjee [at] mcgill.ca) to enroll in the course.

Texts: TBD

Evaluation: TBD

Format: Seminar

Description: Margaret Atwood’s fiction seems to know few limits. Her short stories and novels offer multiple insights into contemporary life through narratives marked by black humour, satire, wry wit, and political nuance. Atwood is an acute observer of her times who writes from a feminist perspective. She challenges conventional assumptions about how storytelling works, just as she challenges our preconceptions about how cultures and social systems operate. Atwood’s fiction-as-critique encompasses a variety of genres. She has created dystopian fantasies and science fiction that explores climate change and environmental collapse. She delves into the imagination of criminals and the prison systems that confine them. There is madness, deception, hunger, disease. And sometimes, in the middle of it all, a warming gothic breeze. Her works are often filled with bizarre images and incidents that make them very funny. On one level, Atwood is an accomplished comic writer. But her fiction also offers chilling accounts of the interface between humans and new technologies—technologies that are forever altering the natural world, the food chain, our communication networks, and the very ways in which we reproduce ourselves. Where have we been in the past? How can we reread history in new ways? Where are we now, and what are we blind to in the world around us? Where will we be in the future, and how bleak does that picture look? To explore these questions, the course focuses on a range of Atwood’s novels and short fiction in order to provide a detailed consideration of her major concerns.

Evaluation: Participation 20%; Presentation 30%; Final Paper/ Project 50%

Texts:

• Surfacing
• The Handmaid’s Tale
• Alias Grace
• The Blind Assassin
• Oryx and Crake
• Wilderness Tips
• Stone Mattress

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

Description: Since the nineteenth century, 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), positioning them for grants and awards, and most importantly giving them the validation of a properly published book bearing their name. The purpose of this course is to read two major Canadian poets of the Centennial and the contemporary periods (Al Purdy and Don McKay) as well as a handful of their successors, in order to analyse the importance of the small press to their poetic careers. Ryerson Chap-Books, Fiddlehead Books, Contact Press, Anansi, Gaspereau, Véhicule … what did publication by one or more of these small Canadian presses mean for the writers’ creative practices? Did it function as a stepping stone toward better publishing terms and greater prominence? How involved in editing and publishing were they themselves? Ultimately this course will reflect on the constitution of the poet and his/her place in Canadian society in the last fifty years.

Evaluation:

• short essay 20%
• seminar presentation 25%
• research paper 40%
• participation 15%

Texts:

• Al Purdy, Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets
• Don McKay, Camber
• Don Coles, The Essential Don Coles
• Jan Zwicky, Songs for Relinquishing the Earth
• A.F. Moritz, Sequence
• Dionne Brand, No Language is Neutral
• Fred Wah, Diamond Grill
• Ken Babstock, Methodist Hatchet
• Nyla Matuk, Sumptuary Laws

Coursepack of secondary readings in the history of the book
We will also subscribe as a group to a contemporary Canadian literary magazine such as The Fiddlehead.

Format:Seminar 

Average Enrollment: 15 students

Description: In this course we ask, how did the crisis of conversion in the early modern world open up a space for dramatists to play with one of the key questions of their time? The conversional crisis extended from the Reconquista to the European conquest of the Americas to the wars of religion in France, to the extraordinary enterprise of the Spanish Armada, to the social, political, and military struggles that swept across Northern Europe and the British archipelago.

How did early modern theatre repurpose, transform, and multiply the forms of religious conversion? A conversion, by the way, is a “turning in position, direction, destination” (Oxford English Dictionary) within a field of possibilities that reconstitutes the field itself. Religious conversion is one kind within a field of interrelated forms that includes material transformation, class and sex change, and human-animal metamorphosis. We study plays by Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, and Philip Massinger; related texts about conversion such as those by Augustine, Ovid, and others; and work on the history and theory of conversion.

The idea for the course emerges from a collaborative, interdisciplinary research project, “Early Modern Conversions: Religions, Cultures, Ecologies of Cognition” (http://earlymodernconversions.com/). The links between the course and the project mean that students in the seminar will not only be studying theatre and conversion in Shakespeare’s England but will also be taking an active part in the creation of a new way of understanding religion, culture, theatre, and individual and collective transformation.

Plays:

• Marlowe, The Jew of Malta
• Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale
• Middleton, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside
• Massinger, The Renegado

Evaluation:

• Journal 30%
• 3-minute presentations 10%
• Course paper (12-15 pages) 40%
• Non-academic version of your paper (1-2 pages) 10%
• Participation 10%

Your journal is, first of all, for you to do some thinking by writing at each step of the course. But it is also something you do for marks, so you have to write at least a page (350 words) about each week’s readings (and our discussions of the readings).

From near the start of the course, you’ll be thinking about the course paper that you will want to write. I’ll work with you and provide a sounding board for your ideas. We’ll put on a course conference in the middle of the term. You will have three minutes—you’ll be on the clock—to present the question and/or argument that you will develop into your course paper. This part of the course is based on the three-minute thesis program, where graduate students compete for prizes in recognition of the clarity, succinctness, value, and appeal of their research. We’ll take the competition out of what we do, but leave in the emphasis on clear, succinct, and engaging accounts of valuable research. We’ll do prep work in the weeks leading up to the course conference.

Your course paper will develop a topic of your own devising. Your work will need to take account of the most important research on the question or argument you’re developing. What you write does not have to be original work, in the sense that it does not have to be an idea or a view that no one has thought of before. But it does have to be work that you care about, have thought a good deal about, and are keen to share with others. So you could write about Midsummer Night’s Dream as an experimental blending of Ovidian metamorphosis and Christian conversion, which is not a new idea, but you could do that with new evidence, with thinking that takes previous work further than it was willing or able to go, and with a conclusion that might shift the perspective from which we see the relationship between theatre and conversion in Shakespeare’s time.

Once you’ve completed your course paper, you’ll have one more task. This one is non-traditional, even experimental. You’ll write a version of your paper’s central argument as if for a non-academic readership—readers who are intelligent and thoughtful but who have not taken the course and who are not in the academy (though they might have an undergrad education in their past). So think about writing a piece on Shakespeare and religion for the weekend edition of the Globe and Mail or maybe as a script for a Ted Talk. We’ll take a bit of time during the course to look at models for this kind of writing.

Participation requires your presence in class, both body and mind. You have to come to each class with questions, ideas, puzzlement (which you have to speak about), expressions of joy or grief. It is true—it’s really true: there is no such thing as a stupid question.

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, considering especially the relations between poetry, freedom, and change. 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.

Evaluation (tentative): Book review 10%; Editorial exercise 10%; Reception project 10%; Participation (includes class Prolusion) 20%; Final 20 page paper 50 %.

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, on-line
• Selected criticism

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students maximum

Description: Britain erased eleven days from the calendar in the 1750s, France turned back the hands of time to Year One in the 1790s, and the British Railway Clearing House adopted Greenwich Mean Time in the 1840s. By the 1850s, the solidification of this mechanized time program was complete; Big Ben towered over London, the marine chronometer (the so-called sea clock) governed navigation, and the trains arrived on schedule. Victorian imperialists and industrialists spread the gospel that Britain’s economic supremacy was a product of the empire’s efficient arrangements of time. At the same moment, English and American writers from a broad range of backgrounds were developing new literary strategies of anachronism (in its literal, etymological sense, ana: “against” and chronos: “time”) to contest the increasing dominance of “imperial time”: the new clock-based, machine-regulated, and strictly standardized temporality used to enforce a forward-moving narrative of empire.

Romantic writers’ active challenges to this new model of temporality (as inherently abstract, commercial, reproductive, industrial, and imperial) resonate with the recent turn toward time in contemporary critical theory and literary criticism. “Romantic Anachronisms” will examine the remarkable temporal insights of Romantic poets, essayists, and novelists along with those of present-day literary critics (from Eighteenth Centuryists to Postmodernists) and temporality theorists (from Jack Halberstam to Timothy Morton). Our examination of these diverse temporalities will seek to historicize modern critical theories of anachronism. By attending to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century works that moved beyond Whig and Tory debates about the progressive or cyclical nature of history, we will trace the recent reappearance of untimeliness back to its historical roots in Romantic literature and culture.

Toward these ends, each week of our syllabus will pair a critical or theoretical work from the twentieth- or twenty-first century with a literary text from the Romantic century (1750-1850). This seminar will also connect these conversations to further readings in eighteenth-century literature and culture that anticipate Romanticism. We will therefore devote a large part of this course (and our research) to the development of our own theories, histories, analyses, and methodologies of anachronism. Together, we will attempt to map the contested ground of literature and theory’s alternative temporal forms.

Evaluation:

• Participation (15%)
• Reading Responses (25%)
• Presentation (10%)
• Seminar Paper (50%)

Texts:

Poetry, Fiction, & Critical Prose

• Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759)
• Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764)
• Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773)
• Frances Burney, Evelina: Or, the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (1778)
• Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789)
• Lord Byron, selections from Hours of Idleness (1807) and Don Juan (1819-24) 
• Jane Austen, Persuasion (1817)
• John Clare, The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827)
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
• William Cowper, The Task (1785)
• William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age: Or, Contemporary Portraits (1825)
• Charlotte Smith, Beachy Head (1807)
• William Wordsworth, selections from The Prelude (1805): “The Discharged Soldier” and “The Blind Beggar”

Criticism & Theory

• Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” Signs 7.1 (1981): 13-35.
• Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (1983)
• Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; 2006)
• Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994)
• Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (1995)
• Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660-1785 (1996)
• Jerome Christenson, Romanticism at the End of History (2000)
• Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time & Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005)
• Dana Luciano, Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (2007)
• Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (2008)
• Mary Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (2009)
• Valerie Traub, “The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies,” PMLA 128.1 (2013): 21–39.
• Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013)
• Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013)

Format: Seminar

Description: Epistolary fiction, in which the narrative is conveyed through an exchange of letters, has ancient and medieval antecedents. This course, however, begins with Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, the tragic novel that even Richardson’s great rival Henry Fielding acknowledged as a masterpiece. Using the full range of epistolary techniques, some of which Richardson inherited and some of which he created, Clarissa combines multiple finely distinguished narrative viewpoints, each advancing its own account of the action, the overall effect being to complicate and intensify the novel’s meaning and impact. Because of its great length (the first edition was published in seven volumes), we shall read the novel in the Broadview abridgment. We shall then turn to three comic novels published in the decade from 1769 to 1778: Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague, set partly in Quebec City and showing the interplay between French, English and Huron communities; Tobias Smollett’s final novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, in which the author experimented with epistolary fiction for the first and only time; and Frances Burney’s dazzling first novel, Evelina, in which she exploits the resources of epistolarity to the fullest, only to abandon it in her three subsequent novels. We shall conclude with three of Jane Austen’s short youthful writings of the 1790s: “Love and Freindship,” “Lesley Castle,” and “Lady Susan.” For all her admiration of Richardson, Austen was acutely conscious of the limitations of epistolary form. After parodying it in her juvenilia, written when she was in her mid-teens, she wrote the novella-length “Lady Susan,” which she completed but did not attempt to publish. In considering why Austen, like Burney, made the move from epistolarity to third-person narration, we shall fulfil part of the course’s principal objective: to examine the various advantages and disadvantages of telling a novel in letters.

Evaluation: seminar presentation:  25%, term paper 50%, participation 25%

Texts: 

• Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1747-48), Broadview
• Frances Brooke, The History of Emily Montague (1769), Broadview
• Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), Norton
• Frances Burney, Evelina (1778), Oxford World’s Classics
• Jane Austen, “Love and Freindship” (1790), “Lesley Castle” (1792) and “Lady Susan” (c. 1795)

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

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

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

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

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

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

 Evaluation (tentative): 

• Seminar presentation with accompanying written component, 20%
• Two ten page essays, 30% each
• Class participation, 20% 

Texts (tentative): 

• Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine
• Brian Friel, Translations
• David Edgar, Destiny
• David Edgar, Pentecost
• Sarah Kane, Blasted
• David Edgar, Testing the Echo
• Ayub Khan-Din, East is East
• Sebastian Barry, The Steward of Christendom
• Robin Soans, Talking to Terrorists
• Richard Bean, England People Very Nice
• Mark Ravenhill, Product
• Caryl Churchill, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You
• Anupama Chandrasekhar, Disconnect
• Jez Butterworth, Jerusalem
• debbie tucker green, Truth and Reconciliation
• Phil Davies, Firebird
• Rory Mullarkey, The Wolf from the Door
• Caryl Churchill, Escaped Alone

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students maximum

Description: In Bowen’s Court, Elizabeth Bowen writes disparagingly of the high-toned, modernist discourse about civilization and the necessity of culture: “And to what did our fine feelings, our regard for the arts, our intimacies, our inspiring conversations, our wish to be clear of the bonds of sex and class and nationality, our wish to try to be fair to everyone bring us? To 1939.” The period from the late 1930s through the 1960s has been, by and large, neglected in favour of scholarly discussions of high modernism and postmodernism. This course investigates British fiction in the years immediately preceding the Second World War, as well as fiction written during the war and its aftermath. In this period, problems that affected British domestic politics cannot be dissociated from international situations. The bombing of London, the election of the Labour government, the dissolution of the British Empire, the years of high taxation and food rationing, the rebuilding of blitzed cities all have important effects on fiction. Moreover, in the postwar period, British fiction merges with Cold War tension and a consciousness of global responsibility. The novels on this syllabus indicate ways in which British writers conceived of the changed realities of the war and the postwar years. Throughout this course, attention will be paid to nationalist discourse, pageants, firestorms, apocalyptic discourse, espionage, love in the time of war, melodrama, alienation, existentialism, citizenship, trials, and some comedy. There will also be a conversation about cinema and documentary in relation to novelistic discourse. Secondary readings by Peter Kalliney, Hannah Arendt, Tony Judt, John Grierson, Lyndsey Stonebridge, David Trotter, Rod Menghem, and others will be available on MyCourses.

Evaluation: short paper (25%), participation (15%), long paper (60%)

Texts: approximately 12 texts will be chosen from the following list. A final list will be available from the instructor in July 2017.

• Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca (1938)
• George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938)
• W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Journey to a War (1939)
• Patrick Hamilton, Slaves of Solitude (1941)
• James Hanley, No Directions (1943)
• Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs. Lippincote’s (1945)
• Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (1949)
• Graham Greene, The Third Man (1949)
• Rose Macaulay, The World My Wilderness (1950)
• Anthony Powell, A Question of Upbringing (1951)
• Ivy Compton-Burnett, Mother and Son (1955)
• Barbara Pym, Less than Angels (1955)
• Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means (1963)

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

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

Description: Intensive study of shorter prose fictions and critical essays by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, as these foundational authors can be seen to work in dialogue with one another, exploring aesthetic problems and cultural preoccupations crucial to mid-nineteenth-century America at the same that they break the ground for the emergence of the modern short story—anticipating fundamental developments in form and theme that would become the bases for self-conscious, experimental short fiction produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Evaluation (tentatively): Participation in seminar discussions, 20%; series of one-page textual analyses, 20%; oral presentation, 20%; final research paper, 40%.

Texts (Tentative; editions of collected short fiction TBA):

• Poe, The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe
• Hawthorne, Selected Tales and Sketches
• Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
• Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor, and Selected Tales or Great Short Works of Herman Melville

Format of class: Seminar

Average enrolment: 15 students maximum

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, including the unforgiving terrains of cities, suburbs, highways, oceans, and outer space. 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, and Actor-Network Theory. Possible films include The Gleaners and I, Los Angeles Plays Itself, Amores Perros, Safe, Under the Skin, and Leviathan.

Evaluation:

• film journals 50%
• presentation 15%
• participation 35%

Texts:

• Hugh Raffles Insectopedia
• Michel Serres The Natural Contract
• and a coursepack

Note: Before the first class meeting please read the first chapter of The Natural Contract ("War, Peace") and the chapter in Insectopedia called "Generosity (the Happy Times).”

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

Expected Student Preparation:  Please note that it is both a critical studies and an art-making course. 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: One of the axioms of modernist aesthetics is that an artwork should investigate the intrinsic conditions of its own ontology rather than attempt to recreate properties of other media. Critical modernist discourse insisted that writing should be about writing, painting should be about painting, sculpture should be about sculpture, and so forth.  Yet one need only consider Rene Magritte's "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (from The Treachery of Images, 1928-29) to consider the ways in which even modernist artworks frequently combined different semiotic systems to create subversive meaning. Since the 1960s, Conceptual art has deliberately troubled the boundaries between media in order to critically reflect upon and interrogate the thoroughly mediated environment of our contemporary world, as well as to investigate intimate questions of self and identity.

This experimental seminar is designed to help students respond critically and creatively to art.  By focusing on multi-media artworks that incorporate elements of image, sound, and/or text, we shall explore how meaning in contemporary art and culture is often generated across multiple registers.  Over the course of the semester, students will be introduced to important examples of experimental film and video, Conceptual art, body art, photography, sculpture, and installation 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 in order to create their own self-directed visual art and curatorial projects.  In other words, students will not only be expected to discuss, think and write about the works we study, but to create more experimental projects that respond 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 in order to attend contemporary art exhibitions and performances.

Evaluation: 

• seminar presentation 35%
• long paper 50%
• participation 15%

Selected artworks by: Chantal Akerman, John Cage, Derek Jarman, Su Friedrich, Jean-Luc Godard, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, Kenneth Anger, Chris Marker, Valie Export, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Anthony McCall, Yvonne Rainer, David Wojnarowicz, Catherine Opie, Sophie Calle, Sharon Hayes, Greg Bordowitz, Shirin Neshat, Glenn Ligon, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Carrie Mae Weems, Adrian Piper, and others.

Texts by:

• Sergei Eisenstein
• Walter Benjamin
• Roland Barthes
• John Cage
• Clement Greenberg
• Michael Fried
• Douglas Crimp
• Amelia Jones
• Rebecca Schneider
• Peggy Phelan
• R. Murray Schaefer
• Carol Mavor
• Kaja Silverman
• Jacques Attali
• Jacques Rancière
• Nicolas Bourriaud
• Claire Bishop
• Susan Howe
• Jennifer Doyle
• Maggie Nelson
• Wayne Koestenbaum
• Rebecca Solnit

Format:  Seminar and Workshop

Average Enrolment: 15 students maximum

Description: St. Augustine was amazed when he saw his teacher Ambrose read a book without speaking the words out loud. In Augustine’s day, reading silently was rarely done. Today, in the digital era, we are witnessing our own shifts in the way we read. This course explores the intersection of premodern and digital technologies of reading. It has two inter-related aims: to discover how people read—or were supposed to read—in the Middle Ages; and to examine how digital technologies are changing the way we read medieval texts. In the first half of the course, we will read a selection of literary and theological works (written primarily in Middle English) that aim to train their readers to read in a certain way, as well as more discursive accounts of the reading process. The second half of the course provides an overview of theoretical models (e.g. hyper reading, distant reading), tools, and projects that have emerged as part of the growing field of the digital humanities, a field whose early development was significantly influenced by the work of medievalists. Our focus will be on how these theories and methods can illuminate our reading of medieval texts. Throughout the course, we will pay close attention to material form: how, for instance, does the experience of interacting with a digital surrogate differ from handling a physical manuscript copy? Other thematic issues that we will pursue across both halves of the course include the relation between text and image; reading as attention formation; communal versus private reading; reading slow and fast; and what it means to be “literate.” Responses to these questions will be informed by students’ hands-on experience with certain digital tools; collaborative lab sessions will prepare students to build their own online collection of material related to the theme of the course.

No specialized technological expertise is expected. Nor are students expected to have previous experience with Middle English. Although some familiarity with Middle English is beneficial, I will be providing basic instruction and language resources. Wherever possible, assignments and readings will be tailored to fit the research interests of seminar participants.    

Evaluation:

Participation 15%
Reading responses 20%
Close reading assignment 15%
Digital project 20%
Final paper 30%

Texts (tentative):

• Augustine, Confessions (trans. Chadwick)
• The Writings of Julian of Norwich (ed. Watson and Jenkins)
• Chaucer, Dream Visions and Other Poems (ed. Lynch)
• Hoccleve, "My Compleinte" and Other Poems (ed. Ellis)
• A coursepack featuring essays by Franco Moretti, N. Katherine Hayles, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, Bethany Nowviskie, and others. 

Format: Seminar

Download Syllabus [pdf]

Description: Secrets, myths and mysteries form the cultural backdrop against which a community’s identity is mapped. They recede ever more into the distance as that identity takes visible shape and gains acceptance. But where to look? What tools can we use to find the hidden history of a city, reveal its secrets, raise questions about accepted truths? How have advances in the art and technology of historical research changed the very manner in which we study and understand the city and its past events?

This interdisciplinary, team-taught course takes students on a journey to discover Montreal, and to uncover its untold stories. But Montreal is only a case study. Through a close focus on specific narratives, artifacts and archives relating to Montreal, this course introduces students to the research detective’s toolbox, to technological skills enabling the sharing of information, and to insights about the ways in which a city’s identity develops over time.

Focussed on primary and secondary materials such as novels, photographs, maps, manuscripts, rare collections and city directories, students will be introduced to advanced research techniques and tools as a means to rethink the ways in which the past is ‘produced’ and ‘maintained,’ as well as how the public encounters the city’s perceived history. To become urban detectives, students will conduct fieldwork in the city's libraries and archives, as well as its buildings, city streets and public places. Even students who have grown up in Montreal will discover new places, hidden treasures, and secrets about the city's past.

Along with watching films and reading literary works set in Montreal, we will look at historical and contemporary maps, explore unpublished materials in McGill’s Archives and Rare Books and Special Collections, and read essays by authors from a wide-range of disciplines including, geography, cultural studies, and archival sciences. Readings are varied, all classes will include one hands-on workshop to familiarize students over time with technological tools. Many classes will involve either a guest speaker or site visit.  

Evaluation:

• Participation 10%
• Short Exercises (relating to hands-on learning of technological tools and applications) 10%
• Online Mapping Assignment (visualization of the film Jesus of Montreal) 15%
• Investigative Project (relating to a particular building in Montreal) 20%
• Presentation (visualization of a creative work on class reading list) 15%
• Final Project (on a Montreal myth or mystery) 30%

Texts:

• Jesus of Montreal (film and mapping stations of the cross in Montreal)
• Bon Cop, Bad Cop (film and visual representation of the film developed by Sebastian Caquard) and 19-2 (which aired in French on Radio-Canada in 2011; and in English on Bravo in 2014)
• Claire Rothman, The Heart Specialist (visits by the author and to the Osler Library, McGill)
• Gabrielle Roy, The Tin Flute (novel and walking tour of St. Henri)
• Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (readings and visit to Richler Room, Concordia University)
• Jonas Company Scrapbook circa 1890 (introduction to research methodologies for identifying history of buildings in Montreal, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill) 

Secondary material to include:

Secondary material to include:

• Michel De Certeau, "Practices of Space," From the Agony of Semiotics, Ed Marshall Blonsky. Oxford University Press, 1985. 122-145. 
• Marc Brosseau, Geography as Literature Progress in Human Geography (18): 333-353. 
• Franco Moretti, Introduction to Atlas of the European Novel: 1800-1900
• D.C.D. Pocock. "Place and the novelist.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 6 (3), 1981. pp. 337–347. 
• Anne-Kathrin Reuschel and Lorenz Hurni, “Mapping Literature: Visualisation of Spatial Uncertainty in Fiction.” Cartographies of Fictional Worlds -- Special Issue November 2011. 48.4: 293-308. 

Description: This course will study the theatre of Shakespeare and his fellows in relation to religious thinking, feeling, and writing in early modern England. This is an area of considerable controversy in Shakespeare studies, with many scholars arguing for or against the essential religiosity of Shakespeare’s drama, the question being, was Shakespeare religious or secular? But our goal is more modest: not to decide once and for all whether Shakespeare and his fellows were religious dramatists but rather to situate the drama in relation to the complex field of early modern religious culture. That task will require a bit of background work on the dominant strain of criticism during the past three decades (i.e., New Historicism), against which recent work on Shakespeare and religion has positioned itself. After that preliminary work, we will turn to a series of case studies of plays mostly by Shakespeare but including also Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and Christopher Marlowe. We’ll read them alongside some central texts of religious culture and in light of the most recent significant work in this branch of Shakespeare studies.

Evaluation: TBA

Texts:  Course pack of critical essays on religion and theatre as well as of primary religious writings from the period.

• Measure for Measure
• All’s Well that Ends Well
• Richard II
• Hamlet
• King Lear
• The Winter’s Tale
• Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
• Thomas Dekker, The Whore of Babylon​
• Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 7 to 10 students

Expected Student Preparation: Previous university-level course work offering some training in relevant areas: 18th- and 19th-century British Literature.

Description: This advanced seminar will undertake a close study of the novels of Jane Austen (1775-1817), concentrating on those that she wrote in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Austen wrote drafts of her first three novels – Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey – in the late 1790s, and they respond, often satirically, to Richardsonian, sentimental, and Gothic fiction. Numerous critics have focused on Austen in her eighteenth-century context; this course will focus, instead, on Austen in her later years. We will begin with two anomalies: Austen’s only novella, “Lady Susan,” probably written in the 1790s but copied in c. 1804 and the first of her two aborted novels, “The Watsons” (c. 1805). We will next study her last three published novels, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, as well as “Sanditon,” which she was writing but could not complete at the end of her life. We will also study Austen’s little-known manuscript “Plan of a Novel.”  Particular attention will be paid to Austen’s own commentary on the art of fiction, both within her novels and in her letters. The course will also include a study of Northanger Abbey, in which Austen’s most celebrated remarks on novel-writing are to be found.

Evaluation: Participation (20%); seminar presentation (30%); term paper (50%)

Texts: 

• Jane Austen, Emma, ed. George Justice, Norton
• Mansfield Park, ed. Claudia Johnson, Norton
• Manuscript Works, ed. Linda Bree, Peter Sabor and Janet Todd, Broadview
• Northanger Abbey, ed. Claire Grogan, Broadview
• Persuasion, ed. Linda Bree, Broadview
• Selected Letters, ed. Vivien Jones, Oxford World’s Classics

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students maximum

Description: Austerity, rationing, youth culture, race riots, sex scandals—British fiction in the 1950s was a literature in motion. Like a sensitive recording machine, British fiction registers social changes, such as the upward scramble for prestige in Angus Wilson’s novels or the taboo of adultery in Elizabeth Taylor’s short stories. Many 1950s novels look back to the war; after all, the Second World War had bankrupted the nation and the consequences of heavy bombardment remained visible in metropolitan centres well into the 1950s. If the 1950s concern the aftermath of the war, they also take a robust perspective on British industry, trade, and research, as manifest in the Festival of Britain (1951) and the injection of vigour given by the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (1953). An unusual number of 1950s British novels speculate on the nature of state sovereignty and the role of individuals in respecting the law, as in John Wyndham’s dystopic novels about carnivorous plants that invade England. Although the Welfare State mandated a levelling down of social difference, many characters in 1950s fiction—usually young urban males—are on the make. Spivs and hustlers fight their way to success, either through employment or strategic marriage. In works by Barbara Pym, Muriel Spark, and Alan Wildeblood, queer young men risk criminal records by having sex with other men. Consequently, this course will deal with changing ideas of sexuality for men and for women. It will also cover domestic and international politics, manifest in Welfare State reforms, the Suez Crisis, and the Notting Hill race riots. Critical readings will include works by Raymond Williams, Frank Kermode, Iris Murdoch, J. B. Priestley, Alice Ferrebe, and Richard Hornsey.

Evaluation: Short paper (25%); participation (15%); long paper (60%)

Texts: approximately 10 texts will be chosen from the following list. Short stories will be interspersed with novels. A final list will be available from the instructor in July 2016.

•  John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (1951)
• Angus Wilson, Hemlock and After (1952)
• Ivy Compton-Burnett, The Present and the Past (1953)
• Evelyn Waugh, Love Among the Ruins (1953)
• Iris Murdoch, Under the Net (1954)
• Peter Wildeblood, Against the Law (1954)
• William Golding, The Inheritors (1955)
• Sam Selvon, Lonely Londoners (1956)
• John Braine, Room at the Top (1957)
• Lawrence Durrell, Justine (1957)
• Muriel Spark, Robinson (1958)
• Barbara Pym, A Glass of Blessings (1958)
• Elizabeth Taylor, The Blush and Other Stories (1958)
• Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners (1959)​
• Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959)

Format: Seminar

Average Enrollment: 15 students 

Prerequisite: This seminar is open to graduate students as well as upper-level Honours undergraduates who have done significant coursework in Cultural Studies or Art History. Other students must get individual permission from the instructor to take the course.

Expected Student Preparation: Please note that this is both a critical studies and an art-making course. 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: Since the late 1950s, art has deliberately troubled the boundaries between media in order to critically reflect upon, and interrogate the thoroughly mediated environment of our contemporary world, as well as to investigate intimate questions of self and identity.

This experimental seminar is designed to help students respond critically and creatively to modern and contemporary art.  By focusing on multi-media artworks that incorporate elements of image, sound, and/or text, we shall explore how meaning in contemporary art is generated across multiple registers.  Over the course of the semester, students will be introduced to important examples of Conceptual art, body art, experimental film and video, photography, sculpture, and installation art from the 1960s to the present. Yet rather than approach these works as historical artifacts, students will be asked to experiment with some of the artistic strategies we study in order to create their own self-directed visual art and curatorial projects.  In other words, students will not only be expected to discuss, think and write about the works we study, but to create artworks that respond 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 in order to attend local exhibitions and performances. In addition to our seminar meeting time, there is a mandatory weekly screening. Students who have conflicts with the screening time, or are unwilling to experiment with new media should not register.

Evaluation: Attendance and participation: 15; Instructional Poems: 5; Mixed Media Portrait: 15; Archive/ Museum Curation Project: 15; Slideshow/ Video/ Sound Installation: 15: Final Project: 35

Texts by:

Sergei Eisenstein
Walter Benjamin
Roland Barthes
John Cage
Douglas Crimp
Rebecca Schneider
Rosalind Krauss
Peggy Phelan
Carol Mavor
Jacques Attali
Jennifer Doyle
Maggie Nelson
Wayne Koestenbaum
​Rebecca Solnit

Art and films by: Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, Jonas Mekas, Chris Marker, Valie Export, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Chantal Akerman, Anthony McCall, Yvonne Rainer, David Wojnarowicz, Catherine Opie, Sophie Calle, Sharon Hayes, Greg Bordowitz, Fred Wilson, Su Friedrich, Shirin Neshat, Glenn Ligon, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Carrie Mae Weems, Adrian Piper, et al.

Format: Seminar and Creative Workshop

Average Enrollment: 15 students

Description: “Writing Montreal” will examine the various ways Canadians have depicted Montreal in their writing (fiction, non-fiction and poetry), and explore what it means to map a city, in words.  Montreal’s role as the pulse of Canada’s shifting realities post WWII (cultural, geographical, political, economic, social, and historical) will be considered through close analysis of media representations of Montreal and the literature of some of Canada’s best and best-loved writers, including Leonard Cohen, Heather O'Neill, Mordecai Richler, Gabrielle Roy, and Michel Tremblay.  As well as reading, students will familiarize themselves with how Montreal is being presented today by touring the city, attending cultural events, and scrutinizing media and social media representations of the city. Students will be urged to consider the dynamics behind a wide range of constructions of this city, including its depictions in literature and film, tourist literature, and comedy routines (think, for example, of Sugar Sammy's attention to Montreal's geography at the neighbourhood level). Drawing from concepts introduced by Edwards & Ivison (2005) as well as Fraile-Marcos (2014), discussions will focus on recent reshapings of the Canadian urban imaginary. Secondary readings will provide students with a solid grounding in the emerging field of literary geography, referencing the work of Marc Brosseau, Sebastien Cacquard, and Barbara Piatti among others.  Examining and participating in various creative ways of mapping Montreal – including experimentation with geospatial tagging and digital mapping – will be part of this course and its assignments. 

Texts: A course pack will contain short fiction and secondary criticism. Longer objects of study tbc, but will likely include:

• Denys Arcand, Jesus of Montreal (film)
• Leonard Cohen, The Favourite Game
• Heather O'Neill, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night
• Mordecai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (recommended reading: The Street)
• Gabrielle Roy, The Tin Flute
• Michel Tremblay, Les Belles Soeurs (drama; recommended reading The Guid Sisters)

Evaluation: 

• Individual presentation 15%
• Group presentation 15%
• Annotated bibliography of a specific canon of writing about Montreal 15%
• Assignments: to include writing an Op Ed, followed by a Letter to the Editor 25%
• Final project, to include proposal for a scholarly conference paper & poster 20%
• Participation 10%

Format: Seminar

Average Enrollment: 10 students

Expected Student Preparation: Previous university-level course work offering some training in critical analysis of poetry. 

Description: Some of the most accomplished American poets have been called “confessional,” even though the label is often misleading. The term has been applied to writers as diverse as Delmore Schwartz, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, and W.D. Snodgrass, to name a few of the early practitioners. More recently, the list could be expanded to include writers such as Sharon Olds, Marie Howe, and Deborah Digges. The term “poetry as confession” was first introduced in 1959. It came to describe a group of poets who focussed on extreme personal experiences, trauma, taboo sexual activities and deviance, madness, death, and suicide. The picture is not often pretty, but it changed the entire tenor of American poetry. And it also changed our conception of the scope and style of personal poetry. At the same time, confessional poetry expressed a profound shift in the relationship between individuals and their culture. Some theorists have argued that postmodernism finds its roots in the confessional mode. However we look at confessional poetry, one thing is clear: the confessional poets wrote carefully composed and highly crafted poems that spoke about a range of emotions seldom associated with the poets who came before them.

This course focuses on the work of three powerful confessional poets: Lowell, Sexton, and Plath. Lowell lived a life of conflict. His writing during the 1940s gave little indication of the kind of confessional work he would produce in his highly influential Life Studies, which is often considered to be a pivotal collection. Here we find compelling poems about Lowell’s upbringing, the tensions between his parents, and acutely rendered expressions of his own marital strife and often desperate psychological condition. Stanley Kunitz called Life Studies “the most influential book of modern verse since The Waste Land.”

Plath and Sexton both attended Lowell’s poetry seminars and, ironically, all three poets spent time in the same psychiatric institution. Sexton described Lowell as “gracefully insane” and hoped to obtain a “scholarship” to enter the hospital, which she saw as a source of creativity. Plath drew on her psychiatric treatment to create the portrait of madness that emerges in her novel, The Bell Jar, and in the extraordinary poems that make up Ariel. She also credited the influence of Sexton, who was exploring similarly dark themes in To Bedlam and Part Way Back.

The course will focus on a number of poems spanning the careers of each poet, with an emphasis on the earlier works. 

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

Description: The material forms and circumstances of texts fundamentally affect their meaning. This is the premise of the history of the book, an approach to literature aimed at understanding the circulation of ideas in connection with technology, sociology, and economics. If the book is not only a vessel of ideas but also a thing of industrial manufacture that is marketed and consumed, then knowledge of the book industry and of the forces that influence it becomes important to critical interpretation. In this course we will become acquainted with defining contributions to the history and theory of the book, reading works of literature in light of classic and recent studies on the socioeconomics of literary creativity. Topics will include the cultural history of authorship, publishing, and literacy; copyright; analytical bibliography; scholarly editing; the evolution of books from ancient to modern times; e-books and digital culture; the Canadian niche in the Anglo-American publishing sphere; and the rise of the writer-run small press. As the last topics suggest, emphasis will be placed on the history of the book in Canada. The course will introduce participants to primary research opportunities involving the outstanding resources in Canadian literature housed at McGill Rare Books and Special Collections. The Department of English at McGill is home to Canada’s oldest book-history journal – Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada / Cahiers de la Société bibliographique du Canada – and its presence will offer first-hand experience in procedures of academic publishing. Overall in this course, students will learn to orient themselves as scholars of book history, acquiring proficiency in a set of theoretical questions that can be applied to works of literature of any region or period. 

Evaluation:

• bibliography assignment 10%
• scholarly editing assignment 10%
• seminar presentation 25%
• research paper 40%
• participation 15%

Texts: A few primary works of literature will be selected from the following tentative list

• Shakespeare, Hamlet
• Samuel de Champlain, 1613 Voyages
• The Jesuit Relations
• Byron, Don Juan
• Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”
• Margaret Atwood, The Circle Game
• Alice Munro, Runaway​
• Don McKay, Camber

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

Description: This course will explore historical or dialectical materialism – as a philosophical school and as a critical method – as it pertains to the study of literature. The course will introduce students to some of the key issues and debates that have occupied Marxist literary scholars, namely, the relationship of literary form to history; the emergence of the novel; debates on realism and modernism; the concept of allegory; the idea of utopia; commodity aesthetics; postmodernism; and the practice of dialectical criticism. While we will read some of Karl Marx’s writings, the course will primarily engage with the work of scholars who have taken up Marx’s insights to shape the uneven and contested terrain of Marxist literary criticism. They include, but are not limited to, Georg Lukacs, Theodore Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin, Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Roberto Schwarz, Ñgugi wa Thiong’o, and Gayatri Spivak. We will also examine how these critics understand, and develop, some of the concepts that are central to their critical enterprise, such as, history, ideology, totality, reification, dialectics, hermeneutics, modernity, and structure of feeling. We will also investigate the persistence of these issues, debates, and concepts in literary criticism and theory in our contemporary moment as evidenced in categories such as “national allegory,” “magic realism,” “global novel,” “peripheral realism,” “global modernism” and “world literature.” The course is open to graduate and advanced undergraduate students. 

Texts (tentative):

Novels:

• Charles Dickens: Great Expectations
• H.G. Wells: The Time Machine
• Franz Kafka: Metamorphosis
• Rabindranath Tagore: Home and the World
• Mulk Raj Anand: Untouchable
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Jamaica Kincaid: A Small Place
• Aravind Adiga: White Tiger

Criticism: Selections from the works of Georg Lukacs, Theodore Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Pierre Macherey, Fredric Jameson, Roberto Schwarz, Ñgugi wa Thiong’o, and Gayatri Spivak.

Evaluation: Participation: 10%; Short Analytical Papers (x7): 35%; Paper Proposal: 15%; Final Paper: 40% 

Format: Seminars

Description: In this course, we will read and view a range of queer plays and performances by North American authors.  Genres will include: solo performance, dramatic realism, and musical theatre, among others.

Evaluation: Discussion Questions and response paper (20%); seminar facilitation (30%); final paper (40%); participation (10%)

Texts, may include:

• Jean O’Hara, ed. Two-Spirits Acts: Queer Indigenous Performance. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2013.
• Lise Vaillancourt, Marie-Antoine, Opus One
• Corrinna Hodgson, Privilege   
• Michel Tremblay, La Maison suspendue
• Sébastien Harrison, From Alaska
• Stephen Schwartz, Wicked
• Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori, Fun Home
• Trey Anthony, ‘Da Kink in my Hair (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2005). 
• Muriel Miguel, Hot n Soft
• Jovette Marchessault, Night Cows
• T. Miller, My Queer Body
• Nina Arsenault, The Silicone Diaries
• Johanna Nutter, My Pregnant Brother
• Alina Troyano, (Carmelita Tropicana) Milk of Amnesia—Leche de Amnesia
• Chay Yew, A Beautiful Country – or A Language of their Own
• Waawaate Fobister, Agokwe
• Richard Greenberg, Take Me Out
• Madeleine George, Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England
• Marie-Claire Blais, The Execution
• Kent Monkman, Taxonomy of the European Male, Séance, and Justice of the Piece
• Winton Christopher Kam, Bachelor Man
• Brad Fraser, Love and Human Remains
• Normand Chaurette, Provincetown Playhouse 1919
• Fabien Cloutier, Scotstown
• Sharon Bridgforth, The love conjure/blues: Text Installation 

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

Description: The critical argument concerning the possibility of tragedy and tragic experience within the condition of postmodernity remains open to debate.  On one side, George Steiner’s infamous thesis of The Death of Tragedy (1961) stands as the most forceful declaration that the form and its unique content are no longer feasible within a secular, reified society.  On the other hand, recent books like Terry Eagleton’s Sweet Violence (2003) and Rita Felski’s edited collection Rethinking Tragedy (2008) constitute persuasive theoretical resuscitations of tragedy and ask us to consider what tragedy offers to present experience.  Whatever their critical positionings, these critics demonstrate that the question of tragedy is vital and animates a vein of contemporary scholarly discourse.

In this course we will study both the theory and practice of tragedy, with special attention to the possible appearance of tragedy within postmodernity.  As an introduction we will consider Steiner’s argument against modern tragedy.  The first section of the course will then address Oedipus Rex and Antigone, alongside critical readings of these plays by Peter Szondi, Charles Segal, J. P. Vernant, Judith Butler and A.C. Bradley.  We will then consider the argument of Raymond Williams in the theoretical section of Modern Tragedy, and then put William’s ideas to work.  We will then study contemporary English tragedians, particularly those who identify their own work as tragedy and theorize about the concept of the tragic in their work, such as British playwrights Edward Bond and Howard Barker.  

Evaluation: 

• One ten-page essay worth 30%, analyzing the theoretical materials in the first section of the course
• One ten-page essay analyzing one or more contemporary English plays from the perspective of the tragic
• One seminar presentation: 25%
• Seminar Participation: 15%

Texts: A group of critical readings and a selection of plays, TBA

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

Prerequisite: This seminar is open to graduate students as well as upper-level Honours undergraduates who have done significant coursework in Cultural Studies or Art History. Other students must get individual permission from the instructor to take the course.

Expected Student Preparation:  Please note that it is both a critical studies and an art-making course. 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: 

One of the axioms of modernist aesthetics is that an artwork should investigate the intrinsic conditions of its own ontology rather than attempt to recreate properties of other media. Critical modernist discourse insisted that writing should be about writing, painting should be about painting, sculpture should be about sculpture, and so forth.  Yet one need only consider Rene Magritte's "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (from The Treachery of Images, 1928-29) to consider the ways in which even modernist artworks frequently combined different semiotic systems to create subversive meaning. Since the 1960s, Conceptual art has deliberately troubled the boundaries between media in order to critically reflect upon and interrogate the thoroughly mediated environment of our contemporary world, as well as to investigate intimate questions of self and identity.

This experimental seminar is designed to help students respond critically and creatively to Conceptual and avant-garde art.  By focusing on multi-media artworks that incorporate elements of image, sound, and/or 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 Conceptual art, body art, experimental film and video, photography, sculpture, and installation art from the 1960s to the present. Yet rather than approaching these works as historical artifacts, students will be asked to experiment with some of the artistic strategies we study in order to create their own self-directed visual art and curatorial projects.  In other words, students will not only be expected to discuss, think and write about the works we study, but to create artworks that respond 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 in order to attend contemporary art exhibitions and performances.

Evaluation: Participation 20%; Presentation 30%; Final Paper/ Project 50%

Selected artworks by: Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, John Cage, Robert Morris, Jean-Luc Godard, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, Kenneth Anger, Joseph Kosuth, Mel Ramsden, Lawrence Weiner, Chris Marker, Valie Export, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Chantal Akerman, Anthony McCall, Yvonne Rainer, Louise Lawler, Bas Jan Ader, David Wojnarowicz, Catherine Opie, Sophie Calle, Sharon Hayes, Greg Bordowitz, Fred Wilson, Su Friedrich, Shirin Neshat, Glenn Ligon, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Carrie Mae Weems, Adrian Piper, William Pope L., Walid Raad, and others. 

Selected texts by: Sergei Eisenstein, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, John Cage, Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, Douglas Crimp, Amelia Jones, Rebecca Schneider, Peggy Phelan, R. Murray Schaefer, Carol Mavor, Kaja Silverman, Jacques Attali, Jacques Rancière, Nicolas Bourriaud, Claire Bishop, Susan Howe, Jennifer Doyle, Maggie Nelson, Wayne Koestenbaum, Rebecca Solnit.

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

Description: This courses addresses the literary and cinematic/televisual manifestation of solitude in a short story, novels, films, non-fiction essays and a TV show. We will examine how it is imagined, elaborated and, if not exalted, presented as inescapable: the experience of being one in a world.  Our characters negotiate “the self” in relation to, among others: their environments; their location or dislocation within culture; the central ambiguities of modern life; memories and official memory, or memory as solitude; others; their emotions, desires and fears; and, perhaps foremost, language itself. A central human paradox is that we have words to describe the indescribable. Solitude may be indescribable but it still seeks expression in language, metaphor and images.  All our characters are marginal in some way or another and that  means they foreground questions about what constitutes a center. Our works depict hope, longing and creative imaginings of understanding and existing.

Evaluation (tentative): oral report (20%); short reading responses (20%); essay, c. 3000 words (40%); participation in class discussions (20%)

Texts:

• Selected chapters from Edward Engelberg, Solitude and its Ambiguities in Modernist Fiction (2001)
• Nina Norgaard, “Pleasure and Pain: Solitude as a Literary Theme,” Orbis Litterarum, 59 (2004)
• Nicole Krauss, The History of Love (2005)
• Hjalmar Soderberg, Doctor Glas, trans. Paul Britten Austin (2002 [1905])
• Thomas Pletzinger, Funeral for a Dog, trans. Ross Benjamin (2011 [2008])
• Kathryn Harrison, Seeking Rapture (2004)
• Lorrie Moore, “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk,” Birds of America (1998)

Films:

• Hiroshima, Mon Amour (dir. Alain Resnais, 1959)
• Last Tango in Paris (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)
• Paris Texas (dir. Wim Wenders, 1984)
• The Straight Story (dir. David Lynch, 1999)
• In Treatment (HBO, 2008-2010)

Format:Seminar 

Average Enrollment: 15 students maximum

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. 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.

Texts: The Poems of the Pearl-Manuscript, ed. Andrew Waldron and Malcolm Andrew. Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies. Liverpool University Press, 2008 (ISBN 9780859897914).

Evaluation: Essay, seminar presentation, final paper, other tba.

Format: Seminar

Average Enrolment: Maximum 15 students.

Description: What is the contemporary novel? What historical dynamics or aesthetic features define its emergence as a formal category? This seminar will tackle such broad questions by pairing ten to twelve novels, all published since 2009, with criticism drawn from literary sociology, media studies, anthropology, new economic criticism, and feminist theory. Reading across a rich cross-section of authors and genres—graphic novels, genre fiction, auto-fiction, avant-garde fiction—we will examine the novel’s various and evolving conditions of production, reception, and criticism; its relationship to other media forms, both old (print culture) and new (the Internet); its investment in national boundaries, “global English,” and the politics of translation; and the always vexed interplay between the novel’s aesthetic and commercial value. Students will have the opportunity to write and workshop a short conference paper (which they will be encouraged to submit to a venue like Contemporaries, Public Books, or Los Angeles Review of Books), as well as an article length essay.

Evaluation: Class presentation/response (25%); Participation (25%); Final paper (50%)

Texts (subject to change):

•  Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels
• Sheila Heti, How Should A Person Be
• Mat Johnson, Incognegro
• Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Vol. 2
• Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station
• Tao Lin, Taipei
• Tom McCarthy, Satin Island
• China Mieville, The City and the City
• Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
• Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven
• Chris Ware, Building Stories
• Course pack with secondary criticism

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students maximum

Description: How does one speak about South Africa beyond the clichés of the “rainbow nation” or the hushed-tone reverence accorded the Truth and Reconciliation Commission? Acknowledging the groundbreaking nature of the transition from apartheid to a democratic society in 1994, while also avoiding sanctifying the recent past, South African writers and film-makers have questioned the tensions that underscore their contemporary culture. South Africa made a spectacular non-violent transition from apartheid to democracy, integrating the black majority and the white minority, yet in 2008 the immigrants from other African countries were the targets of violent outbreaks of xenophobia; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission played an exemplary role in acknowledging the violence of apartheid and projected the image of a healing country yet the newly established official histories are oftentimes contested by community and individual memories; trade unions and the communist party play a decisive role in post-apartheid politics yet they have not managed to prevent neoliberal capitalism from shaping the economy; the country has one of the most progressive constitutions in the world and prides itself on a culture of ubuntu yet homophobia and violence against women have a high incidence. 

These are some of the tensions that will engage our attention in this seminar as we read fiction, discuss new publication forms, debate about photography and watch films released from 1990 to the present, while contextualizing them within larger global phenomena as presented in essays by Achille Mbembe, Timothy Brennan,Jean and John Comaroff, Gayatri Spivak, Zoe Wicomb, etc. As Jacques Derrida acknowledged in the preface to Specters of Marx, the events in South Africa during the latter half of the twentieth century concern us all as they stand in a metonymic relation to the status quo of the world as a whole: “At once part, cause, effect, example, what is happening there translates what takes place here, always here, wherever one is and wherever one looks, closest to home.”

 Evaluation: TBA

Texts: 

N.B. The final list of texts will be available by October 2016. Possible texts include:

• J. M. Coetzee: Disgrace
• Nadine Gordimer: My Son's Story
• Antjie Krog: Country of My Skull
• Zakes Mda: The Heart of Redness
• Phaswane Mpe: Welcome to Our Hillbrow
• Sifiso Mzobe: Young Blood
• Ivan Vladislavic: Double Negative

Films:

• Neill Blomkamp: District 9
• Rehad Desai: Miners Shot Down
• Mark Dornford-May: U-Carmen eKhayelitsha
• Gavin Hood: Tsotsi
• Ralph Ziman: Jerusalema

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students maximum

Description:  

This seminar will take much of its theoretical orientation and its conceptual preoccupations from arguments developed by Peter Brooks in The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (1976; republished with a “new Preface’ in 1995) and in various book chapters and articles by him, in which he postulates that “melodrama is a form for a post-sacred era, in which polarization and hyperdramatization of forces in conflict represent a need to locate and make evident, legible, and operative those large choices of ways of being which we hold to be of overwhelming importance, even though we cannot derive them from any transcendental system of belief.” To advance his case, Brooks examines recurrent terms and concepts, including the confluence of verbal and non-verbal sign systems; hysteria as an exercise in “bodily writing;” repressed affects and effects; psychoanalysis as a melodramatic heuristic device; the aesthetic values and ethical preoccupations of the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque; the literal and figurative journey, from which no return might be possible, into a kind of Conradian ‘heart of darkness;’ “somatic form” and somatic psychology; ‘expressionism’ avant la lettre as inherently a mode of demonstrative and troubled excess; guilt and what is often figured, somewhat paradoxically, as  its antinomy, purgation; “’demonic dread;’” “manichaeistic demonology;” “the Gothic castle [as] an architectural approximation of the Freudian model of the mind;” “an epistemology of the depths;” the “’moral occult;’” the “romance” conventions that govern and are articulated by the triad of “fall-explusion-redemption;” the “’Naturalization of the dream life;’” “the melodrama of psychology;” the functions and forms of “rhetorical excess;” the poetics of torture and terror; the phenomenon of “self-nomination;” “the topos of the voix du sang;” “’the text of muteness;’” the appetite for wonder; the pleasures of virtuosic performance; magical transformations of quotidian life into the realm of the extraordinary, perhaps particularly the 'green world';  the locked-room paradigm; “the language of presence used for the expression of absences;” the “anaphoric” and “desemanticized” nature of the vocabulary and syntax of the language of gesture;  the performative construction of The Other; seeking to speak “the unspeakable” and to transcend the limits of representation; and the pervasive presence of doppelgängers. 

Although Brooks includes the study of fiction by Balzac and James, this seminar will instead concentrate on plays for the stage, with some excursions into the examination of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century melodramatic films. In addition to Brooks, for the purposes of their essays and presentations, students will be expected to draw from the large body of theoretical / historical work on melodrama, much of it referenced by Brooks, much of it be suggested in discussions with me, including  books, chapters, and articles by Michael R. Booth, Eric Bentley, Laura Mulvey, Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, Christine Gledhill, Elaine Hadley, Michael Hays, Anastasia Nikolopoulou, Maurice Willson Disher, Jeffrey N. Cox, Thomas Postlewait, Jane Moody, David Mayer, Marvin Carlson, Gary Richardson, Bruce McConachie, Simon Shepherd, Nina Auerbach, E. Ann Kaplan, T. S. Eliot, Richard Altick, Louis James, Martha Vicinus, Robert Heilman, and Denis Salter. 

A magisterial work that serves as a kind of meta-text for Brooks’s study is Martin Meisel’s Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth Century England, which, among other tasks, reflects on a wide range of melodramas in performance in relation to a study of painting and fiction. The study of the aforementioned works along with a close reading of Meisel will not only re-introduce preoccupations found in Brooks, but will also introduce another complementary cluster of interrelated themes, subjects, structures, and modes of articulation.

The plays to be studied not as dramatic literature but as performance texts will be selected from Charles Robert Maturin’s Bertram; or the Castle of St. Aldobrand, Thomas Holcroft’s A Tale of Mystery and Vanderdecken, Isaac Pocock’s The Miller and His Men, Tom Taylor’s The Ticket-of-Leave Man, Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne, Henry Irving and Leopold Lewis’s The Bells, Henry Arthur Jones and Henry Herman’s The Silver King, George Aiken's Uncle Tom's Cabin; Or, Life Among The Lowly, A Domestic Drama In Five Acts, Dion Boucicault’s The Corsican Brothers, The Octoroon, and  The Poor of New York, David Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West, James Robinson Planche’s  The Vampire, C. H. Hazlewood’s Lady Audley’s Secret,  Douglas Jerrold’s Black-Ey’d Susan and The Rent-Day, Henry M. Milner’s Mazeppa; or the Wild Horse of Tartary, . . .  Dramatised  from Lord Byron’s Poem,  Edward Stirling, The Courier Of Lyons, C. H. Hazlewood's Lady Audley's Secret, John William Buckstone’s  Luke the Labourer; or, The Lost Son, John Walker’s The Factory Lad,  Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins’s No Thoroughfare. The films to be studied will include Les Enfants Du Paradis (aka Children Of Paradise, 1945), directed by Marcel Carné, script by Jacques Prévert, and In The Name Of The Father (1993) starring Daniel Day-Lewis, directed by Jim Sheridan, based on Gerry Conlon's autobiography, Proved Innocent.  

Evaluation: (tentative): Fully engaged and continual participation in the intellectual life of the seminar: 15%; a presentation on a play / production and / or theoretical-historical text: 15%; an 8-page essay arising from that presentation in the form of a distilled critical argument: 20%; a scholarly paper, with an analytical through-line, all themes / topics to be individually-negotiated, in the order of 15 to 20 pages: 50%.

Texts: 

• Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976, rpt. with a New Preface, 1995.
• The Melodramatic Imagination and Realizations will be available on library reserve.
• Les Enfants Du Paradis is available on KANOPY (McGill Library database).

Format: Brief lectures; led-discussions; individual and collective presentations including interrogative Q & As; mini-performances, and lots of reading plays out loud as we seek to understand their original interpretations and modes of performance.  

Average enrollment: 15 students

Description: Cultural theory of the last two decades has been marked by a corporeal turn, reconsidering questions of embodiment, sensation, affect, and materiality in relation to questions of cultural production, identity and social and political concerns. This class will read broadly across key theories and perspectives on the body of the last two decades, including consideration of authors whose work is seen as foundational to these approaches. In parallel we will consider examples from recent media productions and performance to explore these questions in more depth. Key areas of inquiry include: feminist, gender and sexuality studies, with a particular emphasis on women of colour feminisms and queer theory; new materialisms; affect theory; questions of the nonhuman; disability studies; trans* studies; mediated bodies and performance; theories of immaterial and affective labour, critical race and postcolonial theory.

Evaluation: TBA

Texts: TBA

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

Description: This course will examine examples of cross-dressing from the long eighteenth century with the goal of exploring how they might inflect our understanding of transvestism as an aspect of the trans* experience today. We will begin by examining the change in gender dynamics that occurred on the English stage from 1660 onwards when women began to play Shakespeare’s cross-dressed heroines, roles that were originally written for boy actors. Focusing on the stage, we will consider actresses who made their name in breeches parts and travesty roles (such as Margaret “Peg” Woffington and Dorothy Jordan) and examples of men dressing as women in performance (such as David Garrick as Sir John Brute in The Provoked Wife). We will also discuss Charlotte Charke, a performer who cross-dressed outside the theatre.

To supplement our focus on drama, we will also consider cross-dressing in the novel by looking at selections from texts such as Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess (1719-20), Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), John Cleland’s Fanny Hill (1748), Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801), and Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814).

Furthermore, we will explore examples of real-life transvestites including Hannah Snell (a female soldier), the Chevalier d’Éon (who infiltrated the court of the Empress of Russia by presenting as a woman), John Cooper (a.k.a. Princess Seraphina), Margaret Ann Bulkley (who as James Barry performed the first C-section surgery in which both mother and baby survived), Mary Hamilton (who allegedly duped another woman into marriage by posing as a man), Hortense Mancini (a mistress of Charles II with a penchant for cross-dressing), and female pirates Ann Bonny and Mary Reade. These real-life examples will help us to understand the context in which accounts of fictional transvestism might have been received.

Our discussion will of course be informed by theoretical work on cross-dressing by Marjorie Garber and others and by theorists of gender performativity such as Judith Butler. We will consider cross-dressing as a form of gender expression, an opportunity for objectification and eroticisation, a type of deception, and a means of liberation. Throughout the course we will interrogate whether contemporary ideas of gender as spectrum rather than binary are in fact new.

Evaluation (tentatively): 

Primary texts may include:

• Shakespeare’s cross-dressing plays (e.g. Twelfth Night, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice)
• William Wycherley, The Country Wife (1675) and David Garrick’s adaptation The Country Girl (1766)
• Aphra Behn, The Rover (1677)
• George Farquhar, The Constant Couple (1700) and The Recruiting Officer (1706)
• John Vanbrugh, The Provoked Wife (1697)
• A Narrative of the Life of Mrs Charlotte Charke (1755)
• The Female Soldier; Or, The Surprising Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell (1750)
• Henry Fielding, The Female Husband (1746)
• Extracts from novels including Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess (1719-20), Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), John Cleland’s Fanny Hill (1748), Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801), and Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814)

Other readings may include:

• Contextual primary source material (such as performance reviews, actor biographies and newspaper commentary) 
• Historical fiction/drama
• Critical essays on primary sources
• Theoretical readings

Format of class: Lectures by invited speakers; seminar.

Average enrolment: 15 students maximum

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 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 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 consultatively establish (bearing in minds the diverse commitments of seminar members) at the start of the course.  This format aims to establish a diverse, open, and responsive seminar.

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

Texts (provisional): I recommend the Longman Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, and there is a Course Reader, all available at the Word Bookstore

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

Description: 

Scholarly attention to the figure of the fool in Shakespeare has tended to focus on the festive licence the fool enjoys in his interactions with other characters. Shakespeare’s “artificial” or “wise” fools derive this licence from their mimicry of “natural” fools—individuals of limited mental capacity who were known in the period by a variety of names such as idiot, imbecile, mome, moron, and numerous similar epithets still in use today. Broader studies of the fool as a literary and historical type also highlight the figure’s ambivalence, an ambivalence which seems to originate in medieval and early modern attitudes toward individuals with intellectual disabilities. The fool’s very lack of cognitive ability was also considered a positive trait, for such individuals remained impervious to and unaffected by the corruptive effects of social life and manners. What rendered the natural fool special in terms of his relationship to the social environment was his aloofness from it. This positive quality was frequently construed in a religious sense as sacred.

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

Evaluation: 

• seminar presentation 35%
• long paper 50%
• participation 15%

Texts: TBA

Format:  Seminar

Average: Enrolment:15 students maximum

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 view a wide range of relevant films – including operas by Lully, Purcell, Händel, Gluck, and Mozart; and 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 categorial 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.

Evaluation: participation (20%), oral presentation (20%), term paper (60%)

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) 

READING ASSIGNMENT FOR FIRST MEETING: Before coming to the first session of the seminar, please read Richardson's “Preface” to Clarissa (35-36) and the first two letters in the novel (39-44).

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 20 students

Description:  TBA

Evaluation: TBA 

Texts: TBA

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students maximum

Description: Metafiction, the process that a text or narrator uses in drawing attention to its own artifice, is often associated with postmodern fiction.  This course will locate the self-reflective techniques of metafiction in a range of mid-to-late nineteenth-century British novels, drawing attention to their irony and provisionality as an effect, and cause, of materialist critique.  Some of the novels we will read figure novel-writing characters, whose experiences and struggles complicate and draw attention to the story they participate in; other novels (as well as Gaskell’s highly fictionalized biography of Charlotte Brontë) explore the limits of Victorian narrative formulas including the Bildungsroman and the use of marriage or death as closure.  A course pack with readings by a variety of critics (including Mikhail Bakhtin, Rita Felski, George Levine, Patricia Waugh, Jerome McGann) will supplement our list of novels.  Students will be expected to contribute to spirited discussion as well as to a variety of exercises for professional training, including abstract-writing, a class conference, and the art of diplomatic critique.

Evaluation: 

• Participation: 20%
• Abstract: 10%
• Essay (15-20 pps): 60%
• Conference-style paper presentation: (8-9 pps) 10%

Texts may include:

• Grant Allen, The Type-Writer Girl (1897)
• Mary Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife (1864)
• Rhoda Broughton, Cometh Up as a Flower (1867)
• Wilkie Collins, The Evil Genius (1886)
• Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857)
• George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891)
• George and Weedon Grossmith, Diary of a Nobody (1892)
• Ella Hepworth Dixon, The Story of a Modern Woman (1894)
• Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle (1903)
• Eliza Lynn Linton, The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland (1885)
• William Thackeray, Rebecca and Rowena (1850)

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

Description: Over the past decade, 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 late 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 working class but also undocumented immigrants and other marginalized workers not normally represented by labour movement institutions, as well as some highly educated 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?

Texts: Essays from Zygmunt Bauman, Angela Mitropoulos, Michael Denning, Gilles Deleuze, Maurizio Lazzarato, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben, Paolo Virno, Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Lauren Berlant, and others.

Films:

• Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, Italy 1948)
• Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica, Italy, 1952)
• La promesse (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium, 1996)
• Rosetta (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium, 1999)
• Up in the Air (Jason Reitman, U.S.A., 2009)
• L’emploi du temps (Time Out) (Laurent Cantet, France, 2001)
• In This World (Michael Winterbottom, U.K., 2002)
• Le silence de Lorna (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium, 2008)
• Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols, U.S.A., 2011)
• Le temps du loup (Michael Haneke, Austria, 2003)
• Chop Shop (Ramin Bahrani, U.S.A., 2007)
• Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, U.S.A., 2008)
• 24 City (Jia Zhangke, China, 2008)

Evaluation: 

• 10-15 minute class presentation: 15% of final grade
• Class contribution: 25%
• 2pp proposal for end-of-term paper: 10%
• End-of-term paper (15-20pp): 50% 

Format: Seminar

Average enrolment: 15 students 

Description: This course acquaints students with points of contention among literary theorists. It aims to expose advanced students to as many critical viewpoints as possible, focusing especially on questions of interpretability, canon formation, and on the differences between literary theory and literary criticism. Rather than rattle off a ‘who’s who’ among the isms—formalism, marxism, post-structuralism, new historicism, ecocriticism, and so on—we will read works of literature in conversation with divergent interpretative approaches and examine why professors of literature have sometimes adopted polemical positions against each other.  

Evaluation: Attendance/participation (15%); ongoing position papers (25%); oral presentation (20%);  final essay applying a theory to a text of your choice or placing two theorists in conversation with each other, 15pp (40%)

Texts: Coursepack and David Richter’s Falling into Theory.

Format: TBA

Average enrollment: 7-8 students

Prerequisite: This course is open only to PhD2 students in English.

Description: The first semester of the PhD Proseminar will focus on the discussion of recent theoretical texts and issues. Our encounters with theory will serve the following goals: (1) to orient you to some recent theoretical movements and their various loyalties, histories, and methodologies; (2) to develop your conceptual skills, including a feel for determining not only how but also when to be theoretical; and (3) to cultivate creativity and a sense of possibility as you find the critical repertoire most effective for your work.

Evaluation: 

• Seminar presentation: 20% of the final mark
• Seminar participation/contribution: 20%
• Three short (2-3pp) reviews of recent books in one’s field: 20% each

Texts: TBA

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 7-8 students

Description: the second half of the required pro-seminar series for entering PhD students.  

Evaluation: TBA

Texts: TBA

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 7-8 students

Description: This course aims to examine the idea of the fantastic and the grotesque in some of the most popular forms of literature in the Middle Ages - heroic romances and legends of saints - in the light of medieval heroic tradition, popular culture, and medieval ideas of monstrosity.
The fourteenth-century poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, provides a starting point to explore depictions of the grotesque and the discourse of both monstrosity and sanctity. Reading about saints was not confined to the cloister; these stories were read and heard alongside secular tales, both of which could feature demons, dragons and damsels in distress. The fantastic extended to human-animal interaction, the perception of the foreign and exotic (the ‘other’), and certain tropes in both secular and ecclesiastical narratives where virtue must win out (such as prophecy or loss and recovery).
The course includes (but is not confined to) readings from the South English Legendary and other saints’ Lives (such as the legends of St Eustace, St. Margaret, and St George (with that dragon!)), the fantastic pilgrimage in St Patrick’s Purgatory, as well as popular Middle English romances (such as Sir Isumbras, Octavian, Sir Eglamour, among others), the werewolf tale of Bisclavert by Marie de France, the Welsh tales of Arthur and of Merlin, and the romance of Alexander the Great, whose travels to the East provided much influential, fantastic fare.