300-level / Intermediate Courses

Prerequisite: None, though ENGL 311 is recommended.

Description: This course will survey developments in English literature from the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 to the middle of the eighteenth century. Poetry will be the main focus of the class, as we begin with major works by John Dryden, Aphra Behn, and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, which reflect tenuous post-Revolution political boundaries and transgress the limits of politeness during the Restoration. We will move next to Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, early eighteenth-century satirists whose distinctive form and language display the wide range of Augustan poetry. We will conclude at the mid-century with meditative works by James Thomson and Thomas Gray. The class will also touch on other literary genres such as prose and drama. William Wycherley’s witty and bawdy The Country Wife (1675) epitomizes the popular Restoration dramatic form, while Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), arguably the first novel in the English language, along with Daniel Defoe’s picaresque Moll Flanders (1722), will help us trace the rise of the novel. In addition, we will consider biographical, socio-historical, and philosophical contexts included in the Broadview anthology.

Texts:

• The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Volume 3: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century (Broadview, 2nd edition (2012))
• Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (Broadview)
• Selected short texts from Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO)

Evaluation: 15% attendance and participation; 25% mid-term test; 10% final test; 50% term paper.
Evaluation is subject to change based on class size

Format: Lecture and discussion

Prerequisite: None

Expected Student Preparation: Previous university-level course work in literature or cultural studies.

Description: This course will study developments in the English novel from the late 1740s until the turn of the century. It will focus on six novels, grouped in three pairs. We shall begin with two first-person narratives: John Cleland’s erotic, or pornographic, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), compared with Sarah Fielding’s distinctly non-erotic novel, The History of Ophelia (1760). We shall then turn to two epistolary fictions: Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague (1769), set in Quebec City, and Frances Burney’s first novel, Evelina (1778). We shall conclude with Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), the most sensational of the many Gothic novels of the 1790s, paired with Jane Austen’s witty parody of the Gothic, Northanger Abbey (1817). Attention will be paid to gender issues, as well as to genre, style, and thematic concerns. 

Evaluation: 15% participation in discussion sections; 25% mid-term test; 10% final test; 50% term paper.

Texts:

• John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Oxford)
• Sarah Fielding, Ophelia (Broadview)
• Frances Brooke, The History of Emily Montague (New Canadian Library)
• Frances Burney, Evelina (Broadview)
• Matthew Lewis, The Monk (Broadview)
• Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Broadview)

Format: Lectures and discussion

Prerequisite: None

Description:A tour through the English literary Renaissance from around 1500 to 1600, apart from drama, emphasizing literary authors and texts of particularly high quality and influence, and relating them to significant or interesting cultural contexts and nonliterary discourses, including the visual arts. Further readings sample those contexts and discourses. Featured texts and authors will include Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, Edmund Spenser, Mary Stuart (Queen of Scots), and William Shakespeare’s nondramatic poetry. Other parts of the course will address various particular topics through study of relevant English and translated continental texts, including the gender debate enhancing the status of women; the beginnings of female authorship; contemporary erotica; the advent of printing and controls upon print; sixteenth-century literary theory; the relation of visual iconography and emblematics to literature; Neoplatonic love theory and its literary and social impacts; and mythography.

Texts:The Course Reader and other texts will be available in paperback for purchase at the Word bookstore, 469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640. I will also ensure that multiple copies are available at Redpath Reserves.

Sir Thomas More, Utopia; Shakespeare, Sonnets and Narrative Poems; Baldesar Castiglione, The Courtier; Spenser, Book VI of The Faerie Queene; Course Reader.

Evaluationterm paper, 50%; take-home final exam 40%; class attendance and participation 10%.

Format:Lectures, discussion, conferences

Average Enrollment: 75 students.

Prerequisite: None

Expected student preparation: students enrolled in this course will ideally have already taken ENGL 230 Introduction to Theatre Studies

Description:This course provides an overview of dramatic forms and theatrical practice in Britain from the medieval to the early modern period (c. 1300-1642). We will move from the earliest recorded vernacular play texts to the closure of the professional theatre in 1642, encompassing medieval religious drama and the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Rather than taking a chronological approach, we will examine early theatre in a way that highlights continuities as well as divisions between the medieval and the early modern stage. We will analyse the conditions of performance (playing spaces, actors, audience, technology, etc) as well as studying a selection of representative plays (looking at their form, function, aesthetic features, etc).

Emphasis is placed on the plays as theatrical works rather than literary texts. The bulk of our time will be devoted to analysing historical evidence of early performance. In addition to reading and discussing theatre history documents and play texts, students will also participate in practical workshops in which they will direct their peers in performing scenes from the plays studied in light of their knowledge of the playing conditions of the period.

Texts:Janette Dillon, The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); coursepack containing a selection of plays

Evaluation (tentative:) participation 10%; midterm exam 20%; practical assignment 30%; final take-home exam 40%

Format: lecture, discussion, group work, practical work

Prerequisite: None

Description: This course will study early sixteenth-century English theatre through an examination of plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Texts will range from the sublime comedies of Jonson to the dark, bloody, and melodramatic revenge tragedies for which the period is famous. Primary points of interest in our investigation will be Stuart anxieties about greed, consumption, sexual betrayal, retribution, atypical expressions of sexuality, the blurring of gender distinctions, and inter-class friction—all shared with our own era. We will look at the material conditions of performance, staging techniques, theatrical practices, and the performance spaces themselves—from the public theatres, to the private indoor spaces.

Texts:Engle, Eisaman Maus and Rasmussen, eds. English Renaissance Drama.

Evaluation: participation (15%), class presentation (10%), midterm Paper (25%), take home exam (50%)

Prerequisite: None

Description: This lecture course will investigate the evolution of English theatrical comedy through a period of a little over one hundred years. While the principal mode of investigation will involve close readings of the plays, we will also pay close attention to the material conditions of performance, as theatres grew from makeshift spaces for a social elite to vast purpose-built venues able to accommodate thousands of spectators. Central to the course, therefore, is the notion that these plays are intended to be performed on stage and before a live audience. The readings will embrace many of the canonical works from the period, but comedies by some less-well-known playwrights, such as Susanna Centlivre, will also be included.

Texts:The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Drama (Full or Concise Edition)

Evaluation: 15% participation; 15% Secondary source précis and presentation; 30% short paper; 40% final exam

Format:

Average Enrollment:

Prerequisite or co-requisite: ENGL 202 or ENGL 200. This course is open only to English majors in the literature stream. This course is to be taken in the Fall semester of U1 or in the first Fall semester after the student’s selection of the Literature Major program.

Description: This course introduces students to the formal and stylistic elements of poetry and prose fiction, provides them with a shared vocabulary for recognizing and analyzing different literary forms, and develops their reading, writing, and critical discussion skills.

Although many critical methods can be applied to the works in this course, Poetics focuses on teaching students how to talk and write precisely about a wide range of formal and stylistic techniques in relation to literary meaning in poetry and prose fiction. All the critical methodologies you will learn in your other English courses will benefit from your knowledge of the material of ENGL 311. You will read some works in Poetics that are also required in other courses, such as ENGL 202 and 203, the Departmental Surveys of English Literature. In Poetics, we study such works not primarily in historical context, or as engagements with literary, cultural or social history, but for the techniques of literary art with which they communicate to and move us. The course instructors assume that students enrolled as English majors will already have some facility explaining what given works of literature mean; we instead focus on understanding how literature creates meaning. Discussions and assignments will therefore involve the memorization, identification, and application of concepts and terms essential to the study of literary techniques. Thus the English Literature program requires that ENGL 311 be taken in U1 so that all Literature students will be well prepared for their other studies with a shared terminology and training in critical writing.

Texts:

• Abrams, M.H., and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 9th edn. Thomson-Wadsworth, 2009.
• Bausch, Richard, and R.V. Cassill, eds. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Shorter 7th edn. New York: Norton, 2006.
• Ferguson, Margaret, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy, eds. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Shorter 5th edn. New York: Norton, 2005.
• Messenger, William E., et al., eds. The Canadian Writer’s Handbook. 5th edn. Toronto: Oxford, 2010.

Evaluation: essay 1 (5 pp.), 10%; essay 2 (5 pp.), 15%; essay 3 (6-7 pp.), 15%; mid-term examination 10%; formal final examination 30%; short assignments, such as quizzes, writing exercises, and recitations 10%; class participation 10%

Format: Lecture and discussion

Description: This course will examine European and North American drama of the twentieth century. We will begin by studying the great realists of the late nineteenth century and the philosophy underlying their dramaturgy. This will lead us into a consideration of various positive and negative responses to the realist tradition. We will examine these plays in their original theatrical contexts, while at the same time positioning these dramas in relation to their individual social and political moments. We will interrogate the specificity of drama as an art form, the implications raised by repetition, performance, the theatre as a collective activity, and the role of the audience in the determination of meaning on the stage. The overall goal of the course is to impart to students a foundational understanding of the dominant trend in modern drama in the west.

Texts:TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lectures and conferences

Description:In this course, we study the greatest and most protean playwright in world literature, and we consider how he became the greatest because he was the most changeable. Shakespeare was both an actor and a poet; a man and a woman; a "nobody" (merely a private person) and a "somebody" (a famous, public figure); and both an animal and human being. His changeability was an attribute of his life in the world of theatrical make-believe (where boys could be women, commoners could wear crowns, and people could act and look like beasts), but it was also a consequence of his shifting, unstable social situation. After all, he started off a yeoman's son in a small town and ended up a gentleman and the leading writer in the most famous acting company in Europe. We focus on six plays in the genres of comedy, tragedy, and romance—The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, As You Like It, All's Well That Ends Well, Anthony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. Our approach to these plays is informed by ideas about protean Shakespeare, but we also reach beyond those ideas to other matters, including performance and staging, dramatic character, dramatic genre, the complexity of Shakespeare's language, and Shakespeare in his time and ours.

Students will find themselves thinking, speaking, and writing about Shakespeare's plays as expressions of a particularly complex world view, scripts for theatrical performance, works of literature, and instances of imaginative world-making that have powerfully influenced many individuals (including other artists) and groups from early modern London to the twenty-first- century Canada.

Plays: (available at Paragraph Books)

• The Taming of the Shrew, ed. H.J. Oliver (Oxford Shakespeare, 1982).
• King Lear, ed. Russell Fraser (Signet Shakespeare, revised, 1998).
• As You Like It, ed. Alan Brissenden (Oxford Shakespeare, 2008).
• All's Well That Ends Well, ed. Susan Snyder (Oxford Shakespeare, 2008).
• Anthony and Cleopatra, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford Shakespeare, 2008).
• The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford Shakespeare, 1998).

Evaluation:

• In-class essay 10%
• Term paper 35%
• Participation 20% (10% conference, 10% online)
• Final exam 35%

Prerequisite: None, though some knowledge of Renaissance literature or culture is highly useful.

Description: A study of the poetry and selected prose of one of England’s most important, influential, and still controversial writers. While to many people today Milton seems the epitome of literary and political orthodoxy, in his own time he was known as a radical thinker, and advocate of regicide and divorce. His writing is complex and challenging, asking close and active engagement from his readers. In this course we will take up his challenge to see especially how he speaks to current concerns. In the first few weeks, we look at Milton's early poetry and some of his political writings, tracing his development as a poet in relation to his social, political, and literary context. The centre of the course will focus on a close reading of Paradise Lost. In conclusion, we will look briefly at his last works, Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes, and discuss Milton’s later reputation and his continuing role in the Western literary tradition.

Texts: (required texts are available at McGill Bookstore)

• 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 WebCT
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (recommended)
• King James Bible (recommended)

Evaluation: 25% mid-term; 40% term paper on Paradise Lost; 25% take-home exam; 10% class/conference participation

Format: Lecture and discussion; conference (depending on enrollment)

Average Enrollment: 60 students

Prerequisite:  None; limited to students in English programs

Description: This course introduces students to the assumptions and methods of socio-historical approaches to cultural texts. The goals of the course are to help students: 1) become better readers of socio-historical theory; 2) develop the ability to formulate productive historically oriented questions about texts; 3) gain an awareness of the theoretical and methodological assumptions underlying each stage of the writing process; 4) construct compelling interpretations by thinking creatively about the relationship between text and context. In the first part of the course, we trace some of the more influential trends in historical thinking since the early nineteenth-century, when the contemporary concept of “History” became institutionalized. Establishing the influence of Marxist thought on major historical theories, we will also consider how the various “post” movements – poststructuralism, postcolonialism, postmodernism – often challenged notions of linear progression and hierarchy at the core of Marxist philosophy. The second part of the course explores the kinds of analysis that socio-historical approaches make possible for students of literature and cultural studies. Building on the assumption that the meaning and significance of a text lies in its relationship to a contextual problem, we examine how socio-historical approaches have politicized texts in order to challenge hierarchies of cultural taste and canon formation as well as arguments for universal concepts of art, value, and identity. Through our case studies, it will become clear that socio-historical interpretations, which vary widely in technique and implication, depend on an analysis of evidence that comes from both the text and its context, broadly construed. Assignments are designed to encourage self-reflection on theoretical assumptions and methodological efficacy.

Provisional Texts:

• Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”
• Nancy Armstrong, “How Novels Think”
• Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (selections)
• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (selections)
• Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V”
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “Introduction” to Philosophy of History
• Frederic Jameson, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”
• Karl Marx, The German Ideology (Part I)
• Edward Said, Orientalism (selections)

Evaluation: extended essay proposal (15%); mid-term exam (15%); final essay (35%); final exam (25%); participation [includes in-class essay workshop] (10%)

Format: Lecture and discussion

Description: The aim of this course is to introduce students to contemporary Anglophone postcolonial literatures from various countries such as India, Australia, Ireland, South Africa, Senegal, and Ghana. Representations of space are important ingredients for the way in which an individual, a community, or a nation defines itself. We will therefore engage several major questions. How do contemporary writers from postcolonial polities relate to space that has been owned, renamed, and described by an empire and now has been repossessed by its inhabitants? How is space incorporated or used by state structures? What is the relationship between space and nation? How do city dwellers define themselves in relation to the urban landscapes they inhabit? How does space contract or expand according to recent technological innovations? We will discuss these questions in relation to issues pertaining to formal innovation, linguistic novelty, and genre differences.

Texts may include:

• Course pack with relevant articles
• Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day
• J.M. Coetzee: Waiting for the Barbarians
• Brian Friel: Translations
• Anita Desai: Clear Light of Day
• Ama Ata Aidoo: No Sweetness Here

Films:

• Lagaan. Dir. Ashutosh Gowariker
• Touki Bouki. Dir. Djibril Diop Mambety

Evaluation (tentative): reading response paper 20%, research paper 35%, midterm 30%, webct discussions and class participation 15%

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Prerequisites: Students should have completed ENGL 311 (Poetics) before taking this course. Also, students will benefit from a working-knowledge of major issues and major texts of modernist poetry.

Description: This course traces the development of several major movements and schools in U.S. poetry from the fractious period of the mid-twentieth century to the present. We will study the Beat Movement, Confessionalism, the Black Arts Movement, the New York School, and Language Poetry. The course will examine the poetics, politics, and historical influences of these movements through a study of the work of Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Amiri Baraka, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian, and Joshua Clover. We will closely read these authors and situate in cultural context their works and the poetic movements with which they are associated. Among the numerous questions that will guide our study: What forms of subjectivity and agency are represented in U.S. poetry from Confessionalism to Language Poetry? How should we define an avant-garde poetics? Is such a poetics still possible? What is the status and function of the lyric in late twentieth-century life? What are the relationships between post-WWII American poetics and historical developments and crises in American culture, such as the Cold War, the rise of feminism, the expansion of the middle class, the popularization of psychoanalysis, the “end of ideology,” the emergence of poststructuralist theories of language, and the experience of enduring racial injustice? What are the legacies of modernism in American poetry from 1950 to the present? How does postwar poetry critique and extend aspects of the modernist project? This course will endeavor to address these questions and many others through analysis, discussion, lecture, and secondary historical and theoretical readings.

Texts (tentative):

• Ashbery, John. Selected Poems of John Ashbery
• Baraka, Amiri. The LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka Reader
• Clover, Joshua. The Totality for Kids
• Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and Other Poems
• Hejinian, Lyn. My Life
• Lowell, Robert. Life Studies and For the Union Dead
• O’Hara, Frank. Lunch Poems
• Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath

Evaluation: (tentative): Participation (10%), Presentation (20%), Quizzes (35%), Paper (35%).

Format: Lectures and discussions.

Average Enrollment: 60 students.

Prerequisite: None

Expected Student Preparation: Previous university-level course work in American Literature, preferably before 1900, or permission of instructor.

Description: This course will survey, and also critically interrogate, a long line of foundational works in American literature and thought that develop the conception of an “American innocence”—and introduce a new literary character: the “innocent American.” Where does this widely shared notion come from? What does this national self-image imply? What possibilities does it open up? What are its limitations and dangers? A challenging reading list—including selected Emerson essays, Whitman poems, Harte and Twain short stories, Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, James’ “Daisy Miller” and The Bostonians (or “What Maisie Knew”), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Melville’s “Benito Cereno” and “Billy Budd,” Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American—will ground analysis of a variety of distinct versions of this national myth. After first tracing the development of paradigmatic plots, images, and characters associated with this complex of ideas, we will conclude with close readings of several classic literary works that are structured as tests or trials of this “American innocence.”

Texts (Tentative; editions TBA):

• Coursepack—including critical essays and short works such as: Emerson, selected essays; Whitman, “Song of Myself”; Harte, “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and "The Outcasts of Poker Flats"; Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daughter”; James, “Daisy Miller”
• Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• Melville, Billy Budd and Other Stories
• Wharton, The Age of Innocence
• Greene, The Quiet American

Evaluation (Tentative): 20% mid-term exam; 25% essay; 15% conference participation; 40% final exam. (All evaluation—on exams as well as essays—tests abilities in literary-critical writing and analysis; none involves short-answer or multiple-choice exams graded by computer.)

Format: Lectures and discussion sections.

Average Enrollment: 60 students.

Prerequisite: No formal pre-requisite, but students will be expected to have the skills of close reading and command of critical terms developed in ENGL 311 (Poetics). ENGL 228 (Introduction to Canadian Literature 1) provides appropriate background knowledge for this course.

Description: A survey of the emergence and development of Canadian prose fiction in English from the later nineteenth century to the centennial of Confederation in 1967. We will seek to grasp the developing poetics and shifting generic boundaries of the Canadian novel to 1967, including but not limited to works of political romance, prairie pastoral, modern prairie and urban realism, and experimental modernism. A substantial portion of our studies will involve the situation of Canadian fiction within the context of the novel’s international development from realism to modernism.

This course satisfies Literature program requirements in: Canadian literature; Modernism; additional credits in the Literature option.

Texts: TBA, including 6-8 of the following:

• Richardson, Wacousta (1832)
• Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush (1852)
• DeMille, Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888)
• Duncan, The Imperialist (1904)
• Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (1908)
• Leacock, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912)
• Ostenso, Wild Geese (1925)
• Knister, White Narcissus (1929)
• Grove, Fruits of the Earth (1933)
• ---. Settlers of the Marsh (1925)
• Callaghan, They Shall Inherit the Earth (1935)
• Ross, As For Me and My House (1941)
• MacLennan, Two Solitudes (1945)
• ---. The Watch that Ends the Night (1956)
• Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945)
• Klein, The Second Scroll (1951)
• Buckler, The Mountain and the Valley (1952)
• Wilson, The Equations of Love (1952)
• Watson, The Double Hook (1959)
• Laurence, The Stone Angel (1964)
• Cohen, Beautiful Losers (1966)

Evaluation: 30% each for two essays, 8 pp. and 10 pp.; 30% formal final examination; 10% participation in class discussions. (Please note before registering for this course: I assess active participation in discussion and not attendance. Full attendance through the semester without speaking will earn 0/10 in this category and substantially affect your final grade.) Evaluation may change depending on class size and level of TA support; changes will be announced if necessary before the end of the course change period.

Format: lecture and discussion

Average Enrollment: 35

Prerequisite: None

Description: This course uses five wide-ranging British novels to study a foundational relationship in nineteenth-century fiction: the romantic relationship as a synchdoche of social organization. Perhaps more precisely, the relationships we will analyze in the course novels reveal anxieties and realities of social disorganization – with failed marriages, broken engagements, and even bigamy indicating the century’s massive transformations in class structure and geopolitical identity. With this topic in mind, we will better understand how the nineteenth-century novel’s dominantly private settings and intimate plots yield commentary on industrial, economic, and political change.

Texts:(available at the University Bookstore)

• Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
• W.M. Thackeray, A Shabby Genteel Story
• George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
• Anthony Trollope, Dr. Wortle’s School
• Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four
• Course Reader

Evaluation: Participation: 30% (includes reading quizzes and quiz section assignments); short essay (5-7 pps): 20%; group or creative assignment: 20%; Final exam: 30%

Format: lecture, discussion, and quiz section led by TA.

Prerequisite: None

Description: The goal of this course is to acquaint students with English masterpieces of the second half of the nineteenth century. While keenly engaged with the spirit of ‘progress’ and ‘reform’ sweeping through their country at this time, writers in this period often set the action of their novels a few decades back from their time of publication. Keeping this historical perspective in mind, we will focus on how these novels portray a struggle for meaningful employment in an increasingly secular and professionalized society that was still hedged in, nonetheless, by barriers of gender, class, and religious affiliation.

Texts:

• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
• Villette by Charlotte Brontë
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
• Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

Evaluation: 15% attendance and participation; 60% four ongoing exploratory papers; 25% final essay due a week from last class

Format: Lecture and discussion

Average enrollment: 70 students

Prerequisite: None. While it is not required, an understanding of poetics such as that gained in ENGL 311 is recommended, as is some experience of studying literature written before 1800.

Description: This course will introduce students to a selection of English literature from the earlier Romantic period. It will include writers who have historically been central to the study of this period, such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Blake, writers who, while consistently studied, have remained marginal, such as Jane Austen and George Crabbe, and writers who have only recently started to make an impact on our understanding of the period, such as Mary Robinson and Anna Barbauld. While paying attention to the artistic craftsmanship of the writers we study, we will also place them in the historical context of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and think about what links their period and their concerns with our own.

Texts:

• The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Volume 2A – The Romantics and Their Contemporaries, ed. Susan Wolfson and Peter Manning (New York: Longman, 2003).
• Jane Austen, Persuasion: An Annotated Edition, ed. by Robert Morrison (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011).

Evaluation: Attendance 10%, Response Paper 15%, Essay 35%, Exam 40%.

Format: lectures and discussion.

Prerequisite: None

Description: This is a course about really reading poetry, in this case, Canadian poetry. It focuses on a group of approximately ten Canadian poets who have formed and responded to the Canadian literary landscape since World War II. Most of the poets covered in the course are writers who confront modern and contemporary ideas about the nature of self, society, gender, and art, but we also look at the ways in which these writers are trying to deal with the existential implications of new views about science, God, and the poet’s place in his or her rapidly changing world. Since part of the reading involves thinking about aesthetic and theoretical issues, the course will deal with these issues, just as it will pay close attention to the meaning and resonance of particular poems. At the same time, it will consider the ways in which these poets (and us, as readers) construct the place called Canada as a metaphor that’s central to our daily lives. Students are encouraged to explore multi-media material related to each poet in question. The writing component of the course (frequent short essays but no term papers or exams) is designed to improve interpretive abilities and to encourage creative forms of critical expression.

Texts:Lecker, Robert, ed. Open Country: Canadian Poetry in English. Toronto: Thomson Nelson, 2007.

Evaluation: A series of short essays on each of the poets studied in the course, 80%; attendance, 10%; participation, 10%.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Average Enrollment: 25 students.

Prerequisite: None.

Expected Student Preparation: An understanding of poetics such as that gained in ENGL 311 is recommended, as is some experience of studying earlier literature, such as that gained in ENGL 331 or 332.

Description: This course will introduce students to a variety of British poetry written during the 63-year-long reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). This was a period of enormous national pride, imperial expansion, industrial growth, technological innovation and political change, which generated both high levels of confidence in ‘progress’ and high levels of anxiety about public morality, religious belief, gender roles and the national character. We will examine how poetry engaged with those concerns by studying the works of poets such as Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, Ernest Dowson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Charlotte Mew, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and James Thomson. We will examine a variety of forms and genres, such as the lyric, the sonnet, the dramatic monologue, the elegy, the hymn and the ode, as well as a number of recurrent Victorian concerns, such as the ‘death of God’, the morality of sex, the place of art in modernity, and the attractions of decadence.

Texts: Victorian Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, ed. by Francis O’Gorman (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).

Evaluation: Response Paper 15%, Attendance 10%, Essay 35%, Exam 40%.

Format: Lecture and discussion

Average Enrollment: 60 students

Description: This course introduces students to the major formal, thematic, and historical concerns of British fiction over the course of the twentieth century. Beginning with E.M. Forster’s Howards End and finishing with Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, we interrogate the role of the novel as a form through which British writers worked out the relationship between art, identity, politics, and ethics. With texts such as Howards End, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, we consider major social themes of the first half of the twentieth century: class hierarchies, gender relations, property and home ownership, urban culture and suburban sprawl, the decline of the British Empire. In addition to thematic analysis, we examine how these novels help to establish the social realist mode that dominated twentieth-century British fiction, and we ask how this mode intersects with, and is challenged by, the themes, tropes, and stylistic markers of high modernism, including subjectivity, stream-of-consciousness, abstraction, fragmentation, the urban flâneur, and the shell shock experienced by many World War I veterans. Through fiction by Elizabeth Bowen, we reflect on the significance of World War II and the writer’s literary and political engagement with that conflict. Moving into the postwar period, we read novels such as Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and Zadie Smith’s With Teeth. Through these novels, we chart the rise and fall of the Welfare State, the effects of postcolonial emigration, Cold War politics, the transformation of country house culture, and contemporary multiculturalism that continues to define the fictional and socio-political landscape of Britain. Given Zadie Smith’s self-proclaimed indebtedness to E.M. Forster, White Teeth is an appropriate point of closure for considering how the British novel has functioned over the course of the century. To flesh out the cultural context of the texts we consider, lectures include supplementary material from other media and disciplines, including contemporaneous literary criticism, film, radio broadcasts, television, visual arts, music, and architecture.

Provisional Texts:

• Elizabeth Bowen, Selected stories and essays
• John Le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
• E.M. Forster, Howards End
• Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
• Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners
• Zadie Smith, White Teeth
• Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

 

Evaluation: journals (15%); short essay (30%); final essay (40%); participation (15%)

Format: Lecture and discussion

Expected Preparation: previous university courses in English literature, including survey (ENGL 202 and 203), Poetics (ENGL 311), and at least two other courses

Description: This course will focus on British fiction written between the Second World War and Thatcherism. This survey of novels will focus on class, the Welfare State, responses to the war, housing, conceptions of the future, the status of children and refugees, evil, women, gender, the decline of imperialism, and fictional technique. Generic conventions of comedy and tragedy as they get mixed with novelistic representation will inform some lectures. The turn to history in the 1970s and 1980s will also be addressed.

Texts:

• Ivy Compton-Burnett, Manservant and Maidservant
• Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
• Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
• Muriel Spark, Memento Mori
• John Le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
• Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn
• Hilary Mantel, Fludd

Evaluation: Short Paper 30%: Long Paper 40%; Final Exam 30%

Format: Lecture

Average Enrollment: 60

Prerequisite: No formal prerequisite, but previous university-level work in literary studies and a familiarity with the basics of literary criticism are expected. Students lacking such preparation but possessing a background in medieval studies (e.g., coursework on the medieval period in history, religion, or related fields) are also welcome in the course.

Description: Despite the importance attached in the Middle Ages to the realm of the spiritual, medieval writers devoted significant creative energies to representing the natural world: its landscapes, its flora and fauna, its fecund rhythms and energies, and its interface with human civilization and artifice. In the pre-industrial and still largely agrarian Middle Ages, boundaries between humans and the natural world were notably more fluid, mobile, and at times threatening than they are today: hunts, adventures, social pastimes, and fundamentals of sustenance all involved medieval people directly in the natural environment. For all its ideological distance from twenty-first century perspectives on nature, medieval literature invites dialogue with current scholarly and cultural investments in ecocriticism and ‘green’ reading, environmentalism, and the dynamics of ecosystems. At the same time, medieval anthropocentrism and related symbolic conventions complicate attempts to assimilate distant historical apprehensions of the environment into those now current.

This course approaches medieval literary conceptions of the natural world via three thematic clusters: (1) the goddess Natura and her jurisdiction, (2) environments (wilderness, forests, gardens), (3) animal-human relationships. Materials will include: allegorical vision narratives, mock-heroic beast epics, Aesopic fables, chivalric romance, lyric, Breton lai, and avian debate poems, plus interdisciplinary background readings in natural philosophy, theology, zoology, and medieval hunting lore. We will aim to understand these works within their own literary-historical milieux, but we will also consider them in light of current practices of environmental reading. Our primary materials—all works of major literary importance—are balanced among medieval English, Scottish, Latin, and French literary traditions. Most Middle English and Middle Scots texts will be read in the original language (with helpful glosses); foreign language texts will be read in modern English translation. No prior experience with Middle English is necessary, but a willingness to gain experience with it during the course is essential.

Texts:(provisional; specific editions TBA. Many of these will be compiled in a required coursepack):

• Anon., Sir Orfeo
• Anon., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose
• Chaucer, Parliament of Foules
• Chaucer, Nun’s Priest’s Tale and Manciple’s Tale
• Anon., The Romance of Reynard the Fox
• Robert Henryson, Fables
• a selection of Middle English lyrics
• Alan de Lille, Planctus Naturae
• Anon, The Owl and the Nightingale
• Anon., The Flower and the Leaf
• Marie de France, Yonec, Laustic, and Bisclavret (from the Lais)
• Chretien de Troyes, Yvain, or the Knight with the Lion

Evaluation (tentative): shorter essay (20%), longer essay (40%), final exam (30%), class participation (10%)

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Prerequisite: None

Description: This course focuses on a wide range of Canadian short fiction published after 1945. The major emphasis is on contemporary fiction but we will begin by examining some of the trends in Canadian writing that emerged after World War 2. Although we will read individual stories by approximately 15 different authors, we will also look at a few short story collections by specific writers. The course will focus on techniques, issues, and problems associated with the short story form and will stress close and detailed reading of a wide range of stories that deal with politics, gender, sexuality, cultural shifts, and historical awareness. We are going to talk about voices, visions, ideas about identity, and the responsibility of the writer. Through our discussions students will also become familiar with a variety of critical methods. The writing component of the course (frequent short essays but no term papers or exams) is designed to improve interpretive abilities and to encourage creative forms of critical expression.

Texts:

• Blaise, Clark. The Meagre Tarmac.
• Gartner, Zsuzsi. Better Living through Plastic Explosives.
• Gowdy, Barbara. We So Seldom Look on Love.
• MacLeod, Alistair. Island.
• MacLeod, Alex. Light Lifting.
• Selecky, Sarah. This Cake Is for the Party.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Prerequisite: None

Description: This course aims to be an intensive introduction to the study of Old English, beginning with the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the language (necessary but not necessarily painful), and advancing to the reading of selected texts in prose and poetry. The aim is to give students a basic grounding in the language to enable them to read works in the original. Classes will be devoted at first to grammar and translation, but we will also be examining representations of Anglo-Saxon literature through reading and translating the texts. The course culminates in a translation project, which will be a translation and analytical commentary of a selected text.

Texts:An Introduction to Old English, by Peter Baker. 3rd. edition. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Inc., 2003; 2011. Also available as e-book.

Evaluation: Class tests 30%; homework 20% homework exercises; final exam 35%; 15% attendance and participation.

Format: lecture, workshop, discussion.

Description: Thomas Hardy’s novels, short stories, and poetry richly document late-19th and early 20th Century England, and they are also the focus of much interpretive controversy. In this course we will read many of Hardy’s major works in four thematic or generic units: 1) Realism vs Sensation; 2) Wessex and rural history; 3) Science in Culture; and 4) Poetry. These divisions will familiarize students with some of the many divergent readings of Hardy’s work and, especially, with his unstable reputation as a novelist. Critical works and contemporary reviews will accompany the fiction and poetry.

Please Note: This course satisfies the Departmental requirement of a Major Author course.

Texts: (required and available at the University Bookstore unless otherwise noted. All works except for the course reader are by Thomas Hardy. Texts are subject to change with fair warning)

• Desperate Remedies
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles
• “Barbara of the House of Grebe” (short story to be read online)
• The Return of the Native
• The Mayor of Casterbridge
• “The Distracted Preacher” (short story to be read online)>
• Two on a Tower
• The Woodlanders
• The Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy
• Course Reader

Evaluation: 20% attendance and participation; short essay (6-8 pages): 20%; midterm: 20%; final essay: 30%.

Format: Lecture and discussion

Prerequisite: none. Limited to English Majors.

Description: This course is dedicated to exploring the material conditions out of which texts emerge, and in which they make their impact. It will scrutinize the contingencies of production, promotion, distribution, circulation and reception that help to shape the meanings of texts, and the ways in which those contingencies may be either thematized or effaced. It will consider ways in which meaning can be located not only in the words of a poem, but also in the physicality of the book, or newspaper, or parchment, or papyrus, or web page in which it appears. And it will examine tensions between the author’s intentions, the publisher’s interests, the reviewer’s agenda and the reader’s pleasures, which result in the production of texts whose ontology is complex and layered. Beginning with such pioneers as W. W. Greg, D. F. Mackenzie and Roger Chartier, it will explore what Jerome McGann has called “the textual condition” in order to help students develop a more sophisticated understanding of what texts are and do.

Texts: The Book History Reader ed. by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006), plus course packet.

Evaluation: Attendance 10%; Group Presentation 25%; Short Essay 25%; Final Exam 40%.

Format: lecture and discussion

Average Enrollment: 60 students.

Prerequisite: None. If you have already taken ENGL 347 (Great Writings of Europe I) as a different course under that number, you may still take this course, but will need to see me in the first or second week of classes so I can arrange your enrollment.

Description: While concentrating on the major texts of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid in attractive modern translations, we will consider their role in the literary history of western Europe, especially England, up to and including the eighteenth century. The course will thus survey the development of classical myth, mythography, allegory, epic, and literary theory from Homer to Addison. It will provide an effective base of knowledge for reading literature that draws on such contexts, and for appreciating corresponding shifts in literary history and in the roles of myth in western culture.

Texts: The Course Reader and other texts will be available in paperback for purchase at the Word bookstore, 469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640. I will also ensure that multiple copies are available at Redpath Reserves.

• Homer, Iliad, Fagles translation
• Homer, Odyssey, Lattimore translation
• Virgil, Aeneid, Fitzgerald translation
• Ovid, Metamorphoses, Mandelbaum translation
• Supplementary Course Reader, with largely optional readings

Evaluation: take-home final exam, weighting 40%; term paper 50%; 10% conference attendance and participation.

Format: lectures, conferences, class size permitting; discussion

Average Enrollment: 75 students

Prerequisite: None

Description: This course examines several major works of literature from the European continent that significantly impacted Western conceptions of literate practice, authorship, religion, and the place of the individual human in society and in the cosmos. Course texts include examples of literature spanning Late Antiquity to the Italian Renaissance. The course has two main objectives: to introduce students to early literature as an object of study in its own right; and to explore this literature as an important background for the study of subsequent Western literature and culture, including in England. We will also discuss the problematics of periodization (e.g., what do we mean by “Late Antiquity”, “the Middle Ages” and “the Renaissance”?). All course texts were written on the European continent, and will be read in English translation.

Texts:

• St. Augustine, Confessions
• Boccaccio, The Decameron
• Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
• Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances
• Dante, The Divine Comedy
• Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose
• Hildegard of Bingen, Selected Writings
• Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend
• Petrarch, Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works
• Other required readings available online

Evaluation (provisional): Mid-term exam, 25%; Final exam, 35%; Final essay (7-8 pages), 30%; Participation and attendance, 10%

Format: Lecture and discussion

Prerequisite: none, but some knowledge of medieval literature and Middle English is an advantage.

Description:  This course will examine selected texts from the early medieval literature of Britain (Anglo-Saxon and Welsh) and of Ireland (mostly in translation), as well as some later medieval works of Anglo-Norman England, which embody the folklore and popular traditions of the British Isles, including Arthurian tradition and the Robin Hood legends. The main topic will be the study of the folktale in narrative, but we will also consider heroic tradition and the types of the hero, folk motifs, fairy lore, oral tradition, mythology, and folk beliefs. The aim of the course is to explore how folk tradition was incorporated into written narratives, and how they can be approached and interpreted. The goal is not the study of folklore per se, but how authors drew upon traditional material in the composition of their literary texts. The range is delimited to the literature of the British Isles of the medieval period (ca 900-1400 CE), rather than to international tales of later eras.

Texts:

• The Táin. Trans. Thomas Kinsella. Oxford UP, 1969: Selected tales and chapters.
•  The Mabinogion. Trans. Sioned Davies. Oxford UP, 2007 (also available as an e-book): the Four Branches, “How Culhwch Won Olwen,” “The Dream of the Emperor Maxen,” “Lludd and Llefelys.” 
• Beowulf, trans. R.M. Liuzza. Broadview, 2000. 
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. James Winny. Broadview, 1992; rpt. 2006.
•  King Horn. www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/hornfrm.htm 
• A Gest of Robyn Hode. www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/gest.htm 
• Sir Orfeo. www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/orfeofrm.htm 
• Geoffrey Chaucer. ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” “The Clerk’s Tale” – available online, in inter-line translation.
  • www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/teachslf/wbt-par.htm
  • www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/teachslf/clk.htm
• Other works may be distributed in class.

Evaluation: Mid-term 15%; essay 25%; final exam 50%; 10% attendance and participation (all subject to change).

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Prerequisites: There are no official prerequisites for this course. However, some familiarity with cultural studies concepts and terminology will be useful. Furthermore, previous experience with courses in film studies will obviously aid you in navigating the material under consideration.

Description: Director Samuel Fuller famously argued that “there’s no way you can portray war realistically … For moviegoers to get the idea of real combat, you’d have to shoot at them every so often from either side of the screen. The casualties in the theater would be bad for business.” This course will explore the dilemmas of representation that are posed by the war film, as well as the highly charged political stakes of the genre. We will examine the ways in which the war film serves to articulate and stage central questions about U.S. national identity as well as those of racial, ethnic, and sexual difference. We will also attend to the “home front” war films, as they investigate the effects of military conflict on those not involved in combat, as well as the aftermath for those who were. Given the exceedingly masculine nature of most war films, the course will also pay particularly close attention to the circulation of gender signification within the genre. Finally, we will also consider the existential issues raised by a cinema that focuses, metaphorically and literally, on questions of life and death.

Required Texts:

• J. David Slocum, ed., Hollywood and War: The Film Reader
• Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud, eds. From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film
• Course reading pack

Required Films:

• All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930)
• Sergeant York (Howard Hawks, 1941)
• Guadalcanal Diary (Lewis Seiler, 1943)
• The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946)
• The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich, 1967)
• The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978)
• Coming Home (Hal Ashby, 1978)
• Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
• Rambo: First Blood Part II (George P. Cosmatos, 1985)
• Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987)
• Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998)
• Three Kings (David O. Russell, 1999)
• Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott, 2001)

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lecture, discussion, weekly screenings

Prerequisite: None

Description: The nineteenth century juxtaposition of industrialization, urbanization, and colonial expansion has invited numerous theoretical questions. How did the process of industrialization relate to European expansionism? What differences were set up by colonial regimes and how did they operate? How did these differences multiply themselves into other dichotomies structured in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, class, location, or age group? What lingering legacies do we encounter today? We will use critical theory as a springboard for questions that arise from contemporary literature and current socio-political debates. Each theoretical module will be accompanied by a text—be it a short story, a film, or a group of paintings—that will offer the grounding for overarching questions raised by the articles. Starting from crucial nineteenth-century authors like Hegel and Marx, we will work our way into the latter half of the twentieth century to engage with Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, Benedict Anderson, Ella Shohat, Homi Bhabha, Gloria Anzaldua, and Trinh T. Minh-ha.

Texts:

• Course pack
• Frantz Fanon. Black Skin, White Masks
• Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities
• Jamaica Kincaid. A Small Place
• Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin: Post-colonial Studies—The Key Concepts

Evaluation (tentative): Participation and webct discussion (15%); Short paper (20%); Term Paper (30%); Final Exam (35%).

Format: Lecture and discussions.

Pre- or Co-requisite: Engl 230. Limited to students in the English Major Concentration, Drama and Theatre Option

Description: This course engages meaningful issues and debates that have structured the fields of theatre and performance practice and scholarship from ancient Greece to the present. Beginning with a comparative analysis of mimesis and representation in Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Poetics, we will examine a chronological progression of scholarship on theatrical performance, supplementing course lectures with readings in theatre theory, artists’ manifestos, historical texts, plays, and performance footage.

The course addresses topics including:

•  Historical debates regarding the dangers, pleasures, and ‘purposes’ of theatrical representation;
•   Changing acting theories and methods;
•  Approaches to the construction and deployment of theatrical space;
•  Theories of theatrical reception;
•  The body onstage: materiality and semiotics; and
•  ‘Positioning performance:’ disciplinary relationships between theatre and performance studies.

Texts may include:

•  Plato. The Republic. Trans. C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004.
•  The Poetics of Aristotle. Trans. Stephen Halliwell. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.
•   A course packet of exemplary readings by Sophocles, Denis Diderot, Edward Gordon Craig, Henrik Ibsen, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietszche, Konstantin Stanislavski, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, Eugenio Barba, Augusto Boal, Anne Bogart, Wole Soyinka, Gay McAuley, Bruce McConachie, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Richard Schechner, Dwight Conquergood, D. Soyini Madison, and Shannon Jackson.

Evaluation: In-class presentation: 25%; periodic short essays: 25%; final essay (6-8pgs): 25%; participation in group discussions: 25%

Format: Lectures and group discussion

Note: Students who have taken ENGL 356 under a different course topic are free to take this version of the course. Although the course number is the same, the content is entirely different; therefore, these will count as two different courses toward university and program requirements. Course texts are all written in the original Middle English, but no prior experience with Middle English is required. Some introduction to the language will be provided and a portion of several classes will be devoted to reading, translating, and transcribing.

Description: The fifteenth century in England was a dynamic time during which concepts of authorship, communication, textual production and literate activity were undergoing tremendous change. English was developing quickly as England’s official language, overtaking French and Latin. Heresy and its suppression met with a burgeoning humanist movement, and mainstream religious practice was enormously vibrant and varied. Further, at the end of the fifteenth century, print technology coexisted with a lively manuscript culture in England. Yet despite all of these developments, literature of the fifteenth century has often been characterized as derivative and cautious, with far more scholarly emphasis being placed on the poets of previous generations like Chaucer, Langland, Gower, and the Gawain-poet. This course situates fifteenth-century English literature in its dynamic cultural contexts, examining how late-medieval literature in England intersected with developments in politics, religious controversy, historiography, literacy and technology. Texts (provisional):

Texts: (provisional)

• Henryson, Orpheus and Euridice
• Hoccleve, My Compleinte and Other Poems
• Lydgate, The Temple of Glass
• Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur
• The Book of Margery Kempe
• The Paston Letters
• Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales
• Selections from the Towneley Plays, the N-Town Plays, and the Chester Mystery Cycle

Evaluation (provisional): Mid-term exam, 25%; Final exam, 35%; Final essay, 30%; Participation and attendance, 10% Format: Lecture and discussion

Prerequisite: None

Description: An intensive study of Chaucer’s unfinished masterpiece, the Canterbury Tales, in the original Middle English. We will read nearly all of the Tales, exploring the collection’s experiments in a wide range of medieval genres—romance, beast fable, saint’s life, fabliau, sermon, and many more—as well as its frustration and revision of generic expectations. In order to define Chaucer’s particular artistic aims and contributions, we will consider many of his tales in conjunction with their sources and analogues (which include classical, Biblical, and contemporary Continental materials, samples of which will be supplied in translation). Our primary goal will be to characterize Chaucer’s style in the context of his literary/artistic, intellectual, and cultural milieux. In the process, we will devote close attention to Chaucer’s language, the dynamic of tradition and innovation, and the dramatic relationship between tales and their tellers. Why does Chaucer emerge as such an instrumental figure in the development of English literature? How “medieval” (or “modern”) are his literary accomplishments and values, and what is involved in drawing such lines of periodization?

All Chaucer readings will be in the original Middle English. No prior experience with Middle English is necessary, though learning it will be a formal expectation of the course.

Required Texts:

1. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed. Jill Mann (Penguin, 2005). (This specific edition is required.)
2. Coursepack

Evaluation (tentative): 10% Middle English recitation, 20% mid-term exam, 35% term paper (8-10 pages), 25% final exam, 10% class/conference participation.

Format: Lecture and discussion; conferences (class size permitting)

Prerequisite: None

Description: This course is designed to teach students how to meaningfully close read image-based cultural texts. Using multiple strategies of visual analysis, students will learn how to perform perceptive, informed and medium-specific interpretations of both still and moving images. Focusing our critical lens on some of the most innovative photography and film texts of the last century, we will study the nuances of composition, color, mise-en-scène, framing, camera movement, editing and sound. Paying close attention to the ways in which visual style creates meaning, students will learn to look beyond narrative and dialogue in order to understand both the semiotics and poetics of the image. In addition to numerous close-reading exercises, we will be supplementing our investigation of images with several classical texts on photography and film, by theorists such as John Berger, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, Laura Mulvey, Andre Bazin, Christian Metz, Kaja Silverman, and Mary Ann Doane. Students must come to class prepared with all of the assigned reading, and will be expected to participate verbally in class on a weekly basis.

Lectures will be illustrated by copious examples. In addition to lectures, there is a mandatory screening every week and a mandatory discussion session led by a Teaching Assistant.

Readings Include Selections from:

• Roland Barthes
• Andre Bazin
• John Berger
• Stan Brakhage
• Maya Deren
• Mary Ann Doane
• Sergei Eisenstein
• Sigmun Freud
• Siegfried Kracauer
• Jacques Lacan
• Christian Metz
• Craig Owens
• Adrienne Rich
• Kaja Silverman
• Susan Sontag

Texts include art and film by:

• Andy Warhol
• Cindy Sherman
• Dorothea Lange
• Jean-Luc Godard
• Chris Marker
• Sergei Eisenstein
• Ingmar Bergman
• Carl Theodor Dreyer
• Gillo Pontecorvo
• Maya Deren
• Stan Brakhage
• Yoko Ono
• Barbara Hammer

Evaluation: Attendance and Participation 15%; Mini-Paper 20%; Two Small Papers (first worth 25; second worth 35 ) 60%; Section Assignments 5%

Format: Lecture and Discussion

Prerequisite: At least 3 credits of ENGL 200, 201, 202, or 203. Additional pre- or co-requisite: ENGL 311. This course is strictly designed for U2 Honours English Literature students.

Description: This course explores several topics that are central to modern and contemporary literary criticism and critical theory. These include among others: interpretation; canon formation; ideology; class, race, gender, and sexuality; discourse; hegemony; signification; and performativity. As we make our way through the complex issues of interpretation and criticism that fall under these contested terms, we will read key texts from a range of critical schools and practices, including New Criticism, Marxism, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, and New Historicism. These texts will help us articulate and interrogate some of the most fundamental questions pertaining to the practice of literary studies: What constitutes literature? How are canons formed? Who decides? How do readers and texts generate meaning? What are the relations between a text’s meanings and power and ideology? And what are the relations between literary production and other forms of discursivity? Considering these questions and others will necessitate careful and patient reading and sustained engagement with lecture and discussion during class. The reading for this course is, at times, difficult and dense. Thorough preparation for each class meeting is essential.

Texts:

• The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Ed. Vincent B. Leitch
• Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2e, Eds. Frank Lentricchia & Thomas McLaughlin

Evaluation (tentative): Participation (10%), Quizzes (30%), Two short papers (30%, 30%).

Format: Lectures and discussion.

Average Enrollment: 25 – 40 students.

Expected student preparation: Previous course work with poetry preferred.

Description:

From Wallace Stevens, “Of Modern Poetry”

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice.

This course surveys the major poetry of the first half of the past century—an era hailed by poets and critics alike as having witnessed a remarkable revolution in poetry. Between1900 and 1950 there emerged the concept we now think of as “modern poetry”—one whose legacy continues to shape how poetry is written and understood today. Work selected for the course is designed to provide an overview of the chief trends of this watershed period.

Poets of the early twentieth century produced a rich, innovative body of work—too diverse and wide-ranging to summarize simply. One of the principal goals of this course is to help you negotiate through the work of the period: as we address a great deal of poetry, we will also consider strategies for remembering and making sense of that poetry. We will consider the primary conflicts, goals, preoccupations, and principles guiding their work—what drove them to create as they did?—as well as the keynote events and trends associated with different decades.

Many poets of the twentieth century resolved to fashion a modern poetry for a modern age. Poet Ezra Pound was especially committed to this task. In 1914, Pound wrote admiringly of fellow poet T. S. Eliot, “He has actually … modernized himself on his own…. It is such a comfort to meet a man and not have to tell him to … remember the date … on the calendar.” We will consider how different poets met this challenge of remembering “the date on the calendar”—of responding, as Pound said elsewhere, to what “the age demanded.”

As we consider the history of early twentieth-century poetry, we will also pose more general theoretical questions about poetry. These questions echo the ones that the poets of the early twentieth century themselves emphasized as, dissatisfied with what previous generations had suggested about poetry, they sought to discover for themselves what it was and what it could do. What qualifies as poetry? Of what does it consist? In what ways might we describe the parts of a poem and how a poem works? Might we say that, as poet W.H. Auden suggested, “Poetry makes nothing happen”? And can we find in poetry what Marianne Moore calls “a place for the genuine”?

 

Texts:Readings will include work by W.H. Auden, E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, H.D., Langston Hughes, A.M. Klein, Dorothy Livesay, Marianne Moore, P.K. Page, Ezra Pound, Muriel Rukeyser, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas, and W.B. Yeats.

Evaluation (subject to revision): Brief responses; 2 critical essays (5-6 pp.); final essay (10 pp.), participation

Format: Lecture and Discussion

Average Enrollment: 40 students

Description: This course examines the development of cinema during the most radical decade of political resistance and artistic innovation in American history. Juxtaposing an analysis of mainstream films alongside the study of experimental and independent cinema, this course situates the revolution in cinematic form and content in the larger context of the social and political transformations that occurred during the 1960s. By putting Hollywood into dialogue with its alternatives, this course examines how cinema of this period approached complex issues such as: the decline of the Hollywood studio system and the Production Code Administration, the escalating Cold War, political paranoia and assassination, the student protest movement, racial politics and the struggle for civil rights, the sexual revolution, the emergence of gay rights, the Vietnam war, the legacy of earlier progressive movements such as the Popular Front, hippie culture, and the increasing role of the media or what theorist Guy Debord has called “the society of the spectacle.” We will study some of the most important films of the decade, including works by Hollywood directors such as John Huston, Robert Aldrich, John Schlesinger, Stanley Kubrick, and Arthur Penn, independent mavericks such as John Cassavetes, documentarians such as Emile de Antonio and the Maysles Brothers, and experimental filmmakers such as Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, Carolee Schneemann, Jack Smith, and Stan Brakhage.

Attendance at weekly screenings is mandatory; readings from historical texts are copious and intensive. Do not enroll in this course if you cannot make the mandatory screening time each week.

Selected Readings Include:

• J. Hoberman, The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties
• Richard Dyer, Stars
• Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
• Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture
• David James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties
• Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet
• Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
• Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope: Days of Rage
• Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

Selected Films to Be Screened Include:

• Shadows (John Cassavetes, 1960)
• The Misfits (John Huston, 1960)
• What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962)
• The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962)
• Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb
• (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
• Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1963)
• Nothing But a Man (Michael Roemer and Robert Young, 1964)
• Sins of the Fleshapoids (Mike Kuchar, 1965)
• My Hustler (Andy Warhol, 1965)
• Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967)
• Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968)
• Flesh (Paul Morrissey, 1968)
• Midnight Cowoy (John Schlesinger, 1969)
• Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler, 1969)
• Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969)

Evaluation: Class Participation 15% ; Midterm 20% ; Final Exam 25%; Final Paper 40%

Format: Lecture, discussion, and mandatory weekly screenings.

Prerequisite: None

Expected student preparation:

• Permission of the instructor required for registration.
• Reading of play script completed.
• Sewing kit in the costume shop at all times. Minimum sewing kits consists of thimble, fabric scissors, one package of needles, one box of pins, and a pencil. Each item must be labeled with the student’s name, stored in a container.

Description: Costume design is rooted in the play script, which is where the journey begins. Character analysis and period research inform our design choices. Costuming I focuses on skills acquisition. The process of designing and making costumes for a main stage theatre production is the practical project that fuels this class. Skills that will be covered typically include use of industrial sewing machines, hand sewing techniques, and introductory garment construction methods.

The English Department Main Stage theatre production provides an opportunity for students to practice their costuming skills in the atelier and backstage. The costume class will see the project through from concept to confection, and will be in charge of the costumes backstage. Each student will have a specific production duty as well as a hands-on production project.

At the end of term the production will be presented, with the costume team as backstage costume crew. The final night of the production, all students will be required to attend strike, which is dismantling of the show. Students will be expected to strike the set as well as the costumes.

Texts:TBD

Evaluation: (tentative) attendance/participation 10%, hand sewing sample 5%, character notes 5%, charts 5%, design concepts 10%, costume sketches 10%, Production Project 25%, Production Duty 20%, back stage crew 10%.

Format: lectures, hands on projects, demonstrations, and practical work. Additional production hours outside of class time are required, and are often substantial.

Average Enrollment: 10 students, by permission of the instructor.

Prerequisite: It is strongly suggested that students have previous experience in film studies, such as ENGL 277 or FILM 279.

Description: Musicals are one of the most powerful forms to emerge from the cinematic dream machine, but they are also fragile worlds. In this class, we will explore multiple versions of the musical genre to ask: what do musicals do? What does the musical form make possible? What kinds of stories can it tell? How does it challenge our thinking about cinematic conventions? What can the dramatic waxing and waning popularity of this form tell us about social and cultural concerns, fantasies and desires? Our sense of the musical will be broadly expansive, exploring films where music and/or dance movement take centre stage: classical Hollywood musicals from a variety of ears; international musical forms from Bollywood and beyond; animated films where matter itself is the mover, the emerging field of screendance (dance performance created expressly for the screen), and the influence of extra cinematic forms like music videos.

Texts: TBD

Evaluation: TBD

Format: Lectures, screenings, discussions

Average enrollment: 60

Prerequisite: None. Limited enrolment. Permission of instructor required. Not open to students enrolled in ENGL 365. This course is extremely time consuming and labour intensive. It requires a great deal of commitment.

Description: This is a practical theatre course that focuses on technical aspects of theatre performances. Students will be introduced to the practices of lighting, sound, stage management, set and prop construction. The class will be involved in the Mainstage English Department Production and be responsible for the backstage running crew work during the run of the production.

Format: Workshop demonstrations and practical assignments.

Description: In this course, we will investigate the construction of U.S. national identity in nineteenth and twentieth century popular theatre and amusements. As the nation experienced industrialization, urbanization, immigration, changing sexual and gender norms, and increasing cultural and racial contact, popular entertainments attracted mass audiences and created spectacles of national inclusion and ‘othering.’ The course is separated into five general units: antebellum and early post-bellum performances of racial politics (including blackface minstrelsy, performative iterations of what Saidiya Hartman labels ‘scenes of subjection, and abolitionist performances); melodrama’s cultivation of audience empathies in raced, classed, and gendered contexts (Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Boucicault’s The Octoroon and The Poor of New York); popular entertainments (including circuses, Wild West shows, sideshows, and the attractions of impresario P.T. Barnum); the advent of vaudeville (including issues of gender, race, class, and sexuality in burlesque and popular entertainment); and the Jazz Age. We will culminate by investigating the rise of moving pictures and evaluating the validity of widespread proclamations of film’s supposed ‘triumph’ over live performance.

Texts may include:

• A course packet comprising secondary sources by Jayna Brown, Saidiya Hartman, Gay Gibson Cima, Joseph Roach, Annemarie Bean, Stephanie Leigh Batiste, David Savran, David Roediger, Ronald Radano, Sabine Haenni, Andrea Most, Michael Rogin, Richard Drinnon, and M. Alison Kibler, among others.
• Play texts such as Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon and The Poor of New York, George Aiken’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and David Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West.
• Films, available via online streaming, including The Jazz Singer (1927) and The Crowd (1928).

Evaluation:Posting questions to the discussion forum: 20%; research paper (6-8 pages): 20%; archival document analysis exercise: 20%; presentation: 20%; short response essays: 20%

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: How have contemporary choreographers and dancers, following the groundbreaking works of Merce Cunningham and Pina Bausch, experimented with the traditions, conventions and forms of dance? How have they used the body to invent ever-new ways of moving, thinking, and existing? This course will investigate the notions of experimentation across the field of dance from 1960 to the present. Looking at a wide range of choreographers and movements, we will examine the ways in which choreographic creation explores alternative modes of subjectivity and proposes new forms of engagement with contemporary culture. These explorations will lead us to consider the intersections between contemporary dance, the avant-garde, theater, visual and performance art; between choreography, critical theory and philosophy.

This course promotes a close consideration of key choreographers such as Pina Bausch, Jérôme Bel, Jonathan Burrows, Boris Charmatz, Merce Cunningham, William Forsythe, Benoît Lachambre, Ralph Lemon, Miguel Gutierrez, Xavier Le Roy, Mathilde Monnier, Rachid Ouramdane, Yvonne Rainer, Françoise Sullivan. We will view central pieces in Tanztheater, American Post-Modern dance, European and North-American Contemporary dance, and students will be encouraged to attend live performances. The course will proceed through the analysis and the discussion of different kinds of writing, with a particular attention to the artists’ manifestos. We will also frame these works by examining key texts on dance history and analysis.

Texts: Readings for this class include key authors from the field of dance studies such as Mark Franko, Susan Leigh Foster, André Lepecki, Laurence Louppe; as well as manifestos by a range of dance artists such as Jonathan Burrows, Boris Charmatz, Simone Forti, Xavier Le Roy, and Françoise Sullivan.

Evaluation (tentative): 2 papers (30% each), journal (30%), participation (10%).

Format: Lectures, dance screenings, discussions.

Prerequisite: None. Limited enrolment. Permission of instructor required. Not open to students enrolled in ENGL 377. Students interested in taking this course are instructed to contact Mr. Roche by email. This course is extremely time consuming and labour intensive. It requires a great deal of commitment.

Description: This is a practical theatre course that focuses on the more advanced technical aspects of theatre performances. Students will be focus on the practices of lighting, sound, stage management, and set and prop construction as well as some aspects of design in these areas. The class will be involved in the Mainstage English Department Production and be responsible for the backstage running crew work during the run of the production.

Format: Lectures, production demonstrations and up to 80 hours of production work.

Prerequisite: None

Expected Student Preparation: prior film or television studies is advantageous but not required.

Description: No decade in American history attracts a stranger combination of nostalgia and disgust. Indeed, no decade in American history is more peculiarly American—more attached to the prevailing stereotypes of naive affluence, cynical arrogance, and reckless enthusiasm, not to say bobby socks, hula hoops, malted milks, and Elvis Presley. In this course we will dive headlong into the maw of the fifties beast, with all the suburbs, commercialism, and Cold War paranoia that entails. But our method of comparative media and genre studies will also seek out gaps in that old fifties picture. As an aging and blacklist-ravaged film industry confronts an upstart television culture in search of definition—as film noir rots, the Western peaks, and science fiction surges—we will increasingly seek not just the sleek surfaces of the fifties cliché, but the churning history of our own present.

Possible films include: Ace in the Hole, Johnny Guitar, Glen or Glenda?, Rebel Without a Cause, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Imitation of Life, and Shadows.

Note: All students are asked to see Sunset Boulevard before the first class.

Texts: American Cinema of the 1950s, ed. Murray Pomerance; coursepack

Possible shows include: I Love Lucy, Gunsmoke, The Honeymooners, Dragnet, Lassie, The Twilight Zone, and Perry Mason.

Evaluation: 2 Quizzes 5% each, journal 30%, term paper 40%, participation 20%.

Format: Lecture with discussion, conferences, and weekly screenings

Average Enrollment: 60 students

Prerequisite: None

Expected Student Preparation: Previous university-level courses in drama and theatre, literature, or cultural studies.

Description: The object of our seminar is to define, at a theoretical level and through applied case-studies, the fraught terms 'theatricality' and 'performativity' (and their cognates) to determine not only why, how, and to what ends each term can / might be used, but also to arrive at an understanding of to what extent they are sovereign and / or complementary. As Josette Féral proposes: "I would argue here that there is no contradiction whatsoever between these two perspectives, which seem widely divergent. Rather, they complement each other, allowing us to better understand the phenomenon of representation, underscoring that performativity, far from contradicting theatricality, is one of its elements. In integrating performativity within itself, theatricality sees it as one of its fundamental modalities, giving theatricality its power and meaning. In fact, such an approach allows us to better understand any spectacle, which is an interplay of both performativity and theatricality."

Our seminar will first devote itself to a close reading of a selection of mostly theoretical essays, several of which come from a special online issue of SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 31.2 & 3 (2002), ed. Josette Féral. These will include two essays by Féral, and one essay by each of Freddie Rokem, Marvin A. Carlson, and Silvija Jestrovic.

Our seminar will then examine some dramatic / film texts as case-studies, exploring, (re)interpreting, and applying the critical vocabulary that we have acquired to see what its use-value might be.

Texts:

• Coursepack containing a variety of theoretical essays by Philip Auslander, J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, Johan Callens, Tracy C. Davis, Jacques Derrida, Dwight Conquergood, Ric Knowles, Jon McKenzie, Andrew Parker, Thomas Postlewait, Richard Schechner, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
• Michel Tremblay, Albertine In FiveTimes, trans. Linda Gaboriau (Talonbooks)
• Georg Bϋchner, Woyzeck (Nick Hern Books)
• Federico García Lorca, The House of Bernarda Alba, trans. Rona Munro (Nick Hern Books)
• Lorena Gale, Angélique (Playwrights Canada Press)
• Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters, trans. Paul Schmidt, in The Plays of Anton Chekhov (HarperCollins)

Films:

• Baz Luhrmann, Romeo + Juliet (Bazmark Films) Baz Luhrmann, director, written by Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce, William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (Bazmark Films, 1996 ; Beverley Hills: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, ca. 2002)
• The Wooster Group, director, Elizabeth LeCompte, narrator Kate Valk, Brace up! (The Wooster Group, 2009)
• Werner Herzog, director, Woyzeck (Anchor Bay Entertainment, [2000])
• Mario Camus, director, written by Mario Camus and Antonio Larreta, The House of Bernarda Alba (1987; [Chicago]: Cińemateca, ca. 2005)
• Film Script: Craig Pearce and Baz Luhrmann, Romeo + Juliet - www.script-o-rama.com/snazzy/dircut.html

Evaluation (tentative): Active participation in the intellectual life of the seminar 15%; one seminar presentation on a theoretical text or case-study 15%; a distilled critical argument arising from the seminar presentation advanced in a 8-page long essay 20%; a 20-page long scholarly essay from a choice of individually-negotiated topics 50%

Format: Brief lectures; led-discussions; presentations including interrogative Q & As.

Expected student preparation:

• Permission of the instructor required for registration.
• Sewing kit in the costume shop at all times. Minimum sewing kits consists of thimble, fabric scissors, one package of needles, one box of pins, and a pencil. Each item must be labeled with the student’s name, stored in a container.

Description: Special costuming topics will include learning to make patterns though draping fabric on the mannequins. Sewing skills that were gained in the first semester will be practiced in the second semester. New techniques will be explored via sewing exercises in order to gain precision and expand skill base.

The English Department Main Stage production provides an opportunity for students to practice their costuming skills in the atelier and backstage.

The costume class will see the production through from design to closing night. Each student will have a specific production duty as well as a hands on production project. Costuming II differs from Costuming I in the level of independence expected from the students. Production projects will be initiated by the students under the guidance of the instructor. This will give students an opportunity to manage all aspects of costume production independently.

At the end of term the Main Stage theatre production will be presented, with the costume team as backstage crew. The final night of the production, all students will be required to assist on the dismantling of the show (in theatre parlance this is called “strike”), from approximately 10:00pm until 2:00am. Students will be expected to strike the set as well as the costumes. Strike is mandatory.

Texts: TBD

Evaluation: subject to change. Show Charts (5 marks), Costume Development and Sketching (5 marks), Fittings/Measurements (10 marks), Draping Project (10 marks) Production Duty (15 marks), Production Project (15 marks), Sewing Basics (10 marks), Skills testing (10 marks), Preshow preparation (5 marks), Backstage Duties + Strike (10 marks), Attendance (10 marks).

Format: lectures, hands on projects, demonstrations, and practical work. Additional production hours outside of class time are required. This semester will differ from the previous, in that production hours will be spread through out the semester.

Average Enrollment: 10 students, by permission of the instructor.

Prerequisite: None

Description: The media is assuming an ever increasing role in these exciting but turbulent times of culture clashes, political and military uncertainty and globalization. What role do the media play and what role ought the media play? This course will look at different ethical systems and models that the media has adhered to or has tried to adhere to during the previous century and this century, such as the media as educator, the media as social and moral arbiter, the media as the voice of the community, etc. Do these models of media still hold? Or are we operating with new models or maybe no ethical models at all? Do we need ethical models? How can we arrive at them? How has the Internet changed the news media?

The course will examine contemporary media, particularly news coverage in print and television media. It will look at different codes of conduct and models of ethics in various news organizations and attempt to work toward a model(s) of responsible and fair news coverage at a time when the concept of media and news coverage is changing. The course will look at the changes in media brought by the internet, blogs, cell-phone pics, I-reports, etc.

The course will use examples from present-day media (with an emphasis on the news) to try to address these concerns and questions. The emphasis will be strongly on Canadian and American media.

Texts: TBA

Evaluation:

• 2 Short papers (4-5 pages): 20 % each unless there are conferences
• One class test 10%.
• Final Research Paper (8-12): 50% .Topics will be handed out in class, however, if you would like to pursue a topic of your own choice, please submit a written proposal and have it approved before undertaking it.

Format: Lectures and discussions, possibly conferences

Description: This course unfolds around a basic question about cinema: to what extent are categories – generic, aesthetic, cultural – artistically and critically productive? Billy Wilder is our entry point and test case for grappling with this question. Often considered one of the masters of Hollywood comedy but without the same high-profile auteur status as filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford, Wilder blends comedic conventions with darker social, political, and cultural themes. In our examination of the often uneasy combination of comedy and moral seriousness in his films, we interrogate more broadly the limits and functions of genre in wartime and postwar American film culture. The course is structured into three units: 1) film noir; 2) war, politics, and history; and 3) comedy. By the time we encounter Wilder’s more “straightforward” comedies (The Apartment, Kiss Me, Stupid, Love In the Afternoon, Sabrina, The Seven Year Itch, Some Like It Hot), students are able to view these films in the context of a career that demonstrates wide-ranging moral and artistic depth through contributions to the film noir genre (Ace In the Hole, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard) as well as through films that deal with war, politics, and history (Five Graves to Cairo, A Foreign Affair, Witness for the Prosecution, The Spirit of St. Louis). Considering his entire oeuvre, it becomes clear that comedy, for Wilder, always signals a complex set of social concerns that remains troublesome or unresolved beyond the confines of the films themselves. With Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Fedora (1978) as bookends, moreover, the course ultimately allows students to explore the relationship between Wilder’s career and the dominant stories of Hollywood cinema. To help flesh out the relationship between his films and their contexts, students read supplemental critical work on Wilder as well as additional theoretical readings on genre, auteurism, sexuality and gender, production history, and cultural context.

Provisional Films:

• Ace In the Hole
• The Apartment
• Double Indemnity
• Fedora
• Five Graves to Cairo
• A Foreign Affair
• Kiss Me, Stupid
• The Lost Weekend
• Sabrina
• The Seven Year Itch
• Some Like It Hot
• The Spirit of St. Louis
• Sunset Boulevard
• Witness for the Prosecution

Evaluation: journals (15%); short essay (30%); final essay (40%); participation (15%)

Format: Lecture and conference discussion

Note: Students are expected to have taken at least one university-level class in an English department where the focus was on literature and/or film and where textual analyses of either (preferably both) was the focus of the methods of evaluation.

Description: In this course we will examine the (mostly) North American pre-occupation with the Kennedy family in various media, including film, magazines, biography and fiction. Much of the attention to President Kennedy's family occurred following his assassination in Dallas, Texas in November of 1963. We will examine the reasons for this intense media fascination. Kennedy was the 4th US president to be assassinated: some of the media scrutiny is due to his being President while television was taking hold in American homes. Among other things, thus, we will focus on 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 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; some other peripheral and yet central figures to the Kennedy narratives, for example, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Lee Harvey Oswald and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and John Kennedy jr. Key questions here will be, among others, what do we need to remember of them and what do we insist on forgetting? Note: this course will be less concerned with getting at any truths about the Kennedys; rather it 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).

Texts:

• Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images, David Lubin
• Libra, Don DeLillo
• November 22, 1963, Adam Braver
• American Adulterer, Jed Mercurio
• Mrs Paine’s Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy, Thomas Mallon

Evaluation: (tentative) likely short précis of the books and films viewed; participation

Format: Lectures, discussion, presentation of visual materials, film screenings; attendance is mandatory

Enrollment: 45

Description: “… as we embark on a new century of broadcasting, it is clear that no genre, form, or type of programming has been as actively marketed by producers, or been more enthusiastically embraced by viewers, than reality- based TV.”

The course will examine a number of reality-based shows, mainly from Canada and the US. It will look at different categories of shows and will attempt to contextualize them within contemporary popular culture.

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: 2 Short papers (5-7pages): 25 % each unless there are conferences; Final Exam 50%

Format: lectures and discussions

Prerequisite: None

Expected Student Preparation: Previous university-level course work in Shakespeare Studies.

Description: In this course we examine how a range of filmmakers have related to Shakespeare’s cultural and textual authority. Such relationships are inevitably complex, and characterized by a variety of attitudes, including devotion, subversion, opposition, resistance, dialogue, opportunism and appropriation. We will begin by investigating different ways of conceptualizing authority, taking into account early modern modes of textual production, theories of cinematic auteurship, and critical accounts of Shakespeare’s cultural position. The first screening will be Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard (1996), a self–reflexive case study of one director’s attempt to bring Shakespearean material to film. In the second section of the course, “Carrying the Torch,” we will study the work of a number of important directors who have addressed Shakespeare in their cinematic work, including Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Laurence Olivier, Peter Brook, and Kenneth Branagh. The third and final part of the course, “Running with the Ball,” will focus on the work of several directors—Gus van Sant, Peter Greenaway, Jean–Luc Godard, Baz Luhrmann and Lloyd Kaufman—who cinematically expresses what may be termed a more “postmodern” relationship to Shakespearean authority in their works.

Texts: Course-Pak of selected weekly readings. Students are also expected to familiarize themselves with the textual versions of the plays covered in screenings, and may use any edition they have to hand.

Evaluation: Paper 6-8pp (25%); Paper 10-12pp (35%); Final Exam (30%); Conference Participation (10%)

Format: Lecture and class discussion, conference sections, mandatory film screenings.

Average Enrollment: 80 students.

Description: This fall, the Toronto International Film Festival plans to unveil a new video game, “Body/ Mind/ Change” based on the films of David Cronenberg; this title captures the major obsessions of Cronenberg’s long and productive career. His early efforts produced gleeful, shocking and wildly inventive first films (Shivers, Rabid, The Brood), prompting the invention of a new genre (body horror), a rash of Grand Guignol nicknames (the Baron of Blood, the King of Venereal Horror), and outraged debates in the House of Commons over public funding for popular horror films. Although today he has become the eminence grise of Canadian Cinema, the spectacular displays of his early films haven’t gone away, but have become a molecular kind of mutation in films like Eastern Promises and A History of Violence. Cronenberg’s body of work provides us with one of the best sets of texts for exploring the mutations of our existence in an era of intensive technological change. We will work through Cronenberg’s films as engagement with questions around biotechnologies, media, memory, the body and the self, alongside key texts from contemporary cultural theory.

Texts: TBD

Evaluation: TBD

Format: Lectures, screenings, discussions

Average Enrollment: 60

Description: This course will have an academic and creative component, jointly geared toward acquainting students with a popular genre--the historical novel--which has been extremely influential in the western world from the beginning of the nineteenth century to our days. We will read key examples of the genre accompanied by stimulating works of literary criticism. Each student will then design his/her own plans for an historical novel, using our reading and writing assignments to polish, clarify and expand those plans. Students are certainly not expected to turn in full-fledged novels at the end of the semester: only an outline, or couple of chapters, accompanied by an explanation of how your historical novel would negotiate what you perceive to be the genre’s main strengths and pitfalls.

Texts:

• Avishag by Yael Lotan
• Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
• Orlando by Virginia Woolf
• Course Packet with critical readings from Lukács, Ragussis, Shaw, Hutcheon

Evaluation: 15% participation; 40% ongoing responses to the readings; 25% outline or couple of chapters from a potential historical novel of your own design; 20% critical explanation accompanying your outline or chapters.

Format: Lecture and discussion