200-level / Introductory Courses

Description: This is a survey of British and Anglophone literature from the 18^th century to the present, with an emphasis on prose. As this period covers a rich range of texts and authors from various backgrounds, we will focus on writers who, until a few decades ago, were seldom considered to be part of the canon: women, writers of color, outsiders (Mary Wollstonecraft, Olaudah Equiano, Derek Walcott, Angela Carter). In the case of the well-established writers (William Blake, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot) we will focus on texts that showcase the plight of the working classes, distant imaginary or real landscapes, gender and sexuality, and less explored themes. We will study the characteristics of various literary genres, identify the historical and cultural concerns specific to each period, and read the themes and formal elements of poetry, prose and essays against the social and political background of each era.

Texts:

• The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors (Volume 2); 9th edition
• Mary Shelley:  Frankenstein
• Sam Selvon:  The Lonely Londoners
• Course Pack

Evaluation:

• Short Paper 20%,
• Longer Paper 30%
• Final Exam 40%,
• Participation 10%

Format: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisite: None
Not open to students who have taken ENGL 200.  Open only to students in English Major and Minor programs.

 Description:  English 202 is defined as a historical survey of nondramatic English literature from Old English up to and including the eighteenth-century writer Swift, highlighting major texts, authors, and shifts in literary thought, with attention to relevant cultural factors.

Covering around 1000 years of literary history in only 13 weeks, this necessarily fast-moving course provides fundamental grounding for understanding the cross-currents, influences, and intertextual relationships involved in the development of nondramatic English literature.  Accordingly, English 202 focuses on premodern English nondramatic authors, texts, and genres that have had a major literary and cultural impact: Beowulf, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, a range of Renaissance sonnets, lyrics by Donne and Marvell, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Pope’s Rape of the Lock, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.  The course thus provides knowledge of English epic, the formerly major narrative genre; its parodic inversion mock-epic; early modern lyric; satire; and other literary forms.  It further deals with a wide range of cultural, social, and intellectual contexts relevant to these texts, from philosophy, theology, and icongraphy to former notions of amorous desire.  By examining two representative expressions of Renaissance and Enlightenment esthetics, Sidney’s Defence of Poesy and Pope’s Essay on Criticism, it defines prior concepts of literature, how they differed, and how they contrast with our own.  Using Mary Wroth and Aphra Behn as exemplars, it further addresses the origins and development of English female literary authorship.  This course combines with English 203 to survey English literary history up the present, and these surveys much facilitate later specialized study of English literature in the Minor, Major, and Honours programs.

The genres, authors, and longer texts covered in this course–such as Beowulf, the Canterbury Tales and its particular sections studied (the General Prologue, the Wife’s and Miller’s Prologues and Tales), a portion of The Faerie Queene, Sidney’s Defence, Books I to IV of Paradise Lost, Pope’s Essay on Criticism and Rape of the Lock, and parts I and IV of Gulliver’s Travels--are thus quite standard for such surveys throughout the English-speaking world.

Texts: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1, 7^th or later editions (available at the Word bookstore, 469 Milton Street); Colin Norman, Writing Essays (pamphlet, available at the McGill bookstore); Course Reader (available at the Word bookstore)

Evaluation: Final exam, 40%; term paper, 50%; 10% conference attendance and participation

Format: Lectures, conferences and discussions

Average enrolment: 190 students

Description: ENGL 203 surveys English literature from the late 18th through the later 20th century, with emphasis on fiction and poetry in an historical context. We will pay particular attention to the developmental story that the assigned works tell, how they collectively comment upon the purposes of literature, and how they form a dynamic canon.   The course material and the three first novels broadly represent major periods in British literary history: the Romantic, Victorian, and Modern ages.    Like the works that comprise these ages, the periods themselves are subject to controversy and disagreement, but “periodization” remains a useful method of organization, especially in a course that covers a great deal of material in a short time.   “Periodization” is also an integral part of the history of British literature, and whatever its shortcomings, the concepts of Romanticism, Victorianism, and Modernism have been formative to the canon that we have inherited and continue to develop.  By the end of the course, you should be familiar with the outlines of these successive periods, as well as able to comment on  the ways that they speak across each other – and even call into question the ideological and formal divisions that define them as periods. 

Texts:

• The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Concise Edition, Vol. B
• Austen, Jane.  Emma (1815)
• Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure  (1895)
• Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse (1927)
• Ishiguro, Kazuo.  The Remains of the Day (1989)

Evaluation: Attendance and participation (in conference section): 20%; midterm: 20%; essay: 25%; final exam: 35%

Format: Lectures and weekly conferences

Description: Sometime around 1590, a glover’s son named William Shakespeare moved from Stratford-Upon-Avon to London to try his hand at a new sort of commercial venture called ‘playing’: a business that offered ordinary people a few hours of dramatic entertainment for the price of one penny. In addition to watching the professional players onstage, spectators also participated in a form of play themselves, in a sense, because theatrical experience provided a unique opportunity to engage imaginatively with otherwise inaccessible people, worlds, and ideas.

More than four hundred years later, the Shakespearean canon has become the most celebrated set of secular texts in all of world literature, and the name ‘Shakespeare’ has become a byword for literary genius. Our course will offer an introduction to this remarkable dramatist with the goal of understanding what—and how—his works meant in their original context, thereby developing a historically informed perspective on their influence over our own cultural landscape. To bring the ‘playing business’ into better view, we will attend very closely to the socio-economic situation of the theatre, the conditions of performance, the processes of dramatic production, and the print marketplace. This focus will situate Shakespeare within the political and intellectual climate of the early seventeenth century, an era notable for religious conflict, scientific discovery, the birth of journalism, the rise of capitalism, and increasing interaction with the New World. Of course, we will also consider the extraordinary literary qualities undergirding Shakespeare’s enduring appeal—including his method of characterization, his poetic style, and the profoundly experimental, speculative quality that characterizes his art overall.

Our curriculum will comprise seven key texts: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Sir Thomas More, Richard II, Hamlet, Anthony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. Students will write a mid-term exam, a final exam, and a final essay (8-10 pp.). They will also have the option of doing a Directing Project, a Creative Writing Project, or a Performance Research Project. In addition to regular lectures and conferences, we will visit the Special Collections department of the McLennan Library to view rare early editions of Shakespeare’s works. 

Texts: The Arden Shakespeare edition of Sir Thomas More, Oxford World's Classics editions of A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, Hamlet, Anthony and Cleopatra and The Tempest.

Evaluation: Conference mark 15%, special project 15%, midterm exam 20%, final essay 25%, final exam 25 %

Format: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisites: None.

Description: This course surveys American literature from 1950 to the present, focusing on key works in several major literary movements. The course aims to chart the evolution of the American literary tradition through considerations of both intellectual and material history. To this end, we will examine prose fiction and poetry in relation to landmark cultural and sociopolitical developments in contemporary America, including, among others: the growth of suburbia; the Civil Rights movement; the energy crisis; the end of the Cold War; the environmental movement; and the war on terror. One of the objectives of this course is to examine how literary depictions of the self have shifted as various hegemonic narratives of prosperity, ideological triumph, and unlimited growth have peaked over the past six decades. In a related vein, we will examine how stylistic and formal strategies in both poetry and prose have altered in relation to new constructions of individuality and American identity. 

Texts: (available at the McGill Bookstore)

• The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Literature since 1945. Eighth Edition. Volume E. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011
• Stark, Richard. The Hunter
• Walter, Jess. The Financial Lives of the Poets

Evaluation: 

• Mid-Term Exam: 30%
• Final Exam: 35%
• Essay: 20%
• Conference Participation: 15%

Format: Lectures and Conferences

Prerequisites: None

Description: An introduction to Canadian literature in English from its beginnings through the Second World War. Far from being an organic and coherent tradition, early Canadian literature comprises a succession of local responses to international events and movements. Written in an international language and obeying the dictates of a distant publishing industry centred in London and New York, early Canadian writing reflects a country changing with successive waves of imperialism and modernization. In this course, students will become familiar with the major genres that writers in this country adopted to give expression to their experience of Canada: exploration narrative, satire, sketch, nature lyric, short story, long poem, free verse, novel. We will strive to understand why early Canadian writers wrote as they did, how their writing was published and received, what political and aesthetic motives drove them, and what ideals structured their different visions of the nation.

Texts:

• Robert Lecker, ed. Open Country: Canadian Literature to 1950 (Thomson Nelson)
• William E. Moreau, ed. The Writings of David Thompson. Vol. 1, The Travels, 1850 Version (McGill-Queen’s)
• Sara Jeannette Duncan, The Imperialist, ed. Misao Dean (Broadview)
• Sinclair Ross, As For Me and My House (New Canadian Library)

Evaluation: Midterm exam (30%); essay (40%); final exam (30%)

Format: Lectures

Average Enrollment: 150 students

Prerequisites: None

Description: A survey of English Canadian poetry and prose from the Second World War to the present. We will read poetry and short fiction to explore the development of Canadian literature. In addition to looking at the work of specific authors from 1945 to the present, the lectures will cover such topics as Canadian literary nationalism, realism, postmodernism, and different forms of experimentation. We will also look at the idea of nordicity as a central metaphor in Canadian writing and discuss the economic and cultural forces accounting for the construction of a national literature. 

Texts:

• Lecker, Robert, ed. Open Country: Canadian Literature in English. Toronto: Nelson, 2007

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lectures

Average Enrollment: 150 students

Description: This course provides a critical introduction to theatre studies, in its branches of dramatic literature, dramatic theory, and theatre history.  Our point of departure for this introduction to the field will be plays drawn from the major episodes of world theatre history, beginning with Ancient Greek and Japanese Noh drama through contemporary Canadian and postcolonial performance, and including the Department of English mainstage show. Through the plays, we will examine what “theatre” is in different periods and places, how it is constituted by the material conditions of performance, codified in dramatic genres, and conceptualized in dramatic theory.  NB: This course is introductory in the sense of ‘foundational’; it offers the fundaments to the study of theatre, encasing them in a broad historical narrative about the theatre’s development over time.

“Introduction to Theatre Studies” is divided into units and ordered according to chronology. Each unit is built around a representative play or performance and explores a particular question or issue in theatre studies, for instance, the actor’s body, theories of genre, or women on stage.

Texts: Available at the McGill Bookstore and on Reserve

• Worthen, W.B., ed. The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama, Brief 6^th Edition

Required Event: Department of English mainstage play – Moyse Hall Theatre, end of November

Evaluation: Theatre production analysis (20%), midterm take-home exam (30%), final Exam (40%), seminar participation (10%)

Format: Lecture and conference section discussion

Prerequisites: Open to Drama and Theatre Majors

Description: The focus of this course is on the actor as communicator, and on those things (material, physical, and textual) which are inescapably central to the theatrical performance.

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: TBA

Prerequisites: None

Description: This course, one of three required for the Cultural Studies concentration in the English major, will introduce various critical efforts to theorize the aesthetics, semiotics, and politics of popular culture over the past century. Beginning with a few crucial theoretical touchstones (Marx, Freud, structuralism), we will survey such critical movements as the Frankfurt School, American “masscult and midcult” theory, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, critical race studies, queer theory, and various feminisms, as they each formulate critical frameworks to explain how culture works. Along the way, we will consider the following questions: What does the “popular” in “popular culture” mean? Does the distinction between “high” and “low” culture have a political dimension? Furthermore, when we do cultural studies, whose culture should be investigated? And who should do the investigating? Finally, how can we grasp the meanings of popular culture: by examining the texts themselves, or by studying the audiences’ interpretations and uses of these texts?

Texts: Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Essays by Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Andreas Huyssen, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige, Louis Althusser, John Fiske, Janice Radway, Laura Kipnis, Constance Penley, and others

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lecture, weekly TA-led conferences

Average Enrollment: 150 students

Prerequisite:  Restricted to Cultural Studies majors/minors and Film Studies minors

Description: This course is designed to prepare students for future film courses at McGill.  It is therefore dedicated to three main goals: establishing a frame of reference for the history of film and film theory, introducing key analytical concepts and skills, and inspiring an ongoing interest in film.
NOTE: This course is for Cultural Studies majors/minors and Film Studies minors only, and to maintain fairness no exceptions can be made. 

Required Texts (subject to change): James Monaco How to Read a Film, 3^rd edition; and a coursepack

Evaluation: Journal 20%, conferences 15%, quiz 10%, 5-page paper 20%, final 35%

Format: Lecture and conferences plus weekly screenings