500-level courses / Seminars

Description: This course explores the rich body of literature on dreams and dreaming in the Middle Ages, with a focus on the peculiarly medieval genre of the dream-vision. We will first investigate the relevance of medieval “dream theory” to the dream-vision genre by surveying ancient and medieval discussions of physiology, psychology, and dream taxonomy (e.g., Aristotle, Cicero, Macrobius, Boethius of Dacia, John of Salisbury). We will then engage two central traditions that shaped the development of the dream-vision genre—the philosophical and the courtly—as expressed in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Guillaume de Lorris’s and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose, respectively. Building upon these foundations, we will devote the remainder of the semester to close study of the dream-visions of the three most celebrated English poets of the Middle Ages, contemporaries of one another in the second half of the fourteenth century: Geoffrey Chaucer, the anonymous Pearl-poet (who also wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), and William Langland.
In the course of our study of this eccentric community of erotic daydreamers, narcoleptic sinners, and chosen visionaries, we will address the question of whether medieval dream-poetry reveals the stirrings of “modern” ideas of subjectivity, personal experience, and psychology.  To what extent does the literature of dreaming explore problems of representation and artistic self-consciousness?  Why do medieval poets use the dream-vision form to comment upon literary tradition and/or contemporary reality?  What happens when dreams become texts and texts become dreams?  All Middle English readings will be in the original (with helpful glosses); relevant Latin, French, and Italian background materials will be studied in translation.  No prior knowledge of Middle English is required; however, proficiency in Middle English pronunciation and comprehension is a formal goal of this class.  This course will be of interest to medievalists and early modernists, but also to those whose work involves them in the history of subjectivity, psychology, Freud, and/or the generally bizarre.  

Evaluation: 15% Seminar Presentation; 10% Middle English Recitation; 60% Essay (15-20 pages for undergraduates; 20-25 pages for graduate students); 15% Participation. Students should also expect to present course materials and in-progress research informally, as asked.

Texts:  

• Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard Green
• Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Romance of the Rose, trans. Frances Horgan (Oxford World's Classics)
• Geoffrey Chaucer, Dream Visions and Other Poems, ed. Kathryn L. Lynch (Norton Critical Edition, 2006)
• William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. A.V.C. Schmidt (Everyman)
• Pearl, ed. Sarah Stanbury (TEAMS - Medieval Institute Pub.) 
• Coursepack (containing extra required readings)

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

Description: A study of dissident views and practices of love and sex in early modern culture from the later fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, encompassing viragos, prostitutes, sodomites, tribades, sapphists, and hermaphrodites among others.  Their treatment and representation according to various discourses and intellectual disciplines will be considered.  For example, these will include, with varying degrees of emphasis, medicine and the other former sciences (such as physiognomy and astrology), as well as erotica, theology, philosophy, and law.  Our readings of primary sources will thus involve nonliterary as well as literary texts such as Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Milton’s masque Comus, and, in translation, Nicholas Chorier’s Dialogues of Venus, some of Michelangelo’s sonnets, and Montaigne’s essay on friendship.  Depending on class size, each member will likely do two seminar papers, each in a different part of the term.  According to their own particular interests, seminar members will determine their own topics for seminar presentations and hence related discussions, as well as discussion topics in the final period.  Insofar as possible, presentations will be grouped in a series of informal “conference sessions” on related matters according to a schedule we will establish at the start of the course.  This format aims to create a diverse, open, and responsive seminar.

Evaluation: Two Seminar Papers, about 9/10 pages of text each (12 point), to count 45% each; Class Attendance and Participation 10%

Texts:  The last three texts will be available at the Word Bookstore, 469 Milton Street, 514.845.5640.

• General Course Reader, Same-Sex Desire in the English Renaissance: A Sourcebook of Texts, 1470-1650 (copies on reserve, electronic copy in McLennan Library on-line catalogue)
• Supplementary Course Reader with various additional readings including Milton’s Comus
• Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (edition is optional)
• Caterina de Erauso, Memoirs of a Basque Lieutenant Nun (paperback)

Format: Seminar with papers and discussion

Average enrollment: 15 students

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

Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor is required. Enrollment is limited to 15 M.A. and advanced undergraduate students (honours majors in their final year have priority). M.A. and honours students may register for this course but must confirm their registration with the instructor in the fall. All others must meet with the instructor before registering.
N.B.: Electronic registration does not constitute permission of the instructor.

Evaluation: A substantial amount of careful reading, a class presentation, and a close analysis of texts both in seminar discussion and in a final 20-page paper will comprise the work in the course. The evaluation of this work will be weighted as follows: paper (60%), presentation (20%), and general participation (20%). Regular attendance is mandatory. (Depending on enrollment and other factors, the content and evaluative weighting of work may be somewhat modified; any such changes will be discussed in class, decided, and announced before the course change period ends.)

Texts: The reading for this course includes the following books, which will be available at The Word Bookstore (469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640). (The list of texts below is tentative and incomplete, to be confirmed in September 2013.)

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

Films: Usually one film will be shown each week. Viewing the films is a requirement of the course, and attendance at the screenings is an expected form of participation. Most screening sessions will last about two hours; some will be longer. (The following list of films is tentative and incomplete.)

• Wycherley, The Country Wife (1992); and Congreve, The Way of the World (1997)
• F. W. Murnau, Faust (1926)
• Jan Svankmejer, Faust (1994)
• Stephen Frears, Dangerous Liaisons (1988)
• Mozart, Don Giovanni (directed by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, 1996; and others)
• Frederico Fellini, Fellini’s Casanova (1976)
• Tchaichovsky, Eugene Onegin (directed by Daniel Barenboim, 2007; and others)

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

Prerequisites: Enrolment is restricted to MA English students and Honours English students in their final year of undergraduate study. 

Description: TWidely regarded as the paramount American contribution to intellectual thought, pragmatism has always been allied to American identity, with ideals such as action, amelioration, practicality, and pluralism serving as important links. One of the main principles of pragmatism is the idea that actions and consequences bring value to personal beliefs. But in what way is pragmatism a product of a specifically American context? How does pragmatism express an American approach to art, politics, subjectivity, individuality, and material society? And how has pragmatism influenced the American literary tradition? This course will address these questions through analyses of seminal contributions to pragmatist thought and select works of early-twentieth-century American fiction and poetry. One of the objectives of this course is to delve beneath mainstream assumptions about “pragmatic” thinking to explore how pragmatism tests the boundaries of American identity, compelling us to re-evaluate our understandings of national unity, diversity, and narratives about the American ethos. Although philosophical readings will form a substantial component of the course, our ultimate goal will be to develop a comprehensive account of literary pragmatism. Thus, we will examine how early-twentieth-century American fiction and poetry not only reflect pragmatist ideas, but also bring to fruition the insights that the movement offers. 

Evaluation:

• Participation: 15%
• Short Essay: 20%
• Presentation: 20%
• Final Paper: 45%

Texts: (available at the McGill Bookstore)

• The Pragmatism Reader. Ed. Robert Talisse and Scott F. Aikin. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011.
• Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk
• Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury
• Highsmith, Patricia. The Talented Mr. Ripley
• James, Henry. Tales of Henry James
• O’Hara, John. Appointment in Samarra
• Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons
• Wright, Richard. Native Son

Format: Discussion (Regular participation in class discussion is mandatory for this course)

Description:  This course theorizes the idea of literary “recuperation” (that is, the creative portrayal of historical figures in poetry, fiction, and theatre) and uses writings by and about the nineteenth-century pioneer Susanna Moodie as an anchor for these discussions. This course begins by investigating the dramatic reinvention of Moodie over the course of the twentieth century in the context of feminist theories of recuperation. Our discussions of Moodie’s reinvention by poets, novelists, critics, and playwrights will provide inroads into further investigations into recuperative literature by Canadian women writers. We will consider the recuperation of First Nations women and of family history, and even the reinvention of fictional characters. From these investigations, numerous questions will emerge: what is recuperated in recuperative texts? Is recuperation about the retrieval of something vital, something authentic, or both? What qualifies as recuperation? Is Lorna Crozier’s rewriting of Sinclair Ross’s fictional “Mrs. Bentley” an act of feminist recuperation? Studying theories of feminism, reading, historiography, and national identity, we will address these questions throughout our course.

Required Texts (available at The Word)
Margaret Atwood, The Journals of Susanna Moodie
Marie Clements, The Unnatural and Accidental Women
Lorna Crozier, A Saving Grace: The Collected Poems of Mrs Bentley
Jovette Marchessault, The Magnificent Voyage of Emily Carr
Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush
Sinclair Ross, As For Me and My House
Carol Shields, Small Ceremonies
Carol Shields, Swann

Evaluation: 
a) Short Essay (1500wds): 20%
b) Longer Essay (3500-4500 wds; due one week after the last class): 40%
c) Brief Presentation on Final Essay: 5%
d) Presentation on Supplemental Text: 15%
e) Attendance and Participation: 20%

Format: Seminar, with strong emphasis on discussion

Average enrollment: 8 students  

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

Evaluation: TBA

Texts: Course pack including essays by Charles Eckert, Robert Warshow, Fran Mason, Thomas Schatz, Henry Jenkins, Richard Maltby, Lary May, Michael Denning, Lea Jacobs, Vivian Sobchack, Brian Neve, Morris Dickstein, Tino Balio, and others.

Required Films: This list is subject to change, but it will likely include:

•  Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, First National/Warner Bros., 1931)
• Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, Warner Bros., 1931)
• The Easiest Way (Jack Conway, MGM, 1931)
• Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, Paramount, 1932)
• Red-Headed Woman (Jack Conway, MGM, 1932)
• Scarface (Howard Hawks, The Caddo Company/United Artists, 1932)
• I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy, Warner Bros., 1932)
• Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, Warner Bros., 1933)
• Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, Paramount, 1933)
• Wild Boys of the Road (William A. Wellman, First National/Warner Bros., 1933)
• Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy, Warner Bros., 1933)
• Gabriel Over the White House (Gregory La Cava, MGM, 1933)
• Dinner at Eight (George Cukor, MGM/Loew’s, 1933)
• Stand Up and Cheer! (Hamilton MacFadden, Fox Film, 1934)
• Our Daily Bread (King Vidor, King W. Vidor Productions/United Artists, 1934)
• It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, Columbia, 1934)
• Black Fury (Michael Curtiz, First National/Warner Bros., 1935)
• Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, Charles Chaplin Productions/United Artists, 1936)
• Fury (Fritz Lang, Loew’s/MGM, 1936)
• Marked Woman (Lloyd Bacon/Michael Curtz, Warner Bros./First National, 1937)
• Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, Paramount, 1937)
• Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, Selznick International/MGM/Loew’s, 1939)
• The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1940)
• Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges, Paramount, 1941)
• Meet John Doe (Frank Capra, Frank Capra Productions/Warner Bros. 1941)

Format: Seminar, Weekly Screenings

Average enrollment: 15 students

Description: “Landscape” means both a kind of space (such as the “cultural landscape” or the “natural landscape”) and a form of representation (for instance, a genre of painting or photography). Importantly, landscapes – as representations or as places – are also particularly interesting points of political and cultural struggle. In this course we will analyze literary, visual, and other cultural texts to understand how they articulate the power of landscapes. Drawing on work by cultural theorists, literary critics, art historians and human geographers, we will examine how landscapes represent the interests of specific social groups; how they settle questions of belonging; how landscapes naturalize relations of power; and, most important, how they shape and transform social relations between people.

Among the texts in the course are colonial and contemporary British writing on South Asia, as well as postcolonial authors from that region. We will read how literary texts make imperial claims on a space; how these claims are contested; and especially, how, after decolonization, postcolonial authors imagine, articulate, and make sense of the spaces they inhabit, and of the larger space of the nation. We will also examine authors from the South Asian diaspora and inquire into their imaginations of the region. As we read the texts in the course, we will continuously examine the relationship between space, affect, representation and the question of belonging. 

Texts (tentative): 

• EM Forster – A Passage to India
• Khushwant Singh – Train to Pakistan
• Amitav Ghosh – The Hungry Tide
• Arundhati Roy – God of Small Things
• Aravind Adiga – The White Tiger
• Jhumpa Lahiri – The Namesake
• Paul Theroux – The Great Railway Bazaar

Evaluation: Participation 10%; presentation 20%; final paper proposal 20%; final paper 50%

Format: Seminar

Description: How does one speak about South Africa beyond the clichés of the “rainbow nation” or the hushed-tone reverence accorded the Truth and Reconciliation Commission? Acknowledging the groundbreaking nature of the transition from apartheid to a democratic society in 1994, while also avoiding sanctifying of the recent past, South African writers and film-makers have questioned the tensions that underscore their contemporary culture. South Africa made a spectacular non-violent transition from apartheid to democracy, integrating the black majority and the white minority, yet in 2008 the immigrants from other African countries were the targets of violent outbreaks of xenophobia; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission played an exemplary role in acknowledging the violence of apartheid and projected the image of a healing country yet the newly established official histories are oftentimes contested by community and individual memories; trade unions and the communist party play a decisive role in postapartheid politics yet they have not managed to prevent neoliberal capitalism from shaping the economy; the country has one of the most progressive constitutions in the world and prides itself on a culture of ubuntu yet homophobia and violence against women have a high incidence. These are some of the tensions that will engage our attention in this seminar as we read fiction and watch films while contextualizing them within larger global phenomena as presented in essays by Achille Mbembe, Timothy Brennan, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Gayatri Spivak, Jean and John Comaroff, etc. As Jacques Derrida acknowledged in the preface to Specters of Marx, the events in South Africa during the latter half of the twentieth century concern us all as they stand in a metonymic relation to the status quo of the world as a whole: “At once part, cause, effect, example, what is happening there translates what takes place here, always here, wherever one is and wherever one looks, closest to home.” 

Evaluation: Presentation 20%; Short paper on theoretical text 20%, Final essay 45%; Participation 15%

Texts: 

• Course pack with essays. 
• J. M. Coetzee: Disgrace
• Zakes Mda: The Heart of Redness
• Ivan Vladislavic: Double Negative
• Phaswane Mpe: Welcome to Our Hillbrow
• Antjie Krog: Country of My Skull
• Njabulo Ndebele: The Cry of Winnie Mandela
• Nadine Gordimer: My Son's Story 

 Films:

• Neill Blomkamp: District 9
• Mark Dornford-May: U-Carmen eKhayelitsha
• Lee Hirsch: Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony
• Steve Jacobs: Disgrace
• Ralph Ziman: Jerusalema
• Gavin Hood: Tsotsi

Format: Seminar

Average enrollment: 15 students

Description: The critical argument concerning the possibility of tragedy and tragic experience within the condition of postmodernity remains open to debate.  On one side, George Steiner’s infamous thesis of The Death of Tragedy (1961) stands as the most forceful declaration that the form and its unique content are no longer feasible within a secular, reified society.  On the other hand, recent books like Terry Eagleton’s Sweet Violence (2003) and Rita Felski’s edited collection Rethinking Tragedy (2008) constitute persuasive theoretical resuscitations of tragedy and ask us to consider what tragedy offers to present experience.  Whatever their critical positionings, these critics demonstrate that the question of tragedy is vital and animates a vein of contemporary scholarly discourse.
 In this course we will study the theory and practice of tragedy, with special attention to the possible appearance of tragedy within postmodernity.  We will read theoretical essays to be drawn from a wide range of critics including, Steiner, Eagleton, Raymond Williams, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Martha Nussbaum, Peter Szondi, Charles Segal, Frances Fergusson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Juliet Mitchell, Jean-Pierre Vernant, G.W.F. Hegel, A.C. Bradley, Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Gilles Deleuze.  At the same time, we will study contemporary tragedians, particularly those who identify their own work as tragedy and theorize about the concept of the tragic in their work, such as English playwrights Edward Bond and Howard Barker.  It is likely that the plays to be studied will be restricted to a national literature, most likely the contemporary United Kingdom.

Evaluation (tentative): Two ten-page essays, worth 30% each; One seminar presentation: 25%; Seminar Participation: 15%

Texts: A course kit of critical readings and a selection of plays, probably including Edward Bond, Howard Barker, Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, Caryl Churchill, David Hare, Howard Brenton, Timberlake Wertenbaker, David Edgar, Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett.

Format: Seminar discussion

Average enrollment: 15 students

Description: 

Prerequisites: None.

Expected Student Preparation: This is an advanced practice-based research-creation course oriented towards upper level undergrads and graduate students.

Description: This interdisciplinary course tracks and enacts movement techniques from different areas of art and academic practice to explore how thought moves thought techniques of corporeal, mediatic, social and political mobility.  The course will include four units (“Architecting Practices”. “Dance and Performance Ecologies”, “Media and  embodiments”, and 'Urbanity: Moving on the social and political field', each combining critical theory, expert practitioners from a variety of fields (including dance, architecture, cinema, gaming, and more) and student centered experimentation with research-creation projects. Our aim is to collaboratively develop working concepts of movement. Students will both explore existing movement practices and develop their own techniques for putting thought in motion. How do ideas circulate? How might we conceive of collective forms of movement, or the unconscious choreographies we participate in at in our habitual disciplinary practices? How can a thought take flight? 

Evaluation: TBA

Texts: Coursepack

Format: Discussions, workshops, project based research-creation approach

Average enrollment: 18 students